From The New York Sun:

The West Needs To Fight Islamofascists With Big Ideas
BY YOUSSEF IBRAHIM

September 1, 2006

The West's war on terror is going tactically well enough, with its mission to put out fires here and there before they start. But it sorely misses the larger strategy that must be implemented. The concept is this: It isn't enough to get the guys with the bombs or beards but to alter the environment that produces them.

Just like the war on communism, the war on terror must combine the force of arms with the power of ideas, a higher moral purpose with a mechanism of action. In other words, the West, along with Russia and China — which have no interest in jihadist uprisings within their own territories, needs a roadmap for its war on terror, clearly detailing its ultimate goals and how it will achieve them.

Such a strategy must be forged in G-8 Summit Meetings as well as the manuals of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the parliaments of the European Union. It must be defined unambiguously as the obliteration of an ideology that reduces Islam to a cult of mass murder and suicide.

Here is a blueprint:

1.The West needs strategies conveying to the vast majority of the world's 1.2 billion Muslims that acquiescence to jihadists and their ideologies means a rupture with Western civilization. The consequences for this should be spelled out by withholding Western commerce, the Internet, arms, machinery, and know-how — all of which still represent the bulk of progress as we define it in today's world. Imagine a ban on weapons and technology, on Microsoft and IBM, on Boeing, Ilyushin transport planes, and Airbus spares.

2. Draconian sanctions such as these should be applied in unison with Russia and China and clearly framed within the U.N. code. Islamic so-called moderate or client states including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Indonesia, among others, as well as enemies such as Iran, should be provided with a yardstick to define the dismantling of the infrastructure and software of terror at home — in mosques, in schools, in theocratic institutions, and inside government itself.

That will demand total elimination of the madrassa rote systems, the restructuring of religious teachings, and the outlawing of political groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood, which adopt religion as political vehicles.

3. In the West itself, the last vestiges of tolerance toward Islamic fundamentalism must be removed. Laws targeting extremist speech, Islamic dress, storefront unregulated mosques, and the traffic of immigrant Muslims who do not speak the language nor share the values of freedom must surface in the legal codes of America, Europe, and Australia. The West must clearly process the fact that it is facing an existential threat to its core values, and it cannot be shy about installing tools of war in its democratic practices.

Lest anyone think this is much ado about little, five years ago on one of America's darkest days when airplanes were crashed into the World Trade Center, it seemed that only a few hundred jihadists were aiming to make a point.

Now, it is clear that the people responsible for those burning towers in Manhattan were only small filaments of a spider's web encompassing millions of Muslims. Beyond towers, their aim is a freeze on freedom, democracy, and secularism — foundations that took centuries to develop, requiring the defeat of communism in order to prevail. The new plan is tyrannical rule by another name — jihad. But jihadists and secular tyrants are quite willing to join hands on this one.

Long before 9/11, jihadist adherents and sponsoring secular states, even communist states, had been stretching cobwebs into the suburbs of London and Islamabad, the streets of Baghdad and Kabul, the valleys between Syria and Lebanon, Iran and Iraq, and inside Western Europe and across Africa.

Enablers include our closest allies in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, tribal leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the merchants of Dubai and Kuwait, all the way into the Indian Ocean, Indonesia, and Asia.

So, just imagine a world where the likes of Muammar Gadhafi of Libya, President Chavez of Venezuela, Bashar Al-Assad of Syria, Fidel Castro of Cuba, President Ahmadinejad of Iran, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, along with Hosni Mubarak and his sons in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood movements of Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and carbon copies in Indonesia, Pakistan, and across Asia all join hands.

This is the perspective that the larger strategy requires. It's the big picture.

From Real Clear Politics:

The Unlearned Lesson of Katrina
By Robert Tracinski

In the press coverage of the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, we expect a fair bit of the usual throwing around of blame for political advantage, but to my surprise that has not been the main theme of the coverage (though Ted Kennedy couldn't resist a crudely partisan tirade). Instead, the dominant theme of the anniversary coverage is what is not being mentioned. Having reported the wrong story about the flooding of New Orleans one year ago, the press is trying to protect its distortion by excising from history the events that gave many Americans their greatest shock.

What shocked many of us was not the hurricane itself, nor the response of the federal government--outrage against the Bush administration was cultivated later. What shocked us first was the response of the people of New Orleans themselves: the immediate looting, the collapse of the city government as demoralized local police walked off the job in the middle of an emergency, and the thousands of people wallowing in squalor while demanding that someone else come to help them. These are the facts that the mainstream media has downplayed or just plain ignored.

Ironically, it was the press itself that first brought this story to our attention, by focusing its reporting on the crime and squalor at the Superdome and the New Orleans convention center in the days after the levies failed. But the press soon began to backpedal, realizing that they had miscalculated. They showed us too much of the squalor, too much of the rampant looting and lawlessness, and too many ungrammatical ravings by foul-mouthed New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin. The American people began to lose their initial reaction of sympathy and to wonder instead why so many inhabitants of New Orleans were more eager to blame others for their plight than they were to lift a finger on their own behalf.

The media had hoped for an opposite reaction. They wanted to induce guilt, telling the rest of the nation that the wretchedness of New Orleans was somehow our fault. For example, New York Times columnist Frank Rich lectured us that the poor people of New Orleans "were left behind to suffer and die when the people of means began sprinting toward higher ground. They are the ones who are always left behind, out of sight and out of mind, and I'd be surprised--given the history of this country--if that were to change now." Didn't we understand that the story was supposed to be about America's heartless indifference to the poor?

Let's take a critical look at the events, from a year's perspective, and see what the real story was.

The left is correct on one point: the story is all about federal spending and the welfare state--but not in the way that they think.

Frank Rich and company claimed that people were trapped in New Orleans because they had been abandoned for decades by a stingy government that denied them an adequate level of welfare handouts. In fact, New Orleans received a higher per-capita rate of federal welfare spending than most cities--a full 78 percent more than the national average--and the districts hardest hit by the flooding contained some of the city's largest public housing projects. The welfare state had showered its largesse on New Orleans, but with what result?

In fact, the disaster in New Orleans was caused, not by too little welfare spending, but by too much. Four decades of dependence on government left people without the resources--economic, intellectual, or moral--to plan ahead and provide for themselves in an emergency. I stated the lesson at the time:

What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. And they don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men....

People living in piles of their own trash, while petulantly complaining that other people aren't doing enough to take care of them and then shooting at those who come to rescue them--this is not just a description of the chaos at the Superdome. It is a perfect summary of the 40-year history of the welfare state and its public housing projects.

In the week after the disaster, a New York Times reporter profiled two New Orleans families and their different reactions to Katrina. The main difference was not money; neither family was well-off. But one was from the lower middle class--people who are used to working for a living and providing for themselves--whereas the other family fully represented the welfare state mentality. The first family pooled their efforts with their extended family to drive out of New Orleans before the storm hit and stay at an inexpensive hotel farther inland. The other family didn't leave New Orleans until the flood waters reached their own home--and along the way, they blew their "last $25 dollars to buy fish and shrimp from men grilling them on the street"--with apparently nary a thought for what they would live on after dinnertime.

The main difference between these two families was not money but responsibility. That is also the difference between the people in New Orleans who stockpiled necessities like food, gasoline, and bottled water before the storm hit, and those who waited until after the storm and looted whatever they needed--which apparently included televisions, jewelry, and DVDs--from the local Wal-Mart. Many of these looters, especially those who struck within hours after the storm passed, were not in any kind of desperate need. As one of them explained to a reporter, "People who have been repressed all their lives, man, it's an opportunity to get back at society."

This fellow acquired his sense of ethics from the welfare state--and from its spokesmen, like Frank Rich.

This sense of victimhood and entitlement brings us to the other mainstream media claim about Katrina: that it unmasked America's institutionalized racism and showed, as one rapper proclaimed, that "George Bush doesn't care about black people." (It could be argued, incidentally, that "rap music" is itself the most insidious form of institutionalized racism today, peddling a debased view of blacks as thugs and whores that exceeds the wildest slanders of Ku Klux Klan propaganda.) But what are the actual facts about Katrina and race? The Coast Guard and National Guard toiled relentlessly for four days to rescue thousands of people from their roofs, saving as many as 50,000 people--most of them black. And an analysis of deaths from the hurricane showed that mortality rates were slightly higher for whites than for blacks. So much for the myth of the racist hurricane.

But that doesn't mean race was not an issue. Katrina exposed the virulent racism of many blacks, who are raised on a culture of victimhood and grievance and think the rest of the nation owes them a prosperous living. On September 10, for example, Fox News Channel broadcast a live interview with a Katrina evacuee in Houston, a self-parody of the Angry Young Black Man who demanded a $20,000 debit card from FEMA and shouted at the camera: "We didn't ask to come on that bus.... It's like a slave ship. It's just like, you know, back in history, you know, they put us on a slave ship.... Just give us what the f--- we deserve."

What was he describing as a "slave ship"? The buses sent to rescue people from New Orleans--the same buses whose absence in the first days after the flood were considered evidence of nationally institutionalized racism. There is certainly prejudice involved here; this young man has prejudged America as guilty, and he simply grabs at any rationalization that will confirm his bigotry.

Like this young man, the media has blamed Hurricane Katrina on a massive failure of government--which is also true, but again not in the way that they claim. It was not primarily a failure by the federal government, which is not supposed to be the first responder to a natural disaster. The first responders are supposed to be the state and local governments--who failed utterly.

Mayor Ray Nagin failed to devise or administer an evacuation plan--remember that famous photo of dozens of school buses that were left to be swamped by the flood waters instead of being used to evacuate flood victims?

Instead, Nagin spent the entire crisis complaining about what other people weren't doing to save his city. When asked where he was during the crucial moments of the disaster, Nagin snapped back, to the world at large, "Where were you?"--as if a random resident strolling the streets of Buffalo bears more responsibility for the plight of New Orleans than the city's own mayor.

That Ray Nagin is still mayor of New Orleans, one year later, is the worst possible indictment of the city's corrupt culture. In 1979, the people of Chicago voted out their mayor because he failed to ensure the timely plowing of the streets after a heavy snowstorm. Ray Nagin presided over an unprecedented collapse in city government, and the people of New Orleans re-elected him. A large number of New Orleans voters are still stuck in the fantasy of holding everyone responsible for their lives except themselves.

William Jefferson also represents the local political culture well. He's the congressman whose home district is in central New Orleans--and he's also the congressman recently caught hiding $90,000 worth of bribe money in his freezer. Nagin and Jefferson are typical political products of the welfare state. Their job is not to protect citizens' lives and property, but to dole out vast sums in vote-buying patronage to their supporters and constituents, and occasionally to skim a little off the top for themselves.

And that brings us to the role of the federal government. The federal government's problem is not lack of spending. Over the decades, Louisiana's congressional delegation has funneled billions of dollars to a vast system of canals and levees, which failed--not because they were inadequately funded, but because they were inadequately designed and built.

And what about federal spending on the rebuilding of New Orleans? The federal government, far from ignoring the Gulf Coast, has pledged the astonishing sum of $120 billion dollars, far more than for any previous natural disaster. Tens of billions have already poured out of the federal coffers--largely to disappear into the unreformed swamp of Louisiana political corruption.

Yes, this is about a failure of government, all right. It's about the failure of big government and the welfare state and the whole philosophy behind them. It is about the vital necessity to move away from government handouts and toward personal responsibility and private initiative. Hurricane Katrina demonstrated that the moral difference between self-reliance and dependence on government is ultimately the difference between life and death.

The only institution for which the press has any praise on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is, naturally enough, the press. They have spent much of this week congratulating themselves on what a marvelous job they did--which is the surest indication that they have completely missed the real story.

Robert Tracinski writes daily commentary at TIADaily.com. He is the editor of The Intellectual Activist and TIADaily.com.

From macleans.ca:

Call me crazy. I blame terrorists.

How can 36 per cent of people polled think U.S. officials
knew of or participated in 9/11?

By MARK STEYN

Who is A. K. Dewdney? He's an adjunct professor of biology at the University of Western Ontario, and he has pieced together the truth about what happened on 9/11. You may be familiar with the official version: "To account for the events of Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush White House has produced a scenario involving Arab hijackers flying large aircraft into American landmarks," writes the eminent Ontario academic. "We, like millions of other 9/11 skeptics, have found this explanation to be inconsistent with the facts of the matter."

Instead, he argues, a mid-air plane switch took place on three of the jets. "The passengers of one of the flights died in an aerial explosion over Shanksville, Pa.," he writes, "and the remaining passengers (and aircraft) were disposed of in the Atlantic Ocean." Most of us swallowed "the Bush-Cheney scenario" because we were unaware that, when two planes are less than half a kilometre apart, they appear as a single blip on the radar screen. Thus, the covert switch. Instead of crashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the flights were diverted by FBI agents on board to Harrisburg, Pa., where the passengers from all three planes were herded onto UA Flight 175 and flown on to Cleveland Hopkins and their deaths. By then, unmanned Predator drones had been substituted for the passenger jets and directed into their high-profile targets. The original planes and their passengers were finished off over the Atlantic.

But what about all those phone calls, especially from Flight 93? Ha, scoffs Dewdney. "Cellphone calls made by passengers were highly unlikely to impossible. Flight UA93 was not in the air when most of the alleged calls were made. The calls themselves were all faked." Michel Chossudovsky, of Quebec's Centre for Research on Globalization, agrees: "It was extremely difficult, if not impossible, to place a wireless cell call from an aircraft travelling at high speed above 8,000 feet."

So all the "Let's roll" stuff was cooked up by the government spooks. So, presumably, were the calls from the other planes. Flight 175 passenger Peter Hanson to his father: "Passengers are throwing up and getting sick. The plane is making jerky movements." This at a time when, according to professor Dewdney, Flight 175 was preparing to land smoothly at Harrisburg. Or Flight 11 stewardess Madeline Sweeney: "We are flying very, very low. We are flying way too low. Oh my God, we are way too low." Two minutes later, Flight 11 supposedly crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center -- though, as professor Dewdney has demonstrated, by then the plane wasn't even in the state. These so-called "calls" all used state-of-the art voice modification technology to make family members believe they were talking to loved ones rather than vocally disguised government agents. In the case of Todd Beamer's "Let's roll!" the spooks had gone to the trouble of researching and identifying individual passengers' distinctive conversational expressions.

In the end, says Dewdney, Flight 93 was shot down by a "military-looking all-white aircraft." It was an A-10 Thunderbolt cunningly repainted to . . . well, the professor doesn't provide a rationale for why you'd go to the trouble to paint a military aircraft. But the point is, several eyewitnesses reported seeing a white jet in the vicinity of the Flight 93 Pennsylvania crash site, so naturally conspiracy theorists regard that as supporting evidence that the plane was brought down by the U.S. military rather than after a heroic passenger uprising against their jihadist hijackers. "It was taken out by the North Dakota Air Guard," announced retired army Col. Donn de Grand Pre. "I know the pilot who fired those two missiles to take down 93." It was Maj. Rick Gibney, who destroyed the aircraft with a pair of Sidewinders at precisely 9:58 a.m.

Ooooo-kay. We now turn to a brand-new book edited by David Dunbar and Brad Reagan called Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand Up to the Facts. Brad Reagan? There's a name for conspiracy theorists to ponder, notwithstanding his cover as a "contributing editor" for Popular Mechanics. First things first: Maj. Rick Gibney is a lieutenant-colonel. At 9:58 a.m. he wasn't in Shanksville, Pa., but in Fargo, N.D. At 10:45, he took off for Bozeman, Mont., where he picked up Edward Jacoby, Jr., director of the New York State Emergency Management Office, and flew him back to Albany, N.Y., in a two-seat F-16B, unarmed -- i.e., no Sidewinders. The white plane was not an attractively painted A-10 Thunderbolt but a Dassault Falcon 20 corporate jet belonging to the company that owns Wrangler, North Face and other clothing lines. It was coming into Johnstown, near Shanksville, when Flight 93 disappeared and the FAA radioed to ask them if they could look around. "The plane circled the crash site twice," write Dunbar and Reagan, "and then flew directly over it to mark the exact latitude and longitude on the plane's navigation system."

Just for the record, I believe that a cell of Islamist terrorists led by Mohammed Atta carried out the 9/11 attacks. But that puts me in a fast-shrinking minority. In the fall of 2001, a coast-to-coast survey of Canadian imams found all but two insistent that there was no Muslim involvement in 9/11.

Oh, well. It was just after 9/11, everyone was still in shock.

Five years later, a poll in the United Kingdom found that only 17 per cent of British Muslims believe there was any Arab involvement in 9/11.

Ah, but it's a sensitive issue over there, what with Tony Blair being so close to Bush and all.

Professor Dewdney's plane-swap theory?

Come on, if you already live in Canada, it's not such a leap to live in an alternative universe.

But what are we to make of the Scripps Howard poll taken this month in which 36 per cent of those surveyed thought it "somewhat likely" or "very likely" that federal officials either participated in the attacks or had knowledge of them beforehand?

Debunking 9/11 Myths does a grand job of explaining such popular conspiracy-website mainstays as how a 125-foot-wide plane leaves a 16-foot hole in the Pentagon. Answer: it didn't. The 16-foot hole in the Pentagon's Ring C was made by the plane's landing gear. But the problem isn't scientific, it's psychological: if you're prepared to believe that government agents went to the trouble of researching, say, gay rugby player Mark Bingham's family background and vocal characteristics so they could fake cellphone calls back to his mom, then clearly you're not going to be deterred by mere facts. As James B. Meigs, the editor-in-chief of Popular Mechanics, remarks toward the end of this book, the overwhelming nature of the evidence is, to the conspiratorially inclined, only further evidence of a cover-up: "One forum posting that has multiplied across the Internet includes a long list of the physical evidence linking the 19 hijackers to the crime: the rental car left behind at Boston's Logan airport, Mohammed Atta's suitcase, passports recovered at the crash sites, and so on. 'HOW CONVENIENT!' the author notes after each citation. In the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose logic of conspiracism, there is no piece of information that cannot be incorporated into one's pet theory."

When I was on the Rush Limbaugh show a couple of months back, a listener called up to insist that 9/11 was an inside job. I asked him whether that meant Bali and Madrid and London and Istanbul were also inside jobs. Because that's one expensive operation to hide even in the great sucking maw of the federal budget. But the Toronto blogger Kathy Shaidle made a much sharper point:

"I wonder if the nuts even believe what they are saying. Because if something like 9/11 happened in Canada, and I believed with all my heart that, say, Stephen Harper was involved, I don't think I could still live here. I'm not sure I could stop myself from running screaming to another country. How can you believe that your President killed 2,000 people, and in between bitching about this, just carry on buying your vente latte and so forth?"

Over to you, Col. de Grand Pre, and Charlie Sheen, and Alan Colmes.

The sad reality is that never before has an enemy hidden in such plain sight. Osama bin Laden declared a jihad against America in 1998. Iran's nuclear president vows to wipe Israel off the map. A year before the tube bombings, radical Brit imam Omar Bakri announced that a group of London Islamists are "ready to launch a big operation" on British soil. "We don't make a distinction between civilians and non-civilians, innocents and non-innocents," he added, clarifying the ground rules. "Only between Muslims and unbelievers. And the life of an unbeliever has no value."

Our enemies hang their shingles on Main Street, and a University of Western Ontario professor puts it down to a carefully planned substitution of transponder codes.

From The Washington Post:

We're Not Winning This War

Despite Some Notable Achievements,
New Thinking Is Needed on the Home Front and Abroad

By John Lehman

Thursday, August 31, 2006

Are we winning the war? The first question to ask is, what war? The Bush administration continues to muddle a national understanding of the conflict we are in by calling it the "war on terror." This political correctness presumably seeks to avoid hurting the feelings of the Saudis and other Muslims, but it comes at high cost. This not a war against terror any more than World War II was a war against kamikazes.

We are at war with jihadists motivated by a violent ideology based on an extremist interpretation of the Islamic faith. This enemy is decentralized and geographically dispersed around the world. Its organizations range from a fully functioning state such as Iran to small groups of individuals in American cities.

We are fighting this war on three distinct fronts: the home front, the operational front and the strategic-political front. Let us look first at the home front. The Bush administration deserves much credit for the fact that, despite determined efforts to carry them out, there have been no successful Islamist attacks within the United States since Sept. 11, 2001. This is a significant achievement, but there are growing dangers and continuing vulnerabilities.

One of the most deep-seated of these problems is the U.S. government's tendency to treat this war as a law enforcement issue. Following a recommendation of the Sept. 11 commission, Congress sought to remedy this problem by creating a national security service within the FBI to focus on preventive intelligence rather than forensic evidence. This has proved to be a complete failure. As late as June of this year, Mark Mershon of the FBI testified that the bureau will not monitor or surveil any Islamist unless there is a "criminal predicate." Thus the large Islamist support infrastructure that the commission identified here in the United States is free to operate until its members actually commit a crime.

Our attempt to reform the FBI has failed. What is needed now is a separate domestic intelligence service without police powers, like the British MI-5.

The Sept. 11 commission catalogued in detail how our intelligence establishment simply does not function. We made priority recommendations to rebuild the 15 bloated and failed intelligence bureaucracies by creating a strong national intelligence director to smash bureaucratic layers, to tear down the walls preventing intelligence-sharing among agencies, and to rewrite personnel policy with the goal of bringing in new blood not just from the career bureaucracy but from the private sector as well. This approach was completely rejected by the Bush administration, which decided instead to leave this sprawling mess untouched and to create yet another bureaucracy of more than 1,000 people in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It was the exact opposite of what we had recommended.

The greatest terrorist threat on the home front is, of course, the use of weapons of mass destruction by Islamists. Here the president has moved to establish a national counter-proliferation center to share and act on intelligence, and he has recently initiated a cooperation agreement with Russia and our allies to work together in preventing nuclear materials from getting into the hands of the Islamists and to undertake joint crisis management if such an attack takes place. These are real accomplishments.

Turning to the operational front, our objectives are to destroy the capability of Islamist organizations to attack us and to deny them geographic sanctuaries in which they can recruit, train and operate.

The post-Sept. 11 threat demanded preemptive attack against Islamist bases, and this was done without delay in the invasion of Afghanistan to destroy al-Qaeda and remove the Taliban government, its ally and supporter. It was a brilliantly executed operation in which all our armed forces and CIA operatives combined in a ruthlessly efficient victory. In the succeeding years, however, the Taliban and al-Qaeda have been able to regroup, rebuild and re-attack because they enjoy a secure sanctuary largely free from attack within the border areas of Pakistan.

The next military operation of the war was, of course, the invasion of Iraq. Here again the combined military operations of the United States and Britain were brilliantly successful in defeating Iraqi forces and removing Saddam Hussein and his regime. But in the aftermath of that victory, grave blunders were made. There was a total misunderstanding of the requirements for successful occupation.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was proved right in his keeping the initial invasion force small and agile, but desperately wrong in disbanding all Iraqi security forces and civil service with no plan to fill the resulting vacuum. Certainly it is hard now to understand the logic of that decision.

The military occupation in Iraq is consuming practically the entire defense budget and stretching the Army to its operational limits. This is understood quite clearly by both our friends and our enemies, and as a result, our ability to deter enemies around the world is disintegrating.

This brings us to the third front, the strategic-political. The jihadist regime in Iran feels no reservation about flaunting its policy to go nuclear, and it unleashed Hezbollah, its client terrorist organization, to attack Israel. In Somalia a jihadist group has seized control of the government. In Pakistan, Islamists are becoming more powerful, and attacks within India are increasing. Governments in Indonesia, Malaysia, Egypt, Algeria and Jordan are under increasing Islamist pressure. In the Pacific, North Korea now feels free to rattle its missile sabers, firing seven on America's Independence Day. China is rapidly building its 600-ship navy to fill the military vacuum that we are creating in the Pacific as our fleet shrinks well below critical mass. Not one of these states believes that we can undertake any credible additional military operations while we are bogged down in Iraq.

The indoctrination and recruiting of jihadists from Indonesia, South Asia and the Middle East are carried out through religious establishments that are supported overwhelmingly by the Saudi and Iranian governments. Even in the United States, some 80 percent of Islamic mosques and schools are closely aligned with the Wahhabist sect and heavily dependent on Saudi funding. Five years after Sept. 11, nothing has been done to materially affect this root source of jihadism. The movement continues to grow, fueled by an ever-increasing flow of petrodollars from the Persian Gulf.

There is no evidence that the administration has ever raised this matter with the Saudi government as a high-level issue, and -- just as damaging -- it has never acknowledged it as an issue to the American people. Thus Rumsfeld's question -- are we killing, capturing or deterring jihadists faster than they are being produced? -- must be answered with an emphatic no.

In reviewing progress on the three fronts of this war, even the most sanguine optimist cannot yet conclude that we are winning or that we can win without some significant changes of policy.

The writer was secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration and later served as a member of the Sept. 11 commission. This is a condensed version of an article that appears in the September issue of the U.S. Naval Institute's Proceedings magazine.

From FrontPageMagazine.com:

The Terrorist Next Door
By Paul Sperry

August 31, 2006

The recent terror case of a "gentle" third-grade teacher from the D.C. suburbs shows the danger is at once closer and harder to ID than you think. The enemy is hiding not in the shadows, but in plain sight, and may even wear a smile.

Hundreds of Muslims last week flocked to a federal courtroom to show their support for the affable and soft-spoken Ali Asad Chandia of Maryland as he was sentenced to 15 years in prison for supporting terrorists. Friends say anti-Muslim prosecutors railroaded a "law-abiding" and "peaceful" brother.

"He is a dedicated teacher," said one. "A great family man," said another.

Another told the judge Chandia's so gentle he wouldn't hurt a tree branch in his yard. "I said to Ali that I may need to cut the branch (but) he asked that I not hurt the tree," the friend, a landscaper, said in a letter. "I was touched by Ali's insistence that the tree not be harmed in any way."

But prosecutors tell a different story.

They showed evidence that Chandia, 29, trained at a jihad camp in Lahore, Pakistan, run by the terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba, an al-Qaida subcontractor that also trained some of the London bombers. He helped Lashkar ship 50,000 paintball pellets, unmanned aerial vehicles, night-vision gear and wireless video cameras from the U.S. to Pakistan for paramilitary training. He even chauffeured a Lashkar lieutenant around Washington on trips the officer made here after 9-11.

Within months of the attacks, Chandia joined the so-called Virginia jihad network dedicated to preparing for holy war against U.S. troops deployed to Afghanistan. The gang's ringleader was the civil-rights coordinator for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, a Washington-based nonprofit leading the charge against airport and subway terror profiling.

Chandia, who graduated from the University of Maryland and once worked at Costco, also worked as a former personal assistant to the jihad gang's spiritual leader -- imam Ali al-Timimi, a native Washingtonian convicted last year for soliciting the Muslim men to levy war against the U.S. Al-Timimi praised the hijackers who carried out the 9-11 attacks and even cheered the crash of the space shuttle Columbia. Chandia helped al-Timimi schedule his sermons.

In Chandia's car, not surprisingly, federal investigators found a CD-ROM containing videos that glorified Osama bin Laden and the 19 hijackers.

All this took place in the shadow of the U.S. capital. And yet members of the large Muslim community there, many of whom work for the government, were unfazed by the evidence aligned against Chandia. After his conviction, some 350 Muslims including Islamic scholars, activists and other leaders, as well as government employees and contractors, donated generously to his defense fund.

"We ask Allah to reward everyone who supported this cause," gushed the head of the Ali Asad Support Committee. "We ask Allah to raise their ranks and to grant them goodness in this world and in the hereafter."

The local Muslim luminaries also wrote letters to the judge complaining of a U.S. witch hunt against "Brother Ali" and other "principled" Muslims who support "mujahideen" groups. And they mobbed the federal courtroom in Alexandria, Va., hoping for a lenient punishment.

But the judge wasn't buying it, and he imposed a fairly stiff sentence. Chandia, for his part, was unrepentant to the end. Upon his sentencing, Chandia lashed out at prosecutors, warning "their judgment is on the way."

U.S. marshals then led away a terrorist -- not a mild-mannered teacher or loving father -- but a terrorist.

From FrontPageMagazine.com:

Fox News and Forced Conversions
By Robert Spencer

August 30, 2006

The most bizarre element of the two weeks of captivity suffered by Fox News reporter Steve Centanni and photographer Olaf Wiig at the hands of Gaza’s Holy Jihad Brigade was the video that surfaced depicting their conversion to Islam. Even before the journalists revealed that their conversions had been coerced, there were disturbing indications that they were not acting freely. While reading a statement he himself had ostensibly written, Centanni stumbled over words, appeared to puzzle over the handwriting, and seemed to grimace after pronouncing the words “peace be upon him after the name of the Islamic prophet Muhammad.

Their messages as new converts to Islam were predictable denunciations of the United States and Israel, combined with emphasis on Islam’s universal call as the solution to the world’s problems. But most jarring was the video editor’s invocation of the favorite Qur’an verse of Western analysts of Islam and terrorism, “There is no compulsion in religion” (2:256). The irony of featuring this verse in a video depicting two forced conversions has been widely noted. In fact, however, the juxtaposition of this verse with the video of Centanni and Wiig was probably not simply transparent deception, as strange as that may seem, and has far-reaching implications.

Islamic law forbids forced conversion, but as Andrew Bostom documented in a FrontPage article yesterday, this is a law that throughout Islamic history has all too often been honored in the breach. Nor is this yet another case of a “twisting” or “hijacking” of Islam; in fact, Islamic law regarding the presentation of Islam to non-Muslims manifests a quite different understanding of what constitutes freedom from coercion and freedom of conscience from that which prevails among non-Muslims.

Muhammad instructed his followers to call people to Islam before waging war against them – the warfare would follow from their refusal to accept Islam or to enter the Islamic social order as inferiors, required to pay a special tax:

Fight in the name of Allah and in the way of Allah. Fight against those who disbelieve in Allah. Make a holy war…When you meet your enemies who are polytheists, invite them to three courses of action. If they respond to any one of these, you also accept it and withhold yourself from doing them any harm. Invite them to (accept) Islam; if they respond to you, accept it from them and desist from fighting against them….If they refuse to accept Islam, demand from them the Jizya [the tax on non-Muslims specified in Qur’an 9:29]. If they agree to pay, accept it from them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay the tax, seek Allah’s help and fight them. (Sahih Muslim 4294)

There is therefore an inescapable threat in this “invitation” to accept Islam. Would one who converted to Islam under the threat of war be considered to have converted under duress? By non-Muslim standards, yes, but not according to the view of this Islamic tradition. From the standpoint of the traditional schools of Islamic jurisprudence such a conversion would have resulted from “no compulsion.”

Muhammad reinforced these instructions on many occasions during his prophetic career. Late in his career, he wrote to Heraclius, the Eastern Roman Emperor in Constantinople:

Now then, I invite you to Islam (i.e., surrender to Allah), embrace Islam and you will be safe; embrace Islam and Allah will bestow on you a double reward. But if you reject this invitation of Islam, you shall be responsible for misguiding the peasants (i.e., your nation). (Bukhari, 4.52.191).

Heraclius did not accept Islam, and soon the Byzantines would know well that the warriors of jihad indeed granted no safety to those who rejected their “invitation.”

Muhammad did not get a satisfactory answer either from Chosroes, ruler of the Persians. After reading the letter of the Prophet of Islam, Chosroes contemptuously tore it to pieces. When news of this reached Muhammad, he called upon Allah to tear the Persian emperor and his followers to pieces (Bukhari, 5.59.708). He told the Muslims that they would conquer both empires: “When Khosrau [Chosroes] perishes, there will be no (more) Khosrau after him, and when Caesar perishes, there will be no more Caesar after him. By Him in Whose hands Muhammad’s life is, you will spend the treasures of both of them in Allah’s Cause” (Bukhari 4.53.349).

Muhammad did not limit his veiled threat only to rulers. Another hadith records that on one occasion he emerged from a mosque and told his men, “Let us go to the Jews.” Upon arriving at a nearby Arabian Jewish community, Muhammad told them: “If you embrace Islam, you will be safe. You should know that the earth belongs to Allah and His Apostle, and I want to expel you from this land. So, if anyone amongst you owns some property, he is permitted to sell it, otherwise you should know that the Earth belongs to Allah and His Apostle” (Bukhari, 4.53.392). In other words, if you accept Islam, you may keep your land and property, but if not, Muhammad and the Muslims would confiscate it.

Bostom notes: “Orders for conversion were decreed under all the early Islamic dynasties—Umayyads, Abbasids, Fatimids, and Mamluks. Additional extensive examples of forced conversion were recorded under both Seljuk and Ottoman Turkish rule (the latter until its collapse in the 20th century), the Shi’ite Safavid and Qajar dynasties of Persia/Iran, and during the jihad ravages on the Indian subcontinent, beginning with the early 11th century campaigns of Mahmud of Ghazni, and recurring under the Delhi Sultanate, and Moghul dynasty until the collapse of Muslim suzerainty in the 18th century following the British conquest of India.” Since these Muslim rulers and armies all revered Muhammad as an “excellent example of conduct” (Qur’an 33:21), this is not surprising.

After being freed, Centanni said: “We were forced to convert to Islam at gunpoint. Don’t get me wrong here. I have the highest respect for Islam, and I learned a lot of good things about it, but it was something we felt we had to do because they had the guns, and we didn’t know what … was going on.”

Indeed, few in the West know what’s going on regarding the example of Muhammad and the stance of traditional Islam on conversion. The human rights should have the courage to recognize and denounce this conversion-or-else directive, and to recognize the plight of those who even today suffer from its scourge. Moreover, with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad operating according to Muhammad’s instructions, this now has geopolitical implications. In his letter to President Bush, Ahmadinejad invited him to accept Islam, and then echoed the Prophet of Islam in delivering a threat to Bush through Mike Wallace: “We are all free to choose. But please give him this message, sir: Those who refuse to accept an invitation will not have a good ending or fate.”

Ahmadinejad’s threat, as well as the ordeal of Centanni and Wiig, epitomizes the threat that the global jihad represents to the freedom of conscience. Analysts are increasingly beginning to note that the conflict has ideological dimensions, but these dimensions are still imperfectly understood in the public sphere. Were Western leaders courageous enough to speak forthrightly about the threat we face as an Islamic jihad, they could use the “conversions” of Centanni and Wiig to illustrate one of the elements of Western civilization that is being challenged and that we are resolved to defend. Unfortunately, mired as they are in denial about the nature of the “terror” threat itself, they have made as yet no such resolution.

From The Washington Times:

The Bacteria of Stupidity
By Tony Blankley

Quite surprisingly, what may turn out to be the world's most fitting epigram in our time was uttered by none other than the official spokesman of the Hamas-controlled Palestinian Authority, Ghazi Hamad.

According to the Jerusalem Post yesterday, Mr. Hamad told his fellow Palestinians to dismiss Israel's responsibility for the growing state of anarchy and lawlessness in the Gaza Strip. He said it was time for the Palestinians to embark on a soul-searching process to see where they erred. "We're always afraid to talk about our mistakes. We're used to blaming our mistakes on others. What is the relationship between the chaos, anarchy, lawlessness, indiscriminate murders, theft of land, family rivalries, transgression on public lands and unorganized traffic and the occupation? We are still trapped by the mentality of conspiracy theories -- one that has limited our capability to think."

I pray for this man's safety after he said such a sensible thing in such a lunatic place. But what takes his comments beyond a brave, local wisdom to a shrewd global insight was his epigrammatic conclusion: "We have all been attacked by the bacteria of stupidity." "We have lost our sense of direction and we don't know where we're headed."

That seems to sum the world up pretty well. From Iran, Lebanon, Gaza and Israel to the leadership of the Republican and Democratic Parties in Washington, to the governments of most of Europe and South America, to the local, state and federal officials responsible for Katrina recovery, to the U.S. State Department, it is hard to spot any leadership that is both sane and competent.

The leadership of Iran, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda and Venezuela seem politically competent, but they're nuts. Most Western leaders seem at least clinically not insane, but are wandering around bumping into large objects.

The West is being run, more or less, by the most incompetent generation of middle-aged white men since the 6th century -- when they let the Roman Empire collapse without providing for an alternative (other than the Dark Ages.)

When did Americans forget how to fix things? From the Big Dig in Boston, to the Katrina aftermath (where the Corps. of Engineers announced this week that a year later the "repaired" levees couldn't hold back a Category Three hurricane), to our Southern border -- things are broken and can't seem to be repaired.

Maybe the public schools should reinstate those wood, metal and print shop classes they required us boys to take until the mid-1960s. Apparently, we are devolving rapidly back to the Lemur stage of primate tool use skills (no offense intended to my Lemur friends who struggle on bravely without the advantage of opposable thumbs. We middle-aged white guys, on the other hand, seem to have become all thumbs.)

Not that we should let off the hook women and people of color who also hold positions of responsibility in government. The recently re-elected mayor of New Orleans's almost absurd incompetence and lethargy in the face of his duties puts him right up there with the white guys in Boston who have proven themselves utterly unable to build and maintain a tunnel. D--- it, prairie dogs build tunnels better than Bostonians.

And our once estimable secretary of state, Ms. Condoleezza Rice, has proven to be a more able concert pianist than conductor of diplomacy. I have talked to some very senior figures in Europe and here at home (Bush supporters, no less) who were staggered by the secretary's failure to nail down the terms and conditions for troop deployment with France before permitting the French resolution to go to a vote in the Security Council.

It used to be the attribute of adult homo sapiens that when they tripped, they got back up on their hind legs and moved on. But today, we seem to stay on all fours -- often with our heads in rather unfortunate places.

For instance, after tripping in Lebanon, The State Department seems to have decided to start giving money away to Lebanese, willy-nilly, in some demented compassion contest with Iran's Hezbollah cutthroats. Conservative critics, equally dazed, demand not a penny be spent -- as a matter of some principle.

The rather obvious competent policy option -- that seems to be ignored by both sides -- is to calculatedly offer Lebanon not only money, but things Iran can never provide: diplomatic, business, engineering and other help, re-integration into the international world -- on condition that the Lebanese government behave in various ways inimical to Hezbollah. In fact, most Lebanese want to move in that direction, but need our help.

But our State Department, once again panicked into premature action, offered free money, while conservative critics just want to run off with their ball -- when there is an important game to be played -- and won.

Some people of a theological bent see the current mess as a sign of God's imminent apocalyptic plans for us. And they may well be right. I prefer, however, to look on the optimistic side and consider that there may just be a politically curable stupidity bacteria in the air. But it certainly seems like a pandemic.

From City Journal:

Katrina’s Real Lesson
Blame inadequate infrastructure, not poverty, for the storm’s devastation.
By Nicole Gelinas

28 August 2006

Though President Bush declared on Saturday that Hurricane Katrina exposed “deep-seated poverty” in America, the disaster isn’t ultimately a story of poverty or of race, but of the greatest failure of civil engineering in American history. Luckily, while the nation has never been able to solve poverty, it can solve the engineering problem at the heart of southern Louisiana’s potential recovery.

First, some history. Like the Netherlands, much of urban and suburban New Orleans is below sea level. New Orleans started building rudimentary levees to protect residents and businesses from flooding in the mid-1700s, after settlers realized that their city’s vital economic asset, its position at the mouth of the Mississippi, was also its greatest liability.

This liability intensified two centuries later, when New Orleans drained low-lying swamps to build neighborhoods right on Lake Pontchartrain, and when erosion, much of it from the digging of canals that allowed for oil and gas development in the Gulf of Mexico, destroyed half of the 2,800 square miles of wetlands that protected the coast, thereby moving the Gulf 20 miles closer to the city. Those miles proved vital, because storms weaken as they pass over land. Man-made shipping canals within New Orleans would also funnel floodwaters into populated areas.

But as the risks facing New Orleans grew more complex, New Orleans’s hurricane protection system—its levees, floodwalls, and natural barriers such as wetlands—didn’t keep up. The Army Corps of Engineers started building today’s hurricane protection system in 1965, after Hurricane Betsy flooded many of the same areas that Katrina inundated 40 years later. (The feds pay for 70 percent of the system, partly because they earn royalties from offshore energy production.)

Katrina was the biggest test of the 350 miles of levees and floodwalls that the Corps built and refurbished over the past 40 years—and the system crashed, buckling under 50 major breaks and spilling millions of gallons of water into the city. And Katrina was far from a worst-case scenario.

The Corps’ post-mortem of Katrina tells the story: “the system did not perform as a system,” its engineers concluded. “The hurricane protection in New Orleans . . . was a system in name only. . . . The majority, approximately two-thirds by volume, of the flooding and half of the economic losses can be attributed to water flowing through breaches in floodwalls and levees.” The failures weren’t due to construction malfeasance or incompetence: “the system was built as designed,” the Corps concluded. But the system was, in many ways, conceived to fail. In the Corps’ view, it was inconsistently designed and lacked redundancy—that is, back-up protections.

Some levees, in particular the massive earthen fortresses with wide foundations, performed well, withstanding days of water pressure with little erosion. But floodwalls designed as narrow vertical walls driven into the ground—they look like the walls built on highways to block out the noise—performed abysmally.

First, some walls had sunk up to three feet lower than their original “authorized heights” before the storm. Second, the pressure of Katrina’s waters wore away the walls’ narrow vertical foundations because they weren’t “armored” with erosion-proof material, causing the structures to topple into the water. And because the system wasn’t redundant, each break caused additional weaknesses.

Why didn’t the Corps design a consistent, redundant system? In large part, the reason was foot dragging—or worse—by pols on the state, local, and federal levels. In some cases, political opposition prevented the Corps from seizing land to build sturdier foundations. Plus, Louisiana’s local levee boards were lousy stewards. Levee officials were political animals, not engineering experts, and sometimes proved more interested in running ancillary “economic development” projects than working with the Corps to make sure the levees were up to their task. (It’s not because New Orleans is poor and black: the levees protect New Orleans’s richer, whiter suburbs too.) In addition, the Corps warned that many of New Orleans’s manmade canals, obsolete for years, should be closed or at least gated—to no avail. Moreover, when the Corps, along with state officials, came to understand that wetlands restoration is a vital part of the flood protection system, not a tree-hugger’s afterthought, Congress balked at spending the required $14 billion over several decades for coastal restoration.

Public officials have unfortunately lost interest in such rational infrastructure investment, doubtless because entitlement spending has consumed budgets as well as politicians’ attention. As the American Society of Civil Engineers warned last year, “congested highways, overflowing sewers and corroding bridges are constant reminders of the looming crisis that jeopardizes our nation’s prosperity and our quality of life.” As entitlement spending has gobbled up the federal budget, spending on infrastructure has fallen to about half where it was as a percentage of GDP 40 years ago; state and local infrastructure spending lags as well.

So have Americans and New Orleanians learned Katrina’s main lesson: that investment in physical infrastructure is vital? While it’s too early to tell, Congress has awarded around $6 billion—only 5 percent or so of Gulf Coast reconstruction money—to repair the broken levees and to erect gates at key flood-prone areas. After that money is spent, though, New Orleans’s system won’t be any less of a patchwork. Floodwalls in areas that didn’t bear the brunt of last year’s hurricane, but that still sit in the path of a powerful storm, remain vulnerable to the same erosion that toppled walls during Katrina.

Beyond the fast fixes, the Corps has a year and a half to present to Congress its plan to protect Louisiana’s coast from a “100-year hurricane.” For one idea, they can look to the Dutch, who treat life below sea level as an opportunity to create modern engineering marvels. After a 1953 flood that killed more people than Katrina did, the Dutch built sand dunes to prevent erosion, along with a functional network of gates, walls, sluices, and pumps—and they constantly look for ways to upgrade the network.

But to follow the Dutch lead, the pols need convincing that engineering know-how, and the political willpower for infrastructure spending, is the most important part of rebuilding. Moreover, how the feds and New Orleans respond over the long term has implications for the nation, as its own infrastructure needs grow even more complex. New York’s subways, for instance, now need state-of-the-art protection from terrorists, and Las Vegas and other western cities, of course, rely on complex engineering to assure fresh supplies of water in the desert.

President Bush’s recent rhetoric thus doesn’t help New Orleans or the nation. He still talks as if poverty, and not inadequate design and investment in the plain, old, boring infrastructure that makes all cities work, was responsible for Katrina’s tragic devastation

From USA Today:

When schools silence God talk
By Nat Hentoff

Every year, the Frenchtown Elementary School in New Jersey presents an after-school talent show, open to kids from kindergarten through eighth grade. The performers can choose to play an instrument, dance, create a skit or select a song.

This past school year, a second-grader decided to sing Awesome God. But during rehearsal, the teacher in charge, on hearing the title and lyrics, told the child that principal Joyce Brennan would have to approve that song. Brennan contacted the attorney for the school district.

Brennan then explained in a letter to the child's mother that the song was "inappropriate for a school-run event with a captive audience of, in many cases, quite young children because of its religious content."

Accordingly, a lawsuit has been filed in the chronic civil war in our public schools between the First Amendment's Establishment Clause and its Free Exercise of Religion requirement. The case landed in U.S. District Court in New Jersey.

With schools opening around the country, it's unfortunate that many principals and school boards are not educated on the meaning of the Establishment Clause — which can be violated, for example, if a principal asks a priest, rabbi or minister to speak at commencement exercises, thereby officially favoring that form of religion, or any specific form of religion.

Such behavior would appropriately be regarded as a "state action." But under the Free Exercise Clause, a student can express his or her personal religious beliefs in an assignment or as a valedictorian.

A child's right, not a school's choice

In the Frenchtown Elementary School's case, the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey is supporting the child plaintiff. Attorney Jennifer Klear, who took the case on behalf of the ACLU, filed a brief to the court. In it, she made the essential — and to me, obvious — point that it was the child who chose the song, not the school.

So there was no violation of the Establishment Clause by removing the "wall" of separation between church and state. Ironically, the school's guidelines for the talent show mandated only that everything in the performances be G-rated. There were no other restrictions, nor was there a "captive audience" because students were not required to attend.

But the school district's lawyer recoiled at the song's religious content, and the principal explained that the song was the equivalent of a prayer. As this second-grader is discovering how embattled the First Amendment can be, the case is still in the courts.

In another lawsuit, an ACLU affiliate in Nevada has taken the side of school authorities, banishing certain religious speech. In June, during high school graduation exercises at Foothill High School in Henderson, Nev., valedictorian Brittany McComb was reading her address when, suddenly, school officials cut off the microphone.

The audience was spared her presumably infectious references to God, "the Lord," and a mention of Christ. According to Clark County school district officials, while school events may include religious references, proselytizing is forbidden.

Agreeing, Allen Lichtenstein, general counsel for the ACLU of Nevada, said in the Las Vegas Review-Journal: "There should be no controversy here. It's important for people to understand that a student was given a school-sponsored forum ... in essence, it was a school-sponsored speech," thereby violating the Establishment Clause because of "her proselytizing."

"People aren't stupid," the admirably clear-headed McComb told the Review-Journal, "and they know we have freedom of speech, and the district wasn't advocating my ideas. ... I went through four years of school at Foothill and they taught me logic and they taught me freedom of speech. God's the biggest part of my life. Just like other valedictorians thank their parents, I wanted to thank my lord and savior."

How did the school authorities know at what point the forbidden words would be spoken? At Foothill High, as at most high schools around the country, valedictorians are subject to what the courts call "prior restraint" of speeches. School officials preview the remarks, and McComb was ordered to strike those prohibited words.

Refusing, McComb explained why she rebelled against authority for the first time. Having graduated with a 4.7 GPA, McComb — who was planning at the time to study journalism at Biola University, a private Christian school in La Mirada, Calif. — emphasized that she was saying what she believes: "The district wasn't advocating my ideas."

In her lawsuit against the district, McComb is represented by what I consider one of the premier civil liberties organizations in the country, the Rutherford Institute in Charlottesville, Va. Says founder John Whitehead of his client: "She has a constitutional right — like any other student — to freely speak about the factors that contributed to her success."

So why are two ACLU affiliates at odds on the kinds of religious speech protected by the First Amendment? Because the national ACLU puts forth an ambiguous and sometimes misinformed policy on such issues. For example, the ACLU has in numerous cases backed efforts to expunge crosses from city seals — even if the cross dated to the founding of a city, when religion played a vital role. Citing history is not a violation of the Establishment Clause, nor is it proselytizing.

In need of an education

What's unfortunate is that every school year, these unreasonable restrictions of free speech come to the fore in this country simply because educators — and, for that matter, some ACLU chapters — don't have a clear understanding of the First Amendment.

In 1994, I was reporting in Murfreesboro, Tenn., on another high school valedictorian, Kathryn Sinclair, who on principle defied another prior restraint gag rule: She told the principal of Riverdale High School that prior restraint violated the First Amendment. She gave her address without interruption but was reviled by many of her fellow students and some faculty because the resultant publicity "made the school look bad," as Sinclair put it.

When her ordeal — and it was an ordeal — was over, Sinclair asked me: "Why don't schools teach why we are Americans?" And then she stated an unfortunate truth: "So few people know."

Nat Hentoff is an authority on First Amendment issues, student rights and education.

From The Los Angeles Times - 8.26.06:

Why a Racial "Survivor" Is a Good Thing

Reality show gimmick will force conversation
and maybe show that skin color doesn't matter.

By Tony Pierce, TONY PIERCE is the editor of LAist.com

WHO KNEW A stupid game show could launch a race war?

That's what nervous pundits and politicians from coast to coast are saying about the decision by the reality hit "Survivor" to divide this fall season's 20 contestants into four competing groups (or "tribes") — whites, blacks, Latinos and Asians.

"This could get ugly," warned a San Diego Union-Tribune columnist. New York City Council members said they'd launch a boycott. One Arkansas paper ran the headline: "Race wars are coming to a TV near you."

First, unless four white cops get caught on videotape billy-clubbing a black man, and then all get let off the hook, television has little or no power to inspire racial violence. Second, Americans don't rise up for anything nowadays, or else people would be rioting over unleaded being $3 a gallon and the president continuing a war most of us oppose. And third, dividing "Survivor" into ethnic tribes is more likely to keep people off the streets and in their homes watching TV, where they ought to be.

"I can't decide if the producers are completely naive and clueless or completely soulless," Lisa Navarrete, vice president of the National Council of La Raza, told the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram.

Well, am I naive to think that, if everyone actually works well together, it might dispel many of the stereotypes that critics seem so sure will spring up? Do I too have no "soul" because I find it entertaining when some of the widespread ignorance surrounding different cultures (including my own) bubbles to the surface?

One reason for the outrage is that critics don't actually know how "Survivor" works.

Each tribe doesn't literally beat up their competitors — they square off in puzzle-solving games or obstacle courses or tests of endurance, like standing on a beam for the longest amount of time. Unless one desperate dude on a pole drops the N-bomb to distract his opponent, it's difficult to see how race would even come into the game until the second half of the season, when the tribes all merge into one. And even then, the way to win is not by hurling slurs but by getting along with your new tribe and otherwise laying low, as the troublemakers and superstars almost inevitably get voted off.

In "Survivor," if there's going to be any hate going on for the first half of the season, it will be self-hate, as the tribes get to learn all the little irritating things about one another rather than focus on the contestants they don't see very often. It's not the person with the different skin color, it's the guy on your team who eats the last scoop of rice, or that other guy who doesn't seem to ever work around the camp, or the alpha leader who runs around shouting orders.

This stage of the show is where you might see the Japanese American dig at the Korean American (helping people understand that not all "Asians" are the same), or the Mexican American diss the Cuban, who'd probably be put out at being called "Latino" anyway. (Though nine of the 20 contestants are from L.A., so the odds are more likely that they'll all reminisce about which Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf they miss the most.)

What tribal "Survivor" has a real chance of showing us is how much race isn't an issue when it comes to the bare necessities of living on an island for 39 days; how much race is an issue when talk show hosts want to artificially spice up their debates; and that teamwork, communication and trust are the foundation of great teams, not skin color.

The tribal switch is also interesting because it's mass-marketing genius. With specialized narrowcasting geared to ever-smaller pockets of viewers (apparently it's OK to have channels for gays or Cambodians or golfing fanatics, as long as they don't compete on the same show), CBS is trying to create a program appealing to the widest amount of people, especially viewers who have grown weary of the same-ol' same-ol'. They will tune in to root for (or even against) their "race." Take that, World Cup!

Any stupid game show that can get tens of millions of people to talk about serious issues that affect us all (especially if we're uncomfortable bringing it up) should be praised, not scorned. Unless, of course, a white male wins the million bucks, then looks into the camera during the live finale and mumbles something about a master race.

From Gambling911.com - 8.24.06:

Survivor Cook Islands: Whites the race favored to win

Jeff Probst confirmed rumors on Wednesday's "The Early Show" that the 20 castaways for "Survivor: Cook Islands" will be grouped by race, will be divided into four tribes consisting of whites, blacks, Asians and Hispanics.

Bodog.com has made the Whites a favorite to win at odds of 7 to 3 (or $7 paid out for every $3 bet). African Americans pay $13 for every $7 bet. The Hispanic tribe will pay out $3 for every $1 bet. The Asian tribe gets a slightly higher price of $13 for every $7 bet.

"It seems that stereotypes are already coming into play with Bodog.com assuming that because Asians are often classified by the gambling establishment as big gamblers they get the highest priced odds," comments Payton O'Brien, columnist for Gambling911.com.

Notably left out is the Arab tribe.

"It's good press," O'Brien said, "But ultimately you will have people feeling they have been left out and this type of format also tends to encourage segregation. I think 'Survivor Cook Islands' may have taken a step back about 40 years."

In Atlanta, Q100 radio's "The Bert Show" took calls from listeners, most of whom were bothered by the idea. "About 80 percent said this is socially irresponsible, something that's gonna separate us rather than bring us together," said host Bert Weiss. The show called competing DJ Frank Ski at V103, a station with a large African-American audience that was also chilly toward the idea.

Series host Jeff Probst said on "The Early Show" Wednesday morning that "the idea for this actually came from criticism that 'Survivor' was not ethnically diverse enough." He said the idea came up during casting, when producers noted how many contestants had a strong ethnic identity.

"Early Show" host Harry Smith — who was supposed to be helping to hype the show — said he was "dismayed" by the idea of dividing the races, and called it a "stunt" that had "gone too far."

Past "Survivors" have started out with tribes separated by gender and by age. But while those divisions were accepted by viewers as ways to keep the show fresh, the new tribal division struck some people as a ratings ploy that could irritate racial sensitivities.

"There was some minor questioning when they split the contestants by sex, but this seems to be by far a bigger reaction," said Andy Denhard, whose reality TV Web site Realityblurred.com reported the rumored idea several days ago.

"It's natural to assume that certain groups are going to have audience members rooting for them simply because they share ethnicity," Probst said Wednesday. "At the end of the day, I think it'll come down to what it always comes down to: Who do I like?"

"Survivor: Cook Islands" debuts Sept. 14.

Mark Steyn is a genius.
From The Chicago Sun-Times:
Homeland security can't get over the pump
BY MARK STEYN

There was a fascinating story in the Chicago Sun-Times the other day. As Stefano Esposito reported: "Mardin Azad Amin found himself in a tight squeeze last week when security at O'Hare Airport discovered a suspicious-looking object in his luggage.

"So, Amin, 29, handled the delicate situation this way: He told security the object was a bomb, Cook County prosecutors say."

In fact, it was a, er, penis pump. But the unfortunate Mardin Azad Amin was traveling to Turkey with his mom and was understandably a little sheepish. So, faced with the potential social embarrassment of being revealed as a pervert, he allegedly preferred to pass himself off as a terrorist. Many of us chaps would do the same in his situation, though one suspects rather fewer, when flying on vacation with our mothers, would pack a penis pump in our hand luggage. I hasten to add I've no idea whether Mrs. Amin took any maternal pride in her son's alleged claim to be a fanatical suicide bomber -- and even if she had, it would have been tempered by at least a mild irritation at discovering that she was also along for the ride. (One of the guys arrested in Toronto the other week for plotting to behead the Canadian prime minister had a wife who was so eager for him to commit martyrdom operations that she considered having it inserted as a clause in the prenup. But, hot for jihad as she was, her own contribution would have consisted merely of cheering him on from home.) Still, it's a marvelous post-9/11 adaptation of that scene in Austin Powers in which Mike Myers is collecting his personal effects and denies ownership of the penis pump. "Not my bag, baby," as he tells Elizabeth Hurley.

Young Mr. Amin now faces three years in jail for allegedly lying about his ill-fated choice of travel accessory. On the other hand, it's surely only a matter of months before some U.S. court rules that prisoners are entitled under the Geneva Convention to their own penis pumps. By contrast, Muslim men arrested in Denmark for plotting an actual terrorist attack face life imprisonment. In Denmark, life sentences are automatically commuted after 16 years.

Hmm. Three years for a penis pump, 16 years for planning to murder thousands of people.

What happened a week or so back was that a handful of would-be jihadists in London managed to get airline security changed in perpetuity for 300 million Americans, 60 million Britons and anybody who wants to visit them. And we all gave a shrug and barely noticed. I don't know if penis pumps are as yet formally proscribed items. But, if they're not, it can't be long before al-Qaida decides to plant some shoebomber-type on a trans-Atlantic flight and starts training up cadres of Pumpbombers in the Hindu Kush. And, even if the penis pump industry manages to survive, my National Review colleague David Frum calculates that an extra 10 minutes added to the passenger screening process costs the global economy more than $33 billion a year. So, as the Britons and Germans and Danes and Canadians have been doing in recent weeks, we can keep intercepting new terror plots and adding a minute here, a minute there to security procedures to cope with whatever novelties the jihad comes up with.

That's assuming the authorities are allowed to keep intercepting. The method by which Scotland Yard and MI5 uncovered the Heathrow plot -- monitoring communications between external and domestic phone numbers -- has now been ruled "unconstitutional" after a case brought by the Michigan branch of the ACLU, which went judge-shopping and happily for them found a judge who'd previously served as trustee of an organization that funds the Michigan ACLU. Quelle surprise, as the French say. Or as they would say if they weren't too busy trying to weasel out of their phony-baloney U.N. peacekeeping gig in Lebanon.

Setting aside her conflict of interest, Judge Anna Diggs Taylor delivered a legal opinion of almost laughable illiteracy that leaves the United States government in the curious position of being able to do more to intercept terrorist plots against foreign countries than against its own. That's to say, on the Heathrow bust, the United States provided some information from communications intercepts to British and Pakistani authorities. If Judge Taylor's ruling stands, if the U.S. government intercepts a call from Islamabad to London about a plot to blow up Big Ben, it can alert the Brits. But, if the U.S. government intercepts a call from Islamabad to New York about a plot to blow up the Chrysler Building, that's entirely unconstitutional and all record of it should be erased. And, given that cell phones with American area codes can be used all around the planet, all the guy in Islamabad would have to do is get one with a 202 or 212 number and he can plot jihad on every continent to his heart's content. One notes that earlier this month five Muslim Americans were arrested in Ohio and Michigan after hundreds of cell phones were found in their cars. But no doubt Taylor will soon uncover a constitutional right to multiple cell phones.

Do you remember John Kerry's approach to terrorism? As he told the New York Times: ''We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance. As a former law enforcement person, I know we're never going to end prostitution. We're never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn't on the rise.''

The average terrorist doesn't take kindly to having the unstoppable march of Islam compared to the decadent infidels' sex industry (though, psychologically, for these guys the jihad seems to serve as the ultimate penis pump). But, that aside, a casual glance at the lavish display ads for ''escort services'' in the Boston Yellow Pages suggests that applying the Kerry Hooker Doctrine to terrorists would leave rather a lot of them in business. The evidence of recent months confirms that, among the Muslim populations of the Western world, there is a not insignificant fifth column in Britain and Europe and a somewhat smaller one in the United States. We need an effective strategy for that. Instead, between longer check-in lines for airline travelers and the worldwide roaming cell phone plan for jihadists, we're mainly punishing ourselves.

©Mark Steyn 2006

From the Baltimore Sun:

In a war gone bad, sacrifice is not in vain
By Frank Schaeffer

August 27, 2006

SALISBURY, Mass. -- The Marine Corps has just announced that it is calling back several thousand Marines from inactive reserve units. After Sept. 11, all our president asked of most Americans was to go shopping, travel and maintain the economy. But our service members are asked to make sacrifices most Americans wouldn't dream of.

Many Americans are saying that our troops are sacrificing in vain. They are wrong. So are those who claim that if you want to support the troops, you have to support the president. Both misunderstand the meaning of military service in our democracy.

My youngest son, John, joined the Marines in 1999. Bill Clinton was president. The nightmare of Sept. 11 was still in the realm of the unthinkable. John was trained to serve as a Marine wherever he might be sent, not for any particular war. He served five years and returned safely from two combat tours in Afghanistan - a "good war," according to most pundits and opinion polls - and after a mission in Iraq, a war gone "bad."

I was fortunate. My son survived. A friend lost her only child.

Mindy Evnin's son was killed in Iraq. On a sweltering day last month, my wife and I drove from our home in Massachusetts to Burlington, Vt., to visit Mark's grave. Standing in front of that young Marine's headstone, I was overwhelmed by sorrow, fury at our president's mishandling of the war and by gratitude for Mark's life well-lived. Those emotions aren't as contradictory as they might seem.

I e-mailed a civilian friend about visiting Mark's grave. "To me," he answered, "the soldiers who are dying in Iraq should not have been there in the first place. ... If they die, they will have died in vain because the war is all a tissue of lies and/or failed policies."

Did Mark and thousands of others die in vain?

We need to take a step back from the bitter debate over the Iraq war and look at the deeper meaning of service. Does it change when wars go badly? If Mark had been killed in Afghanistan, would that have been a more noble sacrifice than being killed in Iraq?

Maybe it would be helpful to consider the significance of service in a less politicized context. When a fireman runs up the stairs while everyone else runs down, the value of his action is unrelated to who started the fire, or whether those saved are "worthy." And the morality of his action doesn't depend on his motives or whether his leaders are truthful or wise. It is all about what he does once he's called upon to act on behalf of all of us.

While we are busy looking out for ourselves, that fireman is busy looking out for us. His willingness to serve is a victory for community, social responsibility, compassion and bravery.

What did Mark die for?

He did not die for George Bush's ever-changing rationalizations: "finding WMD," "freeing Iraq" or "bringing democracy to the Middle East." And in all probability, if he was like my son, Mark never thought much about why he volunteered. The point is, he did, and in combat he acted on the belief that the Marines standing next to him were more important than he was - and, by extension that his country was more important than his individual right to comfort and safety.

Service in our democracy is not about politics. My son's volunteering in the Clinton era, then being sent to two "Bush wars," one "good" and the other "bad," handily illustrates the fact that the act of volunteering has nothing to do with fighting any war in particular and everything to do with service for service's sake.

Volunteering is a pre-political statement. And if you believe that American democracy is worthwhile, no matter what its imperfections, then the act of volunteering to be sent wherever your country needs you must be acknowledged as a priceless gift from the individual citizen to his or her country. This gift's morality doesn't depend on the rightness or wrongness of any war but on the soldier's high-stakes commitment to the value of our democratic experiment.

Mindy wrote me: "I don't know if Mark was a 'hero.' He did what he was asked to do, and he did it without hesitation. ... Maybe that is heroic."

It was. Our troops volunteer with no guarantee of success. They serve with or without support from other Americans. Now, some are being recalled involuntarily to participate in the fragile exercise of self-rule by equipping our government "of the people" to take action.

There are several thousand Marines who thought that their time of duty was done. Now they are going to be sent back into combat. They will be unhappy, even angry. Some will believe the president is wrong to send them, and their families will be sick with worry. But our Marines will go.

Their lives - and, inevitably for some, their deaths - present us with a stark question: Is citizenship only about enjoying personal preferences, or should we take responsibility for those around us, and by extension for our country?

We don't all need to serve in the military, but in the face of the sacrifice of those who do, what is our excuse for just going shopping? How we answer the question posed to us by their service will decide the health, morality and ultimately the survival of our democracy.

Frank Schaeffer is a writer. His forthcoming novel is "Baby Jack." Contact him at frankschaeffer.com.

From the excellent "Betsy's Blog" by Raleighite Betsy Newmark:

Public flogging
Betsy Newmark

Do you remember the uproar 12 years ago when Michael P. Fay, an American teenager, was caught vandalizing cars in Singapore and was sentenced to a caning? As Wikipedia reminds us,

U.S. President Bill Clinton called the punishment prescribed by Singapore as extreme and mistaken, continuing to pressure the Singaporean government to grant Fay clemency from caning. Two dozen U.S. senators signed a letter to the Singaporean government also appealing for clemency. After Fay's punishment was carried out, the United States Trade Representative said that he would try to prevent the World Trade Organization's first ministerial meeting from taking place in Singapore.

The United States media sensationalized and saturated its coverage of Michael Fay. The New York Times had several editorials and op-eds that condemned the punishment and called the American public to flood the Singaporean embassy in the United States with protests. Newsday wrote about a person who claimed to have witnessed a graphic public caning event in Singapore, despite the fact that Singapore does not practice public canings. Some commentaries treated the Michael Fay affair as a clash of civilizations between Asian values and its differing view of human rights versus as opposed liberal western cultures.

Of course, outrage was exacerbated because it was an American teenager who was being caned, and opinion divided as quite a few people thought that the kid deserved it and it was hypocrtical to get all worked up about one American kid getting caned and not about all the Singapore citizens who might have been caned.

Well, I would like to see one-tenth the outrage for this story.

Islamic leaders in Mogadishu gave a woman 11 lashes for selling cannabis Thursday, the first female to receive such punishment since the fundamentalist rulers took over the capital in June.

The woman, who throughout the beating insisted she was innocent, was flogged alongside five other men at the Yassin Square in Mogadishu in front of several hundred people. The small bundle of cannabis, worth around $1 on the streets in the capital, was burned before the crowd.

Somalia is fast becoming a radical Islamic state with people getting arrested for any supposed violation of Sharia law. Now that is an outrage and downright scary. Perhaps, we could pay attention to that story. Maybe the reporters obsessed with the whole macaca thing could have asked George Allen what he thought about Somalia fast becoming like Afghanistan under the Taliban and the possibility of being a terrorist haven. I don't know what there is to be done, but I'd sure like to see that story on page one rather than another rehash of what Allen may or may not have been thinking about when he uttered that well-known racial epithet.

Seriously, militant Islamicists with ties to Al Qaeda have taken over much of the country and are now whipping women in the street for possession of a dollar's worth of cannabis. Where is the liberal outrage at that story? It's got everything: religious extremism in the government, drugs, abuse of a woman, and the possible connection to terrorism. Why aren't they marching in the street about that? Do they only care if they can blame the U.S. or Israel for what is happening? Is it because the only way to do something to change the situation would be to use military force and they oppose military force at all costs? Or is it because it's in Africa? Twelve years ago, the country was obsessed with talking about one boy getting caned in Singapore; can't we summon up some outrage on this woman's behalf?

From The Washington Post:

In Defense of Andrew Young
By John H. McWhorter

Sunday, August 27, 2006

Andrew Young unwittingly ended his brief tenure as Wal-Mart's ambassador to U.S. cities this month with his remarks about the nation's urban mom and pop shops:

"Those are the people who have been overcharging us -- selling us stale bread and bad meat and wilted vegetables," he told the Los Angeles Sentinel, an African American weekly. "First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it's Arabs," he added. "Very few black folks own these stores."

Young was hammered so quickly in the national media -- the Chicago Tribune's Clarence Page even suggested that he qualified for a Mel Gibson Sensitivity Prize -- that he immediately stepped down from Wal-Mart and issued mea culpas to the New York Times, CNN and the Atlanta-Journal Constitution.

But he apologized too soon. The controversy surrounding his comments -- coming on the heels of Gibsongate, Sen. George Allen's "macaca" fiasco and now the news that the "Survivor" television show will pit different ethnic groups against one another -- only reveals that the civil rights revolution Young once helped lead has taken a detour. Today, when it comes to serious racial issues, political theater has replaced civic engagement.

If Mel Gibson stumbles out of his car and offers a drunken rant about warmongering Jews, we can confidently label him a bigot and use the incident as a reminder of the attitudes the country hopes to leave behind. But Young's case is different. Indeed, "sensitivity" has penetrated the culture so deeply that now everyone is on the hate-speech patrol. As a result, people such as Young are suffering needlessly for making innocent statements. His crime was not his choice of words -- it was his failure to recognize the changing environment in which he uttered them.

The mainstream media have ignored (or remain unaware of) an interesting point concerning Young's allegedly racist comments: His views are in fact common coin among inner-city black people -- the very people the hate-speech patrol so ardently hopes to protect. The notion that non-black owners of corner stores are "interlopers" in African American communities is a staple of black nationalist politics and black talk radio. Young's statement played right into the Sentinel's motto: "The Voice of Our Community Speaking for Itself."

Of course, this decades-old community talking point has its downside. Among less reflective sorts, it encourages an anti-Semitic strain that is indefensible, given how many Jewish people stood alongside blacks during the bloodiest phases of the struggle for civil rights. Jewish civil rights workers Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were dragged from their car, shot dead and left to rot under a Mississippi dam in 1964 -- and 20 years later, Jesse Jackson still called New York City "Hymietown."

But Young is hardly unreflective. He was addressing a real problem: Too many poor blacks have easy access only to corner stores where merchandise is, in fact, stale, bad and wilted. In the small, all-black New Jersey town of Lawnside where I spent part of my childhood, a few such stores still remained, and I will never forget buying a bag of potato chips with an expiration date of 1978 -- in 1983! The shopkeeper in this case was black, however, and Young mentioned in the interview that black shopkeepers have charged their communities high prices as well.

So why did Young raise the ethnicity of the shopkeepers at all? I suspect he did so to reinforce a sense of group solidarity; after all, the interview was with a black newspaper, not National Public Radio. As a friend of mine once put it, the black community would be better off if we owned more of our own stuff (though he used a different word beginning with "s"). To me, listing the shopkeepers' ethnicities is less about xenophobia than about stressing self-sufficiency -- something even those obsessed with policing hate speech should cheer.

Perhaps unaware that his Sentinel interview would travel so widely through the blogosphere and the national media, Young was, in his own way, using black America's private language rather than its public one. In that private language, the shopkeeper issue implies a positive vision of old black communities, where African Americans both owned and shopped in such stores.

Moreover, Young has always labored under the sneaking suspicion that he may not really be "one of us." In 1961, he had to be reminded to eat a brown-bag lunch with poor, uneducated black activist trainees rather than consume a more elegant meal by himself. Helping to supervise marches and protests in the 1960s against bigots with attack dogs and guns, Young was often the one tamping down what he once called "misguided enthusiasm and impetuosity" -- the hard-core militancy that has such currency in black culture today. Is it really so hard to understand, then, why he would flag the shopkeepers' non-blackness when talking to a black newspaper?

The rebukes of Young have been almost cartoonishly excessive given the nature of his alleged offense. It seems that the self-righteousness of "outing" Young is a motivation in itself, surpassing any genuine feeling that real social harm has been done.

Similar insincerity is evident in the reaction to Allen and the macaca episode, in which the Virginia Republican used the word in reference to a U.S.-born Democratic campaign worker of Indian descent. Imagine for a moment that Allen actually knew that a "macaque" is a kind of monkey, or that in French the term is sometimes used as an insult for North Africans (Allen denied having known about either). Who, then, believes that Allen would use the slur against an opposition campaigner aiming a camera straight at him?

The facts of the case would suggest that Allen just made up something silly on the spot -- something especially clear from the video of the incident, in which Allen, as usual, speaks in his jocular backyard-barbecue tone. His erstwhile attitudes toward Confederate memorabilia and Martin Luther King Jr. Day notwithstanding, was calling young S.R. Sidarth "macaca" graceful? Hardly. But racist? Nonsense.

Allen's faux pas is but the latest case of people being damned for uttering racial epithets that few people even regard as such. In recent months, Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) and White House press secretary Tony Snow have used the term "tar baby" to refer to sticky situations, only to be assailed for employing what is presumably a slur against black people. Yet I'd wager that not even one in 1,000 Americans is aware that tar baby has historically been a racially tinged insult.

An event in which words really mattered took place in 2005 in New York City, when a young white man, Nicholas Minucci, greeted a young black man, Glenn Moore, with a racial epithet and proceeded to beat the daylights out of him with an aluminum baseball bat. In the trial two months ago, Minucci's lawyers argued that their client was using the word as an affectionate term, as some black men do with one another. The jury disagreed, finding Minucci guilty of a hate crime. Last month, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

With such substantial and genuine cases to grapple with, what possible value is there in paying any attention to tar babies, macacas or wilted vegetables? Well, there is some commercial value, perhaps. After all, the plan by CBS to structure its next "Survivor" show around dueling African American, Asian American, Hispanic and white tribes only shows that an eternal battle between whites and various minority groups has become a kind of cops-and-robbers fantasy in which we can all indulge.

Perhaps "Survivor" and Young are proof, in an odd way, of how far we have come toward getting past race in American society. Only after we have achieved a certain peace can we afford the luxury of such staged television conflicts -- and of speculation on whether the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s right-hand man, of all people, is insensitive to the problems of prejudice.

John H. McWhorter, a linguist and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is author of "Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America" (Gotham Books).