DebateGate

Islam’s Special Standard

by L. Brent Bozell III
September 20, 2006    

There are moments where it becomes painfully apparent that the media elites think that the only thing redeeming about Western culture is its ability to regret its existence. Their dream president is a lip-biting man from Arkansas, traveling the globe apologizing for every historic fault, real or imagined, America has ever committed.

This was exactly their mentality with Pope Benedict XVI over his remarks at the University of Regensburg. One wonders if any of his critics had bothered to read his address, the theme of which was the inseparability of faith and reason. He quoted a Byzantine emperor – who argued that God could never countenance the coercive violence of radical Islam, and therefore a radical Islam invoking God is irrational. Lost on the outraged was the other argument posed by Benedict: A religion that embraces reason but not faith is also bankrupt. That message was directed at radical Catholics. His call was for a serious and urgent “genuine dialogue of cultures and religions” based on faith and reason.

You would think that this call for a religion based on love and peace, not force, would ring well in peace-loving liberal news rooms. But this lecture was ignored by the secular press until Muslim riots and threats broke out. Then, predictably and incredibly, the media demanded apologies -- but only from the Pope. They treated him like a bumbling candidate for political office, a man too unschooled in the art of public relations, which they know so well. They called him “heavy-handed” and “clumsy.” They auditioned on TV and radio shows to explain how the pontiff could be less “tone deaf.”

They did not ponder how Muslim violence, from assassinating a nun in Somalia to blowing up Canadian solders in Afghanistan as they hand out candy to children, might be, to say the very least, “tone deaf.”

This mind-numbing double standard was set perfectly (and ridiculously) by the New York Times editorial page on a sleepy Saturday, which lamented the Pope’s desire for a “uniform Catholic identity,” which is “not exactly the best jumping-off point for tolerance or interfaith dialogue.” These people seem to have no clue that the Holy Father’s first duty is to maintain a Catholic Church that is united and true to its historical roots. His first duty is to defend an ancient deposit of faith and spread the gospel of Jesus Christ. This, to the sages of the New York Times editorial board, is an inherently offensive mission – exclusive, intolerant, conservative.

But the next paragraph was worse, demanding that Benedict confess his offense to the secular and Islamic worlds: "The world listens carefully to the words of any pope. And it is tragic and dangerous when one sows pain, either deliberately or carelessly. He needs to offer a deep and persuasive apology, demonstrating that words can also heal."

This is rich from the New York Times, whose editor, Bill Keller, has deliberately and carelessly handed out the “pain” to reverent Roman Catholics in a 2002 column by comparing John Paul the Great to a communist despot. Deep apologies did not follow. Hypocrite, heal thyself.

But the networks followed that incompetent example, setting up the debate as Victimized Muslims vs. The Pope Who Needs to Apologize -- immediately and abjectly. On NBC, Brian Williams said “The Pope says he’s sorry, but is his apology enough?” On CBS, reporter Mark Phillips said among Muslims, “Even moderates...say the Pope’s words make their job much harder.” ABC brought on professor Fawaz Gerges to predict “I think it's gonna take years for the damage done to Christian-Muslim relations to be repaired.”

I wonder what Professor Gerges said about those “tone deaf” radical Muslims in the days after 9/11.

From their secular standpoint, the media’s view of the highest point of religion is not the grasp of a true God, but the maintenance of an interfaith dialogue. Conflicts over serious issues, such as whether one religion is true and another false, or whether one religion is compatible with liberal democratic cultures and another is not, are annoying, unnecessary squabbles.

Pope Benedict has long noted that majority-Christian countries tolerate the free exercise of Islam, but Muslim-dominated countries often do not tolerate the free exercise of anything but Islam. The reaction to his address reveals that Western journalists don’t care about this. They have elevated Islam to a special standard, an unofficial Victim Religion, which is only the victimized, and never the victimizer. Even the forced Islamic conversion of American journalists taken hostage does not stir their ardor.

As I file this piece, I’ve read that a Palestinian cleric in Gaza, Dr. Imad Hamto, has declared “Aslim Taslam” on Pope Benedict XVI. It is a phrase taken from the letters of the prophet Mohammed to rival tribal chiefs – urging them to convert to Islam to spare their lives.



http://www.mrc.org/BozellColumns/newscolumn/2006/col20060920.asp

Pardon my controlled bluntness, but after reading this article, for those BDS folks & anti-war folks who still spew the dren of how we "torture & abuse" the prisoners we capture in this current war, comparable to what terrorists perform on their prisoners and who could give a flying flip at the Geneva Convention, your continued asanine portrayals of just how thug like and evil our Military & Administration are, simply demonstrates how utterly devoid you folks are at objectivity and critical reasoning


A DEADLY KINDNESS

AT GITMO, PC RULES LET QAEDAS PLOT ON
by RICHARD MINITER
 
September 15, 2006 -- GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA
ON the military plane back from America's most fa mous terrorist holding pen, the in-flight film was "V for Vendetta," a screed that tries to justify terrorism. It was a fitting end to a surreal, military-sponsored trip.

The Pentagon seemed to be hoping to disarm its critics by showing them how well it cares for captured terrorists. The trip was more alarming than disarming. I spent several hours with Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., who heads the joint task force that houses and interrogates the detainees. (The military isn't allowed to call them "prisoners.")

Harris, a distinguished Navy veteran who was born in Japan and educated at Annapolis and Harvard, is a serious man trying to do a politically impossible job. I spoke with him at length, and with a dozen other officers and guards, and visited three different detention blocks.

The high-minded critics who complain about torture are wrong. We are far too soft on these guys - and, as a result, aren't getting the valuable intelligence we need to save American lives.

The politically correct regulations are unbelievable. Detainees are entitled to a full eight hours sleep and can't be woken up for interrogations. They enjoy three meals and five prayers per day, without interruption. They are entitled to a minimum of two hours of outdoor recreation per day.

Interrogations are limited to four hours, usually running two - and (of course) are interrupted for prayers. One interrogator actually bakes cookies for detainees, while another serves them Subway or McDonald's sandwiches. Both are available on base. (Filet o' Fish is an al Qaeda favorite.)

Interrogations are not video or audio taped, perhaps to preserve detainee privacy.

Call it excessive compassion by a nation devoted to therapy, but it's dangerous. Adm. Harris admitted to me that a multi-cell al Qaeda network has developed in the camp. Military intelligence can't yet identify their leaders, but notes that they have cells for monitoring the movements and identities of guards and doctors, cells dedicated to training, others for making weapons and so on.

And they can make weapons from almost anything. Guards have been attacked with springs taken from inside faucets, broken fluorescent light bulbs and fan blades. Some are more elaborate. "These folks are MacGyvers," Harris said.

Other cells pass messages from leaders in one camp to followers in others. How? Detainees use the envelopes sent to them by their attorneys to pass messages. (Some 1,000 lawyers represent 440 prisoners, all on a pro bono basis, with more than 18,500 letters in and out of Gitmo in the past year.) Guards are not allowed to look inside these envelopes because of "attorney-client privilege" - even if they know the document inside is an Arabic-language note written by a prisoner to another prisoner and not a letter to or from a lawyer.

That's right: Accidentally or not, American lawyers are helping al Qaeda prisoners continue to plot.

There is little doubt what this note-passing and weapons-making is used for. The military recorded 3,232 incidents of detainee misconduct from July 2005 to August 2006 - an average of more than eight incidents per day. Some are nonviolent, but the tally includes coordinated attacks involving everything from throwing bodily fluids on guards (432 times) to 90 stabbings with homemade knives.

One detainee slashed a doctor who was trying to save his life; the doctors wear body armor to treat their patients.

The kinder we are to terrorists, the harsher we are to their potential victims.

Striking the balance between these two goods (humane treatment, foreknowledge of deadly attacks) is difficult, but the Bush administration seems to lean too far in the direction of the detainees. No expense spared for al Qaeda health care: Some 5,000 dental operations (including teeth cleanings) and 5,000 vaccinations on a total of 550 detainees have been performed since 2002 - all at taxpayer expense. Eyeglasses? 174 pairs handed out. Twenty two detainees have taxpayer-paid prosthetic limbs. And so on.

What if a detainee confesses a weakness (like fear of the dark) to a doctor that might be useful to interrogators, I asked the doctor in charge, would he share that information with them? "My job is not to make interrogations more efficient," he said firmly. He cited doctor-patient privacy. (He also asked that his name not be printed, citing the potential for al Qaeda retaliation.)

Food is strictly halal and averages 4,200 calories per day. (The guards eat the same chow as the detainees, unless they venture to one of the on-base fast-food joints.) Most prisoners have gained weight.

Much has been written about the elaborate and unprecedented appeal process. Detainees have their cases reviewed once a year and get rights roughly equivalent to criminals held in domestic prisons. I asked a military legal adviser: In what previous war were captured enemy combatants eligible for review before the war ended? None, he said.

America has never faced an enemy who has so ruthlessly broken all of the rules of war - yet never has an enemy been treated so well.

Of Gitmo's several camps, military records show that the one with the most lenient rules is the one with the most incidents and vice versa. There is a lesson in this: We should worry less about detainee safety and more about our own.

Some 20 current detainees have direct personal knowledge of the 9/11 attacks and nearly everyone of the current 440 say they would honored to attack America again. Let's take them at their word.


 



http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/a_deadly_kindness_opedcolumnists_richard_miniter.htm

"A U.S. senator compared Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Hitler and made fun of his name on Tuesday during a congressional hearing on the U.S. strategy to end Iran's suspected nuclear weapons program," Reuters reports from Washington:

"Ahmadinejad--I call him Ahmad-in-a-head--I think he's a Hitler type of person," Ohio Republican Sen. George Voinovich said during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing.

"He has made it clear that he wants to destroy Israel. He has made it clear he doesn't believe in the Holocaust. He's a, he's a--we all know what he is," the senator added.

Hitler comparisons are almost always unenlightening, but this may be an exception, especially coming from someone so milquetoast that he once accused John Bolton of being insufficiently diplomatic. Ahmadinejad both has advocated and is seeking the means to bring about a Nazi-scale genocide of the Jews. If a Hitler comparison isn't apposite here, we don't know where it would be.

It's curious that Holocaust denial is considered Hitlerian, since Hitler himself believed in the Holocaust enough to make it his life's work. But of course Hitler engaged in a certain amount of misdirection. Here are some soothing passages from his May 21, 1935, speech to the Reichstag:

If present-day Germany stands for peace, it is neither because of weakness nor of cowardice. . . . The blood that has been spilt on the European continent in three hundred years stand in no proportion to the results obtained. . . . Every war means a drain of the best elements. . . . What could I wish but peace and quiet? If anyone says this is only the wish of leadership, I can reply, "the people themselves have never wished for war."

Compare with Ahmadinejad's interview yesterday with NBC's Brian Williams:

Williams: The president of the United States, speaking to the United Nations today, said to the people of Iran, "The United States respects you." But he said, "Your government is using resources to fund terrorists. And pursue nuclear weapons." He said he looks forward to the day when America and Iran can be good friends. And close partners in the cause of peace. How do you react to the statement of the American president today?

Ahmadinejad: We have the same desire, to be together for the cause of world peace. But we have to--see what the impediments are. Is it Iranian forces that have occupied countries neighboring the United States, or is it American forces that are occupying countries neighboring Iran? If Mr. Bush is saying that he can [unintelligible] the distance between the Iranian nation and the Iranian government, he is wrong. I am a normal person. A very average, regular person in Iran. The nation decided that I become the head of the state. The nation and the government are one and single. And together, we share everything. But we too like to rise at a point where we can pursue the cause of world peace.

Probably the strongest argument against the Hitler comparison is that Ahmadinejad, unlike Hitler, isn't an absolute dictator. By all accounts, the real power in Iran rests not with the formal head of state but with the "supreme leader," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Though we're not sure that makes us feel all that much better.


http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110008969

Senate to consider border fence bill
Posted 9/19/2006   

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate will consider a bill calling for erecting 700 miles of fencing on the U.S-Mexican border, a proposal that has been approved twice by the House.
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., used a legislative maneuver to get the bill to the floor as early as Wednesday, when the Senate could decide whether to move forward on the legislation.

"Border security is the essential first step of any effort to enact immigration reform. Only when we have convinced the American people of our commitment to securing our borders will we be able reach a consensus on comprehensive immigration reform," Frist said in a statement.

Democrats are likely to try to block the bill. They may try to attach the comprehensive immigration bill the Senate passed in May as an amendment and push debate into next week. A delay could be a problem as Congress tries to wrestle with legislation addressing treatment of terrorism suspects.

"This smacks of desperation and a clear repudiation of President Bush's support for comprehensive immigration reform. It's obviously designed to play to the base. Sen. Frist was for comprehensive immigration reform before he was against it," said Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

House Republicans, trying to keep the illegal immigration issue before voters, passed the fence bill last week by a vote of 283-138. The House had approved the same amount of fencing last December as part of a broader bill that would have made being in the country illegally a felony. That bill is stalled.

The nearly 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexican border now has about 75 miles of fencing.

The Senate's immigration bill calls for 370 miles of triple-layer fencing along the Mexican border. The Senate approved $1.8 billion in a defense spending bill for the construction. The House has not provided funding for the fence it approved.

The House and Senate passed far different immigration bills. Republican leaders in the House have resisted compromise. Heading into elections, they chose instead to take out parts of their bill and pass them separately to keep the focus on border security, which plays well with conservative voters.

The fence bill to be considered in the Senate is HR 6061.


http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-09-19-border-security_x.htm
 

Plamegate Fadeout II. Newsweek's Thomas: Plamegate a 'Big Zero'

     On the chat show Inside Washington on PBS station WETA-TV in Washington, DC on Friday night, the spin was in: Plamegate was a massive zero. No one was more enthusiastic than Newsweek's Evan Thomas. I'm sure the reporting of his colleague Michael Isikoff has him completely persuaded. But here's what didn't come up: How much ink did Newsweek spill hyping this "zero" story up? When the show's substitute host Kathleen Matthews (wife of Chris Matthews) asked what the bottom line was on Plamegate, Thomas declared: "Nothing! Nothing! This is a big zero of a story that most of the American public has ignored, Washington has been feverishly consumed by, and it means something for Scooter Libby, who may go to jail, so it has some personal consequences, but in the great sum of American body politic, it means nothing."

     Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer added the press angle: "It tells us a lot about the press, which as long as Rove's neck was in the noose, and Libby and Cheney and the President, was extremely interested in this story, hundreds of stories on the front page, hours of it here on this show, and as soon as it doesn't appear to be that way, no interest whatsoever."

     Left-leaning Mark Shields, who worked for years with Robert Novak on CNN's "Capital Gang," declared on the show that Novak is a man of integrity and that he believes that Novak is telling the truth in his column that Richard Armitage deceived people by never admitting he was the leaker, and then claiming that he couldn't talk because of Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, even though Fitzgerald was appointed months after he must have realized he was Novak's source.

http://media.salemwebnetwork.com/TownHall/Car/b/ca0918bd.jpg

Terror Flicks
Movies do a better job covering the war than the news media do.

BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, September 15, 2006

"An event of this consequence is very hard to understand." The event former Congressman Lee Hamilton was describing earlier this week is September 11, 2001. But of course September 11 itself is not hard to understand. They came, they killed.

For many people this is sufficient understanding of 9/11. They believe the job now is simple: Resist and stop more of their killing. However, unlike the proponents of apocalyptic Islam, most normal people in time seek a degree of understanding, even of an enemy who fights by the rules of pre-civilization. Mr. Hamilton, the vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission, was commenting on ABC's now-controversial movie, "The Path to 9/11." The hard-to-understand path to which Mr. Hamilton alluded is obviously not a single event but the origins and organization of the Islamic terrorist movement that began years back and besets the U.S. and the world today.

One can only agree with Mr. Hamilton. The war on terror is more complex, nuanced and indeed more interesting than the general public has been given to believe.

For instance, one oft-cited benchmark of its progress is the status of Osama bin Laden. That he is presumably still alive and at large is taken to mean that President Bush's offensive against the post-9/11 terrorists has "failed," as John Kerry noted this week on the eve of September 11. The Bush administration, Mr. Kerry told CNN, "failed to capture and kill Osama bin Laden when they had him in the mountains of Tora Bora. And that's why we are more threatened today with an al Qaeda that has reconstituted itself in some 65 countries."

This is the Alien vs. Predator model of fighting terror. Bin Laden himself has picked up on the tendency of our political culture to reduce complexity to melodrama. For 9/11, al Qaeda released a propaganda documentary on al-Jazeera this week, depicting masked men training, while Bin Laden walks among them. The New York Times described bin Laden in the 9/11 tape as "looking almost regal."

As to the war in Iraq, daily readers of first-line Internet news services such as Yahoo News know that this event has been reduced simply to body-count headlines. Yahoo News's homepage at mid-day Wednesday: "Bombings, mortar attacks kill 39 in Iraq."

If this is the available public context, then serious people have to assemble an understanding of terror as best they can. It isn't easy. In his comment on the ABC movie, Lee Hamilton said that "news and entertainment are getting dangerously intertwined." But given the alternative, it makes sense to me if people seek a better sense of the obsessions and compulsions inside Islamic terrorism in movies such as "United 93" or ABC's remarkable "The Path to 9/11."
The narcissistic whining of the Clinton coterie over how they're reflected in "The Path to 9/11" was an irrelevant diversion from its real value. The word "Clinton" isn't heard in the film's first 90 minutes, which recreates with startling realism the thunderous basement bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, an explosion stunning to many of us seated at our desks at the Journal's offices across the street that day.

Screenwriter Cyrus Nowrasteh and director David L. Cunningham deserve thanks not obloquy for trying to give us a palpable feel for the terrorist's terrain--Pakistan, Afghanistan, Brooklyn--the world of Ramzi Yousef, the 1993 bomber, and his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or "KSM," identified in the 9/11 Commission Report as the main architect of September 11 and some 3,000 deaths.

KSM is one of the 14 al Qaeda captives whom President Bush revealed last week had been transferred from secret CIA prisons to Guantanamo to await trial. Congress, in the wake of the Hamdan decision, is now arguing over which panoply of legal rights given to accused U.S. soldiers at court martial will be extended to these prisoners if tried by a military commission.

Read through the 14 Guantanamo detainee biographies posted on the White House Web site, and one gets a rare feel for the events that distinguish the lives of these individuals from the daily goals of everyone else in the world--lives simply dedicated to the mass murder of innocents, and not just in lower Manhattan. Indeed, the narrator of Bin Laden's 9/11 tape conveys their milieu: "Planning for September 11 did not take place behind computer monitors or radar screens . . . but was surrounded with divine protection in an atmosphere brimming with brotherliness . . . and love for sacrificing life."

Here are some of the brothers, now at Guantanamo:

• Hambali. Indonesian. Learned radical Islam in Malaysia. Co-planned Bali resort bombing (200 killed); financed Jakarta Marriott bombing; tried to assassinate Philippine ambassador; involved in bombing 30 Indonesian churches on Christmas eve.

• Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani. Tanzanian-born forger. Complicit in 1998 East Africa embassy bombings (well-depicted in "The Path to 9/11"). He was also Osama's cook.

• Mohammed Nazir Bin Lep, a k a Lillie. Architecture degree, Polytechnic University Malaysia; later studied bombmaking with Dr. Azahari bin Husin (deceased). Hoped to achieve martyrdom in post-9/11 attack on Los Angeles.

• Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Planned 2002 bombing of USS Cole. Involved in planned attacks in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Qatar, the Strait of Hormuz, the Strait of Gibraltar and Port of Dubai.

Read all 14 of these histories devoted to "sacrificing life" to put in context the denunciations of warrantless wiretaps and the Swift financial monitoring program.

These and the others await the divine protections of American law that Senators Warner and Graham wish to give them. Republicans are also arguing among themselves over the degree of access to classified intelligence this group should receive at trial. Democrats, other than saying they'll support the more liberal version, are contributing almost nothing to the new system. If a Democrat wins the White House in 2008, we may assume she or he will receive, as payback, a similar level of limp support from the GOP in the same war on terror.

Say this for the Guantanamo 14: They have unity of purpose. Long term, our disunity could prove to be a big advantage to them.



http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/dhenninger/?id=110008949