From The Los Angeles Times:
Don't blame me
Criticizing Democrats isn't mean, it's for their own -- and the country's -- good.
By Jonah Goldberg
February 16, 2006
THE WONDERFUL thing about writing for this newspaper is that I get ample feedback, often from people unencumbered by the niceties of interpersonal diplomacy.
Last week, I did what you might expect a conservative columnist to do. I told young orphans there is no Santa Claus. No, no, just kidding. (Besides, I'd have gotten a better reaction closer to the holidays.)
No, I merely cataloged the troubles of the Democratic Party. The infuriated response from hordes of liberal readers was, "How could you criticize the Democrats when the Republicans are in so much more trouble?" Fortunately they provided their own answers, most of which involved words such as "hack," "shill" and phrases ill-suited to a family newspaper — or even to bars frequented by ex-cons. Angry readers recounted the long parade of GOP problems: warrantless wiretaps, the Abramoff scandal, Tom DeLay's indictment, Katrina, the revelation that President Bush is Rosemary's baby, etc.
And that was before Vice President Dick Cheney started shooting people.
Allow me to defend myself. First, fish gotta fly, birds gotta swim and conservative columnists gotta indulge their schadenfreude about the sorry plight of the Democratic Party. It's what we do.
Second, of course the GOP is a mess (although I would remind liberals that it is better to be a majority party with problems than a minority party with problems). Congressmen are hanging out in K Street warrens like addicts in 19th century opium dens, but instead of Chinese dudes passing out pipes, there are lobbyists handing out checks, golf trips and other prizes from behind Curtain No. 2 on "Let's Make a Deal." The Contract With America that brought the Republicans to power more than 10 years ago is a distant blur in the GOP's rearview mirror. Smaller, competent and restrained government has been sacrificed to the new coalition of Republican rent-seekers.
Compassionate conservatism may have had some intellectual rigor when it was the stuff of egghead journals and think tank conferences, but under Bush it has always been a marketing strategy designed to justify spending vast sums of money. This shattering of the GOP's at-least nominal commitment to limited government has not only resulted in a bidding war between Congress and the White House on how "best" to expand government, it has also caused philosophical incontinence on the right.
I'm less critical of Bush's handling of the war on terror, but there, too, one certainly needn't struggle to the point of herniation to find mistakes.
Third, Republicans and conservatives aren't the same thing. This distinction seems lost on lots of people, including cable television bark-show bookers and partisan Democrats and Republicans alike. To a principled conservative, it is bad news when the Democrats lurch to the left, even if it makes the Democrats less likely to win elections. Why? Because when the Democrats move left, so do the Republicans.
In American politics, when one party moves left or right, the political center of gravity moves that way too. Bill Clinton, whatever his flaws, moved his party to the right. His triangulation infuriated Republicans because it is always vexing when someone steals your lunch. Democrats despise Bush's compassionate conservatism for similar reasons. A Republican president promising to "leave no child behind" annoys Democrats as much as Clinton's denouncing of Sista Soulja irked Republicans. When the Bush presidency is over, it will be more obvious in hindsight how much he moved the GOP to the left — by making the Nanny State bipartisan.
It all boils down to what matters to you most. As a conservative, the extent I root for the GOP depends entirely on how successful it is in moving the political climate of the country toward fiscal restraint, limited government and cultural decency. Single-issue voters understand this point best: Pro-lifers would dearly love to break the GOP monopoly on opposing abortion, just as abortion rights supporters dream of the day when both parties are pro-choice. Many conservatives, including yours truly, would have agonized over a choice between a reliably pro-war Democrat and George W. Bush in 2004, particularly if judicial appointments weren't so important.
The point, dear liberals, is that some conservatives who criticize the Democrats or offer them advice do not do so solely to salt wounds, but in the hope that someday we will have a real choice on Election Day — and not between the lesser of two evils.
Friday, February 17, 2006
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
Muslim Bites Dog
by Ann Coulter
The amazing part of the great Danish cartoon caper isn't that Muslims immediately engage in acts of mob violence when things don't go their way. That is de rigueur for the Religion of Peace. Their immediate response to all bad news is mass violence. That's a "dog bites man" story and belongs on page B-34, next to the grade school hot lunch menu and the birth notices.
After an Egyptian ferry capsized recently, killing hundreds of passengers, a whole braying mob of passengers' relatives staged an organized attack on the company, throwing furniture out the window and burning the building to the ground. Witnesses say it was the most violent ocean liner-related incident since Carnival Cruise Lines fired Kathie Lee Gifford.
The "offense to Islam" ruse is merely an excuse for Muslims to revert to their default mode: rioting and setting things on fire. These people have a serious anger management problem.
So it's not exactly a scoop that Muslims are engaging in violence. A front-page story would be "Offended Muslims Remain Calm."
What is stunning about this spectacle is that their violence is working. With a few exceptions, the media won't show the cartoons that incited mass violence around the globe (see the full gallery below). And yet, week after week, American patriots endure "The Boondocks" without complaint. Where's the justice here?
Perhaps we could put aside our national, ongoing, post-9/11 Muslim butt-kissing contest and get on with the business at hand: Bombing Syria back to the stone age and then permanently disarming Iran.
The mass violence by Muslims over some cartoons reminds us why we have to worry when countries like Iran start talking about having nukes. Iran is led by a lunatic who makes a big point of denying the Holocaust. Indeed, in response to the Muhammad cartoons, one Iranian newspaper is soliciting cartoons about the Holocaust. (So far the only submissions have come from Ted Rall, Garry Trudeau and The New York Times.)
Iran is certainly implying that it has nukes. Maybe they do, maybe they don't, but you can't take chances with berserk psychotics. What if they start having one of these bipolar episodes with a nuclear bomb?
If you don't want to get shot by the police, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then don't point a toy gun at them. Or, as I believe our motto should be after 9/11: Jihad monkey talks tough; jihad monkey takes the consequences. Sorry, I realize that's offensive. How about "camel jockey"? What? Now what'd I say? Boy, you tent merchants sure are touchy. Grow up, would you?
In addition, I believe we are legally required to be bombing Syria right now. And unlike the Koran's alleged prohibition on depictions of Muhammad, I've got documentation to back that up!
Muslims in Syria torched the Danish Embassy a few weeks ago, burning it to the ground. According to everyone, the Syrian government was behind the attack -- the prime minister of Denmark, Condoleezza Rice and White House spokesman Scott McClellan. I think even the gals on "The View" have acknowledged that Damascus was behind this one.
McClellan said: "We will hold Syria responsible for such violent demonstrations since they do not take place in that country without government knowledge and support."
We are signatories to a treaty that requires us to do more than "hold Syria responsible" for this attack. Syria has staged a state-sponsored attack on our NATO partner on Danish soil, the Danish embassy. According to the terms of the NATO treaty, the United States and most of Europe have an obligation to go to war with Syria.
Or is NATO -- like the conventions of civilized behavior, personal hygiene and grooming -- inapplicable when Muslims are involved? Liberals complain about "unilateral action," but under the terms of a treaty created by Dean Acheson and the Democrats, France, Germany, Spain and Greece are all obliged to go to war with us against Syria. Why, it's almost like a coalition! OK, Mr. Commie: Saddle up!
by Ann Coulter
The amazing part of the great Danish cartoon caper isn't that Muslims immediately engage in acts of mob violence when things don't go their way. That is de rigueur for the Religion of Peace. Their immediate response to all bad news is mass violence. That's a "dog bites man" story and belongs on page B-34, next to the grade school hot lunch menu and the birth notices.
After an Egyptian ferry capsized recently, killing hundreds of passengers, a whole braying mob of passengers' relatives staged an organized attack on the company, throwing furniture out the window and burning the building to the ground. Witnesses say it was the most violent ocean liner-related incident since Carnival Cruise Lines fired Kathie Lee Gifford.
The "offense to Islam" ruse is merely an excuse for Muslims to revert to their default mode: rioting and setting things on fire. These people have a serious anger management problem.
So it's not exactly a scoop that Muslims are engaging in violence. A front-page story would be "Offended Muslims Remain Calm."
What is stunning about this spectacle is that their violence is working. With a few exceptions, the media won't show the cartoons that incited mass violence around the globe (see the full gallery below). And yet, week after week, American patriots endure "The Boondocks" without complaint. Where's the justice here?
Perhaps we could put aside our national, ongoing, post-9/11 Muslim butt-kissing contest and get on with the business at hand: Bombing Syria back to the stone age and then permanently disarming Iran.
The mass violence by Muslims over some cartoons reminds us why we have to worry when countries like Iran start talking about having nukes. Iran is led by a lunatic who makes a big point of denying the Holocaust. Indeed, in response to the Muhammad cartoons, one Iranian newspaper is soliciting cartoons about the Holocaust. (So far the only submissions have come from Ted Rall, Garry Trudeau and The New York Times.)
Iran is certainly implying that it has nukes. Maybe they do, maybe they don't, but you can't take chances with berserk psychotics. What if they start having one of these bipolar episodes with a nuclear bomb?
If you don't want to get shot by the police, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then don't point a toy gun at them. Or, as I believe our motto should be after 9/11: Jihad monkey talks tough; jihad monkey takes the consequences. Sorry, I realize that's offensive. How about "camel jockey"? What? Now what'd I say? Boy, you tent merchants sure are touchy. Grow up, would you?
In addition, I believe we are legally required to be bombing Syria right now. And unlike the Koran's alleged prohibition on depictions of Muhammad, I've got documentation to back that up!
Muslims in Syria torched the Danish Embassy a few weeks ago, burning it to the ground. According to everyone, the Syrian government was behind the attack -- the prime minister of Denmark, Condoleezza Rice and White House spokesman Scott McClellan. I think even the gals on "The View" have acknowledged that Damascus was behind this one.
McClellan said: "We will hold Syria responsible for such violent demonstrations since they do not take place in that country without government knowledge and support."
We are signatories to a treaty that requires us to do more than "hold Syria responsible" for this attack. Syria has staged a state-sponsored attack on our NATO partner on Danish soil, the Danish embassy. According to the terms of the NATO treaty, the United States and most of Europe have an obligation to go to war with Syria.
Or is NATO -- like the conventions of civilized behavior, personal hygiene and grooming -- inapplicable when Muslims are involved? Liberals complain about "unilateral action," but under the terms of a treaty created by Dean Acheson and the Democrats, France, Germany, Spain and Greece are all obliged to go to war with us against Syria. Why, it's almost like a coalition! OK, Mr. Commie: Saddle up!
Our hollow prosperity
By Patrick J. Buchanan
Now that the U.S. trade deficit for 2005 has come in at $726 billion, the fourth straight all-time record, a question arises.
What constitutes failure for a free-trade policy? Or is there no such thing? Is free trade simply right no matter the results?
Last year, the United States ran a $202 billion trade deficit with China, the largest ever between two nations. We ran all-time record trade deficits with OPEC, the European Union, Japan, Canada and Latin America. The $50 billion deficit with Mexico was the largest since NAFTA passed and also the largest in history.
When NAFTA was up for a vote in 1993, the Clintonites and their GOP fellow-travelers said it would grow our trade surplus, raise Mexico's standard of living and reduce illegal immigration.
None of this happened. Indeed, the opposite occurred. Mexico's standard of living is lower than it was in 1993, the U.S. trade surplus has vanished, and America is being invaded. Mexico is now the primary source of narcotics entering the United States.
Again, when can we say a free-trade policy has failed?
The Bushites point proudly to 4.6 million jobs created since May 2003, a 4.7 percent unemployment rate and low inflation.
Unfortunately, conservative columnist Paul Craig Roberts and analysts Charles McMillion and Ed Rubenstein have taken a close look at the figures and discovered that the foundation of the Bush prosperity rests on rotten timber.
The entire job increase since 2001 has been in the service sector – credit intermediation, health care, social assistance, waiters, waitresses, bartenders, etc. – and state and local government.
But, from January 2001 to January 2006, the United States lost 2.9 million manufacturing jobs, 17 percent of all we had. Over the past five years, we have suffered a net loss in goods-producing jobs.
"The decline in some manufacturing sectors has more in common with a country undergoing saturation bombing than with a super-economy that is 'the envy of the world,'" writes Roberts.
Communications equipment lost 43 percent of its workforce. Semiconductors and electronic components lost 37 percent ... The workforce in computers and electronic products declined 30 percent. Electrical equipment and appliances lost 25 percent of its workforce.
How did this happen? Imports. The U.S. trade deficit in advanced technology jobs in 2005 hit an all-time high.
As for the "knowledge industry" jobs that were going to replace blue-collar jobs, it's not happening. The information sector lost 17 percent of all its jobs over the last five years.
In the same half-decade, the U.S. economy created only 70,000 net new jobs in architecture and engineering, while hundreds of thousands of American engineers remain unemployed.
If we go back to when Clinton left office, one finds that, in five years, the United States has created a net of only 1,054,000 private-sector jobs, while government added 1.1 million. But as many new private sector jobs are not full-time, McMillion reports, "the country ended 2005 with fewer private sector hours worked than it had in January 2001."
This is an economic triumph?
Had the United States not created the 1.4 million new jobs it did in health care since January 2001, we would have nearly half a million fewer private-sector jobs than when Bush first took the oath.
Ed Rubenstein of ESR Research Economic Consultants looks at the wage and employment figures and discovers why, though the Bushites were touting historic progress, 55 percent of the American people in a January poll rated the Bush economy only "fair" or "poor."
Not only was 2005's growth of 2 million jobs a gain of only 1.5 percent, anemic compared to the average 3.5 percent at this stage of other recoveries, the big jobs gains are going to immigrants.
Non-Hispanic whites, over 70 percent of the labor force, saw only a 1 percent employment increase in 2005. Hispanics, half of whom are foreign born, saw a 4.7 percent increase. As Hispanics will work for less in hospitals and hospices, and as waiters and waitresses, they are getting the new jobs.
But are not wages rising? Nope. When inflation is factored in, the Economic Policy Institute reports, "real wages fell by 0.5 percent over the last 12 months after falling 0.7 percent the previous 12 months."
If one looks at labor force participation – what share of the 227 million potential workers in America have jobs – it has fallen since 2002 for whites, blacks and Hispanics alike. Non-Hispanic whites are down to 63.4 percent, but black Americans have fallen to 57.7 percent.
What is going on? Hispanic immigrants are crowding out black Americans in the unskilled, semi-skilled and skilled job market. And millions of our better jobs are being lost to imports and outsourcing.
The affluent free-traders, whose wealth resides in stocks in global companies, are enriching themselves at the expense of their fellow citizens and sacrificing the American worker on the altar of the Global Economy.
None dare call it economic treason.
By Patrick J. Buchanan
Now that the U.S. trade deficit for 2005 has come in at $726 billion, the fourth straight all-time record, a question arises.
What constitutes failure for a free-trade policy? Or is there no such thing? Is free trade simply right no matter the results?
Last year, the United States ran a $202 billion trade deficit with China, the largest ever between two nations. We ran all-time record trade deficits with OPEC, the European Union, Japan, Canada and Latin America. The $50 billion deficit with Mexico was the largest since NAFTA passed and also the largest in history.
When NAFTA was up for a vote in 1993, the Clintonites and their GOP fellow-travelers said it would grow our trade surplus, raise Mexico's standard of living and reduce illegal immigration.
None of this happened. Indeed, the opposite occurred. Mexico's standard of living is lower than it was in 1993, the U.S. trade surplus has vanished, and America is being invaded. Mexico is now the primary source of narcotics entering the United States.
Again, when can we say a free-trade policy has failed?
The Bushites point proudly to 4.6 million jobs created since May 2003, a 4.7 percent unemployment rate and low inflation.
Unfortunately, conservative columnist Paul Craig Roberts and analysts Charles McMillion and Ed Rubenstein have taken a close look at the figures and discovered that the foundation of the Bush prosperity rests on rotten timber.
The entire job increase since 2001 has been in the service sector – credit intermediation, health care, social assistance, waiters, waitresses, bartenders, etc. – and state and local government.
But, from January 2001 to January 2006, the United States lost 2.9 million manufacturing jobs, 17 percent of all we had. Over the past five years, we have suffered a net loss in goods-producing jobs.
"The decline in some manufacturing sectors has more in common with a country undergoing saturation bombing than with a super-economy that is 'the envy of the world,'" writes Roberts.
Communications equipment lost 43 percent of its workforce. Semiconductors and electronic components lost 37 percent ... The workforce in computers and electronic products declined 30 percent. Electrical equipment and appliances lost 25 percent of its workforce.
How did this happen? Imports. The U.S. trade deficit in advanced technology jobs in 2005 hit an all-time high.
As for the "knowledge industry" jobs that were going to replace blue-collar jobs, it's not happening. The information sector lost 17 percent of all its jobs over the last five years.
In the same half-decade, the U.S. economy created only 70,000 net new jobs in architecture and engineering, while hundreds of thousands of American engineers remain unemployed.
If we go back to when Clinton left office, one finds that, in five years, the United States has created a net of only 1,054,000 private-sector jobs, while government added 1.1 million. But as many new private sector jobs are not full-time, McMillion reports, "the country ended 2005 with fewer private sector hours worked than it had in January 2001."
This is an economic triumph?
Had the United States not created the 1.4 million new jobs it did in health care since January 2001, we would have nearly half a million fewer private-sector jobs than when Bush first took the oath.
Ed Rubenstein of ESR Research Economic Consultants looks at the wage and employment figures and discovers why, though the Bushites were touting historic progress, 55 percent of the American people in a January poll rated the Bush economy only "fair" or "poor."
Not only was 2005's growth of 2 million jobs a gain of only 1.5 percent, anemic compared to the average 3.5 percent at this stage of other recoveries, the big jobs gains are going to immigrants.
Non-Hispanic whites, over 70 percent of the labor force, saw only a 1 percent employment increase in 2005. Hispanics, half of whom are foreign born, saw a 4.7 percent increase. As Hispanics will work for less in hospitals and hospices, and as waiters and waitresses, they are getting the new jobs.
But are not wages rising? Nope. When inflation is factored in, the Economic Policy Institute reports, "real wages fell by 0.5 percent over the last 12 months after falling 0.7 percent the previous 12 months."
If one looks at labor force participation – what share of the 227 million potential workers in America have jobs – it has fallen since 2002 for whites, blacks and Hispanics alike. Non-Hispanic whites are down to 63.4 percent, but black Americans have fallen to 57.7 percent.
What is going on? Hispanic immigrants are crowding out black Americans in the unskilled, semi-skilled and skilled job market. And millions of our better jobs are being lost to imports and outsourcing.
The affluent free-traders, whose wealth resides in stocks in global companies, are enriching themselves at the expense of their fellow citizens and sacrificing the American worker on the altar of the Global Economy.
None dare call it economic treason.
Who's No. 1?
Jeter, not Damon, should bat first in Yankees' lineup
By Tom Verducci
Top 2005 OBPs, batting leadoff
Rk. Player Team AB OBP
1. Derek Jeter Yankees 638 .391
2. Brian Roberts Orioles 558 .384
3. Johnny Damon Red Sox 621 .367
4. Chone Figgins Angels 529 .356
5. Grady Sizemore Indians 534 .353
The Yankees will open camp this week with a thoroughly set roster and the sum of their chances over the next seven months reduced to this: How are Randy Johnson and Mike Mussina throwing the ball on Oct. 1? New York's Spring Training is a snoozefest, unless you get jazzed about Carl Pavano and Jaret Wright battling for a spot in the rotation, updates on the health of Ramiro Mendoza or the chronicles of Felix Escalona. But I do see one obvious problem with this team that people seem to be ignoring: Johnny Damon should not bat leadoff.
Slice it any way you want, but Derek Jeter is a better leadoff batter than Damon. The problem with the 2005 Yankees wasn't the top man in the batting order -- they led all of baseball with a .379 OBP in the leadoff spot; Damon's Red Sox were sixth at .363 -- it was that GM Brian Cashman foisted Tony Womack on manager Joe Torre, who was foolish enough to give Womack 146 plate appearances in the two hole. Womack returned a .529 OPS in that slot, ranking 73rd among the 74 players with 100 plate appearances hitting second. (Ruben Gotay of Kansas City was, insult of insults, worse than Womack.)
Still, there is this idea, much of it borne from the creative mind of Scott Boras, that Damon is the missing piece, the uber-Knoblauch and nouveau-Rickey to make the Yankees champions again. But know this: Jeter was better at getting on base last year than Damon (.389, .366), was better leading off innings (.409 OBP, .365) and, for as much noise about Damon being someone who spoils good pitches, saw more pitches per plate appearance than Damon (3.82, 3.72). Jeter also holds a healthy margin over Damon in career OBP (.386, .353). And remember, Damon's numbers are bound to regress slightly just by leaving Fenway Park.
Further, if Torre bats Robinson Cano ninth and Damon first, he's making the job of every opposing manager much too easy in the late innings. AL managing is almost entirely about securing matchups from the seventh inning on. Torre would rarely get his best hitters late at-bats against offhanded pitchers (i.e., right-handed batters against left-handed pitchers). He would have those two lefthanded hitters, Cano and Damon, followed by possibly three right-handed hitters: Jeter, Alex Rodriguez and Gary Sheffield.
Flip Damon and Jeter and you get left-right-left-right-right. Now what can the opposing manager do? He either burns through his bullpen quickly or he concedes an advantage, such as leaving in a left-hander to face Jeter.
I know we're talking about All-Star players, not platoon players. And I know the batting order has far less impact on how many runs a team scores than the reams of copy devoted to it would have you believe. But if you could gain even slight advantages, wouldn't you do so?
Jeter, not Damon, should bat first in Yankees' lineup
By Tom Verducci
Top 2005 OBPs, batting leadoff
Rk. Player Team AB OBP
1. Derek Jeter Yankees 638 .391
2. Brian Roberts Orioles 558 .384
3. Johnny Damon Red Sox 621 .367
4. Chone Figgins Angels 529 .356
5. Grady Sizemore Indians 534 .353
The Yankees will open camp this week with a thoroughly set roster and the sum of their chances over the next seven months reduced to this: How are Randy Johnson and Mike Mussina throwing the ball on Oct. 1? New York's Spring Training is a snoozefest, unless you get jazzed about Carl Pavano and Jaret Wright battling for a spot in the rotation, updates on the health of Ramiro Mendoza or the chronicles of Felix Escalona. But I do see one obvious problem with this team that people seem to be ignoring: Johnny Damon should not bat leadoff.
Slice it any way you want, but Derek Jeter is a better leadoff batter than Damon. The problem with the 2005 Yankees wasn't the top man in the batting order -- they led all of baseball with a .379 OBP in the leadoff spot; Damon's Red Sox were sixth at .363 -- it was that GM Brian Cashman foisted Tony Womack on manager Joe Torre, who was foolish enough to give Womack 146 plate appearances in the two hole. Womack returned a .529 OPS in that slot, ranking 73rd among the 74 players with 100 plate appearances hitting second. (Ruben Gotay of Kansas City was, insult of insults, worse than Womack.)
Still, there is this idea, much of it borne from the creative mind of Scott Boras, that Damon is the missing piece, the uber-Knoblauch and nouveau-Rickey to make the Yankees champions again. But know this: Jeter was better at getting on base last year than Damon (.389, .366), was better leading off innings (.409 OBP, .365) and, for as much noise about Damon being someone who spoils good pitches, saw more pitches per plate appearance than Damon (3.82, 3.72). Jeter also holds a healthy margin over Damon in career OBP (.386, .353). And remember, Damon's numbers are bound to regress slightly just by leaving Fenway Park.
Further, if Torre bats Robinson Cano ninth and Damon first, he's making the job of every opposing manager much too easy in the late innings. AL managing is almost entirely about securing matchups from the seventh inning on. Torre would rarely get his best hitters late at-bats against offhanded pitchers (i.e., right-handed batters against left-handed pitchers). He would have those two lefthanded hitters, Cano and Damon, followed by possibly three right-handed hitters: Jeter, Alex Rodriguez and Gary Sheffield.
Flip Damon and Jeter and you get left-right-left-right-right. Now what can the opposing manager do? He either burns through his bullpen quickly or he concedes an advantage, such as leaving in a left-hander to face Jeter.
I know we're talking about All-Star players, not platoon players. And I know the batting order has far less impact on how many runs a team scores than the reams of copy devoted to it would have you believe. But if you could gain even slight advantages, wouldn't you do so?
Bono's Prophetic Vox
The Message Author Says U2's Message is Refreshing, Faithful, and Honest
@U2, February 09, 2006
By Scott Calhoun
Eugene Peterson has never been to a U2 concert and he says he isn't particularly interested in going to one. Once, he was invited to Chicago to spend a day with the band but because he had work to do, he declined the invitation. Peterson enjoys classical music, specifically Baroque, and the folk singers of the 20th century. "U2's music is just not a part of my life," Peterson admits, but when it comes to U2's message, he's a Bono-fide fan.
Outside the U2-fan world, Peterson is known as a retired pastor of 35 years, Professor Emeritus at Regent College, author of over thirty books written primarily for pastors and, most famously, the author of The Message. Peterson labored for a decade on his English paraphrase of the Bible to capture the earthy, dynamic language present in the original writings of Scripture. In the 1990s, he published the Psalms and Proverbs and then the New Testament. In 2002, he completed the rest of the Old Testament and the entire Message Bible was published. Then began his unlikely journey from Baroque to Bono.
To U2 fans, Peterson is known first and foremost as the guy whose Bible Bono likes. After the National Prayer Breakfast on February 2, Bono shared with reporters that he gets inspiration from reading The Message "by the very gifted scholar and poet Eugene Peterson." During the Elevation Tour, Bono recited from The Message a portion of Psalm 116 as the introduction to "Where the Streets Have No Name." When his father was near death, Bono said he would sit at his bedside and read aloud from Peterson's translation. (@U2's Angela Pancella's reported on the U2-Peterson connection in 2002.) Bono sent Peterson a video thank-you when he finished work on the whole Bible, to share
"...my thanks, and our thanks in the band, for this remarkable work you've done translating the Scriptures. Really, really a remarkable work....There have been some great translations, some very literary translations, but no translation that I've read that speaks to me in my own language. So I want to thank you for that."
The appreciation goes both ways, Peterson said. He's thankful for U2's remarkable work of spreading a message, calling people to forsake lives of selfish pursuits fueled by destructive delusions. In U2's songs, he hears the sound of truth and love. Peterson can hear, when Bono sings, the voice of the prophet in pop culture.
In the foreword to Raewynne J. Whiteley and Beth Maynard's, Get Up Off Your Knees, Preaching the U2 Catalog, Peterson wrote:
"Is U2 a prophetic voice? I rather think so. And many of my friends think so. If they do not explicitly proclaim the Kingdom, they certainly prepare the way for that proclamation in much the same way that John the Baptist prepared the way for the kerygma of Jesus...Amos crafted poems, Jeremiah wept sermons, Isaiah alternately rebuked and comforted, Ezekiel did street theater. U2 writes songs and goes on tour, singing them."
I asked Peterson if he would take some time to listen to songs from U2's recent albums, All That You Can't Leave Behind and How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, and then talk with me about why he thinks U2 is doing the work of a prophet. Though still hard at work at 73 -- Peterson is writing a five-volume series on what he calls "theology-lived," of which the second volume, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading, was published last month -- he graciously accepted my request.
I.
Would you call yourself a fan of U2?
It would be not accurate to say I'm a fan of their music; I'm a fan of them. I've heard about U2 from my students, actually. They are the ones who introduced me to their songs and a little bit about them. I heard my first Bono song in Munich. I was there visiting a former student and she took me and my wife into her apartment and said, "You've got to listen to this." I think it was "Grace."
What did you think of it?
I loved it. That was my first U2 song. She played it three or four times, actually, and her appreciation evoked my appreciation. I heard things that I probably wouldn't have heard on my own. That was my first introduction.
If it's not their music, then what do you like about U2?
I guess what really impresses me about U2 -- what I like, what I respond to -- is the way they have used their position in the world. They seem to me a very ingenuous group of people, without pretension or pose, who live out their convictions in a way which has nothing to do with their fame.
How so? How are they acting without regard for fame?
Well, I don't know the world of rock and roll music at all, but songs like "Peace on Earth" and "Yahweh," I can't believe they could anticipate that people would like those songs. [The lyrics] are words that I use in the pulpit and classroom, not the common vocabulary of the extra-church crowd. But they are used in such a way, said and sung, so that their meaning is conveyed in a way that reveals their truth: they commune and not just communicate, they evoke a responsive intimacy that can't be extracted from a dictionary. This is what art does, it gets beneath or within essential aspects of our lives.
Why do you call them prophets?
U2 doesn't seem to be calculated in what they are doing. It just comes out of who they are, and maybe that's why people respond to them, because they are so unconventional in the rock music world. And then there is the social passion they have evidenced in the African world, and the effort that they go to to speak to people of influence in order to try to convince them that pain and suffering and impoverishment are the responsibility of those who are in positions of influence and power -- such people are not to just make war and do public relations and win elections and develop strategies to get people to be better consumers.
So I've used the word prophet for them. Walter Brueggemann describes prophets as uncredentialed spokesmen for God. Well, I think that fits them pretty well. They don't have any authority in the world of faith.
But many people of faith respect U2. What do you mean "they have no authority"?
In the professional world of faith; in the conventional, established world of faith. They say unconventional things and use unconventional language. When the Rolling Stone interview came out (People of the Year: Bono, November 2001), one of my former students sent it to me. My friend told me I was in there someplace, so I read it through and I was hoping that when he got to me, he wouldn't use the f-word on The Message.[Laughs.] My daughter was reading it too, and she said, "I thought they were Christians?" and I said, "Well, I think that's the way Irish Christians talk."
That's funny, but you know that is a question which in one way or another has followed them their whole career: Are they capital "C" Christians or not? Do you think that's even a valid question to ask?
No I don't. I don't think it is.
What is the right question to ask?
Maybe we shouldn't even be asking prophets questions. They are asking questions of us. Maybe the question we ask should be, "Is God using these words, this stance, to say something to me, to my society, to my neighborhood?"
A prophet, almost by definition, doesn't fit into the categories you expect, which is what gives them bite, and clarity, and the sense of grabbing us by the scruff of our neck, and saying, "Listen to this: this is truth, this is what's going on." The whole authority of prophets comes not from what people say about them or the credentials that they have, it's from the truth of what they are saying. This is true of the Biblical prophets and of prophetic voices all through history. Often prophets use the name God but sometimes they don't.
It is interesting to reflect that no Hebrew prophet ever was referred to as "messiah," but the pagan Persian king Cyrus was. God used him in what I would refer to as a prophetic way to free the Hebrews from their exile and return them to their homeland, but Cyrus had no idea that he was issuing edicts under the sovereignty of God.
It is my job as a pastor and professor to speak the name of Jesus and proclaim the news of the gospel into whatever reality the prophets expose and call attention to. If they also do it, that's fine, but if they don't that doesn't mean that they aren't speaking/acting on God's behalf.
Have any popular musicians acted as prophets in your life?
Probably the most pervasive one in my life is Pete Seeger. I think he's a prophet. I very much doubt whether he would call himself a Christian, but he spoke truth and called attention to the things the Christian faith is committed to in a way that nobody else could do during his time.
What was Seeger calling your attention to?
Social justice issues, economic things, racial issues, peace....But he was doing this, and continues to do it -- he's done it all his life -- not in ways that the Christian church wasn't doing it, but he was getting the ear of people who would never go to church, and maybe of a lot of those who do go to church because they hadn't heard it from their own pulpits. I guess that's all I'm saying....I was a little offended, to tell you the truth, in the Christianity Today article on Bono there was an editorial and they complained that he didn't go to church! ["Bono's Thin Ecclesiology," March, 2003]
Yes, I remember that piece.
And I thought, "Oh, c'mon now. That's not what prophets do." Sometimes they sneak in, but they get out so they won't be recognized. I guess one of the prophetic voices that I think is very strong and has meant a lot to me is Wendell Berry. But as far as I know he doesn't go to church either.
Do you think a prophet loses something if he or she were to become "churchified" in some way?
Yes, I think so. I guess he'd lose the edge of surprise. I've been a part of the institution of religion all my life and have been quite happy doing it. I felt that's what I was called to do. But I depend for a lot of my insights and language on people who are outside the Church. That doesn't mean they are outside of Christ, but they are outside of the conventional expectations. I need that. If I'm just around people who talk the way I do, I lose perceptive accuracy, sharpness. And I think Bono is doing that for many.
You think he's helping people keep their perspective in focus?
Yes. To be honest with you, he doesn't do it for me. I loved David Dark's The Gospel According to America and I learned a lot from it, but in all his sections on music I didn't know what he was talking about. My children love contemporary music and they could pick out the artists who were saying something that had to do with how to live our lives -- I would say in Christ. They noticed it and they heard those things, then they brought my attention to it.
I noticed you were careful to say the prophet may be outside of the Church but not outside of Christ.
Right.
Can you explain how the prophet may be connected to Christ while at the same time be outside the Church?
Um...that's a complex question!
Well, I'm interested because Christians often are trained to think that life outside of the church is a life of drifting away, of going away from Christ.
Prophets don't have anything that Christ hasn't given them. Some of them find a vocation that is apart from the visible Church, maybe by accident or maybe deliberately or maybe not intentionally. But they are following the Spirit in some unarticulated way.
Sometimes I think God has to find a person who isn't carrying a lot of baggage or bad religion with them. John the Baptist, for example, where did he come from? He didn't fit the categories of the first century. And that happens over and over and over again. Simone Weil, the French woman who sometimes called herself an atheist, was a very prophetic voice in a time when prophetic voices were very rare in France.
These people come up here and there, and also in the Church -- there are plenty of strong, clear voices in the Church. But I think we are always a little surprised, those of us who make our home in the Church. We say, "Oh! Here's somebody. I wish I had thought of that. I wish I could say it that way." But they are getting the ear of people who wouldn't listen to us or wouldn't come to our churches.
Do you think U2 didn't have any bad religion? Was that why God took notice of them?
I wouldn't say they don't have any "bad religion." It's pretty hard to get through life without picking up at least some of it. I'm a pastor and pastors learn soon enough not to have illusions about anyone, in or out of "religion."
From what you know of U2's background, do you see anything that would indicate they were "prophets in the making"?
No, to tell you the truth, I think they started out pretty confused and were kind of just messing around. I think they must be as surprised about this -- that people like me are calling them prophets -- as maybe as I am. But doesn't that happen a lot? When we're living with any kind of authenticity, we don't know what we are doing until, suddenly, moments come of clarification -- catalytic moments -- and we see suddenly this is what I am, this is what I'm doing. But in the spiritual life, calculation doesn't work.
Why not?
Well it's because most of it is about the Holy Spirit, not our spirits, and we're in on something much, much bigger than we have any idea of. If we try to contain it, or try to work with boundaries or containers that we understand, we miss 98 percent of it.
II.
What do you like about the U2 songs you've heard?
Bono's a good poet. He uses words in fresh ways and juxtaposes metaphors in ways that help you see things that you hadn't seen before. The songs all seem to be very expressive in collecting images and metaphors that are out of our lives.
Do you find them compelling or stirring songs to listen to?
I guess the thing that makes them compelling is they don't use religious language. But you don't listen to them for very long before you realize we're working in the realm of God and relationships, of goodness and evil, and so suddenly he gets through our defenses and we're listening to something that is very, very important to us but that we've insulated or inoculated ourselves against.
What's in a U2 song that you think we have insulated ourselves from hearing in the day-to-day world?
I think I would say it a little differently. I think the non-church crowd, through Bono's music, find things which they had either idealized or dismissed as unwelcome intrusions now raised to a new level in which they can be perceived as included in the operations of (what I would call) salvation: grace, peace, etc.
For example, in the song "Peace on Earth": "Jesus sing a song you wrote, the words are sticking in my throat." Well, I start paying attention to that. And I love this line: "But hope and history won't rhyme." They are saying to me that I can't separate life into religious and secular, spiritual and ordinary: the dissonance between hope and history are the context in which we live life honestly and courageously, not by eliminating one or the other but by feeling or hearing that dissonance and living in a way that bring them into harmony.
What do you think motivates someone to sit down and write such a song, or any song? As a pastor and teacher, when someone came to you expressing what they had been thinking or feeling about God, were you able to see what was going on inside that person?
Well, yes, I think so. One of the ways we use language most accurately is when we are in some kind of broken, or uncomfortable, or confusing relationship, because the conventional words aren't working. People often use language very colorfully and very accurately when they don't know what they are talking about, when they are trying to tell the truth and reveal who they are. Pastors are really in a very fortunate position in that we are with people in those times a lot, and so we hear a lot of poetry from people who would be embarrassed to be called poets. I never would take notes when I was with people, but afterwards I would write down these phrases and sometimes would remind them of what they said.
Now, it seems to me that the gift of people like Bono is that they hear those phrases, or the phrases occur to them, and they can make art out of them. They can make a song and get them into our imagination and our way of life so that we start seeing what is going on around us with fresh eyes and fresh ears.
Bono's put two things together with "Hope and history won't rhyme" which we usually keep apart, and they start working on each other, don't they? That's what poets do and what musicians do and that's why we need them. And if they come from outer space like Bono and U2, then you take notice and appreciate it and thank God.
As a Bible scholar and translator, do you think Bono has run afoul of Hebraic tradition by singing the song "Yahweh"?
The only people I think who would be offended by that are the Orthodox Jews, because they normally don't use the name, out of reverence. But I think that now, because the word has been used much more by scholars, preachers, and others, I don't think it's surprising. Outside the Church it might be a surprising word because people haven't heard it. The way he uses it is as an invocation. The genus of the name, Yahweh, is that it is not a noun, it's a verb, and so you can't objectify a verb and therefore you can't make an idol out of it. It is most naturally understood in the vocative, as an address. A name is that way, as an address. The Bible has a lot of metaphors for God but Yahweh is the unique Biblical word for the Presence -- the One who is present to us and we have to be present to Him. I thought the song "Yahweh" uses the word in a way that partakes of its genius, its uniqueness. It's a personal address: "Yahweh, Yahweh." He's not talking about God, he's talking to God, or calling out to God.
III.
Are you surprised by U2's enormous success?
Yes, I am.
Why? Because of what you said earlier, about them acting with conviction and not calculation?
I don't have a whole lot of respect for popular culture -- too much of it seems to me to be reductive, escapist, and trivial. But none of those adjectives fit Bono and U2 as far as I know. And by this time, they have proven that they are not a fad -- they have staying power. That surprises me, and pleases me.
I couldn't appreciate Peter Seeger's fame when he was at the peak of his popularity, but does U2 seem to transcend the level of fame the folk singers of your generation had?
I think they do, yes, but it's a different world sociologically. The youth culture today is so huge and has such a mystique about it. They inhabit a common world, it seems to me: They all know the same music, they dress the same way....You, know, friends of mine, and not just young people but 40- and 50-year olds, go to U2 concerts and they talk of this as religious experiences.
You've heard that before? They tell you that?
I have, a lot, yeah. They say it's like church.
What do you make of that?
I think there's a deep commonality of spirit when people are open to the beauty and the truth and the goodness of God that communicates itself to us. And if it's the genuine thing you can put a name to it: it's religious, it's spiritual, it's God. Not everybody puts the name to it but it doesn't mean they don't participate in it someway or other.
Have you had religious experiences while watching the kind of shows you enjoy?
Oh yes, I've had it in the live theater, and we used to go regularly to concerts in Baltimore, where we lived for 30 years. I've seen Itzhak Perlman in concert several times. It's an awesome thing, it really is. Yes, I've had that kind of experience quite a lot, but for me it's mostly in the concert theater or live theater. Not so much with movies; I like them and appreciate them but I can't say they've ever shaped my life.
When your friends describe their U2 concert experiences to you, a declared non-fan, how do they try to get it across?
[Laughing] They say, "You'd love it, you'e got to come! I'll get you tickets." But I live in Montana and I'm a long ways away from them...
Would you ever want to go to a concert?
I don't know...I don't think so. I don't think I would.
Why not?
They sing out of and into a world that I am not immersed in. I celebrate and honor what they are doing and the way they are doing it, but I have been given a different assignment.
Have you met Bono?
No. I spoke with his chaplain once. I had a lovely conversation with him.
It's odd, don't you think, that a rock band has a chaplain?
Isn't that wonderful!
He invited you to Chicago once, right, when U2 were in town?
Right, it was to come and spend a day with them. At the time, I was finishing up The Message and I was behind and trying to keep deadlines. I just didn't see how I could do that, so I said no.
Do you recall what you spoke about with their chaplain?
Not really, I can't remember. He just told me that he had been with them since they were young and had kind of been their pastor all of their musical lives, and he said how much he respected him.
Bono has said he often read aloud from The Message at the bedside of his dying father. You know he is really fond of your work -- he's called you a poet and a scholar, and he quoted from your translation of Psalm 116 in concert on their Elevation Tour. What does that mean to you, either when you hear that something you made is being shared in an intimate setting between two people, or being shared with 20,000 people at a rock 'n' roll show?
Yeah, how did I get that pulpit, huh? [Laughing.] Well, it pleases me. I was hoping when I was doing The Message that I was going to return the Bible to its basic orality, which is how it started out -- as a story-like thing, with the poetry of it -- which has gotten kind of smothered in a lot of academic work and in overly pious contexts. So, it pleases me immensely. I had hoped that something like that would happen and I would get it read outside of church.
I guess that thing that surprised me most is that The Message has had so much acceptance within churches. I wasn't thinking about churches, I was thinking about people on the street. I was lucky in a way because I had a congregation of misfits -- a lot of recovering drug addicts and alcoholics -- they didn't fit in church and somehow found their way into my congregation. Those are the people I was doing translation for.
So, when somebody like Bono responds and a lot of other people like him -- I get a lot of letters from prison -- I think, "O, thank you Lord, this is where I wanted it to get read and listened to." And when Bono read it to his father I felt very honored to be in on that.
In 2002, Bono sent you his thanks and congratulations on the completion of The Message. If you were sending a greeting to U2, what would you say?
"Thank you for preaching to all the people who will never listen to me or read anything that I write! And for doing it with such integrity." I think that's what I feel, I just feel grateful to them for being obedient to the gifts that God has given them.
"Being obedient" is an unlikely compliment for a rock band. Would you say that by using their gifts, they have been obedient to God?
Well, I think I'd put it a little differently. This is true of virtually everybody: when you listen to what they're singing and you are watching them perform, what you are seeing and hearing is the product of a long process of growth. That doesn't just happen and you don't make it up. You don't say, "I'm going to be a rock star," and then start figuring out how to do it. In fact, one of the engaging things about U2's story is how they didn't know what they were doing for a long time. They weren't very good at it either, from what I read. But there's a certain authenticity of sticking at this.
You know, none of us are very good at what we're doing when we start out. The difference is, some of us keep doing it and finally everyone gets tired of saying "no" to you and they start listening.[Laughing.] I love to delight in finding companions who develop focus and consistency that carries through the years. It is easy to be heroic in a crisis or be a celebrity for a season. They have been in this for the long haul.
Would you expect that if U2 had not been interested in God and still wrote songs about grace, peace, or Yahweh, they would have been very different songs?
It would be interesting to have somebody study their lives and follow the spiritual development in their lives. But you just know there's a lot of soil that has been nurtured and worked on, and other people have contributed to, and other influences of family and friends have all worked into that. But they have been the ones that have said yes. I used the word obedient, but maybe faithful is a better synonym. They stuck at it and stayed with this one thing that has become defining for their lives. I don't know if I'm still with the thread you started out on or not....
Yes, that makes sense. You don't just stumble upon writing lyrics like those lyrics. That's what you're saying, right?
Right, they come out of something lived.
Let me just throw in one more thing. When I was listening to the music you sent me, I thought that with some of the music I grew up on -- Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, all those people -- when I compare Bono and U2 -- the way they're singing and the lyrics -- it seems so much more honest. All that Frank Sinatra crowd, they weren't telling the truth, they were just spinning fantasies. There's something very refreshing about U2. It's honest music. There's an honesty and that's why I think the word prophetic is accurate for them. They are not saying things that people want to hear to make them escape from their ordinary lives. They push us back into the conditions in which we have to live.
The Message Author Says U2's Message is Refreshing, Faithful, and Honest
@U2, February 09, 2006
By Scott Calhoun
Eugene Peterson has never been to a U2 concert and he says he isn't particularly interested in going to one. Once, he was invited to Chicago to spend a day with the band but because he had work to do, he declined the invitation. Peterson enjoys classical music, specifically Baroque, and the folk singers of the 20th century. "U2's music is just not a part of my life," Peterson admits, but when it comes to U2's message, he's a Bono-fide fan.
Outside the U2-fan world, Peterson is known as a retired pastor of 35 years, Professor Emeritus at Regent College, author of over thirty books written primarily for pastors and, most famously, the author of The Message. Peterson labored for a decade on his English paraphrase of the Bible to capture the earthy, dynamic language present in the original writings of Scripture. In the 1990s, he published the Psalms and Proverbs and then the New Testament. In 2002, he completed the rest of the Old Testament and the entire Message Bible was published. Then began his unlikely journey from Baroque to Bono.
To U2 fans, Peterson is known first and foremost as the guy whose Bible Bono likes. After the National Prayer Breakfast on February 2, Bono shared with reporters that he gets inspiration from reading The Message "by the very gifted scholar and poet Eugene Peterson." During the Elevation Tour, Bono recited from The Message a portion of Psalm 116 as the introduction to "Where the Streets Have No Name." When his father was near death, Bono said he would sit at his bedside and read aloud from Peterson's translation. (@U2's Angela Pancella's reported on the U2-Peterson connection in 2002.) Bono sent Peterson a video thank-you when he finished work on the whole Bible, to share
"...my thanks, and our thanks in the band, for this remarkable work you've done translating the Scriptures. Really, really a remarkable work....There have been some great translations, some very literary translations, but no translation that I've read that speaks to me in my own language. So I want to thank you for that."
The appreciation goes both ways, Peterson said. He's thankful for U2's remarkable work of spreading a message, calling people to forsake lives of selfish pursuits fueled by destructive delusions. In U2's songs, he hears the sound of truth and love. Peterson can hear, when Bono sings, the voice of the prophet in pop culture.
In the foreword to Raewynne J. Whiteley and Beth Maynard's, Get Up Off Your Knees, Preaching the U2 Catalog, Peterson wrote:
"Is U2 a prophetic voice? I rather think so. And many of my friends think so. If they do not explicitly proclaim the Kingdom, they certainly prepare the way for that proclamation in much the same way that John the Baptist prepared the way for the kerygma of Jesus...Amos crafted poems, Jeremiah wept sermons, Isaiah alternately rebuked and comforted, Ezekiel did street theater. U2 writes songs and goes on tour, singing them."
I asked Peterson if he would take some time to listen to songs from U2's recent albums, All That You Can't Leave Behind and How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, and then talk with me about why he thinks U2 is doing the work of a prophet. Though still hard at work at 73 -- Peterson is writing a five-volume series on what he calls "theology-lived," of which the second volume, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading, was published last month -- he graciously accepted my request.
I.
Would you call yourself a fan of U2?
It would be not accurate to say I'm a fan of their music; I'm a fan of them. I've heard about U2 from my students, actually. They are the ones who introduced me to their songs and a little bit about them. I heard my first Bono song in Munich. I was there visiting a former student and she took me and my wife into her apartment and said, "You've got to listen to this." I think it was "Grace."
What did you think of it?
I loved it. That was my first U2 song. She played it three or four times, actually, and her appreciation evoked my appreciation. I heard things that I probably wouldn't have heard on my own. That was my first introduction.
If it's not their music, then what do you like about U2?
I guess what really impresses me about U2 -- what I like, what I respond to -- is the way they have used their position in the world. They seem to me a very ingenuous group of people, without pretension or pose, who live out their convictions in a way which has nothing to do with their fame.
How so? How are they acting without regard for fame?
Well, I don't know the world of rock and roll music at all, but songs like "Peace on Earth" and "Yahweh," I can't believe they could anticipate that people would like those songs. [The lyrics] are words that I use in the pulpit and classroom, not the common vocabulary of the extra-church crowd. But they are used in such a way, said and sung, so that their meaning is conveyed in a way that reveals their truth: they commune and not just communicate, they evoke a responsive intimacy that can't be extracted from a dictionary. This is what art does, it gets beneath or within essential aspects of our lives.
Why do you call them prophets?
U2 doesn't seem to be calculated in what they are doing. It just comes out of who they are, and maybe that's why people respond to them, because they are so unconventional in the rock music world. And then there is the social passion they have evidenced in the African world, and the effort that they go to to speak to people of influence in order to try to convince them that pain and suffering and impoverishment are the responsibility of those who are in positions of influence and power -- such people are not to just make war and do public relations and win elections and develop strategies to get people to be better consumers.
So I've used the word prophet for them. Walter Brueggemann describes prophets as uncredentialed spokesmen for God. Well, I think that fits them pretty well. They don't have any authority in the world of faith.
But many people of faith respect U2. What do you mean "they have no authority"?
In the professional world of faith; in the conventional, established world of faith. They say unconventional things and use unconventional language. When the Rolling Stone interview came out (People of the Year: Bono, November 2001), one of my former students sent it to me. My friend told me I was in there someplace, so I read it through and I was hoping that when he got to me, he wouldn't use the f-word on The Message.[Laughs.] My daughter was reading it too, and she said, "I thought they were Christians?" and I said, "Well, I think that's the way Irish Christians talk."
That's funny, but you know that is a question which in one way or another has followed them their whole career: Are they capital "C" Christians or not? Do you think that's even a valid question to ask?
No I don't. I don't think it is.
What is the right question to ask?
Maybe we shouldn't even be asking prophets questions. They are asking questions of us. Maybe the question we ask should be, "Is God using these words, this stance, to say something to me, to my society, to my neighborhood?"
A prophet, almost by definition, doesn't fit into the categories you expect, which is what gives them bite, and clarity, and the sense of grabbing us by the scruff of our neck, and saying, "Listen to this: this is truth, this is what's going on." The whole authority of prophets comes not from what people say about them or the credentials that they have, it's from the truth of what they are saying. This is true of the Biblical prophets and of prophetic voices all through history. Often prophets use the name God but sometimes they don't.
It is interesting to reflect that no Hebrew prophet ever was referred to as "messiah," but the pagan Persian king Cyrus was. God used him in what I would refer to as a prophetic way to free the Hebrews from their exile and return them to their homeland, but Cyrus had no idea that he was issuing edicts under the sovereignty of God.
It is my job as a pastor and professor to speak the name of Jesus and proclaim the news of the gospel into whatever reality the prophets expose and call attention to. If they also do it, that's fine, but if they don't that doesn't mean that they aren't speaking/acting on God's behalf.
Have any popular musicians acted as prophets in your life?
Probably the most pervasive one in my life is Pete Seeger. I think he's a prophet. I very much doubt whether he would call himself a Christian, but he spoke truth and called attention to the things the Christian faith is committed to in a way that nobody else could do during his time.
What was Seeger calling your attention to?
Social justice issues, economic things, racial issues, peace....But he was doing this, and continues to do it -- he's done it all his life -- not in ways that the Christian church wasn't doing it, but he was getting the ear of people who would never go to church, and maybe of a lot of those who do go to church because they hadn't heard it from their own pulpits. I guess that's all I'm saying....I was a little offended, to tell you the truth, in the Christianity Today article on Bono there was an editorial and they complained that he didn't go to church! ["Bono's Thin Ecclesiology," March, 2003]
Yes, I remember that piece.
And I thought, "Oh, c'mon now. That's not what prophets do." Sometimes they sneak in, but they get out so they won't be recognized. I guess one of the prophetic voices that I think is very strong and has meant a lot to me is Wendell Berry. But as far as I know he doesn't go to church either.
Do you think a prophet loses something if he or she were to become "churchified" in some way?
Yes, I think so. I guess he'd lose the edge of surprise. I've been a part of the institution of religion all my life and have been quite happy doing it. I felt that's what I was called to do. But I depend for a lot of my insights and language on people who are outside the Church. That doesn't mean they are outside of Christ, but they are outside of the conventional expectations. I need that. If I'm just around people who talk the way I do, I lose perceptive accuracy, sharpness. And I think Bono is doing that for many.
You think he's helping people keep their perspective in focus?
Yes. To be honest with you, he doesn't do it for me. I loved David Dark's The Gospel According to America and I learned a lot from it, but in all his sections on music I didn't know what he was talking about. My children love contemporary music and they could pick out the artists who were saying something that had to do with how to live our lives -- I would say in Christ. They noticed it and they heard those things, then they brought my attention to it.
I noticed you were careful to say the prophet may be outside of the Church but not outside of Christ.
Right.
Can you explain how the prophet may be connected to Christ while at the same time be outside the Church?
Um...that's a complex question!
Well, I'm interested because Christians often are trained to think that life outside of the church is a life of drifting away, of going away from Christ.
Prophets don't have anything that Christ hasn't given them. Some of them find a vocation that is apart from the visible Church, maybe by accident or maybe deliberately or maybe not intentionally. But they are following the Spirit in some unarticulated way.
Sometimes I think God has to find a person who isn't carrying a lot of baggage or bad religion with them. John the Baptist, for example, where did he come from? He didn't fit the categories of the first century. And that happens over and over and over again. Simone Weil, the French woman who sometimes called herself an atheist, was a very prophetic voice in a time when prophetic voices were very rare in France.
These people come up here and there, and also in the Church -- there are plenty of strong, clear voices in the Church. But I think we are always a little surprised, those of us who make our home in the Church. We say, "Oh! Here's somebody. I wish I had thought of that. I wish I could say it that way." But they are getting the ear of people who wouldn't listen to us or wouldn't come to our churches.
Do you think U2 didn't have any bad religion? Was that why God took notice of them?
I wouldn't say they don't have any "bad religion." It's pretty hard to get through life without picking up at least some of it. I'm a pastor and pastors learn soon enough not to have illusions about anyone, in or out of "religion."
From what you know of U2's background, do you see anything that would indicate they were "prophets in the making"?
No, to tell you the truth, I think they started out pretty confused and were kind of just messing around. I think they must be as surprised about this -- that people like me are calling them prophets -- as maybe as I am. But doesn't that happen a lot? When we're living with any kind of authenticity, we don't know what we are doing until, suddenly, moments come of clarification -- catalytic moments -- and we see suddenly this is what I am, this is what I'm doing. But in the spiritual life, calculation doesn't work.
Why not?
Well it's because most of it is about the Holy Spirit, not our spirits, and we're in on something much, much bigger than we have any idea of. If we try to contain it, or try to work with boundaries or containers that we understand, we miss 98 percent of it.
II.
What do you like about the U2 songs you've heard?
Bono's a good poet. He uses words in fresh ways and juxtaposes metaphors in ways that help you see things that you hadn't seen before. The songs all seem to be very expressive in collecting images and metaphors that are out of our lives.
Do you find them compelling or stirring songs to listen to?
I guess the thing that makes them compelling is they don't use religious language. But you don't listen to them for very long before you realize we're working in the realm of God and relationships, of goodness and evil, and so suddenly he gets through our defenses and we're listening to something that is very, very important to us but that we've insulated or inoculated ourselves against.
What's in a U2 song that you think we have insulated ourselves from hearing in the day-to-day world?
I think I would say it a little differently. I think the non-church crowd, through Bono's music, find things which they had either idealized or dismissed as unwelcome intrusions now raised to a new level in which they can be perceived as included in the operations of (what I would call) salvation: grace, peace, etc.
For example, in the song "Peace on Earth": "Jesus sing a song you wrote, the words are sticking in my throat." Well, I start paying attention to that. And I love this line: "But hope and history won't rhyme." They are saying to me that I can't separate life into religious and secular, spiritual and ordinary: the dissonance between hope and history are the context in which we live life honestly and courageously, not by eliminating one or the other but by feeling or hearing that dissonance and living in a way that bring them into harmony.
What do you think motivates someone to sit down and write such a song, or any song? As a pastor and teacher, when someone came to you expressing what they had been thinking or feeling about God, were you able to see what was going on inside that person?
Well, yes, I think so. One of the ways we use language most accurately is when we are in some kind of broken, or uncomfortable, or confusing relationship, because the conventional words aren't working. People often use language very colorfully and very accurately when they don't know what they are talking about, when they are trying to tell the truth and reveal who they are. Pastors are really in a very fortunate position in that we are with people in those times a lot, and so we hear a lot of poetry from people who would be embarrassed to be called poets. I never would take notes when I was with people, but afterwards I would write down these phrases and sometimes would remind them of what they said.
Now, it seems to me that the gift of people like Bono is that they hear those phrases, or the phrases occur to them, and they can make art out of them. They can make a song and get them into our imagination and our way of life so that we start seeing what is going on around us with fresh eyes and fresh ears.
Bono's put two things together with "Hope and history won't rhyme" which we usually keep apart, and they start working on each other, don't they? That's what poets do and what musicians do and that's why we need them. And if they come from outer space like Bono and U2, then you take notice and appreciate it and thank God.
As a Bible scholar and translator, do you think Bono has run afoul of Hebraic tradition by singing the song "Yahweh"?
The only people I think who would be offended by that are the Orthodox Jews, because they normally don't use the name, out of reverence. But I think that now, because the word has been used much more by scholars, preachers, and others, I don't think it's surprising. Outside the Church it might be a surprising word because people haven't heard it. The way he uses it is as an invocation. The genus of the name, Yahweh, is that it is not a noun, it's a verb, and so you can't objectify a verb and therefore you can't make an idol out of it. It is most naturally understood in the vocative, as an address. A name is that way, as an address. The Bible has a lot of metaphors for God but Yahweh is the unique Biblical word for the Presence -- the One who is present to us and we have to be present to Him. I thought the song "Yahweh" uses the word in a way that partakes of its genius, its uniqueness. It's a personal address: "Yahweh, Yahweh." He's not talking about God, he's talking to God, or calling out to God.
III.
Are you surprised by U2's enormous success?
Yes, I am.
Why? Because of what you said earlier, about them acting with conviction and not calculation?
I don't have a whole lot of respect for popular culture -- too much of it seems to me to be reductive, escapist, and trivial. But none of those adjectives fit Bono and U2 as far as I know. And by this time, they have proven that they are not a fad -- they have staying power. That surprises me, and pleases me.
I couldn't appreciate Peter Seeger's fame when he was at the peak of his popularity, but does U2 seem to transcend the level of fame the folk singers of your generation had?
I think they do, yes, but it's a different world sociologically. The youth culture today is so huge and has such a mystique about it. They inhabit a common world, it seems to me: They all know the same music, they dress the same way....You, know, friends of mine, and not just young people but 40- and 50-year olds, go to U2 concerts and they talk of this as religious experiences.
You've heard that before? They tell you that?
I have, a lot, yeah. They say it's like church.
What do you make of that?
I think there's a deep commonality of spirit when people are open to the beauty and the truth and the goodness of God that communicates itself to us. And if it's the genuine thing you can put a name to it: it's religious, it's spiritual, it's God. Not everybody puts the name to it but it doesn't mean they don't participate in it someway or other.
Have you had religious experiences while watching the kind of shows you enjoy?
Oh yes, I've had it in the live theater, and we used to go regularly to concerts in Baltimore, where we lived for 30 years. I've seen Itzhak Perlman in concert several times. It's an awesome thing, it really is. Yes, I've had that kind of experience quite a lot, but for me it's mostly in the concert theater or live theater. Not so much with movies; I like them and appreciate them but I can't say they've ever shaped my life.
When your friends describe their U2 concert experiences to you, a declared non-fan, how do they try to get it across?
[Laughing] They say, "You'd love it, you'e got to come! I'll get you tickets." But I live in Montana and I'm a long ways away from them...
Would you ever want to go to a concert?
I don't know...I don't think so. I don't think I would.
Why not?
They sing out of and into a world that I am not immersed in. I celebrate and honor what they are doing and the way they are doing it, but I have been given a different assignment.
Have you met Bono?
No. I spoke with his chaplain once. I had a lovely conversation with him.
It's odd, don't you think, that a rock band has a chaplain?
Isn't that wonderful!
He invited you to Chicago once, right, when U2 were in town?
Right, it was to come and spend a day with them. At the time, I was finishing up The Message and I was behind and trying to keep deadlines. I just didn't see how I could do that, so I said no.
Do you recall what you spoke about with their chaplain?
Not really, I can't remember. He just told me that he had been with them since they were young and had kind of been their pastor all of their musical lives, and he said how much he respected him.
Bono has said he often read aloud from The Message at the bedside of his dying father. You know he is really fond of your work -- he's called you a poet and a scholar, and he quoted from your translation of Psalm 116 in concert on their Elevation Tour. What does that mean to you, either when you hear that something you made is being shared in an intimate setting between two people, or being shared with 20,000 people at a rock 'n' roll show?
Yeah, how did I get that pulpit, huh? [Laughing.] Well, it pleases me. I was hoping when I was doing The Message that I was going to return the Bible to its basic orality, which is how it started out -- as a story-like thing, with the poetry of it -- which has gotten kind of smothered in a lot of academic work and in overly pious contexts. So, it pleases me immensely. I had hoped that something like that would happen and I would get it read outside of church.
I guess that thing that surprised me most is that The Message has had so much acceptance within churches. I wasn't thinking about churches, I was thinking about people on the street. I was lucky in a way because I had a congregation of misfits -- a lot of recovering drug addicts and alcoholics -- they didn't fit in church and somehow found their way into my congregation. Those are the people I was doing translation for.
So, when somebody like Bono responds and a lot of other people like him -- I get a lot of letters from prison -- I think, "O, thank you Lord, this is where I wanted it to get read and listened to." And when Bono read it to his father I felt very honored to be in on that.
In 2002, Bono sent you his thanks and congratulations on the completion of The Message. If you were sending a greeting to U2, what would you say?
"Thank you for preaching to all the people who will never listen to me or read anything that I write! And for doing it with such integrity." I think that's what I feel, I just feel grateful to them for being obedient to the gifts that God has given them.
"Being obedient" is an unlikely compliment for a rock band. Would you say that by using their gifts, they have been obedient to God?
Well, I think I'd put it a little differently. This is true of virtually everybody: when you listen to what they're singing and you are watching them perform, what you are seeing and hearing is the product of a long process of growth. That doesn't just happen and you don't make it up. You don't say, "I'm going to be a rock star," and then start figuring out how to do it. In fact, one of the engaging things about U2's story is how they didn't know what they were doing for a long time. They weren't very good at it either, from what I read. But there's a certain authenticity of sticking at this.
You know, none of us are very good at what we're doing when we start out. The difference is, some of us keep doing it and finally everyone gets tired of saying "no" to you and they start listening.[Laughing.] I love to delight in finding companions who develop focus and consistency that carries through the years. It is easy to be heroic in a crisis or be a celebrity for a season. They have been in this for the long haul.
Would you expect that if U2 had not been interested in God and still wrote songs about grace, peace, or Yahweh, they would have been very different songs?
It would be interesting to have somebody study their lives and follow the spiritual development in their lives. But you just know there's a lot of soil that has been nurtured and worked on, and other people have contributed to, and other influences of family and friends have all worked into that. But they have been the ones that have said yes. I used the word obedient, but maybe faithful is a better synonym. They stuck at it and stayed with this one thing that has become defining for their lives. I don't know if I'm still with the thread you started out on or not....
Yes, that makes sense. You don't just stumble upon writing lyrics like those lyrics. That's what you're saying, right?
Right, they come out of something lived.
Let me just throw in one more thing. When I was listening to the music you sent me, I thought that with some of the music I grew up on -- Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, all those people -- when I compare Bono and U2 -- the way they're singing and the lyrics -- it seems so much more honest. All that Frank Sinatra crowd, they weren't telling the truth, they were just spinning fantasies. There's something very refreshing about U2. It's honest music. There's an honesty and that's why I think the word prophetic is accurate for them. They are not saying things that people want to hear to make them escape from their ordinary lives. They push us back into the conditions in which we have to live.
From The Boston Globe:
The flames of hate in Alabama
By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist
SUPPOSE THAT in 2005 unknown hoodlums had firebombed 10 gay bookstores and bars in San Francisco, reducing several of them to smoking rubble. It takes no effort to imagine the alarm that would have spread through the Bay Area's gay community or the manhunt that would have been launched to find the attackers. The blasts would have been described everywhere as ''hate crimes," editorial pages would have thundered with condemnation, and public officials would have vowed to crack down on crimes against gays with unprecedented severity.
Suppose that vandals last month had attacked 10 Detroit-area mosques and halal restaurants, leaving behind shattered windows, wrecked furniture, and walls defaced with graffiti. The violence would be national front-page news. On blogs and talk radio, the horrifying outbreak of anti-Muslim bigotry would be Topic No. 1. Bills would be introduced in Congress to increase the penalties for violent ''hate crimes" -- no one would hesitate to call them by that term -- and millions of Americans would rally in solidarity with Detroit's Islamic community.
Fortunately, those sickening scenarios are only hypothetical. Here is one that is not:
In the past two weeks, 10 Baptist churches have been burned in rural Alabama. Five churches in Bibb County -- Ashby Baptist, Rehobeth Baptist, Antioch Baptist, Old Union Baptist, and Pleasant Sabine -- were torched between midnight and 3 a.m. on Feb. 3. Four days later, arsonists destroyed or badly damaged Morning Star Missionary Baptist Church in Greene County, Dancy First Baptist Church in Pickens County, and two churches in Sumter County, Galilee Baptist and Spring Valley Baptist. On Saturday, Beaverton Freewill Baptist Church in northwest Alabama became the 10th house of worship to go up in flames.
Ten arson attacks against 10 churches -- all of them Baptist, all in small Alabama towns, all in the space of eight days: If anything is a hate crime, obviously this is.
Or is it? ''We're looking to make sure this is not a hate crime and that we do everything that we need to do," FBI Special Agent Charles Regantold reporters in Birmingham. Make sure this is not a hate crime? If 10 Brooklyn synagogues went up in flames in a little over a week, wouldn't investigators start from the assumption that the arson was motivated by hatred of Jews? If 10 Cuban-American shops and restaurants in Miami were deliberately burned to the ground, wouldn't the obvious presumption be that anti-Cuban animus was involved?
Apparently Baptist churches are different.
''I don't see any evidence that these fires are hate crimes," Mark Potok, a director of the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center, told the Los Angeles Times. ''Anti-Christian crimes are exceedingly rare in the South."
But are anti-Christian crimes really that rare? Or are they simply less interesting to the left, which prefers to cast Christians as victimizers, not victims?
A search of the SPLC's website, for example, turns up no references to Jay Scott Ballinger, a self-described Satan worshiper deeply hostile to Christianity, who was sentenced to life in prison for burning 26 churches between 1994 and 1999. Yet if those weren't ''hate crimes," what were they?
Running through the coverage of the latest church burnings is an almost palpable yearning to cast the story in racial terms. ''Federal investigators are looking for two white men for questioning in connection with a string of church fires in central Alabama," began a National Public Radio story on Friday. ''Race may be a factor." In fact, race seems not to be a factor at all -- five of the churches had mostly white congregations, five were largely black. To a media ever ready to expose racism in American culture, the arsonists' lack of regard for skin color must be maddening.
In 1996, a spate of fires in the South was wildly and falsely trumpeted in the media as an eruption of racism. ''We are facing an epidemic of terror," said Deval Patrick, the Clinton administration's assistant attorney general for civil rights. But as it turned out, there was no racist conspiracy. More than a third of the arsonists arrested were black, and more than half the churches burned were white. So perhaps it is progress of a sort that, this time around, the media are keeping in check the urge to cry ''Racism!"
But real progress will come only when we abandon the whole misguided notion of ''hate crimes," which deems certain crimes more deserving of outrage and punishment not because of what the criminal did, but because of the group to which the victim belonged. The burning of a church is a hateful act regardless of the congregants' skin color. That some people bend over backward not to say so is a disgrace.
Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.
The flames of hate in Alabama
By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist
SUPPOSE THAT in 2005 unknown hoodlums had firebombed 10 gay bookstores and bars in San Francisco, reducing several of them to smoking rubble. It takes no effort to imagine the alarm that would have spread through the Bay Area's gay community or the manhunt that would have been launched to find the attackers. The blasts would have been described everywhere as ''hate crimes," editorial pages would have thundered with condemnation, and public officials would have vowed to crack down on crimes against gays with unprecedented severity.
Suppose that vandals last month had attacked 10 Detroit-area mosques and halal restaurants, leaving behind shattered windows, wrecked furniture, and walls defaced with graffiti. The violence would be national front-page news. On blogs and talk radio, the horrifying outbreak of anti-Muslim bigotry would be Topic No. 1. Bills would be introduced in Congress to increase the penalties for violent ''hate crimes" -- no one would hesitate to call them by that term -- and millions of Americans would rally in solidarity with Detroit's Islamic community.
Fortunately, those sickening scenarios are only hypothetical. Here is one that is not:
In the past two weeks, 10 Baptist churches have been burned in rural Alabama. Five churches in Bibb County -- Ashby Baptist, Rehobeth Baptist, Antioch Baptist, Old Union Baptist, and Pleasant Sabine -- were torched between midnight and 3 a.m. on Feb. 3. Four days later, arsonists destroyed or badly damaged Morning Star Missionary Baptist Church in Greene County, Dancy First Baptist Church in Pickens County, and two churches in Sumter County, Galilee Baptist and Spring Valley Baptist. On Saturday, Beaverton Freewill Baptist Church in northwest Alabama became the 10th house of worship to go up in flames.
Ten arson attacks against 10 churches -- all of them Baptist, all in small Alabama towns, all in the space of eight days: If anything is a hate crime, obviously this is.
Or is it? ''We're looking to make sure this is not a hate crime and that we do everything that we need to do," FBI Special Agent Charles Regantold reporters in Birmingham. Make sure this is not a hate crime? If 10 Brooklyn synagogues went up in flames in a little over a week, wouldn't investigators start from the assumption that the arson was motivated by hatred of Jews? If 10 Cuban-American shops and restaurants in Miami were deliberately burned to the ground, wouldn't the obvious presumption be that anti-Cuban animus was involved?
Apparently Baptist churches are different.
''I don't see any evidence that these fires are hate crimes," Mark Potok, a director of the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center, told the Los Angeles Times. ''Anti-Christian crimes are exceedingly rare in the South."
But are anti-Christian crimes really that rare? Or are they simply less interesting to the left, which prefers to cast Christians as victimizers, not victims?
A search of the SPLC's website, for example, turns up no references to Jay Scott Ballinger, a self-described Satan worshiper deeply hostile to Christianity, who was sentenced to life in prison for burning 26 churches between 1994 and 1999. Yet if those weren't ''hate crimes," what were they?
Running through the coverage of the latest church burnings is an almost palpable yearning to cast the story in racial terms. ''Federal investigators are looking for two white men for questioning in connection with a string of church fires in central Alabama," began a National Public Radio story on Friday. ''Race may be a factor." In fact, race seems not to be a factor at all -- five of the churches had mostly white congregations, five were largely black. To a media ever ready to expose racism in American culture, the arsonists' lack of regard for skin color must be maddening.
In 1996, a spate of fires in the South was wildly and falsely trumpeted in the media as an eruption of racism. ''We are facing an epidemic of terror," said Deval Patrick, the Clinton administration's assistant attorney general for civil rights. But as it turned out, there was no racist conspiracy. More than a third of the arsonists arrested were black, and more than half the churches burned were white. So perhaps it is progress of a sort that, this time around, the media are keeping in check the urge to cry ''Racism!"
But real progress will come only when we abandon the whole misguided notion of ''hate crimes," which deems certain crimes more deserving of outrage and punishment not because of what the criminal did, but because of the group to which the victim belonged. The burning of a church is a hateful act regardless of the congregants' skin color. That some people bend over backward not to say so is a disgrace.
Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.
The Free Press Has Surrendered to Islamic Fanatics
By Ed Koch
If there were any lingering doubt that large numbers of fanatical Islamic adherents want to kill us or bring the democracies of the world to their knees, this past week should have settled the issue.
Last September, a Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, published 12 cartoons or caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad -- the one receiving most publicity depicting the Prophet with his head and turban looking like a bomb fused to go off. Four months later, riots, looting and killings by Muslim mobs are being organized around the world.
According to The New York Times, the cartoons have been republished in “Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland and Hungary, as well as in Jordan.” The U.S. State Department, according to The Times, “defended the right of the Danish and French newspapers to publish the cartoons.”
According to The Times, “Major American newspapers, including the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, did not publish the caricatures. Representatives said the story could be told effectively without publishing images that many would find offensive.” Surely, that excuse is inadequate in the U.S. with a population of 300 million, more than 75 percent Christian and subjected to seeing, as columnist Charles Krauthammer pointed out in his brilliant column of February 10, 2006, “publish[ed] pictures of the Virgin Mary covered with elephant dung and celebrat[ion of] the “Piss Christ” (a crucifix sitting in a jar of urine) as art deserving public subsidy, but [these newspapers] are seized with a sudden religious sensitivity when the subject is Muhammad.”
So why the reluctance to report the real story? Did these stalwarts who believe they are protecting the civil rights of the American public when they write editorial after editorial denouncing the Patriot Act and the spying activities of the National Security Agency without court warrants, both of which the President of the United States and leading members of Congress have told us time and again are necessary -- with the President insisting he is using the power provided in both the Constitution, law and court decisions in time of war -- to defend the U.S. from terrorist attack?
Some observers suggest that the newspapers fear physical attacks upon their buildings, presses and worse still upon editors and journalists. In the past, The Times has published material that was classified under U.S. law, e.g. the Ellsberg Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam War and the recent article alleging illegal National Security Agency eavesdropping on telephone conversations -- which the government believed to be taking place between people in the U.S. and people abroad where the government has probable cause to suspect that one of the parties was involved with international terrorism.
Surely when deciding to take actions that might lead to a criminal indictment by the U.S. government against the newspaper for publishing classified material, there must have been some discussion at the paper on whether the story should be published. One can only wonder what arguments were made when the decision was made not to publish the Muhammad cartoons, when the basic principle by which all of these guardians of the First Amendment pride themselves and constantly evoke is their commitment to provide all the news that’s fit to print, without fear or favor.
Bill Bennett, who was Secretary of Education under President Ronald Reagan, and John Zogby, President of the Arab-American Institute, were interviewed on this subject by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on February 9th. Zogby sought to explain, but not excuse, the violent response in the Muslim world, saying, “As it [the publication of the cartoons and the face of Muhammad] spread into the Arab world, another sensitivity, insecurity took over, and that was the fact that there is a deliberate insult against Islam. And Muslims are an iconoclastic religion. They don’t use icons, and they find them deeply insulting.”
At that point, Blitzer interjected, saying to Bennett, “You can understand, Bill, that feeling among many Muslims, that this is beyond the pale when you insult the Prophet Muhammad.” Bennett, as penetrating and brilliant as Krauthammer, responded, “Sure. And if I were a Jew watching what CNN just led in with [anti-Semitic cartoons used in Muslim countries], I might be a little upset, too. But CNN doesn’t have the solicitude for Jews it has for Muslims. Your policy is not to show these cartoons that were shown in Denmark, but to show one after another of the most anti-Semitic cartoons they could come forward with. CNN -- I don’t mean to pick on CNN, just because I work for you. But NBC, The New York Times, other media -- the Virgin Mary in cow dung, that was fine. We can show that everywhere. Now, the Islamists have won, in that they have intimidated the major news media from showing these cartoons. They have lost, however, in the wider world, because people see that this is just totally nutty behavior, that these cartoons are shown and people, as a result, want to kill people, behead people, burn buildings down. And, whatever the argument with the Danes, what is the point of burning the Jewish flag? What is the point of burning the U.S. flag and saying death to Israel and death to the United States? People get a good, close look at this and say, you know, these people are unhinged.”
Bennett’s most important comment was, “I promise you, they have won. They have silenced -- these -- these mobs have silenced the mainstream media, who are afraid of the mob.” Later on in the discussion, Bennett stated, “One of the difficulties with the cartoons is, they hit pretty close to the bone…Is there no suggestion that, in the name of Islam, in the name of the Koran, in the name of Allah, people are having their heads cut off? These things hit their target.”
To me, that is the crux of the matter. There is a war of civilizations being waged in the world with the Islamic fanatics subliminally seeking to storm once again the gates of Vienna, where, in 1683, they were defeated. If by threats of terror against them, the great media institutions can be brought to their knees, we are in big trouble. Before this occurred, I had no doubt that, no matter how difficult, no matter how long the war we are now engaged in continues, the democracies of the world would win, as they did when first facing Hitler and later Stalin. Today, I am no longer so certain.
That Bush-haters Cindy Sheehan and Harry Belafonte seek to sap our strength as a country does not worry me with regard to outcome. But when the greatest, most important institutions in the land -- the free press -- get frightened and surrender, as the German press did under similar assault in Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s, I worry about the final outcome.
For years prior to the outbreak of World War II, Hitler and his Nazi party made their murderous agenda very clear, while frightened democracies refused to heed the warnings and kept their heads in the sand. Today there are new ostriches in our land. They refuse to take terrorists at their word. The Times reported on February 4th the comments of a cleric at the Al-Omari mosque in Gaza, “We will not accept less than severing the heads of those responsible.” Regrettably, many Westerners don’t take Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Osama bin Laden’s principal deputy, at his word when he said, “Killing the infidels is our religion, slaughtering them is our religion, until they convert to Islam or pay us tribute.”
By Ed Koch
If there were any lingering doubt that large numbers of fanatical Islamic adherents want to kill us or bring the democracies of the world to their knees, this past week should have settled the issue.
Last September, a Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, published 12 cartoons or caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad -- the one receiving most publicity depicting the Prophet with his head and turban looking like a bomb fused to go off. Four months later, riots, looting and killings by Muslim mobs are being organized around the world.
According to The New York Times, the cartoons have been republished in “Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland and Hungary, as well as in Jordan.” The U.S. State Department, according to The Times, “defended the right of the Danish and French newspapers to publish the cartoons.”
According to The Times, “Major American newspapers, including the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, did not publish the caricatures. Representatives said the story could be told effectively without publishing images that many would find offensive.” Surely, that excuse is inadequate in the U.S. with a population of 300 million, more than 75 percent Christian and subjected to seeing, as columnist Charles Krauthammer pointed out in his brilliant column of February 10, 2006, “publish[ed] pictures of the Virgin Mary covered with elephant dung and celebrat[ion of] the “Piss Christ” (a crucifix sitting in a jar of urine) as art deserving public subsidy, but [these newspapers] are seized with a sudden religious sensitivity when the subject is Muhammad.”
So why the reluctance to report the real story? Did these stalwarts who believe they are protecting the civil rights of the American public when they write editorial after editorial denouncing the Patriot Act and the spying activities of the National Security Agency without court warrants, both of which the President of the United States and leading members of Congress have told us time and again are necessary -- with the President insisting he is using the power provided in both the Constitution, law and court decisions in time of war -- to defend the U.S. from terrorist attack?
Some observers suggest that the newspapers fear physical attacks upon their buildings, presses and worse still upon editors and journalists. In the past, The Times has published material that was classified under U.S. law, e.g. the Ellsberg Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam War and the recent article alleging illegal National Security Agency eavesdropping on telephone conversations -- which the government believed to be taking place between people in the U.S. and people abroad where the government has probable cause to suspect that one of the parties was involved with international terrorism.
Surely when deciding to take actions that might lead to a criminal indictment by the U.S. government against the newspaper for publishing classified material, there must have been some discussion at the paper on whether the story should be published. One can only wonder what arguments were made when the decision was made not to publish the Muhammad cartoons, when the basic principle by which all of these guardians of the First Amendment pride themselves and constantly evoke is their commitment to provide all the news that’s fit to print, without fear or favor.
Bill Bennett, who was Secretary of Education under President Ronald Reagan, and John Zogby, President of the Arab-American Institute, were interviewed on this subject by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on February 9th. Zogby sought to explain, but not excuse, the violent response in the Muslim world, saying, “As it [the publication of the cartoons and the face of Muhammad] spread into the Arab world, another sensitivity, insecurity took over, and that was the fact that there is a deliberate insult against Islam. And Muslims are an iconoclastic religion. They don’t use icons, and they find them deeply insulting.”
At that point, Blitzer interjected, saying to Bennett, “You can understand, Bill, that feeling among many Muslims, that this is beyond the pale when you insult the Prophet Muhammad.” Bennett, as penetrating and brilliant as Krauthammer, responded, “Sure. And if I were a Jew watching what CNN just led in with [anti-Semitic cartoons used in Muslim countries], I might be a little upset, too. But CNN doesn’t have the solicitude for Jews it has for Muslims. Your policy is not to show these cartoons that were shown in Denmark, but to show one after another of the most anti-Semitic cartoons they could come forward with. CNN -- I don’t mean to pick on CNN, just because I work for you. But NBC, The New York Times, other media -- the Virgin Mary in cow dung, that was fine. We can show that everywhere. Now, the Islamists have won, in that they have intimidated the major news media from showing these cartoons. They have lost, however, in the wider world, because people see that this is just totally nutty behavior, that these cartoons are shown and people, as a result, want to kill people, behead people, burn buildings down. And, whatever the argument with the Danes, what is the point of burning the Jewish flag? What is the point of burning the U.S. flag and saying death to Israel and death to the United States? People get a good, close look at this and say, you know, these people are unhinged.”
Bennett’s most important comment was, “I promise you, they have won. They have silenced -- these -- these mobs have silenced the mainstream media, who are afraid of the mob.” Later on in the discussion, Bennett stated, “One of the difficulties with the cartoons is, they hit pretty close to the bone…Is there no suggestion that, in the name of Islam, in the name of the Koran, in the name of Allah, people are having their heads cut off? These things hit their target.”
To me, that is the crux of the matter. There is a war of civilizations being waged in the world with the Islamic fanatics subliminally seeking to storm once again the gates of Vienna, where, in 1683, they were defeated. If by threats of terror against them, the great media institutions can be brought to their knees, we are in big trouble. Before this occurred, I had no doubt that, no matter how difficult, no matter how long the war we are now engaged in continues, the democracies of the world would win, as they did when first facing Hitler and later Stalin. Today, I am no longer so certain.
That Bush-haters Cindy Sheehan and Harry Belafonte seek to sap our strength as a country does not worry me with regard to outcome. But when the greatest, most important institutions in the land -- the free press -- get frightened and surrender, as the German press did under similar assault in Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s, I worry about the final outcome.
For years prior to the outbreak of World War II, Hitler and his Nazi party made their murderous agenda very clear, while frightened democracies refused to heed the warnings and kept their heads in the sand. Today there are new ostriches in our land. They refuse to take terrorists at their word. The Times reported on February 4th the comments of a cleric at the Al-Omari mosque in Gaza, “We will not accept less than severing the heads of those responsible.” Regrettably, many Westerners don’t take Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Osama bin Laden’s principal deputy, at his word when he said, “Killing the infidels is our religion, slaughtering them is our religion, until they convert to Islam or pay us tribute.”
Monday, February 13, 2006
Junebug
A small town rich in detail
Release Date: 2005
Ebert Rating: ****
BY ROGER EBERT / Aug 12, 2005
"Junebug" is a movie that understands, profoundly and with love and sadness, the world of small towns; it captures ways of talking and living I remember from my childhood, with the complexity and precision of great fiction. It observes small details that are important because they are details. It has sympathy for every character in the story and avoids two temptations: It doesn't portray the small-town characters as provincial hicks, and it doesn't portray the city slickers as shallow materialists. Phil Morrison, who directed this movie, and Angus MacLachlan, who wrote it, understand how people everywhere have good intentions, and how life can assign them roles where they can't realize them.
Tone is everything in this movie; it's not so much what people say as how they say it, and why. Consider this dialogue:
Peg: "You comin' to bed?"
Eugene: "Not now. I'm looking for something. My Phillips head."
That much is exactly right. A certain kind of person (my father was one) finds a Phillips head screwdriver easier to lose than almost everything else. So now wait until it's later at night, and observe Eugene in the kitchen. He looks in the refrigerator and then he says: "Now where would I be if I was a screwdriver?"
If you get that right, you get everything else right, too. And here is other dialogue that rings with clarity and truth:
Ashley to Johnny: "God loves you just the way you are, but he loves you too much to let you stay that way."
Peg, under her breath at a baby shower, after her son's new wife from the city has given her daughter-in-law a silver spoon: "That won't go in the dishwasher."
Who are these people? The story begins in Chicago, where an art dealer named Madeleine (Embeth Davidtz) is holding a benefit for Jesse Jackson Jr. At the event she meets George (Alessandro Nivola), and they fall in love and get married. His family from North Carolina is invited but doesn't attend. Six months later, she learns of a folk artist named David Wark (Frank Hoyt Taylor) who lives near George's family in the Winston-Salem area. They decide to kill two birds with one stone: She'll sign up the artist and meet the family.
Here is the family she meets: Peg (Celia Weston) is the matriarch, who criticizes everyone, second-guesses every decision and is never wrong, according to her. Eugene (Scott Wilson) is her husband, who has withdrawn into a deep silence and a shadowy presence, and spends many hours in his basement wood-carving corner. Johnny (Ben McKenzie) is George's younger brother, newly married to his high school sweetheart, Ashley (Amy Adams). She is pregnant.
As George and Madeleine arrive, Ashley is about to give birth. Johnny is responding to this, as he does to everything, by withdrawing, not talking to anybody, working under his car in the garage. Ashley, on the other hand, is always chatty; she's a good soul, cheerful, optimistic, supportive. The four people in this household are so locked into their roles that the arrival of the Chicagoans is like a bomb dropping.
Madeleine, the outsider, smiles all the time. If she feels this family is strange and disturbing, she doesn't say so. George behaves as he knows he should but remains enigmatic; we don't find out what he really thinks about his family until the movie's last line, if then.
The artist, David Wark, is a profound eccentric with an accent and values that seem to have been imported from the 18th century. His folk art incorporates imperfectly controlled images from a half-understood world. "I like all the dog heads and computers," Madeleine tells him, "and the scrotums." This is not intended as a funny line. Wark has just finished an allegorical painting about the freeing of the slaves. He explains that he can't paint a face unless it belongs to somebody he knows, and he doesn't know any black people, which is why all the slaves have white faces.
There is tension between George and Johnny, between Ashley and Johnny, between the world and Johnny. He spends long hours away from everyone, but watch him down in the basement, when a documentary about meerkats comes on TV. He knows his wife "loves meerkats." He races around desperately to find a blank videotape, so he can tape the show. It would mean so much to him to give her this video. He fails. Ashley explains about the tab that keeps you from re-recording over something, but he responds with anger and, of course, takes it out on her.
Two events happen at once. Madeleine believes she can win David Wark away from a New York gallery, and Ashley goes into labor. George thinks Madeleine's place is with the family, at the hospital. She doesn't agree: "I'll be over as soon as I do this. You know how important this is to me."
Now here is the question: How important is Ashley and Johnny's baby to George? (Johnny, of course, is nowhere to be found, certainly not at the hospital.) If he were in Chicago, George would certainly not fly down to be at the hospital. But when he moves into his family's house, he follows its rules. This leads to a scene of incredible power between Ashley and her brother-in-law, in which we see that Ashley truly is good, and brave, and sweeter than peaches. Small wonder that Amy Adams won the Sundance acting award.
"Junebug" is a great film because it is a true film. It humbles other films that claim to be about family secrets and eccentricities. It understands that families are complicated and their problems are not solved during a short visit, just in time for the film to end. Families and their problems go on and on, and they aren't solved, they're dealt with.
Consider a guarded moment between Madeleine and Eugene, her father-in-law. She observes cautiously of his wife: "She's a very strong personality." This is putting it mildly. Eugene replies quietly, "That's just her way. She hides herself. She's not like that inside." And then he adds two more words: "Like most." Thank God for actors like Scott Wilson, who know how those two words must be said. They carry the whole burden of the movie.
Cast & Credits
George: Alessandro Nivola
Ashley: Amy Adams
Madeleine: Embeth Davidtz
Eugene: Scott Wilson
Johnny: Ben McKenzie
David Wark: Frank Hoyt Taylor
Peg: Celia Weston
Sony Pictures Classics presents a film directed by Phil Morrison. Written by Angus MacLachlan. Running time: 107 minutes. Rated R (for sexual content and language).
A small town rich in detail
Release Date: 2005
Ebert Rating: ****
BY ROGER EBERT / Aug 12, 2005
"Junebug" is a movie that understands, profoundly and with love and sadness, the world of small towns; it captures ways of talking and living I remember from my childhood, with the complexity and precision of great fiction. It observes small details that are important because they are details. It has sympathy for every character in the story and avoids two temptations: It doesn't portray the small-town characters as provincial hicks, and it doesn't portray the city slickers as shallow materialists. Phil Morrison, who directed this movie, and Angus MacLachlan, who wrote it, understand how people everywhere have good intentions, and how life can assign them roles where they can't realize them.
Tone is everything in this movie; it's not so much what people say as how they say it, and why. Consider this dialogue:
Peg: "You comin' to bed?"
Eugene: "Not now. I'm looking for something. My Phillips head."
That much is exactly right. A certain kind of person (my father was one) finds a Phillips head screwdriver easier to lose than almost everything else. So now wait until it's later at night, and observe Eugene in the kitchen. He looks in the refrigerator and then he says: "Now where would I be if I was a screwdriver?"
If you get that right, you get everything else right, too. And here is other dialogue that rings with clarity and truth:
Ashley to Johnny: "God loves you just the way you are, but he loves you too much to let you stay that way."
Peg, under her breath at a baby shower, after her son's new wife from the city has given her daughter-in-law a silver spoon: "That won't go in the dishwasher."
Who are these people? The story begins in Chicago, where an art dealer named Madeleine (Embeth Davidtz) is holding a benefit for Jesse Jackson Jr. At the event she meets George (Alessandro Nivola), and they fall in love and get married. His family from North Carolina is invited but doesn't attend. Six months later, she learns of a folk artist named David Wark (Frank Hoyt Taylor) who lives near George's family in the Winston-Salem area. They decide to kill two birds with one stone: She'll sign up the artist and meet the family.
Here is the family she meets: Peg (Celia Weston) is the matriarch, who criticizes everyone, second-guesses every decision and is never wrong, according to her. Eugene (Scott Wilson) is her husband, who has withdrawn into a deep silence and a shadowy presence, and spends many hours in his basement wood-carving corner. Johnny (Ben McKenzie) is George's younger brother, newly married to his high school sweetheart, Ashley (Amy Adams). She is pregnant.
As George and Madeleine arrive, Ashley is about to give birth. Johnny is responding to this, as he does to everything, by withdrawing, not talking to anybody, working under his car in the garage. Ashley, on the other hand, is always chatty; she's a good soul, cheerful, optimistic, supportive. The four people in this household are so locked into their roles that the arrival of the Chicagoans is like a bomb dropping.
Madeleine, the outsider, smiles all the time. If she feels this family is strange and disturbing, she doesn't say so. George behaves as he knows he should but remains enigmatic; we don't find out what he really thinks about his family until the movie's last line, if then.
The artist, David Wark, is a profound eccentric with an accent and values that seem to have been imported from the 18th century. His folk art incorporates imperfectly controlled images from a half-understood world. "I like all the dog heads and computers," Madeleine tells him, "and the scrotums." This is not intended as a funny line. Wark has just finished an allegorical painting about the freeing of the slaves. He explains that he can't paint a face unless it belongs to somebody he knows, and he doesn't know any black people, which is why all the slaves have white faces.
There is tension between George and Johnny, between Ashley and Johnny, between the world and Johnny. He spends long hours away from everyone, but watch him down in the basement, when a documentary about meerkats comes on TV. He knows his wife "loves meerkats." He races around desperately to find a blank videotape, so he can tape the show. It would mean so much to him to give her this video. He fails. Ashley explains about the tab that keeps you from re-recording over something, but he responds with anger and, of course, takes it out on her.
Two events happen at once. Madeleine believes she can win David Wark away from a New York gallery, and Ashley goes into labor. George thinks Madeleine's place is with the family, at the hospital. She doesn't agree: "I'll be over as soon as I do this. You know how important this is to me."
Now here is the question: How important is Ashley and Johnny's baby to George? (Johnny, of course, is nowhere to be found, certainly not at the hospital.) If he were in Chicago, George would certainly not fly down to be at the hospital. But when he moves into his family's house, he follows its rules. This leads to a scene of incredible power between Ashley and her brother-in-law, in which we see that Ashley truly is good, and brave, and sweeter than peaches. Small wonder that Amy Adams won the Sundance acting award.
"Junebug" is a great film because it is a true film. It humbles other films that claim to be about family secrets and eccentricities. It understands that families are complicated and their problems are not solved during a short visit, just in time for the film to end. Families and their problems go on and on, and they aren't solved, they're dealt with.
Consider a guarded moment between Madeleine and Eugene, her father-in-law. She observes cautiously of his wife: "She's a very strong personality." This is putting it mildly. Eugene replies quietly, "That's just her way. She hides herself. She's not like that inside." And then he adds two more words: "Like most." Thank God for actors like Scott Wilson, who know how those two words must be said. They carry the whole burden of the movie.
Cast & Credits
George: Alessandro Nivola
Ashley: Amy Adams
Madeleine: Embeth Davidtz
Eugene: Scott Wilson
Johnny: Ben McKenzie
David Wark: Frank Hoyt Taylor
Peg: Celia Weston
Sony Pictures Classics presents a film directed by Phil Morrison. Written by Angus MacLachlan. Running time: 107 minutes. Rated R (for sexual content and language).
From Slate:
The Ayatollah Joke Book
So, the Prophet Mohammed walks into a bar …
By Michael Kinsley
Posted Friday, Feb. 10, 2006
Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, the noted wit, expert on freedom, and unelected religious leader—the leader who counts—of Iran, observed the other day that in the West, "casting doubt or negating the genocide of the Jews is banned but insulting the beliefs of 1.5 billion Muslims is allowed." He apparently thought this was a devastating point. Touché, Ayatollah Khamanei.
The worldwide fuss over 12 cartoon images of the Prophet Mohammed (some mocking, some benign) that ran in a Danish newspaper has already killed at least 10 people. Many self-styled voices of Islam have made the bizarre comparison between showing pictures of the Prophet Mohammed and expressing doubt about the Holocaust. A government-controlled Tehran newspaper announced a contest for cartoons about the Holocaust, asking "whether freedom of expression" applies to "the crimes committed by the United States and Israel." In a spirit of "see how you like it," a European Muslim group posted on the Web a cartoon of Anne Frank in bed with Hitler.
Muslim complaints about a Western double standard would be more telling if the factual premise was accurate. But it is not. In fact, it is nearly the opposite of the truth. Nothing is easier and more common in the West, including the United States, than criticizing the United States—except for criticizing Israel. A few Western countries have stupid laws, erratically enforced, against denying the Holocaust, but that hasn't stopped Holocaust denial from becoming a literary industry and cultural phenomenon. This is distressing to many Jews and others because making sure that the world remembers the Holocaust has become the main strategy for trying to prevent another one. The willingness of so many people to disbelieve the reality of a historical event as relatively recent and well-documented as the Holocaust leads you to despair of the human capacity for reason, along with more or less every advance in human affairs since the Dark Ages. Nevertheless, there has been no rioting about the historical reality of the Holocaust. No one has died over it.
Meanwhile, whatever point these European Muslims were making with their cartoon of Hitler and Anne Frank is more or less disproved by their very exercise. No one tried to stop them from putting the cartoon on the Web. The notion that jokes about Anne Frank are beyond the pale is provably false. There's a play running in New York right now called "25 Questions for a Jewish Mother." It's a monologue written and acted by stand-up comic Judy Gold, who says on stage every night that her mother used to read to her from a pop-up version of Anne Frank's diary and would say, "Pull the tab, Judith. Alive. Pull it again. Dead." Maybe you had to be there. But the New York Times reviewer called the play "fiercely funny, honest and moving" and did not demand that the author be executed, or even admonished.
By contrast, in a spectacular exercise of self-censorship, almost every major newspaper in this country is refraining from publishing the controversial Danish cartoons, even though they are at the center of a major news story that these papers cover at length every day. The Danish paper that originally published the 12 cartoons has apologized and editors in France and Jordan who published some of them have been fired. In tomorrow's paper, you're more likely to see a picture of Anne Frank or Hitler or both in bed with Eleanor Roosevelt, all three of them naked and performing unconventional sex acts, than you are to see a perfectly respectful picture of the Prophet Mohammed. An editorial in the Times on Wednesday said that not publishing the cartoons was "a reasonable choice" since they would offend many people and "are so easy to describe in words." I am looking at a front page photo in today's Times (as I write on Thursday) of Mariah Carey singing into a microphone. Words do it justice, I think.
Of course it is not Western values that are trampling freedom of expression: It is the ayatollah's own values, combined with the threat of violence. The other problem with his little joke about double standards, and with the whole supposedly mordant comparison between denying the Holocaust and portraying the prophet, is that the offended Muslims do not want a world where people are free to do both. They don't even want a world where people are not free to do either, which would at least be consistent. They want a world where you may not portray the Prophet Mohammed (even flatteringly, slaying infidels or whatnot) but you may deny the Holocaust all day long.
The bewildered prime minister of Denmark, trying to calm the whirlwind that has descended on his innocent, unsuspecting country, gets it spectacularly wrong when he reassures disgruntled Muslims that Denmark supports "freedom of religion" and is "one of the world's most tolerant and open societies." Tolerance, openness, and freedom of religion are not what they have in mind.
A lively debate is going on about whether Islam really does forbid any portrayal of the prophet, however benign, or whether that is a recent innovation of some subset of the faithful with possible ulterior motives. This debate misses the point. Some Christians believe they are required to wear particular sorts of clothing. Some Jews and Muslims don't eat pork. They don't claim that their religion requires other people to wear special clothing or avoid eating pork. Tolerance and ecumenism can only do so much. They have nothing to offer a Muslim in Afghanistan who is personally insulted and enraged about an image that appears in a newspaper in Denmark.
The shameful American position on all this is boilerplate endorsement of free expression combined with denunciation of the cartoons as an "unacceptable" insult. When three protesters died this week in a confrontation at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan, an American spokesman there said that Afghans "should judge us on what we're doing here, not on what some cartoonist is doing somewhere else." But the limits of free expression cannot be set by the sensitivities of people who don't believe in it. How can President Bush continue to ask young Americans to sacrifice their lives for freedom in the Muslim world, if he won't even defend freedom verbally when forces from that world are suppressing it in our own?
Michael Kinsley is Slate's founding editor.
The Ayatollah Joke Book
So, the Prophet Mohammed walks into a bar …
By Michael Kinsley
Posted Friday, Feb. 10, 2006
Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, the noted wit, expert on freedom, and unelected religious leader—the leader who counts—of Iran, observed the other day that in the West, "casting doubt or negating the genocide of the Jews is banned but insulting the beliefs of 1.5 billion Muslims is allowed." He apparently thought this was a devastating point. Touché, Ayatollah Khamanei.
The worldwide fuss over 12 cartoon images of the Prophet Mohammed (some mocking, some benign) that ran in a Danish newspaper has already killed at least 10 people. Many self-styled voices of Islam have made the bizarre comparison between showing pictures of the Prophet Mohammed and expressing doubt about the Holocaust. A government-controlled Tehran newspaper announced a contest for cartoons about the Holocaust, asking "whether freedom of expression" applies to "the crimes committed by the United States and Israel." In a spirit of "see how you like it," a European Muslim group posted on the Web a cartoon of Anne Frank in bed with Hitler.
Muslim complaints about a Western double standard would be more telling if the factual premise was accurate. But it is not. In fact, it is nearly the opposite of the truth. Nothing is easier and more common in the West, including the United States, than criticizing the United States—except for criticizing Israel. A few Western countries have stupid laws, erratically enforced, against denying the Holocaust, but that hasn't stopped Holocaust denial from becoming a literary industry and cultural phenomenon. This is distressing to many Jews and others because making sure that the world remembers the Holocaust has become the main strategy for trying to prevent another one. The willingness of so many people to disbelieve the reality of a historical event as relatively recent and well-documented as the Holocaust leads you to despair of the human capacity for reason, along with more or less every advance in human affairs since the Dark Ages. Nevertheless, there has been no rioting about the historical reality of the Holocaust. No one has died over it.
Meanwhile, whatever point these European Muslims were making with their cartoon of Hitler and Anne Frank is more or less disproved by their very exercise. No one tried to stop them from putting the cartoon on the Web. The notion that jokes about Anne Frank are beyond the pale is provably false. There's a play running in New York right now called "25 Questions for a Jewish Mother." It's a monologue written and acted by stand-up comic Judy Gold, who says on stage every night that her mother used to read to her from a pop-up version of Anne Frank's diary and would say, "Pull the tab, Judith. Alive. Pull it again. Dead." Maybe you had to be there. But the New York Times reviewer called the play "fiercely funny, honest and moving" and did not demand that the author be executed, or even admonished.
By contrast, in a spectacular exercise of self-censorship, almost every major newspaper in this country is refraining from publishing the controversial Danish cartoons, even though they are at the center of a major news story that these papers cover at length every day. The Danish paper that originally published the 12 cartoons has apologized and editors in France and Jordan who published some of them have been fired. In tomorrow's paper, you're more likely to see a picture of Anne Frank or Hitler or both in bed with Eleanor Roosevelt, all three of them naked and performing unconventional sex acts, than you are to see a perfectly respectful picture of the Prophet Mohammed. An editorial in the Times on Wednesday said that not publishing the cartoons was "a reasonable choice" since they would offend many people and "are so easy to describe in words." I am looking at a front page photo in today's Times (as I write on Thursday) of Mariah Carey singing into a microphone. Words do it justice, I think.
Of course it is not Western values that are trampling freedom of expression: It is the ayatollah's own values, combined with the threat of violence. The other problem with his little joke about double standards, and with the whole supposedly mordant comparison between denying the Holocaust and portraying the prophet, is that the offended Muslims do not want a world where people are free to do both. They don't even want a world where people are not free to do either, which would at least be consistent. They want a world where you may not portray the Prophet Mohammed (even flatteringly, slaying infidels or whatnot) but you may deny the Holocaust all day long.
The bewildered prime minister of Denmark, trying to calm the whirlwind that has descended on his innocent, unsuspecting country, gets it spectacularly wrong when he reassures disgruntled Muslims that Denmark supports "freedom of religion" and is "one of the world's most tolerant and open societies." Tolerance, openness, and freedom of religion are not what they have in mind.
A lively debate is going on about whether Islam really does forbid any portrayal of the prophet, however benign, or whether that is a recent innovation of some subset of the faithful with possible ulterior motives. This debate misses the point. Some Christians believe they are required to wear particular sorts of clothing. Some Jews and Muslims don't eat pork. They don't claim that their religion requires other people to wear special clothing or avoid eating pork. Tolerance and ecumenism can only do so much. They have nothing to offer a Muslim in Afghanistan who is personally insulted and enraged about an image that appears in a newspaper in Denmark.
The shameful American position on all this is boilerplate endorsement of free expression combined with denunciation of the cartoons as an "unacceptable" insult. When three protesters died this week in a confrontation at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan, an American spokesman there said that Afghans "should judge us on what we're doing here, not on what some cartoonist is doing somewhere else." But the limits of free expression cannot be set by the sensitivities of people who don't believe in it. How can President Bush continue to ask young Americans to sacrifice their lives for freedom in the Muslim world, if he won't even defend freedom verbally when forces from that world are suppressing it in our own?
Michael Kinsley is Slate's founding editor.
Sunday, February 12, 2006
Islamic Radicals Take Advantage of Western Liberalism
By John Leo
Is the biggest issue in the cartoon controversy free expression, sensitivity or fear? One vote here for none of the above. The key question may be this: Are Muslims in Europe going to live by the rules of the West, or by the rules of Islam?
Every now and then, a European nation decides to put its foot down, banning headscarves in French schools, expelling some jihadist imams in three nations, and deporting Muslim illegals as the Netherlands did after two high-profile murders that shocked the nation. But on the whole, Europe has chosen weakness and backpedaling.
A British judge agreed to bar Jews and Hindus from the jury at the trial of a Muslim. Sheikh Qaradawi was welcomed in London, despite his call for the murder of homosexuals and the fact that he himself was wanted for murder in Egypt. King Ferdinand III, who fought to win Spain's independence from the Moors, was removed as patron saint of the annual fiesta in Seville out of deference to Muslim feelings.
The Dutch Language Union decreed that the word Christ would now be spelled with a lowercase "c," starting in August. Crucifixes are disappearing from hospitals, and some Muslims are demanding that statues of Dante be removed, because the poet's "Divine Comedy" placed Muhammad in hell. A government office in Britain banned Winnie the Pooh, piggy banks and other images of pigs so Muslims wouldn't have to see them -- a small but galling example of Europe's unwillingness to live by its own standards.
In France, more than 10,000 cars were torched in 2005, mostly, it appears, by young Muslims. Ho-hum. In the post-cartoon demonstrations in Britain, police ignored the signs saying "Exterminate those who mock Islam" and "Be prepared for the real holocaust," but quickly arrested two counterprotesters carrying posters with images of Muhammad. In the first cartoon riots in Denmark last September, Danish police were warned to stay out of Muslim neighborhoods. As one Muslim said, "This is our area. We rule this place."
Europe is facing more opportunities to back down. Muslim fathers in Linz, Austria, are demanding that all female teachers, whether Muslim or not, be required to wear headscarves in school. The Muslim Council of Britain, which justifies Palestinian suicide bombers, wants Holocaust Day eliminated.
Much of the Muslim assertiveness is an outgrowth of Europe's disastrous love affair with multiculturalism. In theory, immigrants were to be encouraged to maintain their own identity and traditions in exchange for accepting Europe's system of shared values. In practice, it has mostly been a plan for hands-off separatism and resistance to assimilation.
Governments offer financial help in building schools and places of worship, and encourage the importing of imams from Arab countries, many of them predictably haters of the West. Raed Hlayhel, an imam in Denmark, for instance, was part of an entourage that toured the Middle East, building rage over the cartoons. He and the other imams took along several fabricated cartoons, one showing Muhammad as a pedophile and another depicting him having sex with a dog. Shouldn't these provocations earn each of these imams a one-way trip back to the Middle East?
As historian Fred Siegel of New York's Cooper Union points out, many of the imams have taken a page out of Yasser Arafat's book, speaking tolerantly in Europe, but calling for blood when on the Arab media. He says Muslim spokesman know how to game Western liberalism, demanding free speech when they deny the Holocaust, then dropping the free-speech argument and arguing that anti-Muslim criticisms and cartoons should be censored on grounds of multicultural sensitivity.
Europe has a hard decision on what to do with the so-called "conveyor-belt" Islamist groups that do not commit terrorism themselves, but recruit and indoctrinate young males, then turn them over to terrorist groups. One of them, Hizb ut-Tahrir, active in Denmark and more than 40 other countries, played an incendiary role in the cartoon controversy. "By combining fascist rhetoric, Leninist strategy and Western sloganeering with Wahhabi theology, Hizb ut-Tahrir has made itself into a very real and potent threat that is extremely difficulty for liberal societies to counter," Zeyno Baran of Washington's Nixon Center wrote in Foreign Affairs.
The conveyor belts are designed to take advantage of the West's protections of free speech and civil liberties. But they are dangerous parts of the broader terrorist operation. Germany banned Hizb ut-Tahrir. Other nations should too. If the West doesn't stop the spread of Islamic radicalism, the danger will soon be far graver than it is now.
By John Leo
Is the biggest issue in the cartoon controversy free expression, sensitivity or fear? One vote here for none of the above. The key question may be this: Are Muslims in Europe going to live by the rules of the West, or by the rules of Islam?
Every now and then, a European nation decides to put its foot down, banning headscarves in French schools, expelling some jihadist imams in three nations, and deporting Muslim illegals as the Netherlands did after two high-profile murders that shocked the nation. But on the whole, Europe has chosen weakness and backpedaling.
A British judge agreed to bar Jews and Hindus from the jury at the trial of a Muslim. Sheikh Qaradawi was welcomed in London, despite his call for the murder of homosexuals and the fact that he himself was wanted for murder in Egypt. King Ferdinand III, who fought to win Spain's independence from the Moors, was removed as patron saint of the annual fiesta in Seville out of deference to Muslim feelings.
The Dutch Language Union decreed that the word Christ would now be spelled with a lowercase "c," starting in August. Crucifixes are disappearing from hospitals, and some Muslims are demanding that statues of Dante be removed, because the poet's "Divine Comedy" placed Muhammad in hell. A government office in Britain banned Winnie the Pooh, piggy banks and other images of pigs so Muslims wouldn't have to see them -- a small but galling example of Europe's unwillingness to live by its own standards.
In France, more than 10,000 cars were torched in 2005, mostly, it appears, by young Muslims. Ho-hum. In the post-cartoon demonstrations in Britain, police ignored the signs saying "Exterminate those who mock Islam" and "Be prepared for the real holocaust," but quickly arrested two counterprotesters carrying posters with images of Muhammad. In the first cartoon riots in Denmark last September, Danish police were warned to stay out of Muslim neighborhoods. As one Muslim said, "This is our area. We rule this place."
Europe is facing more opportunities to back down. Muslim fathers in Linz, Austria, are demanding that all female teachers, whether Muslim or not, be required to wear headscarves in school. The Muslim Council of Britain, which justifies Palestinian suicide bombers, wants Holocaust Day eliminated.
Much of the Muslim assertiveness is an outgrowth of Europe's disastrous love affair with multiculturalism. In theory, immigrants were to be encouraged to maintain their own identity and traditions in exchange for accepting Europe's system of shared values. In practice, it has mostly been a plan for hands-off separatism and resistance to assimilation.
Governments offer financial help in building schools and places of worship, and encourage the importing of imams from Arab countries, many of them predictably haters of the West. Raed Hlayhel, an imam in Denmark, for instance, was part of an entourage that toured the Middle East, building rage over the cartoons. He and the other imams took along several fabricated cartoons, one showing Muhammad as a pedophile and another depicting him having sex with a dog. Shouldn't these provocations earn each of these imams a one-way trip back to the Middle East?
As historian Fred Siegel of New York's Cooper Union points out, many of the imams have taken a page out of Yasser Arafat's book, speaking tolerantly in Europe, but calling for blood when on the Arab media. He says Muslim spokesman know how to game Western liberalism, demanding free speech when they deny the Holocaust, then dropping the free-speech argument and arguing that anti-Muslim criticisms and cartoons should be censored on grounds of multicultural sensitivity.
Europe has a hard decision on what to do with the so-called "conveyor-belt" Islamist groups that do not commit terrorism themselves, but recruit and indoctrinate young males, then turn them over to terrorist groups. One of them, Hizb ut-Tahrir, active in Denmark and more than 40 other countries, played an incendiary role in the cartoon controversy. "By combining fascist rhetoric, Leninist strategy and Western sloganeering with Wahhabi theology, Hizb ut-Tahrir has made itself into a very real and potent threat that is extremely difficulty for liberal societies to counter," Zeyno Baran of Washington's Nixon Center wrote in Foreign Affairs.
The conveyor belts are designed to take advantage of the West's protections of free speech and civil liberties. But they are dangerous parts of the broader terrorist operation. Germany banned Hizb ut-Tahrir. Other nations should too. If the West doesn't stop the spread of Islamic radicalism, the danger will soon be far graver than it is now.
From The Chicage Sun-Times:
Toon-deaf Europe is taking the wrong stand
BY MARK STEYN
February 12, 2006
From Europe's biggest-selling newspaper, the Sun: ''Furious Muslims have blasted adult shop [i.e., sex shop] Ann Summers for selling a blowup male doll called Mustafa Shag."
Not literally "blasted" in the Danish Embassy sense, or at least not yet. Quite how Britain's Muslim Association found out about Mustafa Shag in order to be offended by him is not clear. It may be that there was some confusion: given that "blowup males" are one of Islam's leading exports, perhaps some believers went along expecting to find Ahmed and Walid modeling the new line of Semtex belts. Instead, they were confronted by just another filthy infidel sex gag. The Muslim Association's complaint, needless to say, is that the sex toy "insults the Prophet Muhammad -- who also has the title al-Mustapha.''
In a world in which Danish cartoons insult the prophet and Disney Piglet mugs insult the prophet and Burger King chocolate ice-cream swirl designs insult the prophet, maybe it would just be easier to make a list of things that don't insult him. Nonetheless, the Muslim Association wrote to the Ann Summers sex-shop chain, "We are asking you to have our Most Revered Prophet's name 'Mustafa' and the afflicted word 'shag' removed."
If I were a Muslim, I'd be "hurt" and "humiliated" that the revered prophet's name is given not to latex blowup males but to so many real blowup males: The leader of the 9/11 plotters? Mohammed Atta. The British Muslim who self-detonated in a Tel Aviv bar? Asif Mohammed Hanif. The gunman who shot up the El Al counter at LAX? Heshamed Mohamed Hedayet. The former U.S. Army sergeant who masterminded the slaughter at the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania? Ali Mohamed. The murderer of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh? Mohammed Bouyeri. The notorious Sydney gang rapist? Mohammed Skaf. The Washington sniper? John Allen Muhammed. If I were a Muslim, I would be deeply offended that the prophet's name is the preferred appellation of so many killers and suicide bombers on every corner of the earth.
But apparently that's not as big a deal as Mustafa Shag. When Samuel Huntington formulated his famous "clash of civilizations" thesis, I'm sure he hoped it would play out as something nobler than shaggers vs. nutters. But in a sense that's the core British value these days. If it's inherent in Muslim culture to take umbrage at everything, it's inherent in English culture to turn everything into a lame sex gag. The "Mustafa" template is one of the most revered in the English music-hall tradition: "I've been reading the latest scholarly monograph -- 'Sexual Practices of the Middle East by Mustapha Camel.'" If they wanted to appease the surging Muslim demographic, the British could conceivably withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan but it's hard to imagine they could withdraw from vulgar sex jokes and still be recognizably British. They are, in the Muslim Association's choice of words, "afflicted" with shag fever.
In theory, this should have been the perfect moment for Albert Brooks to release his new film ''Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World.'' Instead, life is effortlessly outpacing art. Brooks had an excellent premise and, somewhere between studio equivocation and his sense of self-preservation, it all got watered down, beginning with the decision to focus the plot on a trip to India. Which is a, er, mostly Hindu country. But the Arab world refused to let Brooks film there, and, even if they had, he'd have been lucky to get out alive. Needless to say, the movie doesn't mention that. So a film whose title flaunts a bold disdain for political correctness is, in the end, merely another concession to it.
You can't blame Brooks, not in a world of surreal headlines like "Cartoon Death Toll Up to Nine" (the Sunday Times of Australia). Instead of ''Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World,'' the Muslim world's come looking for comedy in the West and doesn't like what it's found. If memory serves, it was NBC who back in the '70s used to have every sitcom joke about homosexuality vetted by a gay dentist in New Jersey. Apprised of this at a conference on censorship, the producer of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" remarked, "You mean there really is a tooth fairy?" Alas, the Islamist Advisory Commission on Quran-Compatible Humor will be made of sterner stuff, and likely far more devastating to the sitcom biz.
And the good news is that that body's already on its way. The European Union's Justice and Security Commissioner, Franco Frattini, said on Thursday that the EU would set up a "media code" to encourage "prudence" in the way they cover, ah, certain sensitive subjects. As Signor Frattini explained it to the Daily Telegraph, "The press will give the Muslim world the message: We are aware of the consequences of exercising the right of free expression. . . . We can and we are ready to self-regulate that right."
"Prudence"? "Self-regulate our free expression"? No, I'm afraid that's just giving the Muslim world the message: You've won, I surrender, please stop kicking me.
But they never do. Because, to use the Arabic proverb with which Robert Ferrigno opens his new novel, Prayers for the Assassin, set in an Islamic Republic of America, "A falling camel attracts many knives." In Denmark and France and the Netherlands and Britain, Islam senses the camel is falling and this is no time to stop knifing him.
The issue is not "freedom of speech" or "the responsibilities of the press" or "sensitivity to certain cultures." The issue, as it has been in all these loony tune controversies going back to the Salman Rushdie fatwa, is the point at which a free society musters the will to stand up to thugs. British Muslims march through the streets waving placards reading "BEHEAD THE ENEMIES OF ISLAM." If they mean that, bring it on. As my columnar confrere John O'Sullivan argued, we might as well fight in the first ditch as the last.
But then it's patiently explained to us for the umpteenth time that they're not representative, that there are many many "moderate Muslims.''
I believe that. I've met plenty of "moderate Muslims" in Jordan and Iraq and the Gulf states. But, as a reader wrote to me a year or two back, in Europe and North America they aren't so much "moderate Muslims" as quiescent Muslims. The few who do speak out wind up living in hiding or under 24-hour armed guard, like Dutch MP Ayaab Hirsi Ali.
So when the EU and the BBC and the New York Times say that we too need to be more "sensitive" to those fellows with "Behead the enemies of Islam" banners, they should look in the mirror: They're turning into "moderate Muslims," and likely to wind up as cowed and silenced and invisible.
©Mark Steyn, 2006
Toon-deaf Europe is taking the wrong stand
BY MARK STEYN
February 12, 2006
From Europe's biggest-selling newspaper, the Sun: ''Furious Muslims have blasted adult shop [i.e., sex shop] Ann Summers for selling a blowup male doll called Mustafa Shag."
Not literally "blasted" in the Danish Embassy sense, or at least not yet. Quite how Britain's Muslim Association found out about Mustafa Shag in order to be offended by him is not clear. It may be that there was some confusion: given that "blowup males" are one of Islam's leading exports, perhaps some believers went along expecting to find Ahmed and Walid modeling the new line of Semtex belts. Instead, they were confronted by just another filthy infidel sex gag. The Muslim Association's complaint, needless to say, is that the sex toy "insults the Prophet Muhammad -- who also has the title al-Mustapha.''
In a world in which Danish cartoons insult the prophet and Disney Piglet mugs insult the prophet and Burger King chocolate ice-cream swirl designs insult the prophet, maybe it would just be easier to make a list of things that don't insult him. Nonetheless, the Muslim Association wrote to the Ann Summers sex-shop chain, "We are asking you to have our Most Revered Prophet's name 'Mustafa' and the afflicted word 'shag' removed."
If I were a Muslim, I'd be "hurt" and "humiliated" that the revered prophet's name is given not to latex blowup males but to so many real blowup males: The leader of the 9/11 plotters? Mohammed Atta. The British Muslim who self-detonated in a Tel Aviv bar? Asif Mohammed Hanif. The gunman who shot up the El Al counter at LAX? Heshamed Mohamed Hedayet. The former U.S. Army sergeant who masterminded the slaughter at the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania? Ali Mohamed. The murderer of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh? Mohammed Bouyeri. The notorious Sydney gang rapist? Mohammed Skaf. The Washington sniper? John Allen Muhammed. If I were a Muslim, I would be deeply offended that the prophet's name is the preferred appellation of so many killers and suicide bombers on every corner of the earth.
But apparently that's not as big a deal as Mustafa Shag. When Samuel Huntington formulated his famous "clash of civilizations" thesis, I'm sure he hoped it would play out as something nobler than shaggers vs. nutters. But in a sense that's the core British value these days. If it's inherent in Muslim culture to take umbrage at everything, it's inherent in English culture to turn everything into a lame sex gag. The "Mustafa" template is one of the most revered in the English music-hall tradition: "I've been reading the latest scholarly monograph -- 'Sexual Practices of the Middle East by Mustapha Camel.'" If they wanted to appease the surging Muslim demographic, the British could conceivably withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan but it's hard to imagine they could withdraw from vulgar sex jokes and still be recognizably British. They are, in the Muslim Association's choice of words, "afflicted" with shag fever.
In theory, this should have been the perfect moment for Albert Brooks to release his new film ''Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World.'' Instead, life is effortlessly outpacing art. Brooks had an excellent premise and, somewhere between studio equivocation and his sense of self-preservation, it all got watered down, beginning with the decision to focus the plot on a trip to India. Which is a, er, mostly Hindu country. But the Arab world refused to let Brooks film there, and, even if they had, he'd have been lucky to get out alive. Needless to say, the movie doesn't mention that. So a film whose title flaunts a bold disdain for political correctness is, in the end, merely another concession to it.
You can't blame Brooks, not in a world of surreal headlines like "Cartoon Death Toll Up to Nine" (the Sunday Times of Australia). Instead of ''Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World,'' the Muslim world's come looking for comedy in the West and doesn't like what it's found. If memory serves, it was NBC who back in the '70s used to have every sitcom joke about homosexuality vetted by a gay dentist in New Jersey. Apprised of this at a conference on censorship, the producer of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" remarked, "You mean there really is a tooth fairy?" Alas, the Islamist Advisory Commission on Quran-Compatible Humor will be made of sterner stuff, and likely far more devastating to the sitcom biz.
And the good news is that that body's already on its way. The European Union's Justice and Security Commissioner, Franco Frattini, said on Thursday that the EU would set up a "media code" to encourage "prudence" in the way they cover, ah, certain sensitive subjects. As Signor Frattini explained it to the Daily Telegraph, "The press will give the Muslim world the message: We are aware of the consequences of exercising the right of free expression. . . . We can and we are ready to self-regulate that right."
"Prudence"? "Self-regulate our free expression"? No, I'm afraid that's just giving the Muslim world the message: You've won, I surrender, please stop kicking me.
But they never do. Because, to use the Arabic proverb with which Robert Ferrigno opens his new novel, Prayers for the Assassin, set in an Islamic Republic of America, "A falling camel attracts many knives." In Denmark and France and the Netherlands and Britain, Islam senses the camel is falling and this is no time to stop knifing him.
The issue is not "freedom of speech" or "the responsibilities of the press" or "sensitivity to certain cultures." The issue, as it has been in all these loony tune controversies going back to the Salman Rushdie fatwa, is the point at which a free society musters the will to stand up to thugs. British Muslims march through the streets waving placards reading "BEHEAD THE ENEMIES OF ISLAM." If they mean that, bring it on. As my columnar confrere John O'Sullivan argued, we might as well fight in the first ditch as the last.
But then it's patiently explained to us for the umpteenth time that they're not representative, that there are many many "moderate Muslims.''
I believe that. I've met plenty of "moderate Muslims" in Jordan and Iraq and the Gulf states. But, as a reader wrote to me a year or two back, in Europe and North America they aren't so much "moderate Muslims" as quiescent Muslims. The few who do speak out wind up living in hiding or under 24-hour armed guard, like Dutch MP Ayaab Hirsi Ali.
So when the EU and the BBC and the New York Times say that we too need to be more "sensitive" to those fellows with "Behead the enemies of Islam" banners, they should look in the mirror: They're turning into "moderate Muslims," and likely to wind up as cowed and silenced and invisible.
©Mark Steyn, 2006
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