From The Los Angeles Times:Head-in-the-Sand Liberals
Western civilization really is at risk from Muslim extremists.
By Sam Harris

SAM HARRIS is the author of "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason." His next book, "Letter to a Christian Nation," will be published this week by Knopf. samharris.org.

September 18, 2006

TWO YEARS AGO I published a book highly critical of religion, "The End of Faith." In it, I argued that the world's major religions are genuinely incompatible, inevitably cause conflict and now prevent the emergence of a viable, global civilization. In response, I have received many thousands of letters and e-mails from priests, journalists, scientists, politicians, soldiers, rabbis, actors, aid workers, students — from people young and old who occupy every point on the spectrum of belief and nonbelief.

This has offered me a special opportunity to see how people of all creeds and political persuasions react when religion is criticized. I am here to report that liberals and conservatives respond very differently to the notion that religion can be a direct cause of human conflict.

This difference does not bode well for the future of liberalism.

Perhaps I should establish my liberal bone fides at the outset. I'd like to see taxes raised on the wealthy, drugs decriminalized and homosexuals free to marry. I also think that the Bush administration deserves most of the criticism it has received in the last six years — especially with respect to its waging of the war in Iraq, its scuttling of science and its fiscal irresponsibility.

But my correspondence with liberals has convinced me that liberalism has grown dangerously out of touch with the realities of our world — specifically with what devout Muslims actually believe about the West, about paradise and about the ultimate ascendance of their faith.

On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the Christian right.

This may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that "liberals are soft on terrorism." It is, and they are.

A cult of death is forming in the Muslim world — for reasons that are perfectly explicable in terms of the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad. The truth is that we are not fighting a "war on terror." We are fighting a pestilential theology and a longing for paradise.

This is not to say that we are at war with all Muslims. But we are absolutely at war with those who believe that death in defense of the faith is the highest possible good, that cartoonists should be killed for caricaturing the prophet and that any Muslim who loses his faith should be butchered for apostasy.

Unfortunately, such religious extremism is not as fringe a phenomenon as we might hope. Numerous studies have found that the most radicalized Muslims tend to have better-than-average educations and economic opportunities.

Given the degree to which religious ideas are still sheltered from criticism in every society, it is actually possible for a person to have the economic and intellectual resources to build a nuclear bomb — and to believe that he will get 72 virgins in paradise. And yet, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, liberals continue to imagine that Muslim terrorism springs from economic despair, lack of education and American militarism.

At its most extreme, liberal denial has found expression in a growing subculture of conspiracy theorists who believe that the atrocities of 9/11 were orchestrated by our own government. A nationwide poll conducted by the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University found that more than a third of Americans suspect that the federal government "assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East;" 16% believe that the twin towers collapsed not because fully-fueled passenger jets smashed into them but because agents of the Bush administration had secretly rigged them to explode.

Such an astonishing eruption of masochistic unreason could well mark the decline of liberalism, if not the decline of Western civilization. There are books, films and conferences organized around this phantasmagoria, and they offer an unusually clear view of the debilitating dogma that lurks at the heart of liberalism: Western power is utterly malevolent, while the powerless people of the Earth can be counted on to embrace reason and tolerance, if only given sufficient economic opportunities.

I don't know how many more engineers and architects need to blow themselves up, fly planes into buildings or saw the heads off of journalists before this fantasy will dissipate. The truth is that there is every reason to believe that a terrifying number of the world's Muslims now view all political and moral questions in terms of their affiliation with Islam. This leads them to rally to the cause of other Muslims no matter how sociopathic their behavior. This benighted religious solidarity may be the greatest problem facing civilization and yet it is regularly misconstrued, ignored or obfuscated by liberals.

Given the mendacity and shocking incompetence of the Bush administration — especially its mishandling of the war in Iraq — liberals can find much to lament in the conservative approach to fighting the war on terror. Unfortunately, liberals hate the current administration with such fury that they regularly fail to acknowledge just how dangerous and depraved our enemies in the Muslim world are.

Recent condemnations of the Bush administration's use of the phrase "Islamic fascism" are a case in point. There is no question that the phrase is imprecise — Islamists are not technically fascists, and the term ignores a variety of schisms that exist even among Islamists — but it is by no means an example of wartime propaganda, as has been repeatedly alleged by liberals.

In their analyses of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy, liberals can be relied on to overlook the most basic moral distinctions. For instance, they ignore the fact that Muslims intentionally murder noncombatants, while we and the Israelis (as a rule) seek to avoid doing so. Muslims routinely use human shields, and this accounts for much of the collateral damage we and the Israelis cause; the political discourse throughout much of the Muslim world, especially with respect to Jews, is explicitly and unabashedly genocidal.

Given these distinctions, there is no question that the Israelis now hold the moral high ground in their conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah. And yet liberals in the United States and Europe often speak as though the truth were otherwise.

We are entering an age of unchecked nuclear proliferation and, it seems likely, nuclear terrorism. There is, therefore, no future in which aspiring martyrs will make good neighbors for us. Unless liberals realize that there are tens of millions of people in the Muslim world who are far scarier than Dick Cheney, they will be unable to protect civilization from its genuine enemies.

Increasingly, Americans will come to believe that the only people hard-headed enough to fight the religious lunatics of the Muslim world are the religious lunatics of the West. Indeed, it is telling that the people who speak with the greatest moral clarity about the current wars in the Middle East are members of the Christian right, whose infatuation with biblical prophecy is nearly as troubling as the ideology of our enemies. Religious dogmatism is now playing both sides of the board in a very dangerous game.

While liberals should be the ones pointing the way beyond this Iron Age madness, they are rendering themselves increasingly irrelevant. Being generally reasonable and tolerant of diversity, liberals should be especially sensitive to the dangers of religious literalism. But they aren't.

The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.

To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization.

Review: 'Smith'
The plot is familiar, but the stars are always worth watching
Daniel Fienberg
Zap2It.com

September 19 2006

It was less than six months ago that television viewers politely informed NBC and FX that the public fascination with teams of master criminals and their grandiose schemes was hardly infinite. With the new drama "Smith," CBS hopes to succeed where the interchangeably titled "Heist" and "Thief" failed. Neither as moody and depressing as "Thief," nor as day-glo frivolous as "Heist," "Smith" uses its star-power to captivate, providing solid drama within its crooks-are-people-too framework.

Ray Liotta -- every bit as scary when he's trying to play a stable husband and father as when he's going utterly bat-guano crazy -- is Bobby Stevens, typical suburban husband and father. He has two kids, a cookie-cutter house, a job selling paper cups and a wife (Virginia Madsen) whose name -- Hope -- isn't a coincidence. They're a couple with a troubled past and plenty of secrets.

Bobby's past, it turns out, isn't a secret. He's an expert at his real job, which happens to be planning ambitious robberies. He's got one of those specialized teams that includes weapons suppliers, document forgers and a couple electronics whizzes. The supporting characters would be interchangeable if they weren't played by actors like Simon Baker, Jonny Lee Miller, Franky G. and Amy Smart and if the mastermind atop the organization weren't played by Oscar nominee Shohreh Aghdashloo.

"Smith" is counting heavily on the reservoirs of good faith for the cast, because Bobby's team isn't made up of "Ocean's Eleven"-style quippy, jovial hoods. The characters in "Smith" are the kind of bad news that you usually get on cable, rather than network TV. Bobby, who steals, lies to his wife and is prone to fits of eye-popping rage, is probably the most socially mainstreamed of the characters. Baker's charismatically psychotic Jeff and Smart's diversely amoral Annie are probably the most dangerous, with the other actors filling the shades in-between.

Directed by executive producer Chris Chulack, the pilot has a cold, austere visual sensibility and takes advantage of the steely Pittsburgh locations for the main heist. The pilot draws much of its relatability from putting its not-so-nice characters into welcoming environments, whether it's a beautiful sun-drenched romantic scene between Madsen and Liotta at a piano, or a vibrant sequence at a wedding. The characters are introduced early in the first episode amidst the somewhat botched robbery, so putting them in different contexts later makes them human, if not particularly sympathetic. Like so many post-Scorsese/Tarantino bands of criminals, the characters have shared history that includes romances, grudges and deep resentments, but they're all still pure professionals.

In addition to its familiarity, "Smith" is cursed by the kind of over-bearing seriousness that has colored much of John Wells' work, the quality that made shows like "Citizen Baines" and "The Evidence" difficult to watch and that "ER" and "The West Wing" often needed to overcome.

Where "Smith" goes after its well-acted opening is something of a question. In the very last minutes the FBI team on Bobby's tail is introduced, plus the weary Bobby insists to his boss that he only has "three or four more" jobs left in him. That means that the breakneck heist-an-episode pace won't continue, but how future episodes will balance job-plotting, Bobby's domestic life, flashbacks to past crimes and cat-and-mouse games with the law remains to be seen. For now, I'm content to watch Liotta do his slow-burn, to see Madsen playing a fleshed out character, and to see career-best performances from folks like Baker and Smart.

From The American Interest: To commemorate Bruce's 57th birthday (and I remember him getting testy at the No Nukes show when he turned 30), a fine Seeger Sessions review from a former leftie.

The Boss, Rooted
By Ron Radosh

Bruce Springsteen, We Shall Overcome:
The Seeger Sessions (Columbia Records, 2006)

For more than six weeks (as I write in July 2006) Bruce Springsteen’s retro-folk album, a tribute to the dean of American folksingers, Pete Seeger, has stayed way up in the Billboard charts of best-selling American records. Of course, the Boss—as Springsteen’s fans call him—has been one of America’s most acclaimed and dynamic rock-and-rollers. His legendary concerts with the E Street Band have filled the largest arenas night after night, and the man who made “Born in the USA” one of the most notable rock anthems in American musical history is used to holding the position at the top of the charts. When he started decades ago at the since-demolished Stone Pony in Asbury Park, New Jersey, a young writer, later to become Springsteen’s manager, Jon Landau, wrote that he had “seen the future of rock-and-roll, and its name is Bruce Springsteen.”

But the Boss’s fans could not have been ready for this latest release. There is not an electric guitar in sight. Like Eric Clapton some years back, the rocker has gone unplugged. Springsteen presides over a down-home, back-porch get-together recorded in his farmhouse living room in just three days without any rehearsals. He plays an acoustic Gibson guitar and a harmonica, surrounded by the sounds of a five-string banjo, country fiddles, an accordion, an upright acoustic bass, and a horn and rhythm section composed of a tuba, saxophone, trumpet, trombone and drums. This ensemble allows Springsteen to broaden the concept of folk music to show its intersection with traditional jazz and gospel music. And what irony: Folk purists and leftists, not least Pete Seeger himself, went ballistic when Bob Dylan “went electric” at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, trading in topical songs for introspective rock. It was a long road from “Blowin’ in the Wind” to “Like a Rolling Stone.” Now the Boss has moved in exactly the opposite direction, from rock to old folk, and we have come full circle.

Not since the late 1940s and early 1950s, when Seeger’s own group the Weavers hit the top of what was then called “The Hit Parade” with songs like “Goodnight Irene”, “On Top of Old Smokey”, “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena” and “Wimoweh” (later to become a hit by the Tokens and be featured in The Lion King)—not since then has traditional folk music had such a wide audience. The early Sixties saw the start of what became “the great folk revival”, when “Seeger’s children”, as those who learned his music at left-wing summer camps in Chicago, California and New York were called, formed their own groups when they got to college. At the same time, the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul & Mary, the Tarriers and others managed to bust the charts with number one hits. In those years, ABC aired a weekly series called Hootenanny, in which many of these groups were featured (although Seeger himself, still suffering from the residue of the 1950s blacklist, was not allowed to appear).


Pete Seeger (on the banjo) and the Weavers in 1948 [© Getty Images]Pete Seeger (on the banjo) and the Weavers in 1948 [© Getty Images]

Springsteen started playing guitar after watching this program. He quickly made the switch to rock and roll and electric guitar just as rock washed the folk revival out of sight and mostly off the airwaves. Folk thrived on a smaller scale, with a growing number of venues around the country near big cities—places like the Mainpoint in suburban Philadelphia and the Cellar Door in Washington, DC. A new generation of folk-influenced singer-songwriters honed their craft, built up a small but solid audience and actually managed to make a modest living with their music.

In the ensuing years, folk transmogrified into the short-lived folk-rock movement, when groups like the Byrds and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band revved up the sound using folk standards played in a new way, combining electric and acoustic instruments in a manner that made the music more accessible and danceable. They also integrated the sound of the bluegrass-inspired five-string banjo into their repertoire, and folk-rock acquired a country twang with bands like the Flying Burrito Brothers, a Byrds’ offshoot of the early 1970s. The country influence helped lead many to discover Appalachian mountain music on their own.

At about the same time, bluegrass music itself, an up-tempo transformation of Appalachian music pioneered by mandolinist Bill Monroe and banjo player Earl Scruggs, began to punch into the musical mainstream thanks in part to Flatt & Scruggs’ Foggy Mountain Boys playing the theme song to the blockbuster 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde. Today, bluegrass is mainstream, its popularity soaring with giant audiences for Alison Krauss and Union Station and the success of the Coen Brothers’ film Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? and its live concert spin-off—as well as the successful “Down From the Mountain” tour and CD, spotlighting the artists whose music was featured in the movie.

But not until the arrival of Springsteen’s hit compact disc and sold-out tour have the old folk songs been featured and performed for mass audiences, not only in America, but throughout the world. Springsteen’s Seeger Sessions Band has traveled through Europe singing these old folk standards to audiences who have never heard—or heard of—Pete Seeger. Sometimes the Boss’ audiences are serenaded into a state of shock. In Washington many in the crowd shouted “sing the good stuff” and seemed put off that they weren’t at the usual Springsteen rock show. In Los Angeles, as staff writer Ann Powers reported in the Los Angeles Times, Hollywood’s elite seemed reluctant to join in singing with the Boss as they surely would have done at an E Street Band concert. “Pathetic”, Bruce joked, commenting on their attempt to sing along with “Old Dan Tucker.”

But Powers caught perfectly what was so new and dazzling about Springsteen’s show, and what was different from the way the old folk songs have been previously performed. The music, she realized, “made room for everything from Preservation Hall-style jazz to Western swing, zydeco, Southern gospel, jump blues, country blues, conjunto, classic country and boogie-woogie. . . . It was a history lesson you could dance to.” The music, reminiscent of the various intertwined traditions of American roots music, similar in style much of the time to that offered by The Band in the 1970s and early 1980s (indeed, Bruce has added Levon Helm’s “Rag, Mama, Rag” to the touring show), captures the universality and Americanness of the songs Pete Seeger has been singing and playing since the 1930s.

Seeger began his career with a forthright political agenda. An old-style Stalinist and card-carrying member of the American Communist Party, he argued from the start that “music is a weapon”, a theme immortalized by the words written on the guitar of his pal and singing partner Woody Guthrie: “This machine kills Fascists.” In groups like the Almanac Singers, Seeger sang at union halls and antiwar rallies (including those run by Communist Party fronts during the era of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact), and came into his own as a featured antiwar activist and singer during the Vietnam War years. But Seeger’s other side emphasized the story of America told by old traditional folksingers like Bascom Lamar Lunsford—a banjo picker whose politics and view of the world were 180 degrees out from anything Seeger believed, and whose music and life reflected the Appalachian culture he was born to.

When Seeger sang songs like “Old Dan Tucker”, an 1840s fiddle tune written by Dan Emmett, he stood alone and plucked simply on his banjo. When he played “John Henry”, the classic folk ballad about the attempt of workmen to beat the steam drill while building the first American railroads, it was a simple, solo affair. Seeger realized himself that he needed a bit more for performances. “Pay Me My Money Down”, which Springsteen covers, was a sea chanty sung with a calypso beat by black stevedores in Georgia and South Carolina, commenting upon the scheme of some captains to ship out of harbor without having paid their old crew. Seeger sang it with the Weavers, who commercialized it by adding a guitar solo by Fred Hellerman and a steady beat. Springsteen’s cover is a majestic wall-of-sound, all-acoustic rendition that is more powerful still, with a zydeco-New Orleans sound replete with horns and banjos. It stirs up the music juices but good.

But is it activism, as well? Some of the press have referred to the Springsteen album as a new protest album in the old Seeger mode, tying its success to widespread disenchantment with the Bush Administration. Certainly, Springsteen is an unabashed old-fashioned left-liberal. He campaigned with and for John Kerry and has hardly made his disdain for George W. Bush a secret. We Shall Overcome includes “Mrs. McGrath”, a ballad popular during the 1916 Easter Rebellion in Ireland (but which actually dates from 1815). The lyrics capture the pain of war and the sad familiar response of a mother when she sees her son home from battle and hardly recognizes him because of his injuries. It is a timeless song that could be sung during any war, as families come to appreciate the sacrifice their sons and daughters have made for their country. The grieving mother wails a universal lament: “All foreign wars I do proclaim live as blood and a mother’s pain/ I’d rather have my son as he used to be.”

Perhaps realizing that the song hardly says “U.S. out of Iraq”, which is how many have portrayed its message, Springsteen has added to his tour Seeger’s old anti-Vietnam War song, “Bring ’Em Home”, in which he sings, “If you love your Uncle Sam, bring ’em home, bring ’em home/ bring them home from abroad” (Seeger had sung “from Vietnam”). Springsteen is entitled to his views, and he has made them clear. But do his audiences really believe that the United States should pull its troops out of Iraq immediately? Do they believe, as Seeger used to, that the singing of left-wing and antiwar songs has the power to change American foreign policy? For those who are antiwar (and certainly at least a minority of Springsteen’s audience is), the song works as catharsis. But as before, even in the political folk heyday of the Vietnam War, most of the audience shows for the music; the performers, meanwhile, show up to make it—and to sell records.

There’s nothing wrong with that. We Shall Overcome succeeds in giving us a portrait of America as it grew and matured. Once again Jesse James robs the Glendale train and mule drivers haul barges down the Erie Canal. The black gospel choir helps us once more climb Jacob’s Ladder, and wails and soars in Springsteen’s powerful version of “Oh Mary Don’t You Weep”, which the Boss sang in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The audience roared with raw emotion at the verse, “Brothers and sisters don’t you cry/ There’ll be good times by and by”, when they realized it was sung especially for them. We relive the plight of Okie migrants during the 1930s Dust Bowl, as Springsteen sings Sis Cunningham’s Guthrie-esque story of how her old home “blowed away.” And the kids can laugh with the famed 16th-century Scottish ballad “Froggie Went A Courtin’”, just as some of their parents and grandparents heard it from Burl Ives in the 1940s, Seeger in the 1950s, or the incomparable Doc Watson in the 1960s.

The success of the Seeger Sessions album and Springsteen’s summer tour does not, of course, mean that the folk revival as such is returning in a new phase. American music has become too mixed up and amorphous for that to happen again, and much too commercialized for authenticity to conquer our ersatz-loving marketplace. Far more people will buy the CD of this year’s winner of American Idol than will listen to the Seeger Sessions band. Alas, there really is no accounting for taste. But by going back to the roots of American music, rediscovering what the critic Greil Marcus calls “the old weird America”, Bruce Springsteen will surely lead many—Americans and others all over the world—back to the glorious basics, to sounds and sentiments so old, pure and completely, eclectically American that their power is truly timeless. It’s an order from the Boss.

From National Review Online:

Mesmerized Media
When will Ahmadinejad’s radical religious beliefs get covered?

By Joel C. Rosenberg

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinjad has certainly launched a charm offensive through the American media. First was his “exclusive” interview with Mike Wallace on CBS’s 60 Minutes. This week, the Iranian leader is on the cover of Time. Yesterday, he did a lengthy interview with NBC’s Brian Williams, the only network interview he agreed to on this trip. And, of course, Ahmadinejad’s speech Tuesday blasting the United States (while on American soil) made headlines around the world.

Yet something has been curiously absent from all this media coverage. American journalists aren’t asking Ahmadinejad about his Shiite religious beliefs, his fascination with the coming of the Islamic Messiah known as the “Twelfth Imam” or the “Mahdi,” his critique of President Bush’s faith in Jesus Christ and encouragement of President Bush to convert to Islam, and how such beliefs are driving Iranian foreign policy.

Time’s cover story and exclusive print interview with Ahmadinejad never broached the subject of his eschatology. Nor did Williams. Nor did Wallace. Nor does a just-released book, Confronting Iran: The Failure of American Foreign Policy And the Next Great Crisis in the Middle East, by British Iran expert Ali M. Ansari. Nor does almost any of the saturation coverage Ahmadinejad is receiving.

Journalists aren’t typically shy about asking tough, probing questions about the religious views of world leaders. President Bush has been grilled at length about being an evangelical Christian and how this informs his foreign policy, particularly with regards to Israel and the Middle East. Clearly the pope’s views of Christianity and Islam are now under fire. Why such hesitancy when it comes to the religious beliefs of a leader who has called for the Jewish state to be wiped off the planet and urges fellow Muslims to envision a world without the United States?

I think Ahmadinejad is waiting to be asked. He wants to talk about what he believes and why he believes it. His religion shapes who he is and what is driving him.

When he addressed the United Nations General Assembly last year, he concluded his speech by praying for Allah to hasten the coming of “the Promised One,” the Islamic Messiah also known as the “Twelfth Imam” or the “Mahdi.” When he got back to Tehran, the Iranian leader told colleagues that during his speech he was surrounded by a halo of light, and that for 27 or 28 minutes as he spoke, delegates were so mesmerized by the words Allah was speaking through him that no one blinked. Not once.

In the months that followed, Ahmadinejad made his Islamic eschatology even more clear. He told followers that he believed the end of the world was rapidly approaching, and that the way to hasten the coming of the Messiah was to launch a global jihad to annihilate Israel and the United States. He also told followers that the “Mahdi” is already on the planet, but has not yet chosen to reveal himself. What’s more, Ahmadinejad has said that he has personally been in contact with the “Mahdi” and received instructions from him, instructions that are apparently leading Iran to prepare for an apocalyptic war to annihilate Judeo-Christian civilization as we know it.

In Epicenter, I detail these statements — when and where they were made, and how they illuminate Ahmadinejad’s worldview — and cite numerous Iranians who understand their leader better than many in the West. One source I found particularly instructive in helping Americans better understand the Shiite view of the end of the world. Ayatollah Ibrahim Amini is a professor at the Religious Learning Center in Qom, Iran, and one of the country’s most respected Shiite scholars. In his book, Al-Imam al-Mahdi, Amini describes the signs of the coming of the Mahdi in great detail. Chief among them: a massive earthquake and the launching of a global war to kill and/or subjugate Jews, Christians, and other “infidels” under Islamic rule.

I include key excerpts from the Ayatollah’s book:

When the world has become psychologically ready to accept the government of God and when general conditions have become favorable to the idea of the rulership of the truth, God will permit the Mahdi to launch his final revolution....A few selected individuals...will be the first ones to respond to his call, and will be drawn to him like iron to a magnet in that first hour of his appearance.....On seeing the fulfillment of many of the signs promised in the traditions, a large number of unbelievers will turn towards Islam. Those who persist in their disbelief and wickedness shall be killed by soldiers of the Mahdi. The only victorious government in the entire world will be that of Islam....Islam will be the religion of everyone....The Mahdi will offer the religion of Islam to the Jews and the Christians; if they accept it they will be spared, otherwise, they will be killed....It seems unlikely that this catastrophe can be avoided....War and bloodshed [are] inevitable.


Such beliefs are most certainly a legitimate area for American journalists to explore. Indeed, they are vital to truly understanding Ahmadinejad’s aspirations and intentions. It is time for the media to shake off Ahmadinejad’s charms (or intimidation) and begin to ask the kind of serious questions that serious times require.

— Joel C. Rosenberg is the New York Times best-seller of numerous political thrillers about Iran and the Middle East, including his latest, The Copper Scroll. His first non-fiction book, Epicenter: Why The Current Rumblings In The Middle East Will Change Your Future, was just released from Tyndale.

Speaking Back to Islamists
By George Will

WASHINGTON -- While her security contingent waits outside the Georgetown restaurant, Ayaan Hirsi Ali orders what the menu calls "raw steak tartare.'' Amused by the redundancy, she speculates that it is intended to immunize the restaurant against lawyers, should a customer be discommoded by that entree. She has been in America only two weeks. She is a quick study.

And an exile and an immigrant. Born 36 years ago in Somalia, Hirsi Ali has lived in Ethiopia, Kenya, Saudi Arabia and the Netherlands, where she settled in 1992 after she deplaned in Frankfurt, supposedly en route to Canada for a marriage, arranged by her father, to a cousin. She makes her own arrangements.

She quickly became a Dutch citizen, a member of parliament, and an astringent critic, from personal experience, of the condition of women under Islam. She wrote the script, and filmmaker Theo van Gogh directed, "Submission,'' an 11-minute movie featuring pertinent passages from the Koran (such as when it is a husband's duty to beat his wife) projected on the bodies of naked women.

It was shown twice before Nov. 2, 2004, when van Gogh, bicycling through central Amsterdam in the morning, was shot by an Islamic extremist who then slit his throat with a machete. Next, the murderer (in whose room was found a disk containing videos of "enemies of Allah'' being murdered, including a man having his head slowly sawed off) used another knife to pin a long letter to van Gogh's chest. The letter was to Hirsi Ali, calling her a "soldier of evil'' who would "smash herself to pieces on Islam.''

The remainder of her life in Holland was lived under guard. Neighbors in her apartment building complained that they felt endangered with her there and got a court to order her evicted. She decided to come to America.

Holland evidently tolerates everything except skepticism about the sacramental nature of multiculturalism. One million of the country's 16 million residents are Islamic, and the political left has appropriated the European right's traditional celebration of identity grounded in racial and ethnic traditions and culture. But the recoil of many Dutch people from Hirsi Ali suggests that the tolerance about which Holland preens is a compound of intellectual sloth and moral timidity. She was more trouble than the Dutch evidently think free speech is worth.

Her story is told in a riveting new book, "Murder in Amsterdam,'' by Ian Buruma, who is not alone in finding her -- this "Enlightenment fundamentalist'' -- somewhat unnerving and off-putting. Having experienced life circumscribed by tribal and religious communities (as a girl she suffered the genital mutilation called female circumcision), she is a fierce partisan of individualism against collectivism.

She reminds Buruma of Margaret Thatcher's sometimes abrasive intelligence, and fascination with America. He is dismissive of the idea that she is a Voltaire against Islam: Voltaire, he says, offended the powerful Catholic Church, whereas she offends "only a minority that was already feeling vulnerable in the heart of Europe.''

She, however, replies that this is hardly a normal minority. It is connected to Islam's worldwide adherents. Living sullenly in European "dish cities'' -- enclaves connected by satellite television and the Internet to the tribal societies they have not really left behind -- many members of this minority are uninterested in assimilation into open societies.

She calls herself "a dissident of Islam'' because, given what Allah supposedly enjoins and what she knows is right, "the cognitive dissonance is, for me, too much.'' She says she is not "a militant atheist,'' but the emphasis is on the adjective.

Slender, elegant, stylish and articulate (in English, Dutch and Swahili), she has found an intellectual home here at the American Enterprise Institute, where she is writing a book that imagines Muhammad meeting, in the New York Public Library, three thinkers -- John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper, each a hero of the unending struggle between (to take the title of Popper's 1945 masterpiece) "The Open Society and Its Enemies.'' Islamic extremists -- the sort who were unhinged by some Danish cartoons -- will be enraged. She is unperturbed.

Neither is she pessimistic about the West. It has, she says, "the drive to innovate.'' But Europe, she thinks, is invertebrate. After two generations without war, Europeans "have no idea what an enemy is.'' And they think, she says, that leadership is an antiquated notion because they believe that caring governments can socialize everyone to behave well, thereby erasing personal accountability and responsibility. "I can't even tell it without laughing,'' she says, laughing softly. Clearly she is where she belongs, at last.

georgewill@washpost.com

Benedict XVI -- On God and the Prophet
by Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted Sep 19, 2006

To bank the firestorm ignited by his address in Regensburg, Germany, Pope Benedict XVI declared himself "deeply sorry" for the effect his remarks have had on the Muslim world. The words of the Byzantine emperor he quoted, Benedict explained, were "from a Medieval text which do not in any way express my personal thoughts."

The pope's subject was the "profound harmony" of Biblical truth and Greek thought. No conflict exists, he argued, between true faith and right reason. Contending violence is the antithesis of reason, he cited the "erudite Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus," during a siege of Constantinople, between A.D. 1394 and 1402.

Benedict's words merit being put into context.

"I would like to discuss one point -- itself rather marginal to the dialogue as a whole -- which ... can serve as the starting point for my reflections on this issue.

"In the seventh conversation ... the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war. The emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 (of the Quran) reads, 'There is no compulsion in religion.'

"According to the experts, this 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 Quran concerning holy war. ...

"(The emperor) addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence ... 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 explosion followed. For it was reported that Pope Benedict had endorsed the view that the only innovations the Prophet made to the monotheistic faiths were "evil and inhuman." The pope did not say this, and has denied that he believes this.

Yet the issues he raised, that true faith and right reason are never in conflict, that force is intolerable in advancing God's word, merit discussion in light of history, and the present.

How did the Christians conquer the Roman Empire, after 300 years of persecution? By living the Gospel, preaching the Word and dying for the faith -- martyrdom. But Islam came out of the desert to conquer the Holy Land, North Africa and Spain in a single century, by the sword. Islam is a fighting faith. Wrote J.M. Roberts in "The History of Europe," "Islam from the start has been a religion of conquest."

In 1095, Urban II preached the First Crusade to end the abuse of Christian pilgrims and recapture the Holy City and Holy Sepulcher. Moslems view these Crusades as Christian wars of aggression. Yet the martial means the Crusaders used to recapture Jerusalem were the same as those the Caliph Umar had used to conquer the Holy City.

Until our time, Western man did not apologize for the Crusades. Gen. Eisenhower even titled his war memoir "Crusade in Europe."

For centuries, European Christians fought the Islamic world. In 1492, Muslims were forcibly expelled from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella. In the early 16th century, Suleiman the Magnificent invaded the Balkans, defeated the Hungarians at Bohacs and besieged Vienna. The Balkan wars of Suleiman bear little resemblance to the Christian crusades of Dr. Billy Graham. In 1571, the fleets of the Ottoman Turks were destroyed at Lepanto by a fleet organized by Pius V.

In the 19th century, the Ottoman Turks began their long retreat from the Balkans. At the end of the First World War, Kemal Ataturk abolished the caliphate, put the caliph on the Orient Express, severed the ties between mosque and state, and made Turkey a secular state.

In our own time, however, the issues Pope Benedict addressed -- the harmony between faith and reason, and the disharmony between force and faith -- have re-arisen.

In Afghanistan this year, a Christian convert was threatened with beheading for apostasy. Most imams and Afghans seemed to approve. In Indonesia, Nigeria and Sudan, Muslims are at war with Christians, in the Middle East with Israelis, in Chechnya with Russians, in India with Hindus, in Thailand with Buddhists. Other issues are involved, but faith seems ever present as a prime motivator of violence.

In the West, men and women convert to Islam and imams preach and proselytize. In Islamic nations, conversion to Christianity can mean death, as can preaching and proselytizing. Do Muslim faithful believe it is legitimate to use state power to impose sharia or maintain religious orthodoxy, as Henry VIII and Isabella believed?

In the West, a militant secularism has seized state power and the de-Christianization of America is well advanced. In the East, we had best recognize that the rage, militancy and intolerance so often on display are the unmistakable marks of a rising, not a dying, faith.

An Apologist for Muslim Rage
by Robert Spencer

Posted Sep 20, 2006

As the global Muslim reaction to Pope Benedict XVI’s recent remarks on Islam threaten to eclipse last winter’s Cartoon Rage in irrationality and violence, there has been the usual undercurrent of sympathy on the Left for those breathing threats and murder against the Pope and the West. Notable among the spokesmen for appeasement and accommodation of violent Islamic intimidation was Karen Armstrong, author of the popular books Islam: A Short History and Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet.

Armstrong on Monday published a piece in The Guardian entitled “We cannot afford to maintain these ancient prejudices against Islam: The Pope’s remarks were dangerous, and will convince many more Muslims that the west is incurably Islamophobic.” It’s ironic that she would term the Pope’s remarks, rather than the Muslim reaction to them, “dangerous” – particularly after a nun in Somalia and a lay Christian in Iraq were murdered in apparent expressions of anger against the Pope. As far as Armstrong is concerned, violent Islamic rage against the West, including the rage against the Pope, is all the fault of the West.

“Our Islamophobia,” intones Armstrong, “dates back to the time of the Crusades, and is entwined with our chronic anti-semitism.” Armstrong, like Bill Clinton, who explained 9/11 as part of the debt “we are still paying” to the Islamic world for the Crusades, never mentions that centuries of jihad aggression and imperialism that preceded and provoked the Crusades. The Crusades were not perfect, but they were in no sense a gratuitous proto-colonial attack by the Christian West against a hitherto peaceful and benign Islamic world.

Yet to Armstrong, acts of Islamic aggression were “fearful fantasies created by Europeans.” She doesn’t acknowledge that Islam is unique among world religions in having a doctrine of religious imperialism. Muhammad tells his followers to call people to Islam, and if they refuse, to offer them second-class status or war: “When you meet your enemies who are polytheists, invite them to three courses of action….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).”

Armstrong has never had an overly strong attachment to accuracy. Daniel Pipes has noted about her book Islam: A Short History that “Armstrong goes out of her way to soften every hard edge, explain away every unpleasantness, and hide what she cannot otherwise account for.” An egregious example of this comes in her biography of Muhammad: according to Islamic traditions reported in the hadith collection considered most reliable by Muslims, Muhammad married his favorite wife, Aisha, “when she was six years old and he consummated his marriage when she was nine years old.” He was at this time in his early fifties. Embarrassed by this, many Islamic apologists claim – in the teeth of this evidence – that Aisha was older. Armstrong obligingly asserts that “Tabari says that she was so young that she stayed in her parents’ home and the marriage was consummated there later when she had reached puberty.” Unfortunately, her readers are unlikely to have volumes of Tabari on hand to check her assertion; contrary to Armstrong’s account, the Muslim historian quotes Aisha thusly: “The Messenger of God married me when I was seven; my marriage was consummated when I was nine.” Did Aisha go through puberty at nine, or was Armstrong covering up one of the more embarrassing aspects of Muhammad’s career?

The time for such disingenuousness is over, as is the time for the unseemly self-recrimination to which Armstrong is calling the West. The Muslim rage against the Pope’s call to eschew religious violence reveals an Islamic world in deep denial, as irrational as it is unable to take responsibility for its own actions. And in this it has Karen Armstrong and other Leftist haters of Western civilization and culture as willing accomplices.

Copyright © 2006 HUMAN EVENTS. All Rights Reserved.

From The Boston Globe: More evidence of the moral degeneracy of the "religion of peace" our idiot President has such respect for.

Muslim violence
By Jeff Jacoby

September 20, 2006

AS SHE LAY dying in a Mogadishu hospital, Sister Leonella forgave her killers. She had lived in Africa for almost four decades and could speak fluent Somali, but her last words were murmured in Italian, her mother tongue. ``Perdono, perdono," she whispered. I forgive, I forgive.

She was 65 and had devoted her life to the care of sick mothers and children. She was on her way to meet three other nuns for lunch on Sunday when two gunmen shot her several times in the back. ``Her slaying was not a random attack," the Associated Press reported. It ``raised concerns" that she was the latest victim of ``growing Islamic radicalism in the country."

Raised concerns? Sister Leonella was gunned down less than two days after a prominent Somali cleric had called on Muslims to kill Pope Benedict XVI for his remarks about Islam in a scholarly lecture last week.

``We urge you, Muslims, wherever you are to hunt down the pope for his barbaric statements," Sheik Abubukar Hassan Malin had exhorted worshippers during evening prayers at a Mogadishu mosque. ``Whoever offends our prophet Mohammed should be killed on the spot by the nearest Muslim. Sister Leonella was not the pope, but she was presumably close enough for purposes of the local jihadists.

If it weren't so sickening, it would be farcical: A line in the pope's speech suggests that Islam has a dark history of violence, and offended Muslims vent their displeasure by howling for his death, firebombing churches, and attacking innocent Christians. One of the points Benedict made in his speech at the University of Regensburg was that religious faith untethered by reason can lead to savagery. The mobs denouncing him could hardly have done a better job of proving him right.

In his lecture, Benedict quoted the late Byzantine emperor Manuel II, who had condemned Islam's militancy with these words: ``Show me just what Mohammed 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."

In the ensuing uproar, British Muslims demonstrated outside Westminster Cathedral with signs reading ``Pope go to Hell" and ``Islam will conquer Rome," while the head of the Society of Muslim Lawyers declared that the pope must be ``subject to capital punishment." In Iraq, the radical Mujahideen's Army vowed to ``smash the crosses in the house of the dog from Rome" and the Mujahideen Shura Council swore to ``continue our jihad and never stop until God avails us to chop your necks." Arsonists in the West Bank set churches on fire, and a group calling itself ``The Sword of Islam" issued a warning: ``If the pope does not appear on TV and apologize for his comments, we will blow up all of Gaza's churches."

In fact, the pope did apologize, more than once. Whether the studied frenzy will now subside remains to be seen. But it's only a matter of time until the next one erupts.

This time it was a 14th-century quote from a Byzantine ruler that set off -- or rather, was exploited by Islamist firebrands to ignite -- the international demonstrations, death threats, and violence. Earlier this year it was cartoons about Mohammed in a Danish newspaper. Last year it was a Newsweek report, later debunked, that a Koran had been descecrated by a US interrogator in Guantanamo. Before that it was Jerry Falwell's comment on ``60 Minutes" that Mohammed was a ``terrorist." Back in 1989 it was the publication of Salman Rushdie's satirical novel, ``The Satanic Verses."

In every case, the pretext for the Muslim rage was the claim that Islam had been insulted. Freedom of speech was irrelevant: While the rioters and those inciting them routinely insult Christianity, Judaism, and other religions, they demand that no one be allowed to denigrate Islam or its prophet. It is a staggering double standard, and too many in the West seem willing to go along with it. Witness the editorials in US newspapers this week scolding the pope for his speech. Recall the State Department's condemnation of the Danish cartoons last winter.

Of course nobody's faith should be gratuitously affronted. But the real insult to Islam is not a line from a papal speech or a cartoon about Mohammed. It is the violence, terror, and bloodshed that Islamist fanatics unleash in the name of their religion -- and the unwillingness of most of the world's Muslims to say or do anything to stop them.

Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.

Are Videotaped Beheadings Covered by Geneva?
by Ann Coulter

Posted Sep 20, 2006

Sen. John McCain has been carrying so much water for his friends in the mainstream media that he now has to state for the record to Republican audiences: "I hold no brief for al Qaeda."

Well, that's a relief.

It turns out, the only reason McCain is demanding that prisoners like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, the beheading of journalist Daniel Pearl and other atrocities -- be treated like Martha Stewart facing an insider trading charge is this: "It's all about the United States of America and what is going to happen to Americans who are taken prisoner in future wars."

McCain, along with Sen. Lindsey Graham and Sen. John Warner -- or, as the Times now calls him, the "courtly Virginian" -- want terrorists treated like Americans accused of crimes, with full access to classified information against them and a list of the undercover agents involved in their capture. Liberals' interest in protecting classified information started and ended with Valerie Plame.

As Graham explained, he doesn't want procedures used against terrorists at Guantanamo "to become clubs to be used against our people." Actually, clubs would be a step up from videotaped beheadings.

Or as the New York Times wrote in the original weasel talking points earlier this summer: "The Geneva Conventions protect Americans. If this country changes the rules, it's changing the rules for Americans taken prisoner abroad. That is far too high a price to pay so this administration can hang on to its misbegotten policies."

There hasn't been this much railing about the mistreatment of a hostage since Monica Lewinsky was served canapes at the Pentagon City Ritz-Carlton Hotel while being detained by the FBI.

The belief that we can impress the enemy with our magnanimity is an idea that just won't die. It's worse than the idea that paying welfare recipients benefits won't discourage them from working. (Some tiny minority might still seek work.) It's worse than the idea that taxes can be raised endlessly without reducing tax receipts. (As the Laffer Curve illustrates, at some point -- a point this country will never reach -- taxes could theoretically be cut so much that tax revenues would decline.)

But being nice to enemies is an idea that has never worked, no matter how many times liberals make us do it. It didn't work with the Soviet Union, Imperial Japan, Hitler or the North Vietnamese -- enemies notable for being more civilized than the Islamic savages we are at war with today.

By the way, how did the Geneva Conventions work out for McCain at the Hanoi Hilton?

It doesn't even work with the Democrats, whom Bush kept sucking up to his first year in office. No more movie nights at the White House with Teddy Kennedy these days, I'm guessing.

It was this idea (Be nice!) that fueled liberals' rage at Reagan when he vanquished the Soviet Union with his macho "cowboy diplomacy" that was going to get us all blown up. As the Times editorial page hysterically described Reagan's first year in office: "Mr. Reagan looked at the world through gun sights." Yes, he did! And now the Evil Empire is no more.

It was this idiotic idea of being nice to predators that drove liberal crime policies in the '60s and '70s -- leading like night into day to unprecedented crime rates. Now these same liberal ninnies want to extend their tender mercies not just to rapists and murderers, but to Islamic terrorists.

Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Ronald Reagan and Winston Churchill had a different idea: Instead of rewarding bad behavior, punish bad behavior. How many times does punishment have to work and coddling have to fail before we never have to hear again that if we treat terrorists well, the terrorists will treat our prisoners well?

Fortunately, history always begins this morning for liberals, so they can keep flogging the same idiotic idea that has never, ever worked: Be nice to our enemies and they will reward us with good behavior.

Never mind trusting liberals with national security. Never mind trusting them with raising kids. These people shouldn't even be allowed to own pets.

If the Democrats and the four pathetic Republicans angling to be called "mavericks" by the New York Times really believe we need to treat captured terrorists nicely in order to ensure that the next American they capture will be well-treated, then why stop at 600-thread-count sheets for the Guantanamo detainees? We must adopt Sharia law.

As McCain might put it, I hold no brief for al Qaeda, but what would better protect Americans they take prisoner than if America went whole hog and became an Islamic republic? On the plus side, we can finally put Rosie O'Donnell in a burka.

From The Boston Globe: More evidence of the moral degeneracy of the "religion of peace" our idiot President has such respect for.

Muslim violence
By Jeff Jacoby

September 20, 2006

AS SHE LAY dying in a Mogadishu hospital, Sister Leonella forgave her killers. She had lived in Africa for almost four decades and could speak fluent Somali, but her last words were murmured in Italian, her mother tongue. ``Perdono, perdono," she whispered. I forgive, I forgive.

She was 65 and had devoted her life to the care of sick mothers and children. She was on her way to meet three other nuns for lunch on Sunday when two gunmen shot her several times in the back. ``Her slaying was not a random attack," the Associated Press reported. It ``raised concerns" that she was the latest victim of ``growing Islamic radicalism in the country."

Raised concerns? Sister Leonella was gunned down less than two days after a prominent Somali cleric had called on Muslims to kill Pope Benedict XVI for his remarks about Islam in a scholarly lecture last week.

``We urge you, Muslims, wherever you are to hunt down the pope for his barbaric statements," Sheik Abubukar Hassan Malin had exhorted worshippers during evening prayers at a Mogadishu mosque. ``Whoever offends our prophet Mohammed should be killed on the spot by the nearest Muslim. Sister Leonella was not the pope, but she was presumably close enough for purposes of the local jihadists.

If it weren't so sickening, it would be farcical: A line in the pope's speech suggests that Islam has a dark history of violence, and offended Muslims vent their displeasure by howling for his death, firebombing churches, and attacking innocent Christians. One of the points Benedict made in his speech at the University of Regensburg was that religious faith untethered by reason can lead to savagery. The mobs denouncing him could hardly have done a better job of proving him right.

In his lecture, Benedict quoted the late Byzantine emperor Manuel II, who had condemned Islam's militancy with these words: ``Show me just what Mohammed 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."

In the ensuing uproar, British Muslims demonstrated outside Westminster Cathedral with signs reading ``Pope go to Hell" and ``Islam will conquer Rome," while the head of the Society of Muslim Lawyers declared that the pope must be ``subject to capital punishment." In Iraq, the radical Mujahideen's Army vowed to ``smash the crosses in the house of the dog from Rome" and the Mujahideen Shura Council swore to ``continue our jihad and never stop until God avails us to chop your necks." Arsonists in the West Bank set churches on fire, and a group calling itself ``The Sword of Islam" issued a warning: ``If the pope does not appear on TV and apologize for his comments, we will blow up all of Gaza's churches."

In fact, the pope did apologize, more than once. Whether the studied frenzy will now subside remains to be seen. But it's only a matter of time until the next one erupts.

This time it was a 14th-century quote from a Byzantine ruler that set off -- or rather, was exploited by Islamist firebrands to ignite -- the international demonstrations, death threats, and violence. Earlier this year it was cartoons about Mohammed in a Danish newspaper. Last year it was a Newsweek report, later debunked, that a Koran had been descecrated by a US interrogator in Guantanamo. Before that it was Jerry Falwell's comment on ``60 Minutes" that Mohammed was a ``terrorist." Back in 1989 it was the publication of Salman Rushdie's satirical novel, ``The Satanic Verses."

In every case, the pretext for the Muslim rage was the claim that Islam had been insulted. Freedom of speech was irrelevant: While the rioters and those inciting them routinely insult Christianity, Judaism, and other religions, they demand that no one be allowed to denigrate Islam or its prophet. It is a staggering double standard, and too many in the West seem willing to go along with it. Witness the editorials in US newspapers this week scolding the pope for his speech. Recall the State Department's condemnation of the Danish cartoons last winter.

Of course nobody's faith should be gratuitously affronted. But the real insult to Islam is not a line from a papal speech or a cartoon about Mohammed. It is the violence, terror, and bloodshed that Islamist fanatics unleash in the name of their religion -- and the unwillingness of most of the world's Muslims to say or do anything to stop them.

Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.

Jihad Enablers
By Jonah Goldberg

Before you can discuss the manifest seriousness of the latest controversy involving the pope, you have to acknowledge its hilarity. Pope Benedict XVI, in an austere philosophical address, invoked Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus, the 14th century ruler who offered a harsh assessment of Islam. While the Koran says, "There is no compulsion in religion," Manuel couldn't help but notice that Muslims were setting up more franchises in his neighborhood than Starbucks - and they weren't doing so by selling the best darn Mocha Frappuccinos on his side of the Bosphorus Straits.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new," Manuel complained sometime around the siege of Byzantium, "and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." Why Pope Benedict quoted Manuel is hotly debated. But one explicit reason was to enunciate the Church's opposition to using faith to justify violence or intolerance.

And this is where the hilarity comes in. A Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokeswoman responded: "Anyone who describes Islam as a religion as intolerant encourages violence."

During Friday prayers in Iran, a senior cleric changed his usual script to denounce the pope, but the crowd of worshippers hadn't seen the memo, so they chanted back the usual refrain: "Death to America! Death to Israel!"

In Turkey, protestors demanded that the Justice Ministry arrest the pope when he visits there this fall and prosecute him for insulting Islam.

And just this week, clerics in Gaza reportedly suggested that the pope convert to Islam to save his own life.

But let us not dare suggest that even a whiff of intolerance can be detected in the Islamic world. If you say otherwise, I will cut off your head.

It may be amusing to note how so many Muslims are eager to confirm a stereotype in the process of denouncing that very stereotype, but it's not so funny when they put their jihad where the mouth is. Churches were attacked in the West Bank and a nun in Somalia was murdered, allegedly in reaction to the pope's comments. Al-Qaida's franchise in Iraq announced "We shall break the cross and spill the wine. ... God will (help) Muslims to conquer Rome. ... (May) God enable us to slit their throats."

But this isn't primarily about al-Qaida or even the war on terror. Note that the parliaments and governments of Islamic nations - our allies in the war on terror - have been at the forefront of the anti-pope backlash.

The many learned disquisitions on the pope's speech notwithstanding, this isn't about theology either. After all, no serious person can take lectures on religious tolerance from the Muslim world very seriously. Spare me tales of Jewish accommodation in the 15th century. Today, throughout the Muslim world, Jew-hatred and Christian-bashing are commonplace, state-sanctioned and fashionable.

No, this is about us. The best book for illuminating what's going on in the Muslim "street" isn't some weighty treatise on Islam; it's a short little tract called "White Guilt" by Shelby Steele. The book isn't even about Islam. Steele focuses on white liberals and the black radicals who've been gaming them ever since the 1960s. Whites, he argues, have internalized their own demonization. Deep down they fear that maybe they are imperialistic, racist bastards, and they are desperate to prove otherwise. In America, black radicals figured this out a while ago and have been dunning liberal whites ever since.

The West is caught in a similarly dysfunctional cycle of extortion and intimidation with Islam, but on a grander and far more violent scale. Whether it's the pope's comments or some Danish cartoons, self-appointed spokesmen for the Islamic street say, "You have offended a billion Muslims," which really means, "There are so many of us, you should watch out." And if you didn't get the message, just look around for the burning embassies and murdered infidels. They're not hard to find.

In response, the West apologizes and apologizes. Radical Muslims, who are not stupid, take note and become emboldened by these displays of weakness and capitulation. And the next time, they demand two pounds of flesh. Meanwhile, the entire global conversation starts from the assumption that the West is doing something wrong by tolerating freedom of speech, among other things.

This week, French President Jacques Chirac explained that everyone in the West must avoid everything that sparks tensions. In other words, we must forever be held hostage by the tactical outrage of a global mob. There's nothing funny about that.

©2006 Tribune Media Services, Inc

From The Washington Times:

The Pope and Kissinger Warn the World
By Tony Blankley

There is a historically fairly predictable pattern to the unfolding strategies and views of great wars. They often start with a morally ambiguous view of the enemy, a more limited conception of the war's magnitude and a restrained application of violent tactics.

Eventually, moral clarity is obtained, war objectives expand -- often to grandiosity -- and tactics become ferocious. For example, at the start of our Civil War during the 1861 battle of First Manassas, spectators came out by carriage with picnic lunches to observe the event. By 1865, Gen. Sherman executed a campaign of civilian terror and material obliteration in his march to the sea. Likewise, the war started with the purpose of saving the union, but morally expanded to end slavery -- North and South.

World War II started out in Europe first with the phony war and mutual thoughts of a negotiated peace, then with careful bombing (Adolf Hitler initially ordered that London not be bombed), and ended with the fire-bombing of Dresden and Tokyo and the atomic obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Even Hitler, in his war on the Jews, as late as 1940 was thinking of deporting German Jews to Madagascar, and ended in rounding up Jews throughout Europe and perpetrating genocide in industrially designed death camps (although some historians believe the Madagascar plan may always have been a subterfuge for the Final Solution).

Today, the West's struggle to resist radical Islamic aggression (both cultural and terroristic) is still in that early phase of moral confusion and limited tactics. Thus, we continue to debate the ethical merits of minor intrusions into American civil liberties (such as National Security Agency surveillance of some phone calls from foreign suspects), and even serious and patriotic men such as Sen. McCain and Gen. Powell challenge the need to permit psychologically rough -- but nonviolent -- interrogation of captured terrorists.

But there are some signs that the early stage of moral confusion is beginning to give way to greater clarity. Last week, two towering intellects -- Pope Benedict XVI and Henry Kissinger -- began to offer clarity. On Tuesday, the pope gave his now famous, but still misunderstood, lecture at the University of Regensburg. And on Wednesday, Kissinger published a half-page seminal article on the risk of civilizational war in The Washington Post.

Any fair and careful reading of the pope's lecture must conclude that it was not an inadvertent insult to Islam. Rather, it was a firm assertion that the Judeo-Christian God acts in accordance with reason ("In the beginning was the logos" -- word and reason), and thus Christians and Jews can undertake a rational debate about the morality of violence. He quotes, now famously, Emperor Manuel II's assertion in 1391 that Islam spreads its faith through violence -- which, he says, is unreasonable and incompatible with the nature of God. He then cites an 11th century Arab Muslim theologian, Ibn Hazn, who argued that Allah is transcendent of reason.

After criticizing secular Christians for not giving reason its proper place in understanding faith and God, he concludes his lecture by again quoting the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II on his same criticism of Islam. Then, the pope finishes his lecture with the following words: "It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures. To rediscover it constantly is the great task of the university."

In other words, he is inviting Islam to explain whether their God is like ours -- inherently understandable by reason (and thus, is their God opposed to violence, as ours is?) .

He was also, I strongly suspect, speaking to his own flock, both to return to proper Christianity and to consider the nature of Islam. And, I suspect, the pope did not inadvertently quote the now inflammatory passage. If he had not included that quote, the world would not now be debating his lecture. While the pope surely did not want to see violence, he just as surely wanted to engage the world in this vital search for clarity.

While not the pope, Henry Kissinger is the world's premier practitioner and scholar of realpolitik. So it is consequential that in his article last week, he warned the world that "we are witnessing a carefully conceived assault, not isolated terrorist attacks, on the international system of respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity. The creation of organizations such as Hezbollah and al-Qaida symbolizes the fact that transnational loyalties are replacing national ones. The driving force behind this challenge is the jihadist conviction that it is the existing order that is illegitimate."

He went on to warn: "The debate sparked by the Iraq war over American rashness vs. European escapism is dwarfed by what the world now faces ... the common danger of a wider war merging into a war of civilizations against the backdrop of a nuclear-armed Middle East. ... We now know that we face the imperative of building a new world order or potential global catastrophe."

These are shocking words coming from the verbally impeccably careful diplomatist.

So, within 24 hours the pope raises the question of whether Islam is inherently violent and unreasonable, while Kissinger warns of a possible emerging nuclear clash of civilizations.

Moral clarity, anyone?

From The Washington Post:

Enough Apologies
By Anne Applebaum

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Already, angry Palestinian militants have assaulted seven West Bank and Gaza churches, destroying two of them. In Somalia, gunmen shot dead an elderly Italian nun. Radical clerics from Qatar to Qom have called, variously, for a "day of anger" or for worshipers to "hunt down" the pope and his followers. From Turkey to Malaysia, Muslim politicians have condemned the pope and called his apology "insufficient." And all of this because Benedict XVI, speaking at the University of Regensburg, quoted a Byzantine emperor who, more than 600 years ago, called Islam a faith "spread by the sword." We've been here before, of course. Similar protests were sparked last winter by cartoon portrayals of Muhammad in the Danish press. Similar apologies resulted, though Benedict's is more surprising than those of the Danish government. No one, apparently, can remember any pope, not even the media-friendly John Paul II, apologizing for anything in such specific terms: not for the Inquisition, not for the persecution of Galileo and certainly not for a single comment made to an academic audience in an unimportant German city.

But Western reactions to Muslim "days of anger" have followed a familiar pattern, too. Last winter, some Western newspapers defended their Danish colleagues, even going so far as to reprint the cartoons -- but others, including the Vatican, attacked the Danes for giving offense. Some leading Catholics have now defended the pope -- but others, no doubt including some Danes, have complained that his statement should have been better vetted, or never given at all. This isn't surprising: By definition, the West is not monolithic. Left-leaning journalists don't identify with right-leaning colleagues (or right-leaning Catholic colleagues), and vice versa. Not all Christians, let alone all Catholics -- even all German Catholics -- identify with the pope either, and certainly they don't want to defend his every scholarly quotation.

Unfortunately, these subtle distinctions are lost on the fanatics who torch embassies and churches. And they may also be preventing all of us from finding a useful response to the waves of anti-Western anger and violence that periodically engulf parts of the Muslim world. Clearly, a handful of apologies and some random public debate -- should the pope have said X, should the Danish prime minister have done Y -- are ineffective and irrelevant: None of the radical clerics accepts Western apologies, and none of their radical followers reads the Western press. Instead, Western politicians, writers, thinkers and speakers should stop apologizing -- and start uniting.

By this, I don't mean that we all need to rush to defend or to analyze this particular sermon; I leave that to experts on Byzantine theology. But we can all unite in our support for freedom of speech -- surely the pope is allowed to quote from medieval texts -- and of the press. And we can also unite, loudly, in our condemnation of violent, unprovoked attacks on churches, embassies and elderly nuns. By "we" I mean here the White House, the Vatican, the German Greens, the French Foreign Ministry, NATO, Greenpeace, Le Monde and Fox News -- Western institutions of the left, the right and everything in between. True, these principles sound pretty elementary -- "we're pro-free speech and anti-gratuitous violence" -- but in the days since the pope's sermon, I don't feel that I've heard them defended in anything like a unanimous chorus. A lot more time has been spent analyzing what the pontiff meant to say, or should have said, or might have said if he had been given better advice.

All of which is simply beside the point, since nothing the pope has ever said comes even close to matching the vitriol, extremism and hatred that pour out of the mouths of radical imams and fanatical clerics every day, all across Europe and the Muslim world, almost none of which ever provokes any Western response at all. And maybe it's time that it should: When Saudi Arabia publishes textbooks commanding good Wahhabi Muslims to "hate" Christians, Jews and non-Wahhabi Muslims, for example, why shouldn't the Vatican, the Southern Baptists, Britain's chief rabbi and the Council on American-Islamic Relations all condemn them -- simultaneously?

Maybe it's a pipe dream: The day when the White House and Greenpeace can issue a joint statement is surely distant indeed. But if stray comments by Western leaders -- not to mention Western films, books, cartoons, traditions and values -- are going to inspire regular violence, I don't feel that it's asking too much for the West to quit saying sorry and unite, occasionally, in its own defense. The fanatics attacking the pope already limit the right to free speech among their own followers. I don't see why we should allow them to limit our right to free speech, too.

applebaumanne@yahoo.com

From ABC News:

Why We Will Never See Democracy in the Middle East
By STEVEN PRESSFIELD

September 11, 2006— - In the five years since 9/11, much looking-back has been done. The problem is we haven't looked back far enough. To understand the nature of the enemy in the Middle East and to evaluate the prospects for democracy and peace, we need to extend our gaze not five years into the past, but five hundred and even five thousand.

I've spent the last four years writing two books about Alexander the Great's campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, 331-327 B.C. What has struck me in the research is the dead-ringer parallels between that ancient East-West clash and the modern ones the U.S. is fighting today -- despite the fact that Alexander was pre-Christian and his enemies were pre-Islamic.

What history seems to be telling us is that the quality that most defines our Eastern adversaries, then and now, is neither religion nor extremism nor "Islamo-fascism," but something much older and more fundamental.

Tribalism

Extremist Islam is merely an overlay (and a recent one at that) atop the primal, unchanging mind-set of the East, which is tribalism, and its constituent individual, the tribesman.

Tribalism and the tribal mind-set are what the West is up against in Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, the Iraqi insurgency, the Sunni and Shiite militias, and the Taliban.

What exactly is the tribal mind-set? It derives from that most ancient of social organizations, whose virtues are obedience, fidelity, warrior pride, respect for ancestors, hostility to outsiders and willingness to lay down one's life for the cause/faith/group. The tribe's ideal leader is closer to Tony Soprano than to FDR and its social mores are more like those of Geronimo's Apaches than the city council of Scarsdale or Shepherd's Bush.

Can the tribal mind embrace democracy? Consider the contrast between the tribesman and the citizen:

A citizen is an autonomous individual. A citizen is free. A citizen possesses the capacity to evaluate the facts and prospects of his world and to make decisions guided by his own conscience, uncoerced by authority. A congress of citizens acting in free elections determines the political course of a democratic community.

A citizen prizes his freedom; therefore he grants it to others. He is willing to respect the rights of minorities within the community, so that his own rights will be shielded when he finds himself in the minority.

The tribesman doesn't see it that way. Within the fixed hierarchy of the tribe, disagreement is not dissent (and thus to be tolerated) but treachery, even heresy, which must be ruthlessly expunged. The tribe exists for itself alone. It is perpetually at war with all other tribes, even of its own race and religion.

The tribesman deals in absolutes. One is either "of blood" or not. The enemy spy can infiltrate the tribal network no more than a prison guard can worm his way into the Aryan Brotherhood. The tribe recognizes its own. It expels (or beheads) the alien. The tribe cannot be negotiated with. "Good faith" applies only within the pale, never beyond.

The tribesman does not operate by a body of civil law but by a code of honor. If he receives a wrong, he does not seek redress. He wants revenge. The taking of revenge is a virtue in tribal eyes, called badal in the Pathan code of nangwali. A man who does not take revenge is not a man. Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and the sectarian militias of Iraq are not in the war business, they are in the revenge business. The revenge-seeker cannot be negotiated with because his intent is bound up with honor. It is an absolute.

Perhaps the most telling difference between the citizen and the tribesman lies in their views of the Other. The citizen embraces multiplicity; to him, the melting pot produces richness and cultural diversity. To the tribesman, the alien is not even given the dignity of being a human being; he is a gentile, an infidel, a demon.

The tribesman grants justice within the tribe. In his internal councils, empathy, humor and compassion may prevail. Outside the tribe? Forget it. Can Shiites really sit down with Sunnis? Will the pledges of Hezbollah or Hamas to Israel prove true?

The democratic virtues of the Enlightenment, the Rights of Man and the American Constitution are not virtues to the tribesman. They are effeminate. They lack warrior honor. "Freedom" to the tribesman means the extinction of all he and his ancestors hold dear; "democracy" and Western values are a mortal threat to the ancient and proud way of life that the tribal mind has embraced (whether Scythian nomads, Amazon warriors, or American Indians) for tens of thousands of years.

The tribesman isn't "wrong" or "evil." He just doesn't want what we're selling. We will not convert him with free elections or with SAW machine guns. To him, 9/11 is only the most recent act of badal in a clash that has been raging for more than two thousand years. We will not find the way to contest him, let alone defeat him, until we see the struggle against him within the greater context of this millenia-old, unaltering, East-West war.

Historian Steven Pressfield is the author of the just-release novel The Afghan Campaign. He has written four other historical novels including "Gates of Fire," "The War of Art," and "The Legend of Bagger Vance."

From Swissinfo.org:

"Jihad" vowed over Pope's speech

DUBAI (Reuters) - An Iraqi militant group led by al Qaeda vowed a war against the "worshippers of the cross" in response to a recent speech by Pope Benedict on Islam that sparked anger across the Muslim world.

"We tell the worshipper of the cross (the Pope) that you and the West will be defeated, as is the case in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya," said an Internet statement by the Mujahideen Shura Council, an umbrella group led by Iraq's branch of al Qaeda.

"We shall break the cross and spill the wine. ... God will (help) Muslims to conquer Rome. ... God enable us to slit their throats, and make their money and descendants the bounty of the mujahideen," said the statement.

It was posted on Sunday on an Internet site often used by al Qaeda and other militant groups.

Pope Benedict said on Sunday he was deeply sorry Muslims had been offended by his use of a Mediaeval quotation on Islam and violence. The remarks outraged Muslims and triggered protests and attacks on churches in several Arab towns.

Another militant group in Iraq, Ansar al-Sunnah, also vowed to fight Christians in retaliation.

"You will only see our swords until you go back to God's true faith Islam," it said in a separate Internet statement.

Al Qaeda in Iraq and other militant groups have staged suicide bombings and killings of foreign forces and members of the U.S.-allied government and security forces.

Reuters (IDS)

From World Net Daily:

HOMELAND INSECURITY
Al-Qaida warns Muslims: Time to get out of U.S.
Afghan terror commander hints at big attack on N.Y., Washington

Posted: September 17, 2006

The new al-Qaida field commander in Afghanistan is calling for Muslims to leave the U.S. – particularly Washington and New York – in anticipation of a major terror attack to rival Sept. 11, according to an interview by a Pakistani journalist.

Abu Dawood told Hamid Mir, a reporter who has covered al-Qaida and met with Osama bin Laden, the attack is being coordinated by Adnan el-Shukrijumah and suggests it may involve some form of weapon of mass destruction smuggled across the Mexican border.

"Our brothers are ready to attack inside America. We will breach their security again," he is quoted as saying. "There is no timeframe for our attack inside America; we can do it any time."

As WND has previously reported, el-Shukrijumah is a trained nuclear technician and accomplished pilot who has been singled out by bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri to serve as the field commander for the next terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

The terrorist was last seen in Mexico, where, on Nov. 1, 2004, he allegedly hijacked a Piper PA Pawnee cropduster from Ejido Queretaro near Mexicali to transport a nuclear weapon and nuclear equipment into the U.S., according to Paul Williams, a former FBI consultant and author of "The Dunces of Doomsday."

"He is an American and a friend of Muhammad Atta, who led 9/11 attacks five years ago," said Dawood. "We call him 'Jaffer al Tayyar' (Jafer the Pilot); he is very brave and intelligent. (President) Bush is aware that brother Adnan has smuggled deadly materials inside America from the Mexican border. Bush is silent about him, because he doesn’t want to panic his people. Sheikh Osama bin Laden has completed his cycle of warnings. You know, he is man of his words, he is not a politician; he always does what he says. If he said it many times that Americans will see new attacks, they will definitely see new attacks. He is a real mujahid. Americans will not win this war, which they have started against Muslims. Americans are the biggest supporters of the biggest terrorist in the world, which is Israel."

Dawood said he was currently conducting operations in Afghanistan under the leadership of the Taliban. He warned of a series of upcoming suicide bombings there directed against government and coalition forces during Ramadan.

He is also quoted as saying the next attack in America will not be conducted by people like Atta.

"We have a different plan for the next attack," he told Mir. "You will see. Americans will hardly find out any Muslim names, after the next attack. Most of our brothers are living in Western countries, with Jewish and Christian names, with passports of Western countries. This time, someone with the name of Mohamed Atta will not attack inside America, it would be some David, Richard or Peter."

He said there will be another audio message from bin Laden aired within the next two weeks.

Mir reportedly interviewed Dawood Sept. 12 at the tomb of Sultan Mehmud Ghaznawi on the outskirts of Kabul. Dawood and the al-Qaida leaders who accompanied him were clean-shaven and dressed as Western reporters. The al-Qaida commander had contacted Mir by cell phone to arrange the meeting.

"You have witnessed the brutality of the Israelis in the recent 34-day war against Lebanese civilians," said Dawood. "9/11 was a revenge of Palestinian children, killed by the U.S.-made weapons, supplied to Israel. The next attack on America would be a revenge of Lebanese children killed by U.S.-made cluster bombs. Bush and (British Prime Minister Tony) Blair are the Crusaders, and Muslim leaders, like (Pakistani President Pervez) Musharraf and (Afghani President Hamid) Karzai are their collaborators. We will teach a lesson to all of them."

El-Shukrijumah was born in Guyana Aug. 4, 1975 – the firstborn of Gulshair el-Shukrijumah, a 44-year-old radical Muslim cleric, and his 16-year-old wife. In 1985, Gulshair migrated to the United States, where he assumed duties as the imam of the Farouq Mosque in Brooklyn.

The mosque, located at 554 Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, has served as a hive for terrorist activities. It has raised millions for the jihad and has served as a recruiting station for al-Qaida. Many of the planners of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, including blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, were prominent members of this notorious "house of worship."

In 1995, the Shukrijumah family relocated to Miramar, Fla., where Gulshair became the spiritual leader of the radical Masjid al-Hijah Mosque, and where Adnan became friends with Jose Padilla, who planned to detonate a radiological bomb in midtown Manhattan; Mandhai Jokhan, who was convicted of attempting to blow up nuclear power plants in southern Florida; and a group of other home-grown terrorists.

Adnan Shukrijumah attended flight schools in Florida and Norman, Oklahoma, along with Mohammad Atta and the other 9/11 operatives, and he became a highly skilled commercial jet pilot, although he, like Atta and the other terrorists, never applied for a license with the Federal Aviation Commission.

In April 2001, Shukrijumah spent 10 days in Panama, where he reportedly met with al-Qaida officials to assist in the planning of 9/11. He also traveled to Trinidad and Guyana, where virulent al-Qaida cells have been established. The following month, he obtained an associate's degree in computer engineering from Broward Community College.

During this time, he managed to get passports from Guyana, Trinidad, Saudi Arabia, Canada and the United States, according to Williams. He also began to adopt a number of aliases, including Abu Arifi, Jafar al-Tayyar, Jaafar At Yayyar, Ja'far al-Tayar, and Mohammed Sher Mohammed Khan (the name that appeared on his official FBI file). He traveled to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, where he met with Ramzi Binalshibh, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and other members of the al-Qaida high command. He also spent considerable time within al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan, where he received training in explosives and special operations.

Following 9/11, el-Shukrijumah was reportedly singled out by bin Laden and al-Zawahiri to spearhead the next great attack on America. One plan was for a nuclear attack that would take place simultaneously in seven U.S. cities, leaving millions dead and the richest and most powerful nation on earth in ashes.

"Muslims should leave America," said Dawood. "We cannot stop our attack just because of the American Muslims; they must realize that American forces are killing innocent Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq; we have the right to respond back, in the same manner, in the enemy's homeland. The American Muslims are like a human shield for our enemy; they must leave New York and Washington."

Mir, the journalist, has reported previously that al-Qaida has smuggled nuclear weapons and uranium into the U.S.

"I am saying that Muslims must leave America, but we can attack America anytime," he said. "Our cycle of warnings has been completed, now we have fresh edicts from some prominent Muslim scholars to destroy our enemy, this is our defending of Jihad; the enemy has entered in our homes and we have the right to enter in their homes, they are killing us, we will kill them.

From The Washington Post:

Blue America, In More Ways Than One
By George Will

In this autumn of their discontent, Republicans tremble as November nears. But now comes yet another book by a gloomy liberal anticipating permanent Republican dominance. Thomas B. Edsall of The New Republic, in "Building Red America: The New Conservative Coalition and the Drive for Permanent Power," argues that inexorable social forces, augmented by the conservatives' superior reservoirs of anger, ruthlessness and cynicism -- he neglects only the word "wickedness" -- favor Republicans, "the party of the socially and economically dominant."

The parties are almost at numerical parity, but Edsall, who until recently was a Washington Post political reporter, says Republicans represent people "more broadly skilled in economic combat" and "more accustomed to the rigors of the market." Hence Republicans can maintain "a thin but durable margin of victory." Their technique is "the symbolic manipulation of controversial sociocultural issues touching upon national security, patriotism, race, sex, and religion."

"The GOP," Edsall laments, "has achieved a gradual erosion of the popular consensus behind the major progressive and social-egalitarian movements of the twentieth century." But what actually "achieved" that? Edsall says the principal Republican objective has been to break "the trust . . . between the government and millions of its less advantaged citizens." But he acknowledges that Republicans have been helped "inestimably" by "the daily inefficiencies of government": "The monopoly nature of government guarantees that the public services will often lag in quality behind those delivered in the competitive private sector." Hence "the declining credibility of non-market solutions to economic problems" and the demoralization of "backers of a redistributive agenda."

Edsall complains that conservatives pursue an agenda that does not have the public's "decisive support." Whatever that means, liberals such as Edsall are ineligible to make that complaint. They increasingly have abandoned persuasion and legislation and resorted to litigation and judicial fiats to advance an agenda the public finds unpersuasive.

If Edsall is symptomatic, liberalism is lost in a time warp, thinking in antiquated categories. Edsall approvingly quotes a Democratic activist's opinion that there are twice as many angry conservatives as there are angry liberals: "Liberals by their very nature don't get as angry as conservatives do." Edsall, who evidently has not noticed the vitriol of the liberal blogosphere, is so blinded by his own anger he misperceives Republican realities.

The GOP, he says, courts whites "whose interests are overwhelmingly focused on tempering, if not altogether rolling back, the civil rights movement." Please. Who favors rolling back guarantees of voting rights and equal access to public accommodations?

If Edsall really thinks Republicans are marching efficiently in lock step, he has missed bitter intraparty arguments about spending, immigration and nation-building. Edsall says the conservative agenda is "to dismantle the welfare state." Oh? With a prescription drug entitlement that is the largest expansion of the welfare state since enactment of Medicare in 1965? With a 38 percent increase in discretionary domestic spending unrelated to homeland security -- including a 135 percent increase in the Education Department's budget -- since 2001?

When Edsall says middle- and working-class cultural conservatives vote for Republicans who then use their power "for noncultural objectives," he is voicing a familiar liberal lament: All would be well if voters would vote based on important issues -- material, economic concerns; their wallets -- rather than unimportant ones such as abortion, the definition of marriage, the coarsening of the culture and other moral anxieties. But if those issues are unimportant, why is it that liberals, adamantly supporting partial-birth abortion and celebrating judicial redefinitions of marriage, are so uncompromising about them? As Edsall says, liberalism has become bifurcated. The largest faction looks to government for material help. But the socially liberal "post-materialist" cadre "overwhelmingly sets" the party's agenda.

Edsall notes that one-third of American children -- and almost 70 percent of African American children -- are born to unmarried mothers. Then, in an astonishing passage about this phenomenon, which is the cause of most social pathologies, from crime to schools that cannot teach, he explains how Americans differ concerning what he calls "freedom from the need to maintain the marital or procreative bond."

"To social conservatives," he writes, "these developments have signaled an irretrievable and tragic loss. Their reaction has fueled, on the right, a powerful traditionalist movement and a groundswell of support for the Republican Party. To modernists, these developments constitute, at worst, the unfortunate costs of progress, and, at best -- and this is very much the view on the political left as well as of Democratic Party loyalists -- they constitute a triumph over unconscionable obstacles to the liberation and self-realization of much of the human race."

Looking for the real reason for the rise of "Red America"? Read that paragraph again.