Israel's Foreign Minister visits Brooklyn Heights, and suddenly synagogues are awash with swastikas and other Jew-baiting and anti-Israel (not that there's anything wrong with that!) slogans.

In response, churches, mosques and synagogues have shown some inter-faith solidarity in the form of this Monotheism-or-Bust banner:

It good to see a community that's lately been the sight of a happy reverse exodus of Manhattan Jewry -- including yours truly -- come together in this way. But hasn't anyone told the multi-denominational clerisy of Cranberry Street that anti-Semitism is just an outmoded Edward Gorey sketch in the collective imagination of Marty Peretz, Jeff Goldberg, Richard Perle, Ron Rosenbaum, etc. etc.?

Joe Klein thinks Obama's coy way the "get her!" nature of these Democratic debates is a sign of his political viability. Only the desperate get nasty. (Is that why front-runner George W. Bush unleashed hell on John McCain in 2000?)

But Klein sees Obama's no-bullshit rhetoric as a large part of his appeal to voters: 

But then, Obama's low-key campaign has been confusing to the press, and perhaps to the public, from the start. A few days before the debate, I spent a day with Obama in Iowa, and the most striking thing to me about the Senator's performances was the scrupulous honesty of his answers, his insistence on delivering bad news when necessary. A woman asked if he believed that stay-at-home moms should be eligible for Social Security. There is a way most politicians answer such questions: a moving tribute to the virtues of child-rearing, then on to the next question without ever making the commitment. Obama did the moving tribute — with a joke about his ineptitude as a parent — but then he told the woman no. "We can't extend those benefits without huge financial implications," he said.

And as for Hillary's wound-licking from a few nights ago...

In the climate of our postmodern culture, few things are less "post" than defending science and rationality against superstition and wooly thinking. With most engaged in the hysterical bid to adopt the correctly "nuanced perspective" and a "wide reaching respect for difference" combined with an "open mind" that is "resistant to totalizing," it seems as if today one needn't look far to find the next public conversation where cognitive dissonance is celebrated and clear thinking is dismissed as "arrogance." Last night's King's College-sponsored debate between Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D'Souza at the Center For Ethical Culture was only another such event.

Debate roundups for these scenarios can be every bit as useless as the book reviews of Hitchens and D'Souza's respective diatribes against and in favor of religion. Both debaters make their cases about as well as they can be made. Whether you prefer the acerbic anti-theistic style of one or the pulpit punditry of the other is a matter of taste. Whether you think one was more right than another, however, depends on your basic understanding of rational argumentation and the scientific method as well as the limitations of both.

What's most interesting in this regard is not D'Souza, who essentially regurgitates theistic errors and rhetorical sidesteps, but those in the audience who applauded his points. But this isn't to say they were all idiots. D'Souza himself is a well-spoken fellow, with a decent enough command of the history of science and the ins-and-outs of certain philosophical problems. It is precisely what he upheld in spite of intelligence and knowledge that becomes the most intriguing/disturbing. D'Souza knew the speed of light off the top of his head (easy enough, but still uncommon), he knew the legacy of seminal geneticists, and a few basics about Einstein (even if he tried underhandedly to pass him off as a theist). The majority of the great scientific minds throughout history, he said, were religious, therefore science is proof of religion's truth. He had the auditorium's Christians alight with the notion that their camp had been responsible for the majority of scientific accomplishment throughout history. But for the things he did know, did he not know that the majority of minds throughout history have been religious due in no small part to the threat of death for proclaiming any other worldview--a threat that has been with most humans for most of their years on this planet?

D'Souza's compartmentalized his thinking and is thus so unaware of what it feels like to stand on solid argumentative ground, he couldn't possibly be aware how much he's leap-frogging. What do I mean by leap-frogging? One example: in his opening statements, he proposed to prove the value of religion on the basis of evidence with no recourse to superstition. For the remainder of the discussion, he proceeded to remind everyone that certainty was problematic, thus negating the atheist's adherence to evidential argument. Furthermore, he consistently reproached Hitchens for not presenting evidence, meanwhile failing to live up to his initial promise. Instead, he reiterated the impossibility of evidence-based certainty. Whatever lily-pad will keep you from sinking, I guess...

But Hitchens could have done more to educate the folks who were getting off on his opponent's bullshit (and I mean that in the most Harry G. Frankfurt sense of the word). Not once did he remind Dinesh that atheism is not a firm belief but rather a stance with regard to knowledge. In fact, D'Souza actually made this point himself accidentally when he reminded us that in absence of evidence of unicorns he feels no need to speak out for their non-existence but simply lives as if there are none. I'd have like to have heard Hitchens remind him that a) the belief in absurdity is offensive on its own b) that if part of the unicorn myth involved the sanctioning of murder in the name of one's unicorn tribe, it would become necessary to fervently attack the belief in unicorns and that c) if Dinesh understands this principle with regard to unicorns, his willingness to suspend it for the Christian God proves his hypocritical selectivity and disqualifies him as one worth paying any attention to when he speaks about the universe and the human mind operating according to a rational set of laws.

But to Hitchens: why not school people in precisely how the human mind does work at this point in the argument? It certainly does obey laws--laws so material that the notions of subjectivity and consciousness on which the theist's argument rest get blown to smithereens. If a human subject with a "mind" who makes ethical decisions that transfer to his or her immortal soul suffers a brain injury impairing his or her interpretive systems, ability to read human emotions (key to the brain response we know as 'compassion') then what's happened to the soul? If I can remove the part of a person's brain that enables ethical judgment, have I not surgically removed their moral soul? This connection between what the religious call the soul and what is known about material brain functionality severely undermines the theist's notion of the "I" that makes choices that bear on "my" eternal soul. If I'm a neuroscientist, I can plug your immortal soul into a machine and map it's electricity.

Descartes believed that somewhere in the brain there was a driver's seat for the soul--the site where "you" make the decision to act, whether morally or immorally. But the "I" that so many take for granted is known to be nothing more than the brain's interpretation of its own complex functioning. Multiple things occur in the brain that the "I" isn't aware of and couldn't control no matter how hard it tried. The notion of heaven, this place where all the "I"s will someday go because of things they did or didn't do, is not commensurate with what is known about the brain. The human "I" in other words is little more than the transcendentalizing of an evolved brain phenomenon. If one accepts evolution, as D'Souza does, then one must also accept that these brains once had no ability to conceive of themselves in this way, much less to glorify it so. And so grows a new problem for the theist--not the atheist--to explain, one that isn't unlike the ensoulment debate regarding abortion. Whence did the soul of the "I" come into being in terms of human evolution? And how can something be transcendent if it can be surgically removed?

Many have charged the new atheists of wearing out an old argument and passing off as if its new. But these questions are completely current. Francis Crick proclaimed the brain to be the great frontier of the 21st century and it has only been with the advent of computers in the last 20-30 years that the intensive acceleration in learning has taken place. Hitchens, Dennett, Harris, and Dawkins are not beating dead horses by the name of Russell or Nietzsche. They are pushing back the post-everything world's increasing tendency to accept bullshit. And their rebuttals to this trend stand on foundations that aren't hundreds or thousands but mere tens of years old. Hitchens could have been a bit more forward with some of this information. D'Souza could stand to be a bit more aware of it. But hey, the best bullshitters are the ones who believe their own bullshit.

People can throw around things like "nuance," "respect for difference," "open mindedness," and "resistance to totalizing schemes" all they like. To be sure, each quality is desirable. But what's undesirable is when these catchphrases are taken as gospel by smart people and turned into smokescreens for scientific illiteracy. This is precisely where the collusion of the faithful and the post-modernists takes place--it's an alliance soldered together by these kinds of platitudes that make an enemy out of evidence, should evidence possibly create some friction. It would even appear to arise from a need, common to both the post-modernists and the faithful, to be just a little more clever than science. A little more current. A little more du jour. The Christians want to be so far ahead of their time they're always extending the timelines. Death? Nah, they're ahead of the game. End of Earth? Ahead. End of the universe? So five minutes ago. They're livin' forever.

But really, the most difficult thing to swallow is these are mostly smart people. To quote Frankfurt, this is the essence of bullshit--the bullshitter "does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are." Plenty of that going around courtesy of King's College last night in New York City.

[Watch the Hitchens/D'Souza debate here.]

For some time now, I have been a member-in-good-standing of the Facebook group: "Che Guevara is a PENDEJO." Here is the group's description:

For anyone out there
who's sick of seeing Che Guevara shirts being worn by idealistic
college students and/or simply hates Che Guevara or any other
communists for that matter.

We also invite anyone who's sick of hearing "naw man, you got it all wrong, Castro was an asshole but Che had the right idea."

If
you're slightly amused by the irony of a Marxist t-shirt being sold and
worn in a capitalist system, feel free to join as well.

I was immediately reminded of my association in this august body upon reading Robert Scheer's latest in The Nation (which has a thing for Cuban commies), offering a critical appraisal of Guevara's ideology (apparently it was more sophisticated than "Murdering the bourgeosie," as I had always assumed it to be) and explaining how his CIA-orchestrated assassination has actually proven fortuitous for the left because it turned him into a martyr for the new generation of Latin American leftist leaders to extol. This sentence is emblematic:

Che was restless in post-revolutionary Cuba because his anarchist temperament caused him to bristle at the emerging bureaucracy.

You gotta hand it to Scheer: "Restless" is a pretty good euphemism for "killing people with whom you disagree." Even better is Scheer's whitewashing Guevara's capricious violence as some sort of response to the ineffectiveness of the new Cuban revolutionary government's "emerging bureaucracy." Che's actually a do-it-yourself anti-statist conservative!

One can excuse certain elements of the Left's embrace of totalitarian murderers like Che Guevara because these sorts of folks have always had a hard time coming to grips with thugs preaching a "progressive" ethos. Bashing the Left for loving Che is nothing new. But more troubling among the apologists for Guevara (and the Cuban revolution, more generally) is the lack of acknowledgment of what the Cuban Communists did to homosexuals--that other, oppressed minority which supposedly owes its salvation to the Left, along with the "working classes."

In 1960, just a year after coming to power, Guevara's glorious revolution established forced labor camps (actual gulags, not the fake one of Amnesty International's imagination) for any and all assortment of undesirables. This is how Alvaro Vargas Losa tells it (his article is entitled, by the way, "The Killing Machine," which confirms Scheer's impression that Guevara was indeed just "restless" with the ineffectiveness of the Cuban government's ability to violently suppress dissent):

This camp was the precursor to the eventual systematic confinement,
starting in 1965 in the province of Camagüey, of dissidents,
homosexuals, AIDS victims, Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Afro-Cuban
priests, and other such scum, under the banner of Unidades Militares de
Ayuda a la Producción, or Military Units to Help Production. Herded
into buses and trucks, the “unfit” would be transported at gunpoint
into concentration camps organized on the Guanahacabibes mold. Some
would never return; others would be raped, beaten, or mutilated; and
most would be traumatized for life, as Néstor Almendros’s wrenching
documentary Improper Conduct showed the world a couple of decades ago.

The Communist Cuban regime's treatment of homosexuals was most famously recounted in Reinaldo Arenas's Before Night Falls, the film version of which cast Johnny Depp as a transvestite who smuggled Arenas's prison diaries off the island via his amazingly stretchable...well, you get the picture.

Scheer offers a few drips and drabs of qualified criticism about Che's legacy.
"Fortunately," he writes, Latin America's new crop of leftist thugs "differ from Che in preferring the ballot to the gun," (just wait until Hugo Chavez loses an election). But you know the left is lost when it is still able to glorify and explain away the crimes of a murderer of homosexuals.

Pro-Gay Marriage: San Diego Mayor Jerry SandersI always suspected that the folks over at National Review were heartless and lacked a shred of human feeling, and now I have former Bush administration speechwriter Joshua Trevino to confirm it for me. Writing about conservative Republican San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders's tearful announcement of his support for gay marriage last month, Trevino admits, "It was a moving sight for anyone with a heart and a shred of human feeling." The reason for the Mayor's change of heart, according to Trevino, is "his daughter’s homosexuality."

Bemoaning those who have heaped plaudits upon Sanders for his courage, Trevino offers this total non sequitur:

Courage typically signifies the hewing to core principles in the face of adversity, not their abandonment in the face of personal vicissitude. In the 1988 presidential campaign, the second debate between George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis was marked by the infamous query from moderator Bernard Shaw: “Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?” Dukakis sealed his electoral fate by sticking to his guns on the issue, reminding Shaw, “I think you know that I've opposed the death penalty during all of my life.” One imagines Jerry Sanders in that position, announcing that perhaps, with a family member involved, he is not so opposed to the death penalty after all. The Mayor of San Diego has therefore achieved something truly remarkable, in making us sentimental for the political courage of Michael Dukakis.

Say what you will about Michael Dukakis' debate performance (and I never thought I'd be defending The Duke); it sure took courage for him to stick to his guns and maintain his principled opposition to the death penalty in response to a question so clearly intended to elicit a flip-flop. Of course, there's no way to know if Dukakis would actually maintain his opposition if his wife ever were to be raped and murdered, but that's beside the point. Dukakis didn't give the easy answer the pundits expected him to give. In turn, he came off looking cold and politically stupid, but sometimes there are more important thing in the world than giving focus group answers to focus group questions.

What isn't beside the point is Trevino's assertion that Sanders' newfound support for gay marriage rests entirely upon the fact that the Mayor's daughter is gay, that it's all due to the understandable "parental impetus" of "protecting his daughter." I never thought I'd see the day when a true-blue conservative claims that these familial instincts represent a negative force on politics, but then again, gays are being bashed so all bets are off.

The case for gay marriage is, without question, for those of us who are gay or have family members or friends who are gay, personal. But it is no more personal than the cause of black civil rights was to black people (or their friends and relatives) in the 1960's.

It must be a shared principal of any liberal politics that we're all in this together--irrespective of our immutable traits. Trevino's inability to recognize homosexuals as homosexuals--in his ridiculous assertion that "Sanders' lesbian daughter has the same marital rights now as does his other, heterosexual daughter"--indicates that he's incapable of even empathizing with gays, never mind capable of seeing why they're deserving of equal citizenship. Of this assertion, a friend writes: "Fine, but would you want to be married to a lesbian? Another way to put it: Are former Bush speechwriters really that desperate for a date?" Apparently they are.

The Onion cuts through the election bullshit and discovers more.

In his piece on the Crossroads series by PBS, Gary Kamiya of Salon made the observation that when it comes to reform within Islam, someone whose “views are actually representative” is the best candidate to speak about the subject. Presumably this means that Ayaan Hirsi Ali is out, since she’s atheist and works for American Enterprise Institute; Irshad Manji is out since she’s -- as he called her -- “eccentric” not to mention a lesbian; and someone like Tariq Ramadan is in because a lot of Muslims consider him somewhere near the mainstream and he has a well-kept Muslim beard.

I would like to offer the observation that conceptualizing Islamic Reform in terms of which personality has, or can have, the most influence is a flawed way of evaluating how change in Muslim societies takes place. Over the last year, while working closely with Muslim activists in various countries, I have learned that wherever in the Muslim world positive change occurs, it is not from the influence of a “personality.” Rather, it is a legislative, judicial or regulatory act, brought about – and this is something we Americans can appreciate – by pressure from the people. In other words, the way we in the West conceptualize “Islamic Reform” is upside down.

Where the Muslim world changes, it occurs because its citizenry, galvanized by every day activists and politicians trying to make a name for themselves, wants it changed, not because a personality with appeal (and in the West at that) tells Muslims to change. To be even more blunt: Muslim public opinion shapes clerical opinion, shapes the opinion of legislators, shapes the course of the change itself. When we in the West casually accept that the only way for successful change in the Muslim world is through a through a powerful religious “personality” – a Luther – we simply reinforce the same anachronistic tropes we have always held about Muslims: they are slaves to their imams.

Nothing could be further from the truth. First of all, in most parts of the Muslim world, imams are the laughingstock. Second, reform is actually taking place in the Muslim world and “personalities” are simply not driving the change. Recognizing this might help explain why a majority of Americans never hear about the “successes” of Tariq Ramadan, Irshad Manji, or Ayaan Hirsi Ali. And We won’t. Ever. Cult of personality is not the answer, and we have to ask why we are such slaves to it.

My hypothesis is that we link Islamic reform to a personality instead of to a set of structural, legal and regulatory changes, for one simple reason: Bin Laden.

In 2001, he came on the scene, sitting in a cave, a total rebel. He talked not about Afghanistan versus the US but of Islam versus Satan. He was not bound by any norms applicable to anyone else. This was because he was a member of a state – the Taliban -- that didn’t exist. As such, he was one of the “dead” people of the world: a stateless man. Normally, becoming stateless is a great tragedy. But for Bin Laden, it added to his mystique. It allowed him to appear as if he was bigger than the rest of us, because he was beyond the rest of us, freer than the rest of us. When we couldn’t catch him, we figured we’d just contain him.

How? We imagined that if we could just get an anti Bin Laden, who could convince Muslims of everything that was opposite of what Bin Laden preached, we’d be straight. First we thought it would be Irshad Manji – the NYTimes called her “Bin Laden’s worst nightmare,” remember? Then we thought it was Ramadan, because he could sweet-talk Muslims. These days we think its Hirsi Ali, because she talks down to Muslims. Tomorrow we’ll think the anti-Bin Laden is someone else entirely. We keep running through our list of personalities trying all sorts of different combinations.

Yet, the fact is, the opposite of Bin Laden is not a person; it is an idea. That idea is called Islamic reform. And Islamic reform is not magic dust sitting somewhere in some heretofore undiscovered individual’s pocket, nor is it the act of rewriting a new Quran or coming up with dreamy visions of Islamic theology in which angels are androgynous and God is cupid. Islamic reform is a set of structural, political, and legal changes that occur within each individual Muslim majority nation-state; changes that will be brought about through political parties and other collectives of Muslims.

In short, if you want Muslim reformers, start looking for post-Islamist groups and political parties; Muslims who have figured out how to break the stranglehold of Islamist political theory upon Islam, and who want to work within the nation-state as opposed to outside of it.

Church and State separationist: Michael WeinsteinAs so often is the case, a Reagan Republican comes to the defense of secularism where the bipartisan pious fear to tread. Meet Michael "Mikey" Weinstein , founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a watchdog group that uncovers cases of proselytization and confessional bullying within the ranks of the armed forces.

For Weinstein -- a former Air Force judge advocate and assistant counsel in the Reagan White House -- more is involved than isolated cases of discrimination. He charges that several incidents in recent years -- and more than 5,000 complaints his group has received from active-duty and retired military personnel -- point to a growing willingness inside the military to support a particular brand of Christianity and to permit improper evangelizing in the ranks. More than 95 percent of those complaints come from other Christians, he says.

[...]

For example, he says, Lt. Gen. William Boykin, who gave speeches at churches while in uniform that disparaged Islam and defined the war on terror in fundamentalist, "end times" terms, was not fired but promoted. (Speaking of a Muslim warlord he had pursued, Lt. Gen. Boykin said, "I knew my God was a real God and his was an idol." And our enemies "will only be defeated if we come against them in the name of Jesus.")

MRFF website here.

Look, I don't care what Sully thinks; Ron Paul is the greatest missed opportunity of the Taft administration. He's fun to watch precisely because he's unelectable, he knows it, and he's the kind of doctor whose waiting room magazines are enough to make you turn your head and cough.

Still, the Jewish Establishment/Israel Lobby/Council of Elders should know better than to pull shit like this:

The Republican Jewish Coalition did not invite presidential candidate U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) to its candidates' forum.

Sources close to the RJC leadership cited two reasons for not extending an invitation to Paul for the Oct. 16 forum to take place in Washington: There was time only for leading candidates; and Paul's record of consistently voting against assistance to Israel and his criticisms of the pro-Israel lobby.

The Democratic Jewish Coalition told him his invite got lost in the mail.

Shouldn't the elected isolationists be getting the most attention from those worried about a nuclear Iran, Islamist crazies in Gaza, and the proliferation of non-Kosher Israeli wine?

I just had a vision of a crestfallen Bernie Sanders eating a buttered bagel alone. Outside. In the rain.

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 11:56 AM
i think im voting for hillary. the more the other dems pick on her, the more i want her to win

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 11:57 AM
my landlord -- who literally watches CNN from 7 AM to 11 PM every day -- thinks she's going to win. and i assume anyone who watches that much CNN probably has a good handle on the election

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 11:57 AM
i do too. it'll be hillary v giuliani and giuliani is just too dim on the stump. he doesn't play in peoria.

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 11:58 AM
yeah. also, he's terrifying. you think it'll come down to New York vs New York?

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 11:58 AM
yup. subway series!

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 11:58 AM
because hillary doesn't necessarily play in peoria either

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 11:58 AM
yes she does. i mean, not to the far right, who will always hate her. but her biggest base in ny is upstate farmers. she's very, very shrewd. actually pretty conservative, which can't help but come across, even as she's attacked by both parties for essentially the same behavior.

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 11:59 AM
well, but those farmers have had her as senator for a while

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 11:59 AM
which is why she's still a hawk on foreign policy

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 11:59 AM
yeah, she really is

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 11:59 AM
yeah but in that time she's learned to speak their language. she's nestled up to the status quo as much as she can without actually turning republican. i still think - despite the anti-hillary sentiment - that people will vote for her wanting her husband back

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 12:00 PM
right. but do you think that given the choice between a thrice-married Republican and a Clinton Democrat, conservative rural types will vote for the Democrat?

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 12:00 PM
and he will be back if she gets elected.

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 12:00 PM
yeah, he totally will

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 12:01 PM
well, it depends on the segment of conservative rural types. if thomas frank's "what's the matter with kansas" argument has any legs, then hillarycare, etc. should play well in the sticks. giuliani isn't reagan the way thompson also isn't but wants to be. rudy will have a tougher time convincing the cultural conservatives that he's not too new york, a john lindsay with a testosterone surfeit. whereas hillary's never suffered from island-itis. her unspoken appeal to moderates in the heartland is her metro-phoneyness. if she can fool yankees fans into voting for her, anything's possible.

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 12:01 PM
that's true

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 12:01 PM
so really it'll come down to one of the most hawkish senators following 9/11, and the guy who ran the country on 9/11. rudy has more cachet as a muscular leader, no question. but that's not all he needs. and hillary's not willowy enough to make it all he needs

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 12:02 PM
yeah, she's tough enough to give him a run for his money

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 12:03 PM
also, it'll be one of the most entertaining administrations.... all the corruption, double-dealing, memory lapses before senate subcommittees. vince foster flitting through the west wing like banquo's ghost. i can't wait.

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 12:03 PM
hee. yeah, it'll be good. also fun to have a lady president. i'm excited for four years of gender commentary -- "what does it mean that the President wore a mauve pantsuit to the peace talks?" that kind of thing. i'm also just excited to see what happens to Colbert and the Daily Show

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 12:04 PM
my mom hates her which is funny because she reminds me of my mom (with anger management classes under her belt)... i think he jumped the shark with that, to be honest

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 12:04 PM
yeah, it's sort of a dumb stunt. but what i'm wondering is how their audiences will deal with them satirizing a Democrat

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 12:04 PM
let's see: robin williams makes a box office bomb about a colbert-type late night news satirist running for president. colbert decides to put williams' dead script to work for himself...hmm.

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 12:04 PM
ha ha

Benazir Bhutto may have been an incompetent and corrupt prime minister, but her ill-greeted return to Pakistan leaves me wondering if incompetence and corruption is a small price to pay for combating terrorism.

It should be remembered that the Taliban was given succor and military safeguarding under the Bhutto administration of the mid-90's, under the presumption that a totalitarian Islamist state was better than sheer anarchy.

However, Bhutto's time in exile has not been misspent. She's now both clear and firm in her opposition to Al Qaeda. She's managed to pull off what the U.S. Defense Department had hoped Ahmad Chalabi could do in Iraq and cultivate a massive electoral base from outside her own country. And as a Western-educated woman of great beauty and charm, her place at the head of a Muslim state would surely send a signal to the Bin Ladenists that their former patron regime is now unambiguously ranged against them. Bhutto is quite right to say that the ISI can never really fight Al Qaeda while it is still infiltrated by Al Qaeda sympathizers and rogue generals like Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, the man responsible for her father's murder.

Ms. Bhutto earlier said in the interview atop the truck that she was concerned about her security and that she had told General Musharraf that she suspected people in his administration and the security forces of supporting the militants and terrorism.

“This is not the same Pakistan it was in 1996 when my government was overthrown,” she said. “The militants have risen in power. But I know who these people are, I know the forces behind them, and I have written to General Musharraf about this. And I’ve told him there are certain people I suspect in the administration and security.

“Unless there is some thought given to that, this is what emboldens the militants,” she said. “They’ve got some covert support from sympathizers within the system.”

I have to thank the good people of Alfred A. Knopf for my biggest surprise chuckle in recent memory. I was walking into my local Barnes & Noble yesterday when something leaped out at me from the new non-fiction table. It was a handsome hardcover book whose title and author combo stopped me in my tracks: Giving, by Bill Clinton. After composing myself, I spent the next hour or so coming up with additional titles in what I envisioned as a series of books pitched by some guerilla ironist working under cover in the offices of Knopf: Acting, by Keanu Reeves; Davening, by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; Bending, by George W. Bush; Abstaining, by Keith Richards; Hiding, by Oprah Winfrey; Swinging, by Al Gore . . . You get the idea. Coming up with them is almost too addicting. But the list of titles wouldn’t be complete without Believing, by Hillary Clinton. For it was yesterday that I also first heard of Senator Clinton’s unofficial appointment of Sandy Berger (Disclosing) as a campaign advisor. This tawdry development is evidence of the Senator’s immunity to conviction.

Berger, Bill Clinton’s national security advisor, was found guilty of stealing and destroying classified terror-related documents from the National archives. The case has never been treated with the seriousness it demands. Berger destroyed the documents specifically to keep them from the eyes of the 911/Commision – a body charged with reviewing all materials relevant to the September 11 attacks and making recommendations on the defense against such attacks in the future. The destroyed documents presumably painted the Clinton administration in an unflattering light. The most troubling aspect about the insouciance with which the Berger case was handled is that it never allowed for a proper inquest which may have told us something about Bill Clinton’s culpability or consent in the destruction of classified terror-related material. One assumes that Clinton and Berger at least spoke about what Berger was supposed to do when looking though the National Archives. I can’t imagine I’m alone in wanting to know more about the nature of such a conversation.

Continue reading...

Today The Jerusalem Post reports that Israeli authorities have started to talk about the September 6 IAF attack on targets in northern Syrian. Up until now Israeli officials had been uncharacteristically mum on the incident, leaving everyone to speculate on the nature and intent of the operation. The Jerusalem Post's round-up:

The Washington Post reported that the target had been a facility involved in a joint Syrian-North Korean nuclear project - a claim backed by former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton.

Britain's Sunday Times, meanwhile, reported just over a week ago that soldiers from the IDF's elite General Staff Reconnaissance Unit (Sayeret Matkal) had seized North Korean nuclear material from a secret Syrian military installation before it was bombed by IAF jets.

The paper claimed that the IAF attack on September 6 was sanctioned by the US after the Americans were given proof that the material was indeed nuclear-related. It also stated that Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who used to head the unit, personally oversaw the operation.

Someone who claims to have access to Binyamin Netanyahu told me that the strike was essentially a test of Iranian surveillance capability - to see what Iran could catch and how soon. Sounds far fetched, but who knows?

I was shocked from the start that this story wasn't a much bigger deal. It would seem to me that a nuclear nexus of Iran, Syria, and North Korea pretty much defines our worst nightmare. This comes, by the way, two months after a mysterious accident in northern Syria, widely believed to be the result of chemical weapons development, killed both Syrian and Iranian engineers.

What I find most interesting about this is that Victor Davis Hanson said a long a time ago we would start to see Saudi Arabia and Turkey and others in the area give Israel the implicit okay to take out regional threats to stability. Hanson said they'd condemn Israel publicly, but not do a thing about it. I'm not sure I've even seen the public condemnation.

A man who looks like Jack Palance's lesbian sister gets to say things like this:

Putin is enormously popular. The device by which he is continuing his leadership, behind a competent but happily subordinate technician, is accepted there as good news. I suggest that we should agree with the Russian people. They are getting what they want and they want it because Putin has governed Russia for Russia and Russians, has put back self-respect in a country whose nadir reflected an American zenith.

Izzy tells me an episode of 30 Rock already had oodles of fun with this, and every pundit a year ago was gibbering away at how easy it would be for, say, Hillary to accidentally say "Osama" when she meant her charismatic Democratic rival for the White House.

Still, this is pretty funnny:

“I think that is a position which is not consistent with the fact,” Mr. Romney said. “Actually, just look at what Osam — uh — Barack Obama, said just yesterday. Barack Obama calling on radicals, jihadists of all different types, to come together in Iraq. That is the battlefield. That is the central place, he said. Come join us under one banner.”

The comment set off some confusion among the press corps. Glen Johnson of the Associated Press was momentarily frantically searching for comments made by Mr. Obama, another Democratic presidential contender, about jihadism and Iraq.

The last paragraph is almost a perfect Evelyn Waugh set-piece.

    *    *    * 

UPDATE: Found the 30 Rock clip! 

Nicholas von Hoffman will probably go to his grave still known as the journalist who predicted in 2001 a complete rout in Afghanistan -- by the Taliban. To borrow Trotsky's animadversion on Dwight Macdonald, everyone has the right to be stupid, but von Hoffman abuses the privilege.

His latest Nation column, "Whose Genocide Counts?", is more like a sub-literate raspberry directed at the congressmen of the House Foreign Affairs Committee who yesterday voted to recognize the Armenian Genocide:

What's next? A resolution condemning Napoleon's invasion of Egypt and the slaughter visited on the Egyptians at the Battle of the Pyramids? And how about a little legislative attention for the Romans killed by Hannibal at the Battle of Cannae in 216 BC. Better look into that one, too, guys.

Do you think that the House Foreign Affairs Committee might, after it has righted any number of ancient wrongs, look into what the Sam Hill is going on now? This very committee has a direct responsibility for the death of 600,000 Iraqis and the flight of some 2 million more from their homes. Does that bear a little looking into? While they are putting the genocide label on others, would the gentlemen and gentleladies of the committee consider putting some sort of label on themselves?

More interesting questions: Does France today make it a crime to acknowledge or publish works about Napoleon's invasion of Egypt? Is there a massive state-funded project underway attempting to get classicists to airbrush Hannibal's depredations from the historical record?

Since von Hoffman segues so effortlessly from Bonaparte to Baghdad, it's worth pointing out that the Left's favorite Mideast historian is Juan Cole, lately the author of Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East, which parlays the French general's 19th century adventurism into a cautionary tale about U.S. efforts in Iraq.

And what of those efforts? According to the above, the same committee that now censures the vanished Ottoman Empire bears a "direct responsibility for the death of 600,000 Iraqis and the flight of some 2 million more." If only Al Qaeda or the Mahdi Army had thundered and grumbled about the Tehcir Law, then perhaps The Nation might lay some direct responsibility at their feet!

Of course, we're now told of another dread "lobby" that has wielded its undue influence to get cynical congressmen to alienate Turkey: "Many persons of Armenian extraction live in vote-rich California," writes von Hoffman, "which explains why these politicians have flung themselves into the study of bygone events. Once again the pander bear stalks the land."

There are exactly 10 California representatives on the committee, and the resolution was passed 27-21, leaving the other 17 either big fans of System of a Down or hostages to conscience.

And consider von Hoffman's citation of Committee chairman Tom Lantos, who:

hit it on the head when he said, "We have to weigh the desire to express our solidarity with the Armenian people...against the risk that it could cause young men and women in the uniform of the United States armed services to pay an even heavier price."

Von Hoffman is concerned for the U.S. troops fighting, in an all-volunteer military, a war commissioned by the very politicos said to be directly responsible for a human catastrophe. Left to the imagination is what von Hoffman thinks of the responsibility borne by those troops he suddenly can't bear to see put in harm's way for so many dead and displaced Iraqis. But the moral logic here is as simple as it is bankrupt: Turkey might now assault our soldiers and this is all the fault of rich Armenians and incumbents! Von Hoffman could teach Bashar al-Assad's correspondence course in propaganda.

Just out of curiosity, and because a Turkish invasion of Kurdistan seems imminent, what responsibility would the rogue Kemalist military bear for killing Kurds under the pretext of hunting the PKK? What responsibility does Abdullah Gul bear for imprisoning the son of murdered journalist Hrant Drink for the crime of re-publishing his father's articles about the Armenian Genocide?

Looks like Armenian-Jewish solidarity is stronger than ever. We've both got evil, heaving lobbies in Washington responsible for all the trouble in the world.

[Note: This is the first in a four-part series on the state of the left. --ed]

I suspect it might be men in particular who have a problem about leaving behind the passions of our youth. We can't let go of our favourite bands from our teens, we still take an odd pleasure in eating the candy we enjoyed as a kid, we have ever-lasting soft spots for those early girlfriends and spend an inordinate amount of time watching and talking about games.

But when it comes to politics, surely a grown up affair, we really should be able to cast off much more easily our youthful attachments, shouldn't we? Yet, when it comes to ideology and allegiance, it is hard to throw out every little pamphlet from the wardrobe. If you were a teenage Trot, a youthful commie, or an adolescent anarchist, you have probably found yourself caught in the trap – the past six years have been hard for anyone who still identifies themselves as a lefty but maintains a commitment to the core principles that were supposed to bind all the 57 varieties of leftism. Yet you can't get let go.

I'm addressing this to the kind of readers who, perhaps with a background in Marxism, or socialism or social-democracy or serious liberalism, have found themselves shuffling away from the ANSWER-led anti-war demonstrations, raising eyebrows at people buying the latest Chomsky Self-Help Guide for Lefties, shaking their head at those who have failed to take clear sides in the conflict against Islamism and sighing when hearing those who have allowed their opposition to the Iraq war to lead them to ignoring the need for solidarity with Iraqi democrats.

I'm talking about the kind of people who found much to appreciate in Paul Berman's thoughtful and informative Terror and Liberalism or in the more strident arguments of Christopher Hitchens about the struggle against Islamism and the bankruptcy of the anti-war movement. I am talking about those of you who get labelled 'neo-con' by old comrades and aren't really sure whether to simply embrace the presumed insult or to fire back with a list of their leftist credentials.

Because the dissenting voices that have emerged on the left in the past five or six years have been fairly confident in asserting that, despite supporting 'Bush's wars', despite finding Paul Wolfowitz closer to their own views on foreign affairs than John Kerry, despite finding more to nod along to in Commentary than the magazines of the left, they are still the torch-bearers of real leftism and it is the rest of the left who have sold out.

Why do we bother? Are we just clinging to an identity from our youth and denying that old line that "If you aren't a socialist at 18 you haven't got a heart but if you are a socialist at 40 you haven't got a brain"? Are we just trying to deny that we are following the classic path of moving rightward, drifting into conservatism as we mature? Or are we actually on to something, are we really witnessing the separation of the left into two new camps – 'the anti-imperialists' who put the blame for all the world's ills at the door of western democracies and we, the 'anti-fascists' who despite our criticisms of capitalism, recognise the need to take sides against tyranny, theocracy and terror?

In the coming weeks I want to make the case for the re-affirmation of liberal left principles against the crude anti-imperialism (in hard and soft version) that has come to dominate the voice of the radical left. To argue why, despite our embarrassment at those who claim to be the authentic voice of radicalism, it is really the Eustonite, the Bermanite, the Hitchensian, left that is the true torch-carrier of our youthful idealism. I want to argue that there is, in fact, nothing 'right-wing' about opposing tyranny, terrorism and fascism and nothing 'left-wing' about making excuses for tyrants. That it is an agenda of social solidarity and liberalism that has the best chance of defeating reaction across the globe and not isolationism, thoughtless militarism or free-market evangelism. I will make the case that here is nothing in opposing injustice abroad that stops us from making the case for a liberal-left agenda at home.

In short, I will argue that not only is it still possible to be a lefty but that, rather, it is more essential than ever.

[Read part two here.]

I'm in D.C. today having a nice meet-and-greet with political bloggers, and I find myself in a Starbucks on Connecticut Avenue. Who's sitting next to me right now, you ask?

He chews up uni-ball pens by the packet, scribbling out Bush's most acclaimed speeches in longhand on a yellow legal pad. He sometimes takes days to produce a first draft. And he does some of his best writing in the nearest Starbucks, where his muse is the largest latte on the menu and the ambient noise of an espresso machine. When he was crafting Bush's inaugural address, he waited in pre-dawn darkness for the coffee shop to open at 5:30 a.m. near his home in Alexandria, Va. (The real West Wing speechwriter's office is a windowless room in the basement.)

That'd be Michael Gerson, who also wrote -- or took credit for writing -- Bush's State of the Union address following 9/11. Attentive Jewcy readers may recall an earlier post about another Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully's poisoned pen portrait of his colleague in the Atlantic:

 My most vivid memory of Mike at Starbucks is one I have labored in vain to shake. We were working on a State of the Union address in John’s office when suddenly Mike was called away for an unspecified appointment, leaving us to “keep going.” We learned only later, from a chance conversation with his secretary, where he had gone, and it was a piece of Washington self-promotion for the ages: At the precise moment when the State of the Union address was being drafted at the White House by John and me, Mike was off pretending to craft the State of the Union in longhand for the benefit of a reporter.

Have these stirrers and chocolate-covered espresso beans have heard Churchillian rhetoric in the making? It's the guy sitting next to Mike -- now a WaPo columnist and Council of Foreign Relations bigwig -- who's doing the writing. Point, Scully.

I knew something was absent from Rachel Morris' excellent exposure of the trespasses and constitutional encroachments of the Giuliani mayoralty. Now I know what it was. It was Rudy's political philosophy. John Judis at TNR goes farther back into the biography to cull this telling episode:

Of course, Giuliani made his career as a prosecutor rather than a philosopher, and there are certainly Catholic teachings he has repudiated or ignored. In 1989, wanting the New York Liberal Party's endorsement for his GOP mayoral bid, Giuliani renounced his past opposition to abortion and Roe v. Wade. But his exposure to Catholic and classical political thought clearly had a lasting impact on him. At a forum on crime in March 1994, sponsored by the New York Post, Giuliani voiced views on liberty and authority that seemed to flow from these teachings. He criticized liberals for seeing only "the oppressive side of authority." "What we don't see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be," he said. "Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do." Asked in the question period to explain what he meant, Giuliani said, "Authority protects freedom. Freedom can become anarchy." Norman Siegel, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said afterward that he was "floored" by Giuliani's definition of liberty and authority. But anyone who studied philosophy at a Catholic college would not have been surprised by Giuliani's words.

Nor would Mark Lilla be, as his well-received new book, The Stillborn God, defines American exceptionalism -- or why our democracy is so different from European or Asian democracies -- as a "post-Christian phenomenon." It was Thomas Hobbes who first sought to examine revelation from the bottom-up, asking why it is we believe what we do, rather than from the top-down, simply applying assumed revelation to the various levers of state power. Transported to these shores by persecuted Protestant fundamentalists, the bricks and mortar of the wall that separates church and state were easily assembled, ab initio.

Here is Lilla in a fascinating discussion he started at Cato Unbound:

What we seem to have forgotten is how unique the circumstances were that made possible the establishment of the American compact on religion and politics. Perhaps now is the time to restore the much needed concept of American exceptionalism and remind ourselves of some basic facts. The most important one that set our experience apart from that of Europe was the absence of a strong Roman Catholic Church as a redoubt of intellectual and political opposition to the liberal-democratic ideas hatched by the Enlightenment – and thus also, the absence of a radical, atheist Enlightenment convinced that l’infâme must be écrasé. For over two centuries France, Italy, and Spain were rent by what can only be called existential struggles over the legitimacy of Catholic political theology and the revolutionary heritage of 1789. (Though the term “liberalism” is of Spanish coinage, as a political force it was weak in the whole of Catholic Europe until after the Second World War.) Neither side in this epic struggle was remotely interested in “toleration”; they wanted victory.

For a politician like Giuliani, raised (forgive the alliteration) in a tight ethnic and ecumenical enclave, Catholic political theology is still paramount. What accounts for his vaunted liberal tendencies -- his approval of gay marriage, abortion rights, etc. -- is the head-on collision that such theology has had with another breed of exceptionalism: the New York one. The strict law-and-order mayor of the city was also one of its most cosmopolitan mayors. (The man who tried to shut down a museum over a dung-slathered Christ painting also dressed up as Marilyn Monroe.)

Glib talk of Il Duce of Gotham, then, misses the larger point about Giuliani's true character, which was, after all, once attracted to the muscular, theodicy-based liberalism of the Kennedys. The Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Cuban missile crisis, the tensest moments of the Cold War, were really fought between an American Roman Catholic dynasty and the Russian Communist clerisy.

This is why neoconservatism, although pioneered by Jewish ex-radicals, has proved so enticing to political Catholics like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Richard John Neuhaus and George Weigl. They have recognized in it the germ of a deeply Christian phenomenon -- the Manichean worldview that binds recovering City College Trotskyists and their children to Thomas Aquinas. (Not for nothing did the French philosopher-historian Raymond Aron once term Marxism a "Christian heresy.") In other words, they are the exceptions American exceptionalism.

There's no question that an international purview will only strengthen the core Catholic doctrine in Giuliani. For one thing, the Manichean rumble will now be properly situated between two open faiths, one amenable to Western democracy, and one violently opposed to it.

The popular refrain among progressive alarmists today is, "If you liked Bush, you'll love Giuliani." But this isn't quite right because Giuliani would be staggeringly competent as president, regardless of whether or not you liked the results he produced, or how he set about producing them. Indeed, the "broken windows" theory of crime prevention is, as I've been banging on about for months, the closest analog to what constitutes the counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq.

So rather it should be said that if you didn't like him as mayor, you'll downright hate Rudy as president.

The house that Hossan al-Banna built has laid down its foundation for the 21st century. Surprise, surprise, it's still in the 7th: 

"It establishes a religious state," said Abdel Moneim Said, head of the leading Al Ahram Center for Strategic and Political Studies. "It's an assassination to the civic state."

The program calls for the formation of a commission of senior religious scholars, chosen in national elections, to advise parliament and the president, according to a copy of the program obtained by The Associated Press.

The commission's position on government and parliament decisions would be the "recommended one," suggesting it could veto those decisions. The platform says parliament could overrule the board but not in issues governed by "proven texts" of Islamic Sharia law, a vague phrase that could apply to a wide range of issues.

As Daniel Henninger wrote last week in the Wall Street Journal, "The anti-Bush, anti-neocon obsession has been so constant, so often pegged to the broader Bush 'dream' for democracy and freedom, that its critics have tossed out the world's democratic babies with the Iraqi and Afghan bathwater." Roger Cohen echoed a similar theme: that anyone who favored the Iraq War, continues to believe it was the right course of action to take, and persists in the goal of democracy promotion will inevitably be slandered as a "neocon." He wrote that this sort of reasoning

...makes Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik and Kanan Makiya and Bernard Kouchner neocons, among others who don’t think like Norman Podhoretz but have more firsthand knowledge of totalitarian hell than countless slick purveyors of the neocon insult.

For an example of this bizarre type of thinking, head on over to the blog of the New American Foundation's Steve Clemons, (last seen engaging in bizarre fantasies of "Purging the Neocons from the American Soul" and praising all-around clown Joe Wilson), where Sameer Lalwani writes of the thwarted democratic uprising in Burma:

Despite the much ballyhooed cedar, rose, and orange revolutions that turned out to be far more complex power struggles rather than purely democratic revolutions, there appears to be something qualitatively different about what is happening in Myanmar right now -- a much more organic galvanization of the population -- though I think we lack sufficient information to substantiate it.

The sneer here directed towards the Lebanese, Georgians and Ukranians--who took to the streets to demand democratic reforms, many risking their lives to do so--is simply breathtaking, especially coming from someone sitting in a cubicle at a Washington, D.C. think tank. Writing these events off as "far more complex power struggles rather than purely democratic revolutions," Lalwani thinks he's undermining the nefarious neocon project of global democracy promotion when really all he's doing is casting aspersions on masses of people with far more courage than he, pegging them down from democracy activists fighting authoritarianism to the status of urban ward heelers.

He then expresses skepticism at whether or not the events in Burma last week constituted a "purely democratic revolution" because "we lack sufficient information to substantiate it." It's no doubt the case that information out of Burma has been spotty (due to the ruling junta's running the country like a giant prison cell, shutting off the country's internet access last Friday) but there has been no shortage of news confirming the reality of the situation in Burma, if Lalwani is even paying attention.
We already have reports that thousands of monks and other protesters are "missing." Over 100 monks (and potentially many more) were slaughtered, their bodies tossed into the jungle. Tens of thousands of people protested in Rangoon's streets last week with very clear and simple demands: democratic reforms, the release of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, et. al. How is this not a genuine "democratic revolution?" Because those dreaded neocons supported it?

One of the commenters conspiratorially writes:

Just to note the "Democratic Voice of Burma" is financed by the NED [the National Endowment for Democracy] - a U.S. operation like Al-Hurra. So take their accounts with some salt.

Yes, the NED, that dreaded locus of evil. In actual fact, the Democratic Voice of Burma (no scare-quotes needed), is staffed by Burmese exiles in Norway and actually gets money from George Soros. Does his mighty imprimatur negate the suspicion?

21st century revolutions are brought to you by Old Navy. Saffron belongs to Burma, Orange belongs to Ukraine. Maybe Waziristan can go for Burnt Sienna after it regurgitates bin Laden and his band of merry men. Thoughts for the morrow. But Kiev's political turmoil is, for now, at an end:

The snap election - the third national poll in three years - was called in an attempt to resolve a long-running power struggle between Mr Yushchenko and Mr Yanukovych, who favours closer ties with Moscow.

Mr Yushchenko and Ms Tymoshenko struck a last-minute deal before the poll to form a coalition in parliament, under which the president would make Ms Tymoshenko his prime minister.

You can expect that this won't go down smoothly in the Kremlin, and it may be time for Yushchenko to keep his dermatologist on retainer again. Still, it's a symbolic victory over the forces of Soviet-era autocracy.

I don't accept Jamie Kirchik's argument that in order for the left to deal with its naïve post-colonialists and their blind eye towards terrorists and fanatics we have to use the epithet “Islamofascism.” It was because this is such an unreasonable conflation of two separate issues that I didn't even bother to address the part about Islamofascism in my first reply and moved straight to the real issue: what do we, in the left, do about those who are naïve?

Fact is, there is no logical or even pragmatic relationship between using the term Islamofascism and the left cleaning its house. If you want to deal with the Massads and Spivaks, engage them, and pull at them by offering them a better narrative, not by slapping them with a term that is already politicized, already obfuscatory, already a part of the right-wing lexicon, and already divisive. I made one attempt at such an engagement with Chomsky when I wrote him an open letter. I didn’t need to shove a meaningless term down his throat.

Perhaps Jamie considers these members of the left to be of such little value that he wishes they would simply go away. I think that is a very incorrect thing for the left to engage in. I studied continental philosophy in college, read Fanon and Said by the ton, and wrote my thesis (on Nietzsche) under post-structuralist philosophers. Under Jamie's view I should be laughing with glee when militants kill Americans or fanatical patriarchs engage in honor killing or stoning. Yet that is hardly the case. I turned out to have quite a healthy antagonism and moral clarity towards Islamic militancy and fanaticism, not despite the influence of post-colonial thinkers, but because of them. They helped me see that the nature of oppression – all oppression – is not just overt, but subtle, sinister, and sometimes seductive. Their assistance in helping uncover the labyrinthine structures (and strictures) of historical patriarchy, both in the West and East, allowed me to deconstruct Islamist misogyny. It wasn’t my conservative professors who taught me that when Islamists talk about “family values” they are using it as a code word for keeping women subjugated. Quite the contrary, it was the allegedly naïve post-modernists like Derrida, Lyotard and Foucault, who exposed the history of physical and sexual discipline on the basis of authoritarian religions (by showing to me how it occurred in the Christian West).

Those on the left who want to so casually give into Dadaist terms like Islamofascism do it not out of intellectual defensibility of the term but out of convenience. If the issue is that post-colonial and post-modernist theories are producing students and activists who do represent a form of self-hate, then what we have to do is re-orient these theories, not dismiss the flock that follows them as unworthy of our time. Remember, post-modernism was not supposed to be a rejection of Enlightenment; it was a continuation of it (see, for example, Foucault’s Was ist Aufklarung or 1970's Lyotard).

That reorientation is not difficult, though it does help having the facility to offer something more than just the rote narratives – “all naïve leftists are enablers of Islamofascism!” It also requires speaking to those with whom we disagree with a modicum of respect. Jamie is willing to allot time and respect to someone who promotes such beacons of freedom as Ann Coulter and Rick Santorum (what are their views on homosexuals again?) but has no time for the other, far more valuable, project? Clearly his theoretical and verbal skills are superior to most of the rest of us, or else he would not be so accomplished at such a young age. However, in this instance his skills are misdirected.

In David Lodge’s comic novel Changing Places, a British professor from the fictitious University of Rummidge takes over an American’s post at Euphoric State—UC Berkeley, of course—and vice versa. The Brit is briefly caught up in the tumult of countercultural revolution, and there is a priceless episode in whi