Islam versus The Islamists on TV. Round One to Islamists

Read this if you want to get your dander up about tax-subsidized PBS scotching a film on moderate Islamists after allegations that WETA, a far-left outlet of PBS based in DC [I was Associate Producer for a WETA project and can vouch for their far-left tilt] tampered with the project. Martyn Burke, the producer alleges:
• A WETA manager pressed to eliminate a key perspective of the film: The claim that Muslim radicals are pushing to establish "parallel societies" in America and Europe governed by Shariah law rather than sectarian courts.

• After grants were issued, Crossroads managers commissioned a new film that overlapped with Islam vs. Islamists and competed for the same interview subjects.

• WETA appointed an advisory board that includes Aminah Beverly McCloud, director of World Islamic Studies at DePaul University. In an "unparalleled breach of ethics," Burke says, McCloud took rough-cut segments of the film and showed them to Nation of Islam officials, who are a subject of the documentary. They threatened to sue.

"This utterly undermines any journalistic independence," Burke wrote in an e-mail to WETA officials." Burke also alleges that PBS demand that two conservative backers of the project resign from participation.

DePaul Prof McCloud has been caught in an untruth:

In an interview, McCloud said she showed a single video frame to a Muslim journalist who was not a Nation of Islam representative.

However, in a January e-mail, McCloud told Crossroads producers that she had spoken with Nation of Islam representatives and "invited them over to view this section." She also wrote that they were outraged "and will promptly pursue litigation."

Stewart, the WETA executive, said McCloud was admonished for "inappropriate" conduct.

The project I worked on way back in the day was also threatened with litigation and, in my case, a five-minute rejoinder was tacked on to the end of the piece, which dealt with the Middle East.

Anyone familiar with DePaul knows that its association with Islamic affairs tends to be radical, due to a law school professor named Cherif Bassiouni.

PBS was able to escape accountability for its ultra-left bias a couple of years ago when a Bush appointee tried to clean house, but was nailed for a minor infraction by a whistle-blower. Like any government-connected bureaucracy, the lifers in CPB and PBS are almost to-a-man/woman Democrats or lefter than that.

Olbermann Puff-Piece in Lib Mag

To those who switch during ads to Keith Olbermann during The Factor, often enough the stick-insect on MSNBC is ranting about Bill O'Reilly, who conversely has never mentioned this silly juvenile on his own show. One reason why may be that B O'R regularly has about four times the viewership of KO, despite the touting and boasting by NBC that KO has increased his viewership 50% [from almost nothing] in the last year. Although KO is episodically funny and often too clever by half, watching his show is pretty much an exercise of a predictable waste of time.

Keith Olbermann is a refugee sportscaster from ESPN [turns out he is the only major former ESPN sportscaster not invited to the vastly successful franchise's 25th Anniversary this Spring and if you want to know why, just read
New York Magazine for its hagiographic puff-piece on KO.] Hint: it turns out every single ESPN employee except Dan Patrick thinks KO is a nasty egocentric solipsistic cad/dork whose sharp elbows and snide remarks finally revolted every single one of his colleagues at ESPN, to one degree or another. If he returned to ESPN, KO would predictably get beaten up, which he admits happened all the time when he was a kid---because he admits that people just don't like him.

After you read the positive-spin puff-piece in New York mag linked above, you may be able to deduct just why KO is such a roundly disliked fellow by his fellow employees.

Noose Tightening on Pasqua and Chirac?

The belly-aching in the US media about Halliburton is non-stop, it seems, but at least the US media works to uncover seamy relationships between Government and business. In countries with no real First Amendment rights like France, the process of unraveling the sordid political bonds twixt political protectors and big oil is much harder to uncover. Take Oil-for-Food and Iraq, for instance.

When I was living there, the French government was discovered to have put a "table d'ecoutes," or bug, in the conference room of Le Canard Enchaine, a satirical journal much like the Onion or the Tatler, only much more widely distributed and respected as telling the truths which must not be uttered in the marketplace of public discourse. When the scandal erupted, the government simply threatened to raise the price of raw paper for newsprint, and in the press and electronic media, utter silence ensued.

But French courts are more independent than the supine French press, and now the rocks are beginning to be turned over and the exploits of former Senator and Interior Minister Charles Pasqua, whom all observers know as Chirac's fixer and bagman, ["tuyau" in the local argot], are being increasingly exposed. Over a year ago, Le Monde courageously buried Pasqua's indictment for Oil-for-Food below the fold deep in its daily. There was no follow-up anywhere by the tame and complicit French press, nor none overseas, as the MSM in the US views Chirac as an ally in its campaign to destroy GWB.

The Wall Street Journal has an opinion piece with a graph demonstrating how Total, a company notoriously in bed with the French political elites, no matter who wins the national election, is just one of many big foreign oil operations trying to pay off the mullahs to get into Iran's oilfields at the expense of US majors.

Read the piece, and the next time you drive into a Shell station, remember that you are helping the mullahs and their little madman Ahmedinejad in their campaign to destroy Israel and eventually, the Western Civilization most Americans treasure.

Why is Bill Richardson Changing His Tune[s]?

When I first met him [he had dated my wife while they were both at Tufts] in the early eighties, I immediately became a fan of then-Congressman Bill Richardson.

I found Bill to be a quintessential regular guy with no pretensions, proud of his Hispanic heritage [his mother lived in Mexico City at the time] and frank about his aspirations to higher office [he told me at my house in a private conversation that he wanted to be elected Senator from New Mexico]. Later, when I worked for the Oil Daily, Bill was generous with his time as a source [he was on the House Energy Cte] and even inserted one of my articles in The Congressional Record.

But Domenici and Bingaman were solidly ensconced and Bill went on to become Sec'y of Energy and US Ambassador to the UN. After the Clintons left the WH, Bill got himself elected governor to New Mex and has been a breath of fresh air---until he decided to put his hat in the ring and run for President this year.

Bill had told me in the eighties that he considered the threat to the American way of life from massive invasion by illegal aliens, almost entirely from Mexico, as the chief national security threat to the USA in the coming decades. This surprised me, since at the time the US was still in a balance of mutually assured destruction with the USSR. But Bill was adamant in his estimation of the downside of illegal immigration.

As governor of NM, he demonstrated this by calling up the National Guard to protect the state's border with Mexico. I realized that what he had said two decades ago was still important to him, and that the problem of illegals was one of his main priorities.

But then, he announced his candidacy for POTUS, and the flipping and flopping began.

Suddenly, Bill was against strict border enforcement and strong penalties for illegals and those hiring them. [Can you imagine what the MSM would do to a Republican who switched from McCainism to strict enforcement?]

And Richardson, heretofore a paragon of fair play and diplomatic niceties suddenly has no problem with the Nevada Democrats dropping FoxNEWS as moderator when serial chronic panderer John Edwards had responded to the ultra-left fringe by refusing to participate.

Funny what running for President does to a Democrat.

Does Richardson believe that he must deconstruct himself to win in the primaries?

Ann Coulter Hits a Four-Bagger

You love her and you hate her and you can't help watching and reading her because
Ann Coulter is smarter and sharper than any fever-swamp denizen on the lefty roster of the bloggerati. Read her SHOOTING ELEPHANTS IN A BARREL and get your blood pumping at the simple silliness of Sandy Bergler stealing/destroying documents which the 9/11 Commission needed to make its judgments and walking away with the drastic punishment of picking up litter in Virginia parks. Then note that a witch-hunt by a political assassin named Fitzgerald catches Libby stumbling in nonsensical memory games---after FitzFong knew the leak had been to Novak by Armitage before he started his show trial. And that Plame was not a covert agent, as Ms. Toensing points out in her lucid professional fashion. Just another Vishinsky-type purge by rabid apparatchiki of the left peddling their agitprop.

GWB is either too compliant or, in the case of last year's elections, preaching ceaselessly about Iraq when he should have been non-stop touting the best economy ever. He either gets wobbly like his Poppy or stubbornly butts his head against walls. Why doesn't he realize that the MSM will never forgive him for defeating Gore in 2000? The game is fixed, and Coulter does well to remind the ridiculous flaps about chasing DeLay while a crook like Cong. Jefferson gets appointed by Pelosi to Homeland Security, with its fungible secrets that Jefferson will trade for more cold cash to the highest bidder. Pelosi is a machine politician more crooked than DeLay ever was.

The outcome is rigged, and if Billy-Jeff can pardon a mega-criminal like Marc Rich in return for massive contributions to his library and some fleshy face-time with Marc's wife Deborah, then Libby can get pardoned for faulty memory in a kangaroo court plumped up in the media by mendacious reporters like Tim Russert. And Chris Matthews.

Hitchens on Hirsi Ali as an "Enlightenment Absolutist"

Remember back in college when your agnostic professors used to intone against the backwardness of medieval religious civilization and then exalt the glories of the Enlightenment, a narrative which brushed aside centuries of Church-dominated "superstition and obscurantism?" That was the prevailing doctrine at the University of Michigan in the late sixties.

But in a classic case of Giambattista Vico's ricorso, Christoper Hitchens has discovered the beginning of an ultimate betrayal of the Enlightenment we were all taught in graduate school to revere. [Actually, as a reconverted Catholic, I now believe the Enlightenment more than a bit oversold, to say the very least.]

Hitchens cites one of my favorite poems, September 1, 1939, W.H. Auden's gloomy meditation on how all the s**t in the world is hitting the fan one more time, only now even worse than ever, as the planet slides into World War II. [Pardon my indulgence]
"Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analyzed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again."
I'm now reading Victor Davis Hanson' book A War Like No Other based on Thucydides wonderful history concerning The Pelopponesian War [431-411 B.C.] Back in the day, I studied Attic Greek and read several authors in their original flowing language [unfortunately, not Thucydides before my Attic faded]. Hanson brilliantly shows the insanity of the jealous and hopelessly reactionary Spartans attack on the rich, globalizing [the contemporaneous term was attikizo]arrogant Athenians, busy enticing the entire Mediterranean with its seductive democracy, a democratic ethos that was seducing the poor in many Greek city-states into calling for Athenian home-grown models. More importantly to the Spartan ephors, the economic and artistic growth concomitant with democracy was undermining the tough oligarchic semi-serf dictatorship of the militarist Spartans. So the Spartans rashly decided in 432 BC to strike at Athenian democracy and prosperity in order to undermine the growing seductions of globalization just as Al Qaeda struck at the WTC and the Pentagon, a pre-emptive blow to an overwhelmingly powerful hegemon.

Of course, the Auden poem is correct that Thucydides saw all the ironies of a rich democratic power attacked by a benighted reactionary militarist ethos. Substitute religious for militarist, and the parallelism with Al Qaeda is uncanny.

And today, Hitchens points out the incomprehensible irony of the two great reactionary forces in constraining human freedom, atheistic socialists and violent religious reactionaries, seeking common cause in tearing down Enlightenment values and replacing them with, on the one hand, a semi-totalitarian elitist nannified dirigiste guardian state and on the other, a hateful and violent religious imperialism employing terrorism and immigrant communities as their beachhead into democracies based on Enlightenment values.

As Hitchens notes in his article, these two opposing ideologies, like Stalin and Hitler before September 1, 1939, have become allies of convenience to attack globalization and democratic values from two fronts. Internally, the ultra-left socialists employ progressive moles to advance their attacks on economic free markets and religious/volunteer organizations and private education. Externally, the Islamists ally with these leftist dupes to wreak slaughter and havoc in London, Madrid, and a couple of failed attempts in Germany and the US, knowing that the leftist media will downplay their nefarious agenda and cover up their crimes with MSM counterattacks on the GWOT.

Hitchens has recovered his sanity after decades of railing against capitalism and zionism. We can only hope that the media elites in academia, newsprint and TV, Hollyweird, and the moles in the US public educational establishment eventually awaken and avoid the catastrophes that ensue when jealous militant reactionaries meet rich democratic globalizers.

That already happened, as Hitchens, W.H. Auden, and Victor Davis Hanson all know. I am going to see the movie 300 this weekend to get a good fix on the event at Thermopylae [which I have visited in Greece] in 490 B.C. that began the incredible century of Greek cultural glory. Like the French holding back the German Army in 1914, Thermopylae began a century of conflicts and cultural efflorescence and worldwide prosperity and again, a final conflict. As the Greek example indicates, all the remarkable gains of the twentieth century could implode as Thucydides delineates in his magnificent history, which is more exactly a work of moral philosophy.

Unfortunately, Thucydides recounted a century that ended in the Greeks tearing themselves apart in an insane civil war.

Omne Exemplum Clauditur, [every metaphor limps], but Ayaan Hirsi Ali's cry for freedom from religious oppression is a canary in a coal mine for all of our values.

Hitchens does well to put the contending forces into context.

Hirsi Ali Irks Euro Nomenklatura

Those orchidaceous Dutch, who fervently collaborated with the Nazis against the Jews
dislike Hirsi Ali intensely, says Anne Applebaum, writer of the Pulitzer-winner Gulag and a world-ranking expert on group-think in a Slate piece.

You see, Hirsi has disturbed the Euros complacency about Islam, and brought an inconvenient truth [THAT IS ACTUALLY TRUE!] to the fore by her book Infidel, which trumpets Western values, a most unfashionable thing to do among Dutch intelligentsia and their Brit collaborators, like Timothy Garten Ash, who sneers at Hirsi Ali for her juvenile enthusiasm for democracy and liberal values.

The multiculturalists refuse to turn over the Islamic rock to investigate just what kind of life lives beneath, and condone honor killings and sharia law as some sort of commendably exotic eccentricity. However, a few Europeans actually criticize the sometimes violent and deeply reactionary culture that persists in the 45 signatory countries of "Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam."

Yes, there are many moderate Muslims in Europe who want to live a quiet life. Unfortunately, among them dwell a growing minority of aggressively violent conspirators who want to overthrow Western values, the ones that distinguished European academics and writers so often disparage with ill-concealed disdain.

How these sophisticated European polemicists square their hatred of the pope with their admiration of Islam continues to baffle this confused observer.

Rundown of The Decline of the West

I'm down with the flu, but think that Jules Crittenden is the voice of sanity in a
piece on just how messed up the situation is, with the Dems reverting to their default-mode of treacherous backstabbing, although now it's on each other when they are not stabbing American national interests in the back. Plenty of interesting and instructive links in the piece above.

The French went through just such a phase in their inglorious descent from world power to their current status as craven cowards and backstabbing feminized morons. The Decline of the West, with the Democratic Party as enabler and enthusiastic cheerleader, proceeds apace.

Mass Psychosis Drives Global Warming Fears

How to explain the whack-a-doodle gyrations of preposterous weather-boys like pretty-locks Sam Champion of ABC, except as deliberate satire on Max Headroom or Bob Forehead or John Edwards Breck-boy templates? Or the ultra-serious CNN clown Miles O'Brien playing "let's pretend I'm a serious scientist" about Global Warming?

Dr. Sanity examines and explains some of the borderline mental disorders affecting the liberal mindset from her Ann Arbor perch, a very good neighborhood to observe whackiness about the weather at close hand. Dr. Sanity is a member of Pajamas Media "Sanity Squad" which debunks the hysteric ravings that pass for journalism and analysis by leftist political commissars:

[Recently] the [Sanity] Squad debunked a Psychology Today article asserting that conservatives are motivated by fear, while the liberal left has cornered the market on rationality and reason. Obviously, the author of that "scientific" article didn't take into account the left's preaching about the coming environmental apocalypse.

If you want to observe the abandonment of reason and the manipulation of fear, simply cconsider the incredible histrionics being exhibited by the left about global warming. Their fear-filled predictions of imminent doom and catastrophe have been going on for five decades now.

First we were going to be wiped out by Erlich's population explosion ; then the planet was definitely doomed by nuclear winter; and--was it only a few short years ago?--they were going on about global....cooling.

And how could we forget to the inevitable end of civilization as we knew it from Y2K (at least according to the United Nations Report on the matter) ?

Each of these "imminent" doomsday scenarios were described in their time as the "greatest threat that human civilization has ever known." Each amounted to absolutely nothing of consequence. Zip, Zilch, Nada.

Thankfully, none of the proposed draconian measures suggested to prevent these disasters were ever implemented. See here for a fascinating look back on the hysteria; plus a discussion about what happens when you mess around with complex systems--systems like the earth's climate, for example.

In all of these instances, the proposed solutions were always the same: BIG--really really big--GOVERNMENT. Government would rescue us! New laws would save the day and keep all of us pathetic human beings and our environmentally destructive behavior in check. Unbelievably harsh measures were always suggested--up to and including the deliberate elimination of large numbers of humans in order to accommodate the agenda of the eco-tyrants.

As Mark Twain once said, "I’ve seen a heap of trouble in my life, and most of it never came to pass."

Read the whole post and an interesting previous posting on Iraq by John Burns. Dr. Santy is my guru on the aberrations foisted on the American public by MSM and Hollyweird illusionists. She's a good antidote to the delirium on daily news concerning just about every subject.

Hagel Cranky on Stephanopoulos ABC Morning Show

The Dems have their own
problems, but two Republican Senators who may run for president were on the ABC Sunday Morning Show and though I missed most of McCain [except his somewhat impolitic endorsement of the Colts over the Bears in vote-rich Chicago], Hagel came across as querulous and defensive on his answers to GS's pointed questions about "what exactly are you for?"

Hagel almost resented the question, and when GS prodded him for specifics, started to retort in a three-octave range that made him sound like Dennis Kucinich. Truth is, Hagel has no answer to the NIE report that American withdrawal will leave Iraq and the whole region in a complete shambles and perhaps region-wide war.

And Hagel mentioned "McCain" several times in a somewhat disrespectful way, not calling him "Senator McCain," while giving other Senators their due as "Senator Clinton" and "Senator Biden." Not to mention Hagel's evasive answers to GS's points, which he answered by "read the [Levin/Hagel] proposal," without spelling out the specifics which would answer GS's queries. Methinks this gruff and unready persona won't play well in a national contest for pres, which GS asked Hagel about and which Hagel dodged. Could be a one-hit wonder.

And the Dems refuse to answer this elephant-in-the-living-room question. Yes, we are in the middle of a civil war [or several civil wars, as Iraq devolves into a Hobbesian war of all against all], but the implosion of an early American exit would bring in overt Iranian support for the Shi'ites, Saudi/Egyptian/Jordanian support for Sunnis, and a possible Turkish incursion into Kurdistan. The US "occupying forces" are now actually desired by most Iraqis, if only to avert an even worse situation. A recent poll studiously ignored by the ultra-left MSM demonstrates that most Sunnis and half the Shi'ites and all the Kurds support the US presence.

And a participant in the NIE exercise told me he spent months in hammer-and-tongs robust debate in the composition of the Estimate, classified Top Secret, only to see not only the unclassified but some highly classified material on the front page of the Washington Post on Friday morning. The Post, of course, emphasized the negative half-empty glass. For its ultra-left reasons, the Post avoided mentioning much about the catastrophe awaiting the region should the US heed the Kucinich/Edwards wing of the Democratic Party.

Groundhog Punxatawny Phil Versus UN IRGC: Phil Wins!

It's Groundhog Day and the movie with endless iterations reminds us that the Extraordinary Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is still working overtime, as global freezing in the '70s morphs into global warming as the latest Chicken Little delirium tremens the MSM and UN scammers are foisting upon a besotted public opinion.

The attached article has the Methusaleh Groundhog evidently living since before 1886, but this old specimen of Pennsylvania Dutch folklore will almost certainly be more
accurate
than the hilarious pontifications of a super-special 113-country UN study which blames it all, like the Time Man/Person of the Year, on YOU!

So start feeling bad right now, sell the SUV, and ride a bike to the local grocery [I Tactually have two Taiwanese e-go electric bikes which I and spouse ride to the foodstore with, except both now have flat tires which are virtually impossible to re-inflate---just another design flaw]. My thoughts on Phil's commonsensical accuracy were pre-empted by Argggh! from the freezing Iraqi hinterlands. I will plagiarize myself from January 4th here:

may have ended up in the dustbin of history, but the tradition of political commissars has not ended. One with the ludicrous name of Rockefeller and the other a transgendered Republican have sent Exxon a threatening letter saying that the debate on Global Warming is hereby over.

The High Church of GW does not permit latitudinarian dalliances with the scientific method. The Holy Curia of the Royal Academicides and pseudo-scientists like the inventor of the Information Highway and also the Lockbox, Earthtones Al Bore, have declared ex cathedra that whomsoever shall disagree with their exalted opinionations shall be subject to Inquisition and even "Windfall Taxes."

What used to be a democracy in DC is now evolving into a populist revival along the lines of Malthusian prophecies, Luddite wrecking crews, etc, as the WSJ opines:

environmentalists have been wrong about almost every other apocalyptic claim they've made: global famine, overpopulation, natural resource exhaustion, the evils of pesticides, global cooling, and so on. Perhaps it's useful to have a few folks outside the "consensus" asking questions before we commit several trillion dollars to any problem.

Often wrong but never in doubt, say the IPCC doctrinal heirs to political commissar Suslov in the old USSR and Cardinal Ottaviani in the ancient College of Cardinals. Or as the Wahhabis like to put it, ijtihad, their greatest enemy, as it is the Islamic struggle for the truth outside rigid categories defined by rigid strictures on independent thinking.

Actually, Canadian Prime Minister Harper may have the goods on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the science by majority, in this case a tyrannical majority, which is comprised of go-along-to-get-along "climatologists" and other bureaucrats and petty functionaries of the mind. The rest of the world, Harper divined back in 2002, hates the USA for its continuous economic ascendancy and wants to drag it back down into the pitiful Keynesian nitwittery paint-by-numbers economies in their own squalid backyards.

Free markets ala Milton Friedman would deprive these functionaries of their raison d'etre. Their government meddling and taxes are what pays them and their scientific panels to measure, calibrate and subsequently cry out that the sky is falling!

Even non-socialist crony-capitalism countries fear truly free markets. The economic growth of the USA, which is perhaps 23% of the entire world economy, is what galls the Davos crowd [h/t: Dennis Mangan] and other senior functionaries from getting their meat-claws on American assets in order to tax the squat out of them. The IPCC reminds me of the "North-South Dialogue" of the seventies, which had whinging poor countries in the southern hemisphere guilt-tripping the industrial north for all sorts of freebies and emoluments.

The other night I watched Sens. Boxer and Inhofe on Larry King and Inhofe kept referring to statistics while Boxer referred constantly to drowning polar bears and King's Man-on-the-Street outtakes had people telling the camera "how bad they feel" that Katrina was the result of AGW.

Thoughts beat feelings, and while the MSM will act as cheerleaders for the ultra-left socialist agitpreppies at Davos, Paris, and other chic Comintern gatherings, I will bet against Sens. Snowe and Rockefeller and put my money on Punxatawny Phil.

Read Consilience, by Edward O. Wilson, for why I myself am a contrarian on AGW to the "consensus" of a tyrannical majority of "scientists."

Just a feeeeling I've got!!!

Brace yourselves for 10 Muharram tomorrow

The Muslim feast of
Ashura
is January 30, and my bet is that the large collection of bad hombres killed yesterday near Najaf were in a staging area for a big terrorist attack on Shi'ite pilgrims going to Najaf or Kerbala, the two great Shi'a pilgrimage sites, for this gruesome festival commemorating the death of Husayn, the son of 'Ali. While living in Lebanon, I saw an Ashura street demo in South Beirut with a very mild public version of the terrific penitential self-flagellation and cutting that takes place in Shi'ite mosques.

Even NPR hints that the horrific attack on the Samarra mosque and Zarqawi's assaults on Shi'ites in Sadr City and elsewhere are instigated by an Al Qaeda campaign to foment civil war and boost the ranks of defeatists in the USA. The brunt of the attacks on Najaf and Kerbala may have been thwarted by yesterday's news of hundreds of casualties among the Sunni insurgents, but the good tidings of an Iraqi military success has been put on the back pages of the MSM outlets and TV news. East-to-get video of terror-bombings in Baghdad make front-page, top of the broadcast news. Successes in out-of-the-way places are duly noted, but buried by lurid tales of insurgent nastiness and funerals of stateside families mourning their heroic dead. At one point a few days ago, I switched from ABC to CBS to NBC and all simultaneously [I believe it was Friday night's weekend wrap-up] had stories of berieved families. AQ Agitpreppie Brian Williams had his usual shallow commentary, and the MSM campaign to discredit victory in Iraq continues...

Yes, Bush and his lieutenants botched the job, but that doesn't mean walking away before the job is finally finished. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow the Al Qaeda will still be on the job, whether we walk away or not.

David Gregory a Liar?

We know that Mr. Gregory is bucking for a battlefield commission in NBC's war against the Bush Administration, but the silly Libby snipe hunt reveals how far this ambitious
Kerry-clone [he married well to use as a springboard to higher pay grades] might have gone in a Tom Maguire vignette [h/t: Mickey Kaus].

Hitchens Makes Mincemeat of Old Left Radicals

The Perfessoriat, the BBC, and George Galloway all come under the withering fire of the redoubtable Christopher Hitchens, reviewing Nick Cohen's book, What's Left? How the Liberals Lost Their Way. CH as usual eviscerates with a sharp scalpel all the frauds on the far left who still love to hate Bush/Blair/democracy.

Some choice cuts:

...there are thousands and thousands of middle-aged lefties for whom their once-revolutionary "credentials"” are all they have left to show for a lifetime of "activism," and who could not face their friends — or, perhaps, their students — if they found themselves endorsing a war fought by British or American soldiers. (I myself remember repressing a twinge of annoyance at the idea that the assault on civilisation represented by the 9/11 attacks would drive my anti-Kissinger book from the front page where I still believe it belonged.) But Cohen goes further: "I wanted anything associated with Tony Blair to fail, because that would allow me to return to the easy life of attacking him."”

It is this sentence, and its implications, that make his book an exceptional and necessary one. Cohen has no problem with those who are upset about state-sponsored exaggerations of the causes of war, or furious about the bungled occupation of Iraq that has ensued. People who think this is the problem are not his problem. Here’s his problem: the people who would die before they would applaud the squaddies and grunts who removed hideous regimes from Afghanistan and Iraq, yet who happily describe Islamist video-butchers and suicide-murderers as a “resistance”. Those who do this are not “anti-war” at all, but are shadily taking the other side in a conflict where the moral and civilisational stakes are extremely high.

Treason on the left is not new, but has become the media shibboleth with Dysfunctional-Bush-Hatred and Global Warming the new armaments in the long leftist war against free enterprise and political freedom. Of course, no one dissects these walking talking cadavers better than Hitchens, himself a veteran Man of the Left.

It’s all here: from the pseudo-radicals who said there was nothing to choose between Nazi imperialism in Europe and British rule in India, through the supporters of the Hitler-Stalin pact, all the way to those who defended Slobodan Milosevic as a socialist and those who took, quite literally took, money from the bloody hands of Saddam Hussein. Just in the past decade or so, had this “anti-war” rabble had its way, we would have seen Kuwait stay part of Iraq, Bosnia and Kosovo cleansed and annexed by “Greater” Serbia, and the Taliban retaining control of Afghanistan. You might think that such a record would lead its adherents to be dismissed as a silly and sinister fringe, but instead it is they who pose as the principled radicals and their opponents who are treated with unconcealed disdain in the universities and on the BBC.

This betrayal (because there is no other word for it) has been made possible in part by a degraded version of multiculturalism. The hard left has junked its historic secularism, to say nothing of its principles of equality for females and homosexuals, to make common cause with Muslim outfits some of which are associated in other countries with the extreme right. It has done this by the use of nonsense terms such as “Islamophobia”, which are designed to give the no-less nonsensical impression that Islam is some kind of persecuted ethnicity. But the vile attacks by Islamists on the Jews (Britain’s oldest minority) and on India (Britain’s most important democratic ally after the United States) show the truly reactionary and hateful character of the opportunist alliance between failed ex-Stalinists and fanatical theocrats. For Cohen, as for some others of us, this is no longer a difference of emphasis within the family of the left. It is the adamant line of division in a bitter fight against a new form of fascism, at home no less than abroad.

I think he is right to identify the opening of this crisis with the events in Bosnia and Kosovo, because in that instance it was America (pushed by the supposed “poodle” Blair) that used force to prevent the annihilation of a Muslim community. Those who opposed that rescue operation, and who yet denounce the fight against Bin-Ladenism and its allies as “targeting” Muslims, have given the game away and shown that they hate only Anglo-American policy, to a degree that results in blindness. Meanwhile, Israel is always and everywhere to be denounced (and not always wrongly) while the other product of British partition policy during 1947-48, the part-rogue and part-failed state named Pakistan, is never indicted in the same way for its numberless bigotries and aggressions. This is bad faith, and needs to be unmasked as such. Cohen’s book is an admirable example of self- criticism and self-examination, using intellectual honesty as a means of illuminating a much wider canvas.

Like St. Paul who was a sort of one-man Mossad for the Orthodox Jewry of his day, CH has had the scales fall from his eyes and recognizes the shallow, superficial twaddle purveyed by the High Priests of the Liberal Left, be it useful idiots like Gore on GW or former-rightie opportunists like Arianna Puffington and her attendant Host twittering at the moon as they flutter skyward above the darkling plain.

CH ends with a recommendation to read another book:

Do not feel that you have to be a leftist or liberal to read it, because it engages with an argument that is crucial for all of us, and for our time.

Read on... books:
Terror and Liberalism by Paul Berman (Norton £9.99)
A huge influence on Cohen’s ideas

The long demise of a defunct intelligentsia continues, but as their moral authority erodes, the shrill hysteria increases, so leftists are left to tabloid issues like the Plame fiasco or pseudo-heroism by barely literate actors and other showmen.

Adam Gadahn Got California State Funding before Defecting to AQ

The New Yorker has a long narrative on Adam Gadahn, Dr. Zawahiri's PR chief who is high in AQ's hierarchy, who is, as the FBI says, the ultimate "home-grown" Islamic terrorist, a breed very little studied and poorly understood, as the article proceeds to make clear.

The narrative of Gadahn portrays him as a sort of Phil Spector wannabe, a nerdy, brilliant, alienated second-generation dropout who was the home-schooled son of a '70's era hog-farm [in this case, goats] commune dweller. Adam had an isolated childhood in Riverside County and Oregon on a goat farm, and morphed into a "death-metal" tyro impresario until he collided with Islam, after which he switched his death fetish toward killing infidels.

The story of Gadahn's conversion and immersion in The Islamic Society of Orange County is convoluted and depressing, but suffice it to say that Gadahn got angry at a fellow named Bundakji, a Jordanian Sunni married to a Shi'ite who called himself "Sushi" and was reviled [called "Danny the Jew"] for his moderate views by the extremist infiltrators of the ISOC. They seceded along with Gadahn, ironically a man with Jewish antecedants, after trying to take over the organization. As he tells his tale, the article's author buries some interesting nuggets about three quarters of the way through this long article:

In the late nineties, the National Security Council, concerned about possible terrorist attacks around the millennium, asked a team of private terrorism analysts to investigate Deek and Diab’s [Gadahn's extremist mentors] activities. Rita Katz, who is now the director of the SITE Institute, a nonprofit group that monitors jihadi communiqués on the Internet, led the investigation. (Katz showed me a videotape of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman’s 1992 lecture at the Islamic Society.) Katz knew that Deek had obtained American citizenship, and she learned from intelligence reports that he had connections to a terrorist cell based in Montreal. (The cell included Ahmed Ressam, who was involved in the millennium plot to blow up Los Angeles International Airport.) Katz suspected that Deek was working as a coördinator for Al Qaeda groups in the West. She discovered that he had collaborated with Diab in California; the two men had set up a bogus nonprofit group, called Charity Without Borders, in Diab’s name, and Diab had even managed to obtain grants for it from the state. (Gadahn is listed as "crew member" in the charity’s official documents.) Deek and Diab paid the rent on the apartment where Gadahn lived.....

[comments and emphasis mine]
So the State of California helped pay the rent for Islamic terrorists planning to blow up LAX, a tidbit one would think worthy of highlighting, or at least comment, were The New Yorker a more reliable publication concerning national security affairs. No irony there.....

Just another terrorist organization subsidized by the state whose Ninth Circus [oops] Circuit Court has recently honored Ahmed Ressam's appeal by throwing out parts of his conviction for planning to blow up the state's biggest airport. Yawn....

The story moves on as Adam fell into the baddest crowd in the neighborhood and emigrated to Pakistan in the late '90s, where he quickly picked up Arabic and a smattering of Pushtu, and the rest unfolds like a bad novel. The author goes on to generalize about the big question why:

.....former C.I.A. case officer...Marc Sageman..after September 11th, while teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, decided to examine the process of Islamic radicalization in a way that had not been done before, empirically.....Sageman discovered that most Al Qaeda operatives had been radicalized in the West and were from caring, intact families that had solidly middle- or upper-class economic backgrounds. Their families were religious but generally mainstream. The vast majority of the men did not have criminal records or any history of mental disorders. Moreover, there was little evidence of coördinated recruitment, coercion, or brainwashing. Al Qaeda’s leaders waited for aspiring jihadists to come to them—and then accepted only a small percentage. Joining the jihad, Sageman realized, was like trying to get into a highly selective college: many apply, but only a few are accepted.

Perhaps his most unexpected conclusion was that ideology and political grievances played a minimal role during the initial stages of enlistment. “The only significant finding was that the future terrorists felt isolated, lonely, and emotionally alienated,” Sageman told the September 11th Commission in 2003, during a debriefing about his research. These lost men would congregate at mosques and find others like them. Eventually, they would move into apartments near their mosques and build friendships around their faith and its obligations. He has called his model the “halal theory of terrorism”—since bonds were often formed while sharing halal meals—or the “bunch of guys” theory. The bunch of guys constituted a closed society that provided a sense of meaning that did not exist in the larger world.

Sageman examined scholarship on other revivalist movements and found important parallels. He learned that doctrine played a negligible role for new converts to the Reverend Moon’s Unification Church, for example. “Many moved into the Moonie commune because of their attachment to group members while still openly expressing rejection of the Moon ideology,” Sageman wrote in his book, “Understanding Terror Networks,” which was published in 2004. But, once the converts experienced the social benefits of their new community, accepting their friends’ beliefs was much easier. Later, when asked by researchers about their conversion, most Moonies spoke of the irresistible appeal of the church’s religious outlook, and had forgotten their initial skepticism about the faith.

Within the “bunch of guys,” Sageman found, men often became radicalized through a process akin to oneupmanship, in which members try to outdo one another in demonstrations of religious zeal. (Gregory Saathoff, a research psychiatrist at the University of Virginia and a consultant to the F.B.I., told me, “We’re seeing in some of the casework that once they get the fever they are white-hot to move forward.”) Generally, the distinction between converts and men with mainstream Islamic backgrounds is less meaningful than it might seem, Sageman said, since “they all become born again.” Many Muslims who accept radical Salafist beliefs consider themselves “reverts.” They typically renounce their former lives and friends—and often their families.

Sageman’s model provides clues to how radicalization unfolds, but it cannot explain why one person embraces extremism and another does not. (As a former senior intelligence analyst told me, “It’s not something you can plot on a graph and study.”) Two of Gadahn’s siblings are in college, and the third is an aesthetician; why was Adam the one to join Al Qaeda?

So a young man from a counter-cultural goat farm in Southern California promises to America from Pakistan to "make the streets of America run red with blood" and the state that produced Jonestown cadavers to the tune of 908 and Hale-Bopp cometeers to the order of the high thirties sees this as business as usual in the multiculti broth simmering as a sort of Sargasso of Lunacy just west of Nevada. One could go on, but multiplying the defects of Panglossian nitwittery just bores sophisticated liberals who wave their arms as much as Gadahn while yammering on Huffington and elsewhere...

"Charity Without Borders" is an appropriate bogus group for this endlessly deluded State of Mindset to donate dollars toward its own destruction.

O'Reilly gets Fouled, Strikes Back and gets Called for Second Foul

Howie Kurtz at the Washington Post bemoans the condemnation and wrath Bill O'Reilly has displayed against NBC, which has scuttled leftward with the political winds. Kurtz knows his inside-the-Beltway audience shares NBC's leftish tilt, and panders to its delusion that NBC is "centrist" while he tries to deconstruct O'Reilly in his usual soft-pedaling manner.

He brings up Keith Olbermann, whose rants called "special comments" have been put on the blogosphere's most prominently ultra-left "media blogs" as audience-boosting ploys for the farthest reaches of the fever swamps.

As an obiter dictum, isn't it interesting that the favorite POLITICAL columnists of the loony left are failed Broadway critic Frank Rich, former Enron-consultant professor Paul Krugman and TV ex-sportscaster KOlbermann, who flunked out at his sports outpost by reportedly outlandish behavior and insufferable arrogance. Perfect job description for a ultra-left political observer, including the poor soul whom Kurtz chided O'Reilly for calling a lunatic, a New Age poster girl named Sansura Taylor whose mother must have had some bad acid while carrying little Sansura in the womb. Sansura's demented solecisms betray a City-by-the-Bay mindset so deranged that O'Reilly can't help himself and keeps inviting her on his show. Her IQ is such that he could be chided for cruelty to animals.

Kurtz's entire article is slanted pro-NBC and against O'Reilly, going so far as to quote:

Olbermann says O'Reilly's latest offensive "reeks a little bit of an attempt to get some attention," though the former sportscaster admits he started the feud as a way of raising his profile.

Just burying the lede as a final dependent clause, which is Kurtz's manner of writing. Let's say O'Reilly shook off the small dog biting his ankle as a more appropriate trope for the situation.

Kurtz quotes Joe Scarborough extensively, as though this recanted GOP congressman were a "conservative." Joe is tacking with the prevailing winds, though his cultural conservatism is still hostile to what he calls "Hollyweird."

Without defining the previous "layer of farce," Kurtz takes a cheap shot at BOR:

Adding an extra layer of farce, O'Reilly now regularly features a body-language expert, who said that Mitchell displayed "high level of uncomfortability" during her appearance on the show.

The fact is that O'Reilly did not condemn all of NBC as Kurtz deceptively implies, and actually praised the Today Show and Mitchell and some other relatively objective or centrist commentators. Though you wouldn't know this from Kurtz's hit-piece drive-by substance hidden by his soothing style.

But although Chris Matthews gets a free pass at saying Cheney "never passes up a chance to kill," an SF blogger can start a campaign against free speech from the left without any objection from the MSM, who will call right-wing comments that resemble Matthews' senseless rant against the VP "hate speech" and call for its abolishment---hang the First Amendment. Watch this blogger get on MSM and garner praise for trying to limit talk-radio, which is an outlet that entertains tax-paying working people on the job, obviously not a left-wing constituency.

Remember Alec Baldwin calling for Henry Hyde to be assassinated on network TV back during the height of the Clinton Impeachment for lying under oath? I do, but Orwell's memory hole has swallowed that up too.

And to switch from the prophetic 1984 to Animal Farm put it, some animals are more equal than others.