This item is available on the Militant Islam Monitor website, at http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/2376

Jihadists threaten Pope: "We swear that we will destroy your cross in the heart of Rome ...and that your Vatican will be attacked"

September 16, 2006

MIM: Muslim outrage over the Pope's quote of a medieval emperor about Islam being spread by the sword has galvanised both Shiite and Sunni and even secularists to take up the sword and threaten the Pope and the Vatican with death and retaliation.

Muslims are threatening revenge and demanding an apology that the Pope has equated Islam with violence.

Muslim clerics have challenged the Pope to a debate, with one proclaiming he would 'convert to Christianity' if the Pope will come out as the winner.

According to the article below an Iraqi group calling themselves Jaish Al Muhajideen announced that "We swear we will destroy your cross in the heart of Rome...and that your Vatican will be attacked".

The security at the Pope's residence has been stepped up and Italian soldiers in Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon were placed on alert.

http://www.kleine.at/nachrichten/politik/214133/index.do

From Chronicles:

Farewell to a Good European: Oriana Fallaci (1929 2006)
By Srdja Trifkovic

Friday, September 15, 2006

Back in the 1960s Oriana Fallaci was a “brave,” leftist, feminist hackette. Her iconoclastic interviews were praised by the chattering classes for bringing the genre to the heights of postmodernism—she was lauded for doing to journalism what Susan Sontag was doing to fiction. But whereas the latter progressed to become an apologist for jihad and died as a self-hating degenerate, Fallaci’s old age brought her wisdom and true grit. She died on September 14 as an outstanding defender of our culture and civilization against the onslaught of barbarity from without and betrayal from within.

For some 20 years starting in the early 1960s Fallaci was famous for her political interviewers with the great and the mighty of that era, including Deng Xiaoping and Henry Kissinger, who later wrote that his 1972 interview with her was “the single most disastrous conversation I have ever had with any member of the press.” On his own admission, he had been flattered into granting it by the company he’d be joining in Fallaci’s “journalistic pantheon,” but realized too late that it was more like a collection of scalps. Her manner of interviewing was deliberately unsettling: “she approached each encounter with studied aggressiveness, made frequent nods to European existentialism… and displayed a sinuous, crafty intelligence.”

Fallaci’s once-famous reportage has not aged well, and on the strength of it alone her death would have attracted scant attention. But in the aftermath of 9/11 she became a fierce critic of jihadism and an outspoken opponent of Muslim immigration into Europe. Her book The Rage and the Pride—a provocative extended essay initially published by Corriere della Sera—caused a sensation. While countless bien-pensants and talking heads from her 1960s and 70s milieu were prompted by 9/11 to explain to the masses the peaceful and tolerant nature of “true Islam,” Fallaci understood what was going on. It is certainly not rock and roll music that the jihadist hates, she wrote, not the usual stereotypes like chewing-gum, hamburgers, Broadway, or Hollywood. Accustomed as the Westerners are to the double-cross, blinded as they are by myopia, they’d better understand that a war of religion is in progress:

A war that they call Jihad. Holy War. A war that might not seek to conquer our territory, but that certainly seeks to conquer our souls. That seeks the disappearance of our freedom and our civilization. That seeks to annihilate our way of living and dying, our way of praying or not praying, our way of eating and drinking and dressing and entertaining and informing ourselves. You don’t understand or don’t want to understand that if we don’t oppose them, if we don’t defend ourselves, if we don’t fight, the Jihad will win. And it will destroy the world that, for better or worse, we’ve managed to build, to change, to improve, to render a little more intelligent, that is to say, less bigoted—or even not bigoted at all. And with that it will destroy our culture, our art, our science, our morals, our values, our pleasures.

Fallaci had no qualms when it came to the comparison of what we have with their culture, their art and their science, not to mention their morals, values, and pleasures. She despised the evaders of the truth about our two civilizations as weaklings, cowards or simple masochists:

It bothers me to even talk about “two of them,” to put them on the same plane as though they were two parallel realities of equal weight and equal measure. Because behind our civilization we have Homer, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Phydias, for God’s sake. We have ancient Greece with its Parthenon and its discovery of Democracy. We have ancient Rome with its greatness, its laws, its concept of Law. Its sculptures, its literature, its architecture. Its buildings, its amphitheaters, its aqueducts, its bridges and its roads. We have a revolutionary, that Christ who died on the cross, who taught us (too bad if we didn’t learn it) the concept of love and of justice.

Yes, I know—the old agnostic went on—there’s also a Church that gave me the Inquisition, the torture and the burning at the stake. But Fallaci, who was granted an audience with Pope Benedict XVI last year, readily recognized the contribution of Christianity to the history of European thought, “the inspiration it gave to Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael, the music of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, to Rossini and Donizetti and Verdi, and to science that cures diseases, and has invented the train, the car, the airplane, the spaceships, and changed the face of this planet with electricity, the radio, the telephone.”

She offered a resolute reply to “the fatal question” of what is behind the Muslim culture: “We can search and search and find only Mohammed with his Kuran and Averroe with his scholarly merits, his second-hand Commentaries on Aristotle”—all quite worthy, but pretty second-rate stuff, really. Well, yes, numbers and math; but even on that, Fallaci pointed out, there’s far less than meets the eye. Unlike the perpetrators of the myth of an Islamic Golden Age, she realized that the Muslim Empire merely inherited the knowledge and skills of the ancient Middle East, of Greece and of Persia, and added to them a few innovations.

The learning curve of Oriana Fallaci on the issue of Islam may be traced back to her famous October 1979 interview with Ayatollah Khomeini, soon after the fall of the Shah, when she took off her chador in the middle of the proceedings. His political and social views were hardly a revelation to her, but his passing comments on the music of the West shook her deeply. The old man declared dryly that it “dulls the mind, because it involves pleasure and ecstasy, similar to drugs,” instead of exalting the spirit as it should. “Even the music of Bach, Beethoven, Verdi?”—Fallaci asked, to which Khomeini curtly replied, “I do not know these names.” He went on to allow for the possibility that if Western music does not dull the mind, it would not be prohibited: “Some of your music is permitted. For example, marches and hymns for marching . . . Yes, your marches are permitted.”

For once she was genuinely horrified. As she told the New Yorker earlier this year, “I am known for a life spent in the struggle for freedom, and freedom includes the freedom of religion. But the struggle for freedom does not include the submission to a religion which, like the Muslim religion, wants to annihilate other religions. Which wants to impose its Mein Kampf, its Koran, on the whole planet. Which has done so for one thousand and four hundred years. That is, since its birth. Which, unlike any other religion, slaughters and decapitates or enslaves all those who live differently.”

As an astute analyst of world affairs in her mature years. Fallaci knew that the Islamic genie, released by the United States thanks to Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski’s “excellent idea” to support Usama bin Laden and his ilk in Afghanistan in 1979, came to haunt us all like a boomerang. She recalled the footage of mujahideen attacking Soviet positions:

Do you remember those bearded men with the gowns and the turbans who, before firing their mortars, shouted “Allah akbar! Allah akbar!” I remember them very well. I used to shiver hearing the word “Allah” coupled with the shot of a mortar . . . Well, the Russians left Afghanistan . . . and from Afghanistan the bearded men . . . arrived in New York with the nineteen kamikaze.

But unlike her beloved New York, European cities would succumb, she feared, because of the Muslim demographic onslaught on the Old World, an invasion unparalleled in human history. This was a key theme of the best-selling sequel to The Rage and the Pride which was published last year, The Force of Reason was another frantic wake-up call. It made Fallaci the subject of several “hate-crime” lawsuits in her native country, where a court in Bergamo indicted her for ‘defaming Islam.’ In her final months, she was gripped by deep pessimism, lamenting the decline of Europe which refuses to confront the “reverse Crusade” by the “sons of Allah.”

Europe is already “Eurabia,” she declared last year, “a colony of Islam, where the Islamic invasion does not proceed only in a physical sense, but also in a mental and cultural sense.” What actually occurred, she wrote four years earlier, “was not an immigration, it was more of an invasion conducted under an emblem of secrecy—a secrecy that’s disturbing because it’s not meek and dolorous but arrogant and protected by the cynicism of politicians who close an eye or maybe even both.” The tolerance level was already surpassed fifteen or twenty years ago, “when the Left let the Muslims disembark on our coasts by the thousands.” Servility to the invaders has poisoned democracy, undermined the freedom of thought and the concept of liberty itself.

The tangible results are as devastating as the moral and spiritual ones. In Venice the invaders have taken over Piazza San Marco. In Genoa the marvelous palazzi that Rubens so admired “have been seized by them and are now perishing like beautiful women who have been raped.” In her native Florence, a huge tent was put up next to the Cathedral to pressure the Italian government to give them “the papers necessary to rove about Europe” and to “let them bring the hordes of their relatives to Italy”:

A tent situated next to the beautiful palazzo of the Archbishop on whose sidewalk they kept the shoes or sandals that are lined up outside the mosques in their countries. And along with the shoes or sandals, the empty bottles of water they’d used to wash their feet before praying. A tent placed in front of the cathedral with Brunelleschi’s cupola and by the side of the Baptistery with Ghiberti?s golden doors . . . Thanks to a tape player, the uncouth wailing of a muezzin punctually exhorted the faithful, deafened the infidels, and smothered the sound of the church bells . . . And along with the yellow streaks of urine, the stench of the excrement that blocked the door of San Salvatore al Vescovo: that exquisite Romanesque church (year 1000) that stands at the rear of the Piazza del Duomo and that the sons of Allah transformed into a shithouse.

Of course she prompted countless howls of rage from coast to coast and from one side of the Atlantic to another, among the degenerates, cowards, masochists, madmen, and villains. (Christopher Hitchens, who is all of the above, has described Fallaci’s work as “a sort of primer in how not to write about Islam.”) They can relax now, and write mean-spirited obituaries of this “controversial author” who’s been “harshly criticized” for “inciting hatred against Islam.” She will be sorely missed by those of us who know what she knew, and who abhor what she abhorred.

From The National Post:
Rioters' madness shames Muslim world
Reactions of some fanatics does not help open dialogue

By Father Raymond J. de Souza

Saturday, September 16, 2006

Pope Benedict XVI greets a crowd in front of a church in Munich on Sunday. Words from a lecture he gave on Tuesday touched off protests across the Muslim world.

The eruption of rage in some quarters of the Islamic world against Pope Benedict XVI requires that several tough things be said.

Painful though it may be, speaking frankly is necessary if there is to be honest and open dialogue between the Abrahamic faiths. Given the reaction to Benedict's address, though, one wonders if that dialogue is even possible.

The Pope devoted almost 4,000 words to examining the relationship between faith and reason, and the prospect for dialogue between modernity and the world of religion.

In the course of that address he quoted a dialogue recorded between the Byzantine (Christian) Emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an erudite Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam. The dialogue took place during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402.

During their conversation, the Pope said, the Emperor "turns to his interlocutor somewhat brusquely with the central question on the relationship between religion and violence in general, in these words: 'Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.' "

Benedict was quoting a 14th-century Christian emperor, under siege from the Ottomans, defending the position that spreading religion by violence is contrary to the nature of God. The Emperor, quite reasonably given his circumstances, suggested to his Persian interlocutor such a view did not prevail in Islamic thought.

In response to this historical excursus in an academic lecture by one of the world's most erudite theologians, we are witnessing a wave of madness and malice, no doubt an embarrassment to millions of Muslims.

Roman Catholics are likely angry. Relations between adherents of the two religions simply cannot develop without all conducting themselves as mature adults.

It does a disservice to children to call the wild-eyed statements and deranged behaviour of the past days childish.

It is not only the obscenity of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist terrorist band suppressed in several Muslim states, demanding an apology from anyone, let alone the Holy Father.

It is not only the grandstanding Pakistani politicians passing resolutions condemning a papal speech few read, and even fewer understood. It is not only the extraneous charges about the Holocaust and Hitler by the agitated and excited.

It is that we have seen this before.

When Pope John Paul II made his epic pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Palestinian Muslim representatives jostled him on the Temple Mount, shouted at him, and, in one episode of maximum rudeness, abandoned him on stage during an interfaith meeting. Bashir Assad, the Syrian President, treated him to an anti-Semitic rant when the late pope visited Syria.

Catholic goodwill toward global Islam is severely attenuated by such continued maltreatment of our universal pastors.

And it is well past time that the maltreatment of history ceased too.

The irony of the accusations that Pope Benedict has a "Crusader mentality" is that he was speaking about the period in which the Crusades themselves took place.

Catholics have for quite some time now confessed the sinful and wicked shadows that marked the Crusades, but any suggestion the whole affair was about rapacious Christians setting upon irenic Muslims must be rejected.

After all, the formerly Christian lands of North Africa, the Middle East and Asia Minor were not converted to Islam by Muslim missionary martyrs. Those lands were conquered by the sword.

The Crusader idea was that they could be recovered. Who wronged who first is a fruitless historical inquiry, but historical honesty requires an admission that Muslims wronged as much as they were wronged against.

The sword of Islam is carried today by self-professed jihadis. In most countries with Muslim majorities, Christians do not have the full freedom to practise their faith without fear.

Whether private harassment or state-sanctioned torture, Christians the world over know all too well that the sword of Islam has not been sheathed. No doubt the extreme reaction to Benedict's address will serve the purpose of keeping local Christians in their place throughout the Islamic world.

Pope Benedict is a gracious man and a Christian disciple, so it is likely he will extend an olive branch to Islamic leaders. He will likely speak to his fellow Catholic prelates about the way of the Cross, and that the disciple cannot be greater than the Master. And will no doubt pray that his fellow children of Abraham might turn away from the sword of conquest, and of terror.

It is a prayer for conversion of heart -- a prayer urgently needed for the mad and the malicious.

'YOU WILL FIND THINGS ONLY EVIL AND INHUMAN ...'

In his lecture, delivered on Tuesday at the University of Regensburg where he once taught theology, the Pope called for a dialogue of cultures "so urgently needed in the world today." His larger point is that the West's separation of faith and reason into different spheres (with reason elevated above faith) is offensive to other traditions, including Islam, and is a barrier to understanding. He takes as his point of departure the dialogue between the erudite 14th-century Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam.

In the seventh conversation ... the Emperor touches on the theme of the jihad (holy war). The Emperor must have known that Sura 2:256 [of the Koran] reads: "There is no compulsion in religion." It is one of the suras of the early period, when Muhammad was still powerless and under [threat]. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Koran, concerning holy war.

Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the "Book" and the "infidels," he turns to his interlocutor somewhat brusquely with the central question on the relationship between religion and violence in general, in these words: "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."

The Emperor goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. "God is not pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably (syn logo) is contrary to God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats ...

"To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death ..."

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: Not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.

Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn [an 11th-century Arab theologian] went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practise idolatry.

[R]eason and faith [must] come together in a new way ... Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today. In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid.

Yet the world's profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions ...

"Not to act reasonably is contrary to the nature of God," said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures.

From Pitchfork Media:

R.E.M.
And I Feel Fine
[Capitol; 2006]
Rating: 9.7

The first thing you need to know is that neither of the two sets-- the one disc set of previously released material nor the collector's edition with an extra disc of live tracks, rarities, and demos-- has "Romance" on it. So you'll want to hang on to the now out-of-time Eponymous, or at least burn the song before you sell the disc. The second thing you need to know is that the second disc contains a favorite track from each member, and Stipe chooses "Time After Time (AnnElise)", quite possibly to piss off Stephen Malkmus (how's that for a little bit of indie arcana?).

After that, you probably know everything you need to know: how the band was started by four UGA students; how their enigmatic frontman occasionally sang in a mumble; how he wrote impressionistic lyrics that made obfuscation a virtue; how the drummer played close to the chest to give the songs their tightly wound tension; how the guitarist updated Roger McGuinn's Americana strum; how they released a five-song EP and then a near-perfect full-length debut in 1983, followed by four more excellent albums, a rarities comp, and the aforementioned Eponymous on I.R.S. Records, before signing to Warner Brothers; how during those years they embodied Southern locality, effectively pinpointing Athens, Georgia, as a hotbed of indie music; how they eventually traded that locality for national and then global generality, the music suffering as their scope widened; how you and me and maybe every one else who heard Around the Sun wished the band would either pack it all in or take $500 and whatever equipment they could carry and record their next album in some kudzu-covered barn in the middle of rural Georgia.

As disappointing as their Warner Brothers trajectory has proved, R.E.M.'s I.R.S. years were a period of sustained and boundless creativity, which makes And I Feel Fine inevitably enthralling, and hearing these songs in the context of a late-career retrospective feels undeniably rewarding. In short, there's not a bad song on this tracklist. Hell, there's not even a single merely good song on here. And I Feel Fine is 42 mind-blowing tracks from a band that helped to define and codify indie rock.

With startling obviousness, Disc 1 begins with "Begin the Begin", the Lifes Rich Pageant opener, and spirals outward with no regard for chronology. "Begin" is one of R.E.M.'s rock songs (the kind they tried to replicate on Monster), and it immediately showcases their elemental sound, each instrument carrying democratic weight and creating a surprisingly aggressive whole, topped by Stipe's alternately precise enunciations and Weird Harold growls and barks. R.E.M. were an intuitively tight unit, a fact that often gets lost in the legend: Bill Berry, Peter Buck, and Mike Mills were a power trio, all rhythm section but all lead, and their expansive musical vocabulary-- encompassing power pop, folk, soul, classic rock, and even punk-- proved surprisingly malleable over time. The group was as dynamic on an early track like "Radio Free Europe" and the gentle "Perfect Circle" as on the countrified "Can't Get There From Here" and deceptive rock songs like "Life and How to Live It" and "The One I Love", with its contradictory declarations of romantic devotion and manipulation.

If the band was a traditional, yet inventive, three-piece, who knows what Stipe was? Possessed of a roomy, plainspoken tenor that could rise into a plaintive keen, he adopted new approaches for each song, sounding withdrawn on "Perfect Circle" or mimicking a hick accent on "Can't Get There from Here". His fragile falsetto sounds like it could break on "Feeling Gravitys Pull", the perfect compliment to Buck's question-mark guitar chords. Stipe liked to adopt the posture of Southern enigma, but it was less a stance than an elusive ploy. He turned regional vernacular into lyrical puzzles, reading rural Georgia culture as poetry and philosophy, incorporating colloquialisms like "I will rearrange your scales" and "can't get there from here" (and later, more famously, "losing my religion") into lyrics that prized vexing obscurity and absorbing complexity, settling for no set meanings but only open-ended impressions. Remarkably, he sounded like he belonged to this marginal culture, writing and singing his songs with absolutely no class or intellectual condescension or any trace of irony, which seems sadly impossible today.

What's missing from Disc 1 are the album tracks that comprise the darker corners of the R.E.M. catalog, which, it could be argued, are the true essence of the band's legend. For this reason, the second disc of And I Feel Fine, heavy with less canonical songs but compiled with obvious care, proves just as revelatory and representative as the first: The tracklist presents a subterranean history of the band to complement the popular legend. Disc 2 has a palindromic symmetry, beginning and ending with band members' personal picks. "Pilgrimage" (Mills), "These Days" (Berry), and "Disturbance at the Heron House" (Buck) could just as easily have been first-disc hits, but "Time After Time" remains a strange avenue (although Stipe's affection for it seems understandable, like a mother's love for the runt of the litter). The second and penultimate sets of songs include alternate takes, demos, and unreleased rarities, including Hib-tone versions of two Murmur tracks, a wonderful slowed-down version of "Gardening at Night", and early demos of later tracks "All the Right Friends" and "Bad Day".

But it's the center of Disc 2 that's the true prize of the set: four live tracks that amount to a concert of sorts. These songs, three from 1983 and one from 87, show the band as a fierce and tight live act, Stipe commanding the stage (his lengthy spoken-word intro to "Life and How to Live It" is a beaut) and the band muscling (yes, muscling) up behind him with celebratory bravado. At so few tracks this section is just a tease, but it raises two important questions: First, in their storied two-decade-plus career, why the hell haven't R.E.M. released a live album? And second, when they do, can it be a double?

-Stephen M. Deusner, September 15, 2006

An object lesson in proving Benedict correct. More rational discourse from the religion of peace.

From BBC News: The Vatican should not apologize for anything The Pope said. If anything, he didn't go far enough in criticizing the founder of Islam (whether it was by quoting another's remarks or not). The religion of peace's adherents behave like rabid animals everytime Islam is criticized in any fashion, but remain silent in the face of the most base, degenerate behaviors of a huge portion of their faith's adherents. Here's hoping The Pope doesn't back down any more than has been done already.

Key excerpts: The Pope's speech

Remarks by Pope Benedict XVI in a speech in Germany have provoked outrage in the Muslim world and led to demands that the pontiff apologise for "insulting" Islam.

Below are some key excerpts from the Pope's speech at the University of Regensburg, entitled Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections.

ON UNIVERSITY LIFE

It is a moving experience for me to be back again in the university and to be able once again to give a lecture at this podium.

The university [of Bonn, where the Pope taught for a period from 1959] was also very proud of its two theological faculties. This profound sense of coherence within the universe of reason was not troubled, even when it was once reported that a colleague had said there was something odd about our university - it had two faculties devoted to something that did not exist: God.

That even in the face of such radical scepticism it is still necessary and reasonable to raise the question of God through the use of reason, and to do so in the context of the tradition of the Christian faith: this, within the university as a whole, was accepted without question.

ON HOLY WAR

I was reminded of all this recently, when I read... of part of the dialogue carried on - perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara - by the erudite Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both.

Most computers will open this document automatically, but you may need Adobe Reader
In the seventh conversation...the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the "Book" and the "infidels", he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."

The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. "God," he says, "is not pleased by blood - and not acting reasonably is contrary to God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats."

ON RELIGION AND REASON

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.

At this point, as far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is concerned, we are faced with an unavoidable dilemma. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true?

ON THEOLOGY AND SCIENCE

The liberal theology of the 19th and 20th Centuries ushered in a second stage in the process of dehellenisation, with Adolf von Harnack as its outstanding representative.

The intention here is... of broadening our concept of reason... Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today
Pope Benedict XVI

Jesus was said to have put an end to worship in favour of morality. In the end he was presented as the father of a humanitarian moral message. Fundamentally, Harnack's goal was to bring Christianity back into harmony with modern reason.

[But]...any attempt to maintain theology's claim to be "scientific" would end up reducing Christianity to a mere fragment of its former self... This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that... religion or ethics no longer concern it.

CONCLUSION

The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application... Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today.

In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid. Yet the world's profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions. A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures.

From Opinion Journal, another brilliant piece by Hitchens:

Solidarity
Our first duty is to stand together against bin Ladenism.
BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

Monday, September 11, 2006 12:01 a.m.

Never mind where I was standing or what I was doing this time five years ago. (Because really, what could be less pertinent?) Except that I do remember wondering, with apparent irrelevance, how soon I would be hearing one familiar cliché. And that I do remember hearing, with annoyance, one other observation that I believe started the whole post-9/11 epoch on the wrong foot.

The cliché, from which we have been generally but not completely spared, was the one about American "loss of innocence." Nobody, or nobody serious, thought that this store-bought phrase would quite rise to the occasion of the incineration of downtown Manhattan and 3,000 of its workers. It might have done for the Kennedy assassination or Watergate, but partly for that very reason it was redundant or pathetic by mid-day on September 11, 2001. Indeed, I believe that the expression, with its concomitant naïve self-regard, may have become superseded for all time. If so, good. The beginning of wisdom is to recognize that the United States was assaulted for what it really is, and what it understands as the center of modernity, and not for its unworldliness.

But here I am, writing that it was "the United States" that was assaulted. And there was the president, and most of the media, speaking about "an attack on America." True as this was and is, it is not quite the truth. I deliberately declined, for example, an invitation to attend a memorial for the many hundreds of my fellow-Englishmen who had perished in the inferno. I could have done the same if I was Armenian or Zanzibari--more than 80 nationalities could count their dead on that day. It would have been far better if President Bush had characterized the atrocity as an attack on civilization itself, and it would be preferable if we observed the anniversary in the same spirit.

In the past five years, I have either registered or witnessed or protested at or simply "observed" the following:

(1) The reopening of a restaurant in Bali, where several dozen Australian holidaymakers and many Indonesian civilians had earlier been torn to shreds. (2) The explosion of a bomb at a Tube station in London which is regularly used by two of my children. (3) The murder of a senior Shiite cleric outside his place of worship in Iraq. (4) The attempt to destroy the Danish economy--and to torch Danish embassies and civilians--as a consequence of the publication of a few caricatures in the Danish press. (5) The murder of the U.N. envoy to Baghdad: a heroic Brazilian named Sergio Vieira de Mello, as vengeance (according to his murderers) for his role in shepherding East Timor to independence. (6) The near-successful attempt to blow up the Indian parliament in New Delhi, and two successful attempts to disrupt the commerce and society of Mumbai. (7) The destruction of the Golden Dome in Samara: a place of aesthetic as well as devotional importance. (8) The bombing of ancient synagogues in Tunisia, Turkey and Morocco. (9) The evisceration in the street of a Dutch filmmaker, Theo van Gogh, and the lethal threats that drove his Somali-born colleague, a duly elected member of the Dutch parliament, into hiding and then exile. (10) The ritual slaughter on video of a Jewish reporter for this newspaper.

This list is not exhaustive or in any special order, and it does not include any of the depredations undertaken by the votaries of the Iranian version of Islamic fundamentalism. I shall just say that I have stood, alone or in company, with Hindus, Jews, Shiites and secularists (my own non-sectarian group) in the face of a cult of death that worships suicide and exalts murder and desecration. This has not dimmed, for me, the importance of what happened in New York and Washington and Pennsylvania. But it has made me slightly bored with those who continue to wonder, fruitlessly so far, in what fashion "we" should commemorate it.

The time for commemoration lies very far in the future. War memorials are erected when the war is won. At the moment, anyone who insists on the primacy of September 11, 2001, is very likely to be accused--not just overseas but in this country also--of making or at least of implying a "partisan" point. I debate with the "antiwar" types almost every day, either in print or on the air or on the podium, and I can tell you that they have been "war-weary" ever since the sun first set on the wreckage of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and on the noble debris of United Airlines 93. These clever critics are waiting, some of them gleefully, for the moment that is not far off: the moment when the number of American casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq will match or exceed the number of civilians of all nationalities who were slaughtered five years ago today. But to the bored, cynical neutrals, it also comes naturally to say that it is "the war" that has taken, and is taking, the lives of tens of thousands of other civilians. In other words, homicidal nihilism is produced only by the resistance to it! If these hacks were honest, and conceded the simple truth that it is the forces of the Taliban and of al Qaeda in Mesopotamia that are conducting a Saturnalia of murder and destruction, they would have to hide their faces and admit that they were not "antiwar" at all.

One must have a blunt answer to the banal chat-show and op-ed question: What have we learned? (The answer ought not to be that we have learned how to bully and harass citizens who try to take shampoo on flights on which they have lawfully booked passage. Yet incompetent collective punishment of the innocent, and absurd color-coding of the "threat level," is the way in which most Americans actually experience the "war on terror.") Anyone who lost their "innocence" on September 11 was too naïve by far, or too stupid to begin with. On that day, we learned what we ought to have known already, which is that clerical fanaticism means to fight a war which can only have one victor. Afghans, Kurds, Kashmiris, Timorese and many others could have told us this from experience, and for nothing (and did warn us, especially in the person of Ahmad Shah Massoud, leader of Afghanistan's Northern Alliance). Does anyone suppose that an ideology that slaughters and enslaves them will ever be amenable to "us"? The first duty, therefore, is one of solidarity with bin-Ladenism's other victims and targets, from India to Kurdistan.

The second point makes me queasy, but cannot be ducked. "We"--and our allies--simply have to become more ruthless and more experienced. An unspoken advantage of the current awful strife in Iraq and Afghanistan is that it is training tens of thousands of our young officers and soldiers to fight on the worst imaginable terrain, and gradually to learn how to confront, infiltrate, "turn," isolate and kill the worst imaginable enemy. These are faculties that we shall be needing in the future. It is a shame that we have to expend our talent in this way, but it was far worse five years and one day ago, when the enemy knew that there was a war in progress, and was giggling at how easy the attacks would be, and "we" did not even know that hostilities had commenced. Come to think of it, perhaps we were a bit "innocent" after all.

Mr. Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is "Thomas Jefferson: Author of America" (HarperCollins, 2006).

Epic headline, great article from Ace of Spades HQ:

Air America Files For Chapter 19, Combined Financial & Intellectual Bankruptcy

Women, Minorities, Al Franken Hardest Hit

Based on my experience, they're very popular with foreign-born NYC cabdrivers.

Not so much anyone else.

The New York Times was big on Air America's launch, but, as Michelle Malkin notes, they've been entirely unwilling to cover its (inevitable) demise. Or its Enron-ish financing shenanigans.

They'll now have to mention it, but I can already tell you what they're going to say. Liberals are too smart and too complex and too nuanced to either do, or tune in to, the simplistic format of political talk radio.

The real reason Air America failed is that there was already an Air America on the dial, a little known outfit called NPR.

If Only Bin Laden Had a Stained Blue Dress...
By Ann Coulter

If you wonder why it took 50 years to get the truth about Joe McCarthy, consider the fanatical campaign of the Clinton acolytes to kill an ABC movie that relies on the 9/11 Commission Report, which whitewashed only 90 percent of Clinton's cowardice and incompetence in the face of terrorism, rather than 100 percent.

Islamic jihadists attacked America year after year throughout the Clinton administration. They did everything but blow up his proverbial "bridge to the 21st century." Every year but one, Clinton found an excuse not to fight back.

The first month Clinton was in office, Islamic terrorists with suspected links to al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein bombed the World Trade Center.

For the first time ever, a terrorist act against America was treated not as a matter of national security, but exclusively as a simple criminal offense. The individual bombers were tried in a criminal court. (The one plotter who got away fled to Iraq, that peaceful haven of kite-flying children until Bush invaded and turned it into a nation of dangerous lunatics.)

In 1995 and 1996, various branches of the Religion of Peace -- al-Qaida, Hezbollah and the Iranian "Party of God" -- staged car bomb attacks on American servicemen in Saudi Arabia, killing 24 members of our military in all. Each time, the Clinton administration came up with an excuse to do nothing.

Despite the Democrats' current claim that only the capture of Osama bin Laden will magically end terrorism forever, Clinton turned down Sudan's offer to hand us bin Laden in 1996. That year, Mohammed Atta proposed the 9/11 attack to bin Laden.

Clinton refused the handover of bin Laden because -- he said in taped remarks on Feb. 15, 2002 -- "(bin Laden) had committed no crime against America, so I did not bring him here because we had no basis on which to hold him." Luckily, after 9/11, we can get him on that trespassing charge.

Although Clinton made the criminal justice system the entire U.S. counterterrorism strategy, there was not even an indictment filed after the bombing of either Khobar Towers (1996) or the USS Cole (2000). Indictments were not filed until after Bush/Ashcroft came into office.

Only in 1998 did the Clinton-haters ("normal people") force Clinton into a military response. Solely because of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Clinton finally lobbed a few bombs in the general direction of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

In August 1998, three days after Clinton admitted to the nation that he did in fact have "sex with that woman," he bombed Afghanistan and Sudan, doing about as much damage as another Clinton fusillade did to a blue Gap dress.

The day of Clinton's scheduled impeachment, Dec. 18, 1998, he bombed Iraq. This accomplished two things: (1) It delayed his impeachment for one day, and (2) it got a lot of Democrats on record about the monumental danger of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction.

So don't tell me impeachment "distracted" Clinton from his aggressive pursuit of terrorists. He never would have bombed anyone if it weren't for the Clinton-haters.

As soon as Clinton was no longer "distracted" by impeachment, he went right back to doing nothing in response to terrorism. In October 2000, al-Qaida bombed the USS Cole, killing 17 sailors and nearly sinking the ship.

Clinton did nothing. This is only an abbreviated list of Clinton's surrender to Islamic savagery. For a president who supposedly stayed up all night "working" and hated vacations, Clinton sure spent a lot of time sitting around on his butt while America was being attacked.

According to Rich Miniter, author of "Losing Bin Laden," Clinton's top national security advisers made the following classic Democrat excuses for doing nothing in response to the Cole attack:

Attorney General Janet Reno "thought retaliation might violate international law and was therefore against it."

CIA Director George Tenet "wanted more definitive proof that bin Laden was behind the attack, although he personally thought he was."

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright "was concerned about the reaction of world opinion to a retaliation against Muslims and the impact it would have in the final days of the Clinton Middle East peace process." (How did that turn out, by the way? Big success, I take it? Everybody over there all friendly with one another?)

Secretary of Defense William Cohen "did not consider the Cole attack 'sufficient provocation' for a military retaliation."

Less than a year after Clinton's final capitulation to Islamic terrorists, they staged the largest terrorist attack in history on U.S. soil. The Sept. 11 attack, planning for which began in the '90s, followed eight months of President Bush -- but eight years of Bill Clinton.

Clinton's own campaign adviser on Iraq, Laurie Mylroie, says Clinton and his advisers are "most culpable" for the intelligence failure that allowed 9/11 to happen.

Now, after five years of no terrorist attacks in America, Democrats are hoping we'll forget the consequences of the Democrat strategy of doing nothing in response to terrorism and abandon the Bush policies that have kept this nation safe since 9/11. But first, they need to rewrite history.

Copyright 2006 Ann Coulter

From The Washington Post:

Equality Beats Diversity
By Clarence Page

WASHINGTON-A lot of people have their shorts all bunched up in a knot over a decision by the CBS reality-game show "Survivor" to divide its competing "tribes" by race and ethnicity. No surprise there. We have enough tribal wars to worry about these days without having one put forth as prime-time entertainment, even if it's all in good fun.

Hispanics Across America founder Fernando Mateo called the move an "offensive and cheap trick" to boost ratings, which is undoubtedly true, but hardly the first time networks have done that. Does anybody remember Fox TV's "Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire"?

In fact, Carlos Mencia, that mogul of politically incorrect (but often dead-on target) humor on cable TV's Comedy Central, already parodied "Survivor"'s idea this season, playing on every racial stereotype he could dredge up (The brainy Asian guy, the fast black guy, the buoyant white guy, etc. In the end, the Hispanic guy won, leading to suspicions that Carlos had tilted the playing field.) But, interestingly, no big headlines followed Mencia's move. After all, he's only on cable and he's only kidding. "Survivor" is prime-time and it's serious, inasmuch as any goofy game show can be serious.

Adjectives like "insulting," "irresponsible," "reprehensible" and that category-five conversation-stopper, "racist," have been thrown at the idea of separate black, white, Asian and Latino teams scheming and competing against each other. Sponsors fell away like autumn leaves in a category-five media storm.

And, yet, when you think about it, the protests illustrate how double-minded Americans remain about race. Since the 1960s, it's become chic, particularly among liberals, to decry color-consciousness and, at the same time, embrace it.

Americans have "a love affair with race," writes Walter Benn Michaels, a literature professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In his new book, "The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality," he describes in eloquent detail how the liberal pursuit of social and economic equality was sidetracked by the pursuit of "diversity."

Ironically, the more we've pursued diversity by repudiating racism and the notion that our racial biology is our destiny, the more we've perpetuated those very concepts, he writes. While conservatives ask, "Why can't we all just be 'American'?," liberals "celebrate diversity." Liberals shy away from being "judgmental" about various groups. Liberals grant people from all manner of subcultures their "agency," which is their right to make their own choices about their moral behavior. Liberals quantify "equal rights" in terms of affirmative action "goals" and "timetables" that critics dub "racial quotas," which are supposed to be illegal but aren't because, so far, the Supreme Court says they aren't.

Others have similarly complained that we talk too much about race these days, but, unlike most of them, Michaels is a liberal and proud of it. He wants to reenergize the left by persuading it to build new coalitions to fight the growing problem of economic inequality.

Out of 37 million poor Americans in the 2004 head count, he points out, almost 17 million (45.6 percent) were white. Poor whites are not touched by the left-right disputes over whether discrimination is a thing of the past or stronger than ever. They are touched by statistics that show upward mobility, the American dream, to be increasingly elusive for those at the bottom of the nation's economic ladder.

Yet, while poor whites numerically outnumber poor blacks, poverty has taken on a black face in the public mind, from the ghetto riots of the 1960s to the coverage of Hurricane Katrina. "The truth is, there weren't too many rich black people left behind when everybody who could get out of New Orleans did so," says Michaels. True enough.

Unlike racism, poverty cannot be pinned as easily on a particular set of villains. The poor do share some responsibility to improve their own condition, as entertainer Bill Cosby has famously pointed out. But the most compelling part of Michael's book to me is his descriptions of the vanishing American dream. Increasingly one's chances in life are defined by the parents to whom one is born, regardless of race or religion, and whether one happens to be lucky enough to get into the right schools-from kindergarten on up. That wasn't Martin Luther King's dream for America but that's the direction in which we're moving. That's not just a reality show. It's reality.

Page is a Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist specializing in urban issues. He is based in Washington, D.C. E-mail: cptime@aol.com

From The Washington Post:

Liberalism as Condescension
By George Will

EVERGREEN PARK, Ill. -- This suburb, contiguous with Chicago's western edge, is 88 percent white. A large majority of the customers of the Wal-Mart that sits here, less than a block outside Chicago, are from the city and more than 90 percent of the store's customers are African-American.

One of whom, a woman pushing a shopping cart with a stoical 3-year-old along for the ride, has a chip on her shoulder about the size of this 141,000 square- foot Wal-Mart. She applied for a job when the store opened in January and was turned down because, she said, the person doing the hiring "had an attitude.'' So why is the woman shopping here anyway? She looks at the questioner as though he is dimwitted and directs his attention to the low prices of the DVDs on the rack next to her.

Sensibly, she compartmentalizes her moods and her money. Besides, she should not brood. She had lots of company in not being hired: More than 25,000 people applied for the 325 openings.

Which vexes liberals like John Kerry. (He and his helpmeet last shopped at Wal-Mart when?) In 2004 he tested what has become one of the Democrats' 2006 themes: Wal-Mart is, he said, "disgraceful'' and symbolic of "what's wrong with America.'' By now, Democrats have succeeded, to their embarrassment (if they are susceptible to that), in making the basic numbers familiar:

The median household income of Wal-Mart shoppers is under $40,000. Wal-Mart, the most prodigious job-creator in the history of the private sector in this galaxy, has almost as many employees (1.3 million) as the U.S. military has uniformed personnel. A McKinsey company study concluded that Wal-Mart accounted for 13 percent of the nation's productivity gains in the second half of the 1990s, which probably made Wal-Mart about as important as the Federal Reserve in holding down inflation. By lowering consumer prices, Wal-Mart costs about 50 retail jobs among competitors for every 100 jobs Wal-Mart creates. Wal-Mart and its effects save shoppers more than $200 billion a year, dwarfing such government programs as food stamps ($28.6 billion) and the earned-income tax credit ($34.6 billion).

People who buy their groceries from Wal-Mart -- it has one-fifth of the nation's grocery business -- save at least 17 percent. But because unions are strong in many grocery stores trying to compete with Wal-Mart, unions are yanking on the Democratic Party's leash, demanding laws to force Wal-Mart to pay wages and benefits higher than those that already are high enough to attract 77 times more applicants than there were jobs at this store.

The big-hearted progressives on Chicago's City Council, evidently unconcerned that the city gets zero sales tax revenues from a half a billion dollars that Chicago residents spend in the 42 suburban Wal-Marts, have passed a bill that, by dictating wages and benefits, would keep Wal-Marts from locating in the city. Richard Daley, a bread-and-butter Democrat, used his first veto in 17 years as mayor to swat it away.

Liberals think their campaign against Wal-Mart is a way of introducing the subject of class into America's political argument, and they are more correct than they understand. Their campaign is liberalism as condescension. It is a philosophic repugnance toward markets because consumer sovereignty results in the masses making messes. Liberals, aghast, see the choices Americans make with their dollars and their ballots, and announce -- yes, announce -- that Americans are sorely in need of more supervision by ... liberals.

Before they went on their bender of indignation about Wal-Mart (customers per week: 127 million), liberals had drummed McDonald's (customers per week: 175 million) out of civilized society because it is making us fat, or something. So, what next? Which preferences of ordinary Americans will liberals, in their role as national scolds, next disapprove? Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet?

No. The current issue of The American Prospect, an impeccably progressive magazine, carries a full-page advertisement denouncing something responsible for "lies, deception, immorality, corruption, and widespread labor, human rights and environmental abuses'' and of having brought "great hardship and despair to people and communities throughout the world.''

What is this focus of evil in the modern world? North Korea? The Bush administration? Fox News Channel? No, it is Coca-Cola (number of servings to Americans of the company's products each week: 2.5 billion).

When liberals' presidential nominees consistently fail to carry Kansas, liberals do not rush to read a book titled "What's the Matter With Liberals' Nominees?'' No, the book they turned into a best-seller is titled "What's the Matter With Kansas?'' Notice a pattern here?

georgewill@washpost.com

Brigitte Gabriel's Speech at Duke University

Delivered at the Duke University Counter Terrorism Speak-Out, 2004

I'm proud and honoured to stand here today, as a Lebanese speaking for Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East. As someone who was raised in an Arabic country, I want to give you a glimpse into the heart of the Arabic world.

I was raised in Lebanon, where I was taught that the Jews were evil, Israel was the devil, and the only time we will have peace in the Middle East is when we kill all the Jews and drive them into the sea.

When the Moslems and Palestinians declared Jihad on the Christians in 1975, they started massacring the Christians, city after city. I ended up living in a bomb shelter underground from age 10 to 17, without electricity, eating grass to live, and crawling under sniper bullets to a spring to get water.

It was Israel who came to help the Christians in Lebanon. My mother was wounded by a Moslem's shell, and was taken into an Israeli hospital for treatment. When we entered the emergency room, I was shocked at what I saw. There were hundreds of people wounded, Moslems, Palestinians, Christians, Lebanese, and Israeli soldiers lying on the floor. The doctors treated everyone according to their injury. They treated my mother before they treated the Israeli soldier lying next to her. They didn't see religion, they didn't see political affiliation, they saw people in need and they helped.

For the first time in my life I experienced a human quality that I know my culture would not have shown to their enemy. I experienced the values of the Israelis, who were able to love their enemy in their most trying moments. I spent 22 days at that hospital. Those days changed my life and the way I believe information, the way I listen to the radio or to television. I realized I was sold a fabricated lie by my government, about the Jews and Israel, that was so far from reality. I knew for fact that, if I was a Jew standing in an Arab hospital, I would be lynched and thrown over to the grounds, as shouts of joy of Allah Akbar, God is great, would echo through the hospital and the surrounding streets.

I became friends with the families of the Israeli wounded soldiers: one in particular Rina, her only child was wounded in his eyes.

One day I was visiting with her, and the Israeli army band came to play national songs to lift the spirits of the wounded soldiers. As they surrounded his bed playing a song about Jerusalem, Rina and I started crying. I felt out of place and started waking out of the room, and this mother holds my hand and pulls me back in without even looking at me. She holds me crying and says: "It is not your fault." We just stood there crying, holding each other's hands.

What a contrast between her, a mother looking at her deformed 19 year old only child, and still able to love me, the enemy, and between a Moslem mother who sends her son to blow himself up to smithereens just to kill a few Jews or Christians.

The difference between the Arabic world and Israel is a difference in values and character. It's barbarism versus civilization. It's democracy versus dictatorship. It's goodness versus evil.

Once upon a time, there was a special place in the lowest depths of hell for anyone who would intentionally murder a child. Now, the intentional murder of Israeli children is legitimized as Palestinian "armed struggle."

However, once such behaviour is legitimized against Israel, it is legitimized everywhere in the world, constrained by nothing more than the subjective belief of people who would wrap themselves in dynamite and nails for the purpose of killing children in the name of God.

Because the Palestinians have been encouraged to believe that murdering innocent Israeli civilians is a legitimate tactic for advancing their cause, the whole world now suffers from a plague of terrorism, from Nairobi to New York, from Moscow to Madrid, from Bali to Beslan.

They blame suicide bombing on "desperation of occupation." Let me tell you the truth. The first major terror bombing committed by Arabs against the Jewish state occurred ten weeks before Israel even became independent.

On Sunday morning, February 22, 1948, in anticipation of Israel's independence, a triple truck bomb was detonated by Arab terrorists on Ben Yehuda Street, in what was then the Jewish section of Jerusalem. Fifty-four people were killed, and hundreds were wounded. Thus, it is obvious that Arab terrorism is caused not by the "desperation" of "occupation" but by the VERY THOUGHT of a Jewish state.

So many times in history in the last 100 years, citizens have stood by and done nothing, allowing evil to prevail. As America stood up against and defeated communism, now it is time to stand up against the terror of religious bigotry and intolerance. It's time to all stand up and support and defend the state of Israel, which is the front line of the war against terrorism.

The Path to 9/11--A Postmortem
By Victor Davis Hanson

Americans who watched ABC's The Path to 9/11 saw a well-crafted dramatic interpretation of what rendered the United States, both under the Clinton and Bush administrations, vulnerable to terrorist attack. Perhaps the producers were conservative, but no more so than most of their Hollywood counterparts are liberal--and not to the degree that their politics slanted the presentation of the narrative.

But why, then, the hysteria?

It's hard to believe that Bill Clinton or the film's numerous critics were objecting on any basis of principle--on anything other than furor at pre-election time because some Clintonites, like many others, were portrayed as either distracted or hopelessly naïve about the nature of Islamic fascism.

First, consider the ignorance about the genre of the "docudrama," which is simply the video version of what journalism has been doing for decades--and even centuries. To read Bob Woodward's "meta-histories" is to intrude into the inner thoughts, mental musings, and private conversations of those few Washington insiders who are willing to talk with him, and thereby ensure that their own whitewashed take on events is privileged and becomes the dominant narrative.

Very few of Woodward's characters' cobbled-together reflections can possibly be verbatim transcripts of recorded interviews. Rather in the purest Thucydidean sense, Woodward apparently attempts to "make the speakers say what was in [his] opinion demanded of them by the various occasions, of course adhering as closely as possible to the general sense of what they really said."

Whether the result is factual goes back to the age-old Greek debate over subjective and objective truth. Always controversial is establishing the murky point at which an artist's attempts to portray what "actually happened" so drifts from, or contradicts, what is known from other evidence that it leaves the realm of history and enters that of propaganda or fiction.

Recent tell-all books about Iraq, such as Cobra II, hedge as well, using footnotes that appear to reflect scholarly rigor, but, in fact, sometimes simply cite "unnamed" officials or "senior" officers. There is no chance to establish the veracity of these informants, but some reason to doubt the credibility of an apparently angry source that refuses to be identified. In any case, scholars do not write histories of the Peloponnesian War with footnotes such as "unpublished manuscript of Herodotus" or "unnamed Greek inscription," whose contents are known only to the author and cannot be checked by his peers.

But more importantly, there were various disclaimers in The Path to 9/11 that repeatedly reminded the viewer of the "fictionalized" nature of the docudrama, that it was impressionistic entertainment drawn from various 9/11 sources. Given that warning, objecting to The Path to 9/11 is not that much different from lamenting that Steven Pressfield's fine Gates of Fire, both for the sake of entertainment, and because of the paucity of information, deviated from the text of Herodotus concerning Thermopylae--although he could have hardly made the Greeks win or King Leonidas and his Spartans survive.

Then there is the second issue of hypocrisy. Few of the present critics worried that a recent fictionizalized film of Ronald Reagan sought to create dialogue that the screenwriter apparently "thought" might best represent what Reagan "might" or "should" or "could" have said--in light of the nature of the evidence and the author's own predispositions. That all such dialogue proved negative to the former president was not so surprising given the political leanings of Hollywood, but still should not have earned such anger from the Right to the point of demanding a cancellation. And such clear bias was not true of "The Path of 9/11," in which Clinton's successors often fared little better in confronting the terrorist challenge.

What are we to say about throat-clearing historians who damned the docudrama (often without seeing it) on grounds of the lack of historical integrity, this from a discipline where postmodernism--there is no objective truth, just rival discourses and narratives constructed on class, race, and gender--was not only appeased, but nearly destroyed the profession.

And what are we to think of Bill Clinton lamenting the movie's supposed deviation from the "truth", or Sandy Berger's concern about protocols, or Madeline Albright's apparent charge of partisanship, this from a former Secretary of State who has traveled the globe plugging her book by faulting her successors to foreign media in a time of war. Although I'm not a fan of docudramas, I found The Path to 9/11, with its disclaimers, far closer to the "truth" about the saga of bin Laden than what turned up in Bill Clinton's "factual" autobiography.

When ABC cut portions of the most controversial segments before airing the film, there was no outcry from the American Civil Liberties Union that has so often and so loudly lectured us on the dangers not merely of government censorship, but of insidious self-censorship as a result of public pressures.

Nor did the New York Times or the law faculty of Harvard University rush to the producers' defense, despite the long-held and self-acclaimed commitments of both to free speech and the First Amendment at nearly all costs. And, of course, we heard none of the current furor when Oliver Stone produced his wacko conspiracies on the Kennedy assassination and the life of Richard Nixon.

Third, a far greater problem, contrary to the current noise, is not with the docudrama per se--especially when the viewer is clearly and often apprised of this new genre's nature and limitations--but rather with documentaries that do not list any such disclaimers and yet distort truth through clever editing of film clips. A great deal of Michael Moore's documentaries was composed of drive-by interviews of the surprised, senile, or bushwhacked. Many interviews encouraged false impressions, and, unknown to the viewer, were not natural or impromptu, but propped or staged, and so taken out context as to imply the very opposite as intended by the speaker.

Note again, for all this, Mr. Moore was not condemned by historians or lawyers, but rather rewarded with a prominent seat at the Democratic National Convention. Even Bill Clinton would confess that Fahrenheit 911 was intended to do far more damage to George Bush than The Path to 9/11 was to himself.

In this regard, concern could be far better voiced about onslaughts against other traditional and trusted genres--Dan Rather's presentation of the news based on forged documents, or Reuters' publishing photo-shopped pictures. And these are neither isolated lapses, nor in the mainstream media do they cut both ways equally against liberals and conservatives. Rather these distortions are concrete manifestations of a long-standing effort on the part of the more theoretical Left to subordinate the means to the ends, as if progressive spirits are to be granted some exemption from bothersome scrutiny and archaic protocols given their purportedly superior moral mission.

There is a final consideration. We are at war. Unlike Fahrenheit 9/11 that is referenced ad nauseam by the jihadists and still a favorite among al Qaedists, or the current film portraying the imagined assassination of President Bush that played to recent applause in Canada, but gained little condemnation here in America, The Path to 9/11 won't be popular with our enemies. And that might tell us something. If we know one thing about bin laden and Al Qaeda, they hate the truth and love the lie.

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War." You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.

From National Review Online: More good reasons why Giuliani should be the next President of the US.

Rudy Rising
His 9/11 legacy and 2008 prospects.

An essay by Deroy Murdock

America’s still-vivid memories of that miserable morning five Septembers ago may be brightened by recollections of former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani’s focused, confident performance on 9/11. The ongoing goodwill his leadership generated may explain why he outpaces his potential rivals for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination.

Recent polls show Giuliani waxing on the right, regardless of any misgivings conservative GOP voters may have with him on abortion, gay rights, or gun control.

Among 432 registered Republicans and pro-GOP independents who CNN and Opinion Research Corp. surveyed from August 30 to September 2, 31 percent favored Giuliani for the nomination, while 20 percent backed Sen. John McCain. (Error margin: +/- 5 percent.)

Of the 6,926 participants thus far in an ongoing Internet survey for the very conservative FreeRepublic.com, 45.1 percent endorsed Giuliani, 28.3 percent backed Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, and only 5.3 percent picked McCain.

An August 14–15 Victory Enterprises poll found 30 percent of Iowa Republicans for Giuliani, while 17.3 percent wanted McCain (+/- 4.9 percent). Among these 400 likely caucus voters, 70 percent called themselves pro-life.

Strategic Vision’s August polls of Republican voters discovered these results — Washington State: Giuliani 40 percent, McCain 28; Florida: Giuliani 42 percent, McCain 28; Pennsylvania: Giuliani 44 percent, McCain 24 percent.

In a July 31 through August 3 survey of 623 New York state registered voters, the Siena Research Institute saw McCain beat Hillary Rodham Clinton in New York state by 46–42 percent (+/- 3.9 percent). Giuliani, however, would stomp Clinton even harder, 48–42 percent, and capture the Empire State’s 31 electoral votes.

In a world where Islamofascists plot to use baby-formula bottles to blow up tourist-filled jets, GOP voters understand how vital it is to assign someone tough and talented to confront this life-and-death challenge. Giuliani looks like that man.

Giuliani’s formidable stature seems to make liberals nervous. Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins, authors of Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11, have attempted to rain fresh rubble on Rudy. While they praise Giuliani for his on-camera comments that day, they mainly criticize him for what else they believe he should have done then and, indeed, throughout his mayoralty to cope with such a major terrorist attack.

Barrett and Collins are a two-man Hubble Telescope of hindsight. Yes, in retrospect, the Emergency Operations Center might have survived were it not situated at 7 World Trade Center, where it went unused that morning and then collapsed along with the entire building at 5:20 P.M. Besides, as Vincent J. Cannato recalls in his September 3 Washington Post review of this book, Barrett never embraced this “bunker in the sky.” In 2000, he called it “a symbol of Giuliani’s weakness for gadgetry, secrecy, and militarist overkill.”

These authors complain that Giuliani and his top aides kept moving around on September 11. Let’s see: Giuliani’s advisors considered 7 WTC too dangerous, as was the fire department’s impromptu command post at Vesey and West streets. The next stop, a basement at 75 Barclay Street, became uninhabitable after Lower Manhattan choked in dust and smoke. After phoning in a reassuring radio message to New Yorkers from a Houston Street firehouse, Giuliani finally settled in at the Police Academy on East 20th Street in Gramercy Park. Giuliani had little choice but to stay mobile that morning.

Barrett and Collins chide the Office of Emergency Management for not conducting a drill involving a major skyscraper fire. Yes, OEM should have. However, it stayed busy rehearsing for chemical-weapons attacks, securing Times Square’s millennium celebrations (a feared terror target), and guarding against immediate threats, such as a West Nile virus outbreak.

Could New York have prepared for and responded even better to 9/11? Naturally. Still, Giuliani and city employees helped some 15,000 WTC inhabitants flee to safety. While President Bush understandably remained a moving target, Giuliani restored city government, then calmly and firmly reassured Americans and the world that we had endured a serious blow, but bounced back up off the mat.

While Giuliani’s critics try to paint him as someone who first leapt on the antiterror bandwagon on 9/11, he actually has fought Islamofascists since the mid-1970s.

Barrett and Collins blow it big time when they write: “Giuliani had behaved from the outset of his mayoralty as if the 1993 [WTC] bombing had never happened.” In fact, just moments after becoming mayor, Giuliani said in his first inaugural address on January 2, 1994: “Your strength was demonstrated within sight of this place, last year, at the World Trade Center . . . those who work for our city are the most professional and best in the nation.” He praised New Yorkers, in and out of government, for emerging from that terrorist assault, and argued that Gothamites could accomplish great things under pressure.

As mayor, Giuliani had then-PLO leader Yasser Arafat ejected from an October 1995 Lincoln Center concert to which he was not invited. “Maybe we should wake people up to the way this terrorist is being romanticized,” Giuliani said. While a U.S. attorney under President Reagan, Giuliani investigated the 1985 PLO hijacking of the luxury liner Achille Lauro. Four terrorists fired on and wounded ship passengers and fatally shot Leon Klinghoffer, a wheelchair-bound retired New Yorker who was selected for being Jewish.

As President Gerald Ford’s associate deputy attorney general, Giuliani was a member of the Cabinet Committee to Combat Terrorism. According to a declassified June 10, 1976, State Department memorandum, this panel addressed the “increased danger of major terrorist attacks in the US requiring urgent preventive and preparatory action.” Among other things, this memo reveals that, at a meeting that May 27, “Mr. Giuliani said that it would be important to have the USG [U.S. government] respond to press queries during an IT [international terrorist] incident with a single voice. He suggested that a model plan be worked out.”

As Barrett and Collins aim their lances at Giuliani’s post-9/11 armor, they largely miss what GOP primary voters clearly see: a dedicated and relentless patriot who has been fighting terrorists for 30 years. Facing an unprecedented crisis, Giuliani stayed remarkably cool, maintained order, and helped evacuate the financial district’s dangerous streets. “Just keep going north,” he told those still in Lower Manhattan.

To amplify his enduring post-9/11 reputation, Giuliani should educate Republicans on his Reaganesque tax-reducing, budget-restraining, crime-cutting mayoral record. Somehow, Giuliani also needs to make peace with pro-life and Second Amendment activists. But for now, “America’s Mayor” — previously caricatured as “too liberal for the nomination” — looks like 2008’s Republican to beat.

— Deroy Murdock is a New York-based columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a senior fellow with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation. Researcher Marco DeSena contributed to this piece.

From The New York Times: More examples of subtle Muslim reasoning.

The Apocalypse Will Be Blogged
By BERNARD HAYKEL and SAUD AL-SARHAN

NEARLY every organ of the American news media marked the fifth anniversary of Sept. 11 yesterday. But the Web sites affiliated with many of militant jihadism’s top thinkers, including Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi and Sulayman al-Alwan, remained silent. That shouldn’t surprise us: the Salafi strain of Islam, to which most jihadis subscribe, prohibits commemorating anniversaries.

Celebrations other than the holidays of Id al-Fitr and Id al-Adha are considered reprehensible adaptations of non-Muslim ways. What’s more, the jihadis normally use the lunar calendar, by which the fifth anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001, fell on July 19.

Perhaps more remarkable was the fact that this year, a number of Web sites affiliated with Al Qaeda did commemorate the day — no doubt because they knew Americans would. Osama bin Laden and his associates have generally referred to the Sept. 11 attacks as “the attacks on Manhattan,” “the invasion of Manhattan” or the “attacks of Jumada,” the lunar month in which they occurred. But this year, a number of jihadi sites have referred instead to Sept. 11.

Some messages yesterday were clearly meant for Western consumption, reminding the United States that Al Qaeda is still active and bent on future attacks, and even posting images overlaid with threats in English.

What follow are excerpts, translated from the Arabic, from texts posted on jihadi Web sites about the anniversary.

•

A jihadi Web site associated with Al Qaeda posted the following plea beneath images of the American, Israeli and Danish flags. The text was interspersed with animated images of American company logos, including one with a row of praying Muslims dressed as Coca-Cola bottles.

With God’s help and yours, let us make the fifth anniversary of the events of Sept. 11 the beginning of a boycott of all Zionist-American products that are sold in Arab and Muslim countries. Many continue to buy these products despite all they see and hear about the killing, torture and destruction that Muslims are faced with due to the Crusader and Zionist-American war. Let us boycott these products because we do not need them, nor are they to be considered absolute necessities. Here is a list of the companies and products that should be boycotted: Coca-Cola, Proctor & Gamble, Nike, Mars, McDonald’s ... “Pepsi” stands for “Pay Every Penny to Save Israel.” ...

I’m against America even if it turns this life into a paradise

I’m against America even if a mufti issues a fatwa in its favor from within the glorious Kaaba

I’m with Osama no matter where he might be, so long as he carries a banner on the battle front

I’m with Osama whether he gains a quick victory or attains the rank of the martyrs.

•

A submission to a Qaeda Web site called for readers to sign their names to the following statement:

In the name of God the merciful and the compassionate, Monday morning is the fifth anniversary of the glorious attacks on New York and Washington accomplished by the 19 heroes of the Muslim community — may God have mercy on them and raise them to the highest rank for their sacrifice. They pressed America’s nose into the ground and allowed the whole world to witness the destruction of its economic and military citadels. In so doing, they crushed the myth with which America had terrorized the world, namely that it was the greatest power on earth and no one was strong enough to confront, let alone make an enemy, of it....

That day changed the world, even by the admission of our enemies, and created ... a world divided into two camps, as our sheik and leader Osama bin Laden — may God protect him — has stated: “A camp of belief and another camp of hypocrisy and disbelief.” Choose for yourself, o Muslim, which camp to belong to: that of belief, Islam and jihad under the banner of the holy warriors or that of hypocrisy and unbelief under the banner of America, the crusading West and those hypocrites who have banded with them. Our congratulations to all and we beseech God to show us in America another black day like that blessed Tuesday.

•

A poster calling himself Abu Lujayn Ibrahim contributed the following to a Saudi site that often posts jihadi material but is not controlled by Al Qaeda.

The text was interspersed with gruesome photographs of dead and mutilated children in the Middle East.

Before my eyes is a veil that does not permit me to see those killed in the twin towers, nor to remember them on this day. Indeed, I don’t see those killed in the twin towers nor remember them on this day! Do you know why?

Because their fallen are not purer or better than our fallen. And because the blood of my Muslim brothers and that of my family in Palestine ... and in Iraq and in Afghanistan and in every location in which Muslim blood is shed has blocked my vision ...filled my retinas with black lines so that I can see only our martyrs and injured being slain by America’s weapons and its support .... Yes, Sept. 11 is the anniversary of the fall of American arrogance into history’s garbage dump, and of the rebellion against injustice.

•

Hamid ibn Abdallah al-Ali is a Kuwaiti ideologue of jihadism — the only Qaeda intellectual to have posted a text specifically for the Sept. 11 anniversary. The sheik cites an article by Leonard Peikoff, heir and executor to Ayn Rand, that appeared as an advertisement in The New York Times shortly after the 9/11 attacks.

In his article “End States that Sponsor Terrorism,” Leonard Peikoff, one of the leading ideologues of American extremism, concluded that America’s policy of appeasement toward the Muslim world led to Sept. 11. For 50 years, he writes, American administrations have relinquished their true ownership rights over Muslim oil resources, which they discovered and developed the technology to extract. The solution, according to Mr. Peikoff, is for the United States to eliminate the states that sponsor terrorism with the most lethal weapons at its disposal.

This is exactly the kind of rotten thinking that animates those living in the extreme west of the globe, from where they spread their rot to the rest of the world — these politicians of underdevelopment, criminality and mass extermination of humanity. This is the arrogance of fascism, of which Bush has accused Muslims recently: in this case it is the fascism of the cross standing on the tribunes of oil. In short, it means that they own our oil that is in our land; they own our blood, which they can shed at will; they own our present and future, and they have the right to change our history and our education!...

Hunger, disease, thirst and regional wars instigated by poverty all stem from the greed of the West, its thirst for plunder and desire to control the world’s wealth. These in turn lead to a rate of destruction every year that equals the destruction World War II effected over six years.

The mercenaries who dominate the World Trade Organization ... the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund ...the bloodsuckers of the world’s poor, the immiserators of nations and the thieves, murderers, shedders of blood: these are the ones who control the international political system. They are the ones who spread their armies throughout the world, terrorizing and stealing the wealth of nations while enslaving them. They are the ones who are exterminating the people of Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon and other places. They are the ones who ally themselves to the despotic rulers in order to suck the blood of the people, using companies that are owned by the leaders of their countries and headed by murderers and criminals.

•

This essay, called “The Day Smoke and Dust Covered New York’s Sky,” was posted to a Qaeda-affiliated Web site:

What a beautiful morning it is today, an amazing morning when we witnessed this great power flailing in every direction as if it were a slaughtered headless animal....

Some believe that if Bush were to leave then the situation would improve and become stable. But the eternal truth is that there is no difference between Bush and the one who preceded him, or the one who will succeed him, and for a very simple reason: cloning is an inherent property of the American presidential personality. Every new president is a perfect copy of the previous one...

Three children, 10 or 11 years old, who watched the recently released film “United 93” at the theater zealously and gleefully cheered when the plane hit the tower, as if they were watching a goal being scored in a soccer match against an opposing team. What is it that makes these children so happy about this crash that they stand up and strongly applaud? Ask yourselves, oh Americans, what is it that made those 19 young men engage in such a legendary and miraculous act...?

Naturally, you will not bother to investigate, because you are not concerned with the reasons, and even if you find the answer you are incapable of understanding it. Therefore, nothing will change, and your troops will continue to invade our lands in order to teach us lessons about the virtues of American freedom and the well-known methods for spreading them, like flushing the Quran down the toilet, or one of your soldiers’ stepping with his filthy foot on the face of a prisoner, having placed a metal chain like a dog leash around his neck, as we saw in Abu Ghraib.

You will witness anew men as brilliant as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and as determined as Muhammad Atta, whom you saw on the monitoring screens full of self-assurance in his blue shirt.... Who knows, perhaps we will see another glorious day soon!

Bernard Haykel, an associate professor of Islamic studies at New York University, is the author of ’’Revival and Reform in Islam.’’ Saud al-Sarhan is a Saudi Arabia-based analyst of Islamist groups.

Many on the right who oppose the Bush administration's misadventures in Iraq still favor an intelligent, focused, unrelenting war against radical Islam. One of those most missed as a result of the Iraq debacle is Michael Kelly. Here is one of his cogent essays, written 2 weeks after the Twin Towers fell.

From washingtonpost.com:

Pacifist Claptrap
By Michael Kelly

Wednesday, September 26, 2001

Pacifists are not serious people, although they devoutly believe they are, and their arguments are not being taken seriously at the moment. Yet it is worth taking seriously, and in advance of need, the pacifists and their appeal.

It is worth it, first of all, because the idea of peace is inherently attractive; and the more war there is, the more attractive the idea becomes. Second, it is worth it because the reactionary left-liberal crowd in America and in Europe has already staked out its ground here: What happened to America is America's fault, the fruits of foolish arrogance and greedy imperialism, racism, colonialism, etc., etc. From this rises an argument that the resulting war is also an exercise in arrogance and imperialism, etc., and not deserving of support. This argument will be made with greater fearlessness as the first memories of the 7,000 murdered recede. Third, it is worth it because the American foreign policy establishment has all the heart for war of a titmouse, and not one of your braver titmice. The first faint, let-us-be-reasonable bleats can even now be heard: Yes, we must do something, but is an escalation of aggression really the right thing? Mightn't it just make matters ever so much worse?

Pacifists see themselves as obviously on the side of a higher morality, and there is a surface appeal to this notion, even for those who dismiss pacifism as hopelessly naive. The pacifists' argument is rooted entirely in this appeal: Two wrongs don't make a right; violence only begets more violence.

There can be truth in the pacifists' claim to the moral high ground, notably in the case of a war that is waged for manifestly evil purposes. So, for instance, a German citizen who declined to fight for the Nazi cause could be seen (although not likely by his family and friends) as occupying the moral position. But in the situation where one's nation has been attacked -- a situation such as we are now in -- pacifism is, inescapably and profoundly, immoral. Indeed, in the case of this specific situation, pacifism is on the side of the murderers, and it is on the side of letting them murder again.

In 1942 George Orwell wrote this, in Partisan Review, of Great Britain's pacifists:

"Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me.' "

England's pacifists howled, but Orwell's logic was implacable. The Nazis wished the British to not fight. If the British did not fight, the Nazis would conquer Britain. The British pacifists also wished the British to not fight. The British pacifists, therefore, were on the side of a Nazi victory over Britain. They were objectively pro-Fascist.

An essentially identical logic obtains now. Organized terrorist groups have attacked America. These groups wish the Americans to not fight. The American pacifists wish the Americans to not fight. If the Americans do not fight, the terrorists will attack America again. And now we know such attacks can kill many thousands of Americans. The American pacifists, therefore, are on the side of future mass murders of Americans. They are objectively pro-terrorist.

There is no way out of this reasoning. No honest person can pretend that the groups that attacked America will, if let alone, not attack again. Nor can any honest person say that this attack is not at least reasonably likely to kill thousands upon thousands of innocent people. To not fight in this instance is to let the attackers live to attack and murder again; to be a pacifist in this instance is to accept and, in practice, support this outcome.

As President Bush said of nations: A war has been declared; you are either on one side or another. You are either for doing what is necessary to capture or kill those who control and fund and harbor the terrorists, or you are for not doing this. If you are for not doing this, you are for allowing the terrorists to continue their attacks on America. You are saying, in fact: I believe that it is better to allow more Americans -- perhaps a great many more -- to be murdered than to capture or kill the murderers.

That is the pacifists' position, and it is evil.

© 2001 The Washington Post Company