CenterFeud

The lowest ratio of real to apparent integrity

Alan Dershowitz on Jimmy Carter:

If money determines political and public views as Carter insists "Jewish money" does, Carter's views on the Middle East must be deemed to have been influenced by the vast sums of Arab money he has received. If he who pays the piper calls the tune, then Carter's off-key tunes have been called by his Saudi Arabian paymasters. It pains me to say this, but I now believe that there is no person in American public life today who has a lower ratio of real to apparent integrity than Jimmy Carter. The public perception of his integrity is extraordinarily high. His real integrity, it now turns out, is extraordinarily low. He is no better than so many former American politicians who, after leaving public life, sell themselves to the highest bidder and become lobbyists for despicable causes. That is now Jimmy Carter's sad legacy.

In 1976 I voted for Jimmy Carter and saw his inauguration as a long-overdue cleansing of the Nixonian stench hanging over Washington and the country. But over the years I have come to see Carter as a failed president, albeit a moral man who worked hard for worthy causes such as his Habitat for Humanity.

More recently, I have been troubled by his tendency to focus on Israel's occupation of the West Bank as though it were the only obstacle to middle East peace, with his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid being the most egregious example. It is sad enough to think that Carter is merely so shallow as to uncritically drink the Israel-as-South-Africa kool-aid retailed the world over as thoughtful analysis, but that he is a bought-and-paid-for shill, working as a tool of the Saudis even as denounces the influence of the "Zionist lobby" on US policy-making.

Is Carter sincere? I believe that at this point he is, but in the mold of Dershowitz' example of the tobacco lobbyist, he has thoroughly convinced himself that a genocidal Hamas-led government in Palestine is less of an obstacle to peace than an Israeli polity that builds a wall to protect itself from that genocide. And that human rights abuses in the Arab world (or China, North Korea, Sudan or Iran for that matter) don't merit the condemnation that Carter seems to think is due uniquely to Israel.

The left's betrayal of liberal ideals

A must-read excerpt from UK journalist Nick Cohen's new book, What's Left: How Liberals Lost Their Way:

Why is it that apologies for a militant Islam which stands for everything the liberal left is against come from the liberal left? Why will students hear a leftish postmodern theorist defend the exploitation of women in traditional cultures but not a crusty conservative don? After the American and British wars in Bosnia and Kosovo against Slobodan Milosevic's ethnic cleansers, why were men and women of the left denying the existence of Serb concentration camps? As important, why did a European Union that daily announces its commitment to the liberal principles of human rights and international law do nothing as crimes against humanity took place just over its borders? Why is Palestine a cause for the liberal left, but not China, Sudan, Zimbabwe, the Congo or North Korea? Why, even in the case of Palestine, can't those who say they support the Palestinian cause tell you what type of Palestine they would like to see? After the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington why were you as likely to read that a sinister conspiracy of Jews controlled American or British foreign policy in a superior literary journal as in a neo-Nazi hate sheet? And why after the 7/7 attacks on London did leftish rather than right-wing newspapers run pieces excusing suicide bombers who were inspired by a psychopathic theology from the ultra-right?

In short, why is the world upside down? In the past conservatives made excuses for fascism because they mistakenly saw it as a continuation of their democratic rightwing ideas. Now, overwhelmingly and every where, liberals and leftists are far more likely than conservatives to excuse fascistic governments and movements, with the exception of their native far-right parties. As long as local racists are white, they have no difficulty in opposing them in a manner that would have been recognisable to the traditional left. But give them a foreign far-right movement that is anti-Western and they treat it as at best a distraction and at worst an ally.

Cohen grew up on the political and cultural left, which he always saw as inherently virtuous. Now, he bemoans the left's betrayal of everything it formerly stood for. Case in point, Iraq:

Journalists wondered whether the Americans were puffing up Zarqawi's role in the violence - as a foreigner he was a convenient enemy - but they couldn't deny the ferocity of the terror. Like Stalin, Pol Pot and Slobodan Milosevic, they went for the professors and technicians who could make a democratic Iraq work. They murdered Sergio Vieira de Mello, one of the United Nations's bravest officials, and his colleagues; Red Cross workers, politicians, journalists and thousands upon thousands of Iraqis who happened to be in the wrong church or Shia mosque.

How hard was it for opponents of the war to be against that? Unbelievably hard, it turned out. The anti-war movement disgraced itself not because it was against the war in Iraq, but because it could not oppose the counter-revolution once the war was over. A principled left that still had life in it and a liberalism that meant what it said might have remained ferociously critical of the American and British governments while offering support to Iraqis who wanted the freedoms they enjoyed...

The policy of not leaving Iraqis stranded was so clearly the only moral option, it never occurred to me that there could be another choice. I did have an eminent liberal specialist on foreign policy tell me that 'we're just going to have to forget about Saddam's victims', but I thought he was shooting his mouth off in the heat of the moment. From the point of view of the liberals, the only grounds they would have had to concede if they had stuck by their principles in Iraq would have been an acknowledgement that the war had a degree of legitimacy. They would still have been able to say it was catastrophically mismanaged, a provocation to al-Qaeda and all the rest of it. They would still have been able to condemn atrocities by American troops, Guantanamo Bay, and Bush's pushing of the boundaries on torture. They might usefully have linked up with like-minded Iraqis, who wanted international support to fight against the American insistence on privatisation of industries, for instance. All they would have had to accept was that the attempt to build a better Iraq was worthwhile and one to which they could and should make a positive commitment.

A small price to pay; a price all their liberal principles insisted they had a duty to pay. Or so it seemed.

Like Christopher Hitchens, Cohen has become something of an outcast for his consistency in opposing fascism and supporting human rights and self-determination, even if that ostensibly lands him in the same camp as George W. Bush and Tony Blair. He refuses to treat politics as an us-against-them team sport, instead holding the left and the anti-war movement accountable for its betrayal of what he thought were obvious principles.

Bruce Bawer's wake-up call for the West

FrontPage Magazine has an excellent and thought-provoking interview with Bruce Bawer, author of While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within. Bawer, who is gay and had previously written Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity, had moved to Amsterdam in 1998, looking forward to living in a tolerant, secular country that embraced gay rights and other liberal values. Instead, he ran headlong into far more virulent form of fundamentalism:

Bawer: In 1998 I moved from New York, where I’m from, to Amsterdam. I loved the Netherlands – its tolerance, its secularism, its heritage of freedom and learning and culture. But in early 1999, living in a largely Muslim area called the Oud West, I saw another side of the Netherlands, and of Europe, that I hadn’t seen before, or even been particularly aware of. The Oud West seemed less a neighborhood than an enclave – a piece of another society that had been dropped down into the city and that lived apart from it and its values. Just to walk from downtown Amsterdam into the Oud West was to experience a staggering contrast.

I soon came to realize that Amsterdam wasn’t unique – virtually every major city in Europe had Muslim enclaves like this one. The people outside of them were living in a democracy, but the people in them were living in a theocracy, ruled by imams and elders who preached contempt for the host society and its values. They were against secular law, against pluralism, against freedom of speech and religion, against sexual equality. Husbands believed it was their sacred right to beat and rape their wives. Parents practiced honor killings and female genital mutilation. Unemployment and crime rates were through the roof.

Most remarkable of all, nobody was saying or doing anything about any of this. European politicians took a hands-off attitude. Journalists sang the praises of multicultural society. With very few exceptions, nobody in a position of authority seemed willing to stand up for basic democratic values.

Later in the interview, Bawer examines the dark side of European multiculturalism that has resulted in the emergence of fundamentalist Islamist enclaves in virtually every country on the continent. He contrasts it with the American ideal of assimilating immigrants into the larger society:

In Norway there’s a comedienne named Shabana Rehman whose parents brought her to Norway from Pakistan when she was a baby. On her website, she writes: “I speak strikingly good Norwegian. But most native Norwegians I meet wish that it was a little broken.” I’ve seen this attitude. Americans are delighted to hear immigrants speaking English. By contrast, many Norwegians are uncomfortable when they hear a Pakistani speaking Norwegian. One thing I still find remarkable in Norway is the frequency with which people use the expression “Like barn leker best.” It’s a very common expression and it means something like “Children play best with other children who are like themselves.” I’ve heard it being said a thousand times by people who think of themselves as devout multiculturalists.

The most successful immigrant group in the history of the world is American Jews. Why? Because they integrated enthusiastically into the mainstream of American society. They rejected the ghetto and embraced American pluralism. In Europe, this same eagerness to belong, to contribute, and to thrive – and not remain segregated and ghettoized – led to the Jews’ near-extermination. It seems to me that part of the reason why anti-Semitism is so widespread in Europe while Islam is often treated with kid gloves is that the European elite has a reflexive contempt for a group that blends in and a reflexive respect for a group that holds itself proudly apart and resists assimilation. That’s a formula for disaster.

Bawer's book is a compelling and disturbing read, and a wake-up call not only for Europe, but for the entire Western world.

(Hat tip: Roger L. Simon)

Garrison Keillor n'est pas bien impressé avec M. Lévy

Garrison Keillor, no red-stater but nonetheless an enthusiastic romanticist of small-town American life, reviews the latest book by French sociologist Benard-Henri Lévy, American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville for the New York Times Book Review and finds it to be superficial and off-the-mark:

Any American with a big urge to write a book explaining France to the French should read this book first, to get a sense of the hazards involved. Bernard-Henri Lévy is a French writer with a spatter-paint prose style and the grandiosity of a college sophomore; he rambled around this country at the behest of The Atlantic Monthly and now has worked up his notes into a sort of book. It is the classic Freaks, Fatties, Fanatics & Faux Culture Excursion beloved of European journalists for the past 50 years, with stops at Las Vegas to visit a lap-dancing club and a brothel; Beverly Hills; Dealey Plaza in Dallas; Bourbon Street in New Orleans; Graceland; a gun show in Fort Worth; a "partner-swapping club" in San Francisco with a drag queen with mammoth silicone breasts; the Iowa State Fair ("a festival of American kitsch"); Sun City ("gilded apartheid for the old");a stock car race; the Mall of America; Mount Rushmore; a couple of evangelical megachurches; the Mormons of Salt Lake; some Amish; the 2004 national political conventions; Alcatraz - you get the idea. (For some reason he missed the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, the adult video awards, the grave site of Warren G. Harding and the World's Largest Ball of Twine.) You meet Sharon Stone and John Kerry and a woman who once weighed 488 pounds and an obese couple carrying rifles, but there's nobody here whom you recognize. In more than 300 pages, nobody tells a joke. Nobody does much work. Nobody sits and eats and enjoys their food. You've lived all your life in America, never attended a megachurch or a brothel, don't own guns, are non-Amish, and it dawns on you that this is a book about the French. There's no reason for it to exist in English, except as evidence that travel need not be broadening and one should be wary of books with Tocqueville in the title.

Although I have not read his book and therefore am not really qualified to comment, I had formed a similar impression of Lévy, after listening to him for five minutes being interviewed by John Stewart. He claims to be out to dispel the stereotypes of Americans for his French readers, but ends up reinforcing them at every turn. As a result, he comes off as either hypocritical or clueless about his subject, and doesn't do much to dispel American stereotypes of the French as arrogant, judgmental and elitist.

My own experience as regards France and its people is largely positive. True, I don't care for France's role on the global stage ("a moral compass has to have a butt end" as humorist P.J. O'Rourke observed), and most of us have had at least one or two experiences with snooty French waiters at one time or another, but at the grassroots level, I have had mostly positive experiences with everyday French citizens, who have hosted me in their homes and were gracious guests in mine.

I was hoping that Levy's excursion across this country would be more of an acknowledgement of that reality. And perhaps to some readers, it is just that. But it's telling that he can't even persuade Garrison Keillor to go along for the ride.

Racial profiling in the Third Age of Middle Earth

One of those amusing time-wasting quiz-thingies the Web is so famous for asks "To which race of Middle Earth do you belong?"

Apparently I'm a Numenorean.

Numenorean


To which race of Middle Earth do you belong?
brought to you by Quizilla

Not bad. This puts me in the company of Aragorn and Faramir. Oh, and Hugh Hewitt. So I guess I can't complain.

(Hat tip: Bogus Gold)

Living in the post-post-Sept 11 world

No, the title of this post is not a typo. My morning paper (the Minneapolis Star-Tribune) made it clear that we are so over 9/11 and have moved on. After all, there haven't been any other terrorist attacks on the US (gee, I wonder why?) and we no longer get apprehensive about congregating in places like the Mall of America, which at one time seemed like the obvious next logical taget after the World Trade Center. But no, thankfully that's all behind us now:

Four years ago today, communications Prof. Edward Schiappa wrote "September 11, 2001," on the chalkboard in his classroom at the University of Minnesota. He told his students they would never forget the day, which would become a watershed moment just as President Kennedy's assassination was for their parents.

Four years later, Schiappa wonders whether all the talk of a pre-9/11 and post-9/11 mentality is hype.

"It took a long time for us to evolve to where we are in terms of our mindsets," he said. "Even something as dramatic as this is not going to change that. Once you get over the emotional impact, this is new information and you adapt as humans and animals have been doing for thousands of years."

As a longtime shoeshine manager at the airport, Jessie Perez has watched that shift from fear to calm firsthand.

"You can tell the difference big-time," he said. "After 9/11, people were kind of hinky about getting on the plane, keeping an eye on things and watching people. Now it's more relaxed and it actually seems like prior to 9/11 right now."

What a difference a year makes! At this time last year, I posted about my own 9/11 wake-up call, and now increasingly, I see confirmation that I'm behind the curve. After all, if Hurricane Katrina showed us anything, it's that people can die from all sorts of causes, natural and man-made, and that the federal government continually demonstrates it is not prepared (a fair point, to which I can readily agree, though most media accounts let state and local officials off the hook much too easily).

True, the article does not entirely gloss over the possibility of another attack. It allows that while complacency is a natural tendency, too much of it is not a good thing, and it is more than likely we'll be hit again at some point. And it does mention, almost in passing, the role of radical Islam, albeit indirectly in connection with everyday Muslims worried about guilt by association and trying to keep their heads down:

"It's back to normal to the extent that we've had less people vandalizing our mosques," said Maple Grove attorney Sumbal Mahmud.

She remembers trading her traditional Islamic hijab head scarf for a beret in the days after 9/11. She wore her University of Minnesota Law School sweatshirt "to prove I fit in." She wanted to distinguish herself from those who had hijacked her faith along with the jumbo jets.

She remembers when her cousin visited from Pakistan a few months before 9/11 and then came back last summer wearing traditional clothes.

"Our walks around Lake Calhoun were different," she said, saying curious glances had turned into suspicious looks.

As an American Jew I sympathize, and I'm not being at all ironic here. This past August, I attended the opening ceremonies for the Maccabi Games, an international sports event sort of like a mini Jewish Olympics, with Jewish youth competing from all over North America, as well as Great Britain, Poland, Venezuela and Israel. St. Paul Mayor Randy Kelly was in attendance. So was St. Paul Police Chief William Finney, along with a good number of his force. Security around the St. Paul Excel Center was very tight. The marquee did not announce the event, and all attendees were credentialed. This tight security was true in other cities, not just St. Paul.

Why you ask? Well first of all, numerous kids from all over the world were involved so it only makes sense that access would be restricted to their families, supporters and community. But the other factor was that it was an assembly of Jews, which for some sick people would have made it a target-rich environment. Anti-semitism is never far away in the world, not when within the past year I saw the words "Die Jew" scrawled on the wall of the Jewish Day school in St. Paul. And anti-semitism is less a problem in the US than it is in the rest of the world, where it has been a scourge for centuries, well before the founding of the state of Israel, or even the publication of Mein Kampf or The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Mostly it stemed from the refusal of Jews to accept the majority belief that a first century radical rabbi was in fact the Son of God and the Messiah, clinging instead to the apparently misbegotten notion that God had made a lasting covenant with Moses and the people of Israel at Mount Sinai. For centuries, Christians said to non-Christians, including both Jews and Muslims: "Follow our loving God and worship his son as your only true savior -- or die." Eventually, they got over it for the most part. But a great number of prominent imams still preach hatred of both Jews and Christians, even though Islam is said to honor its fellow monotheistic faiths as "people of the book".

So Muslims do have a huge challenge ahead of them, to take back their faith from the fundamentalist fanatics who claim the headlines by flying planes into buildings, murdering school children, and blowing up buses and discos, not to mention churches and synagogues, in the process claiming the lives of countless Muslims as well as non-Muslims. While it is unfair to say that such monsters represent the totality of Islam, they represent an extreme edge of a strain of thinking within Islam that needs to be repudiated, not for Western consumption, but within the Muslim community.

South Park Conservatives explained

Plus much, much more. NRO interviews Brian Anderson, author of South Park Conservatives, who comments on college campuses, Fox, Air America, the publishing industry, and of course the impact of blogs.

Sorry to source two posts back-to-back from NRO, but it's an illuminating interview and most of Anderson's observations ring true, at least from my perspective.

Swift Boat Vets retrospective

AEI Magazine has a fascinating interview with John O'Neill, who spearheaded Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and authored the best seller Unfit for Command, both of which did considerable damage to John Kerry's presidential aspirations. He provides his perspective of the election, the role he and his group played, and the often-hostile treatment they received at the hands of the mainstream media who at first ignored them and then later attempted to discredit them.

For those of my readers who were Kerry voters and who view O'Neill and the Swift Boat Vets as nothing more than a blatant Karl Rove-backed smear operation, I urge you to take a few moments to at least read through his version of events. Some of it you have to take with a grain of salt - O'Neill portrays himself as something of naive vet, surprised by the controversy he unleashed in the 2004 election, while in fact he is an experienced lawyer who has worked in the past for political organizations. At the same time, his statements about Viet Nam, his role in the war, and the visceral reaction he and other vets had to Kerry's actions and his later portrayal of himself as war hero/war protester ring very true.

(Hat tip: Power Line)

P.J. O'Rourke on Talk Radio

Actually, he's not on talk radio, he's writing about it in the July/August Atlantic Monthly. O' Rourke has always been one of my favorite conservative writers because he says stuff like this:

I am a little to the right of ... Why is the Attila comparison used? Fifth-century Hunnish depredations on the Roman Empire were the work of an overpowerful executive pursuing a policy of economic redistribution in an atmosphere of permissive social mores. I am a little to the right of Rush Limbaugh. I'm so conservative that I approve of San Francisco City Hall marriages, adoption by same-sex couples, and New Hampshire's recently ordained Episcopal bishop. Gays want to get married, have children, and go to church. Next they'll be advocating school vouchers, boycotting HBO, and voting Republican.

The basic point of his piece is that right-wing talk radio hosts seem to not to care whether they're winning anyone over to their point of view:

I suppose I should be arguing with my fellow right-wingers about that, and drugs, and many other things. But I won't be. Arguing, in the sense of attempting to convince others, has gone out of fashion with conservatives. The formats of their radio and television programs allow for little measured debate, and to the extent that evidence is marshaled to support conservative ideas, the tone is less trial of Socrates than Johnnie Cochran summation to the O.J. jury. Except the jury—with a clever marketing strategy—has been rigged. I wonder, when was the last time a conservative talk show changed a mind?

O'Rourke expands his net to include TV and books, using as his admittedly unscientific sample some of the most aggressive and partisan right-wing pundits: Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, and Ann Coulter. I have listened to, watched, and/or read all four of them and on the basis of that sample I am in total agreement with O'Rourke. These people are often entertaining and provocative, but they are largely preaching to a choir of enthusiastic head-nodders, and I seldom see them really engage at the level of debating policy or ideas with qualified opponents.

But -- if you never tune into talk radio, you may be under the impression it's all Rush all the time, but that's a wholly inaccurate view of the medium. I regularly listen to a number of conservative talk show hosts who are not in that mode. Laura Ingraham for example, raucously skewers liberal figures like Ted Kennedy and rails about media bias, yet frequently brings on guests with a liberal-left perspective, such as David Corn of The Nation, whom she obviously enjoys debating. Hugh Hewitt, whose background is in Constitutional law, has a regular cadre of guests from across the political spectrum, and at times will only accept calls from left-leaning callers because he already knows where people who agree with him stand. Michael Medved, whose show is primarily debate-oriented, regularly hosts "disagreement day" and "open-mind Friday" where the format is set up specifically for people to confront him and make him defend his views. He even urges callers to not hang up and stay with him over commercial breaks so as to continue the debate. Dennis Prager talks about "everything under the sun" including religion, politics, war and even happiness, and often invites left-leaning academics and authors to explain their views to his audience, always treating them with courtesy and respect.

I have developed the habit of tuning into conservative talkers like these precisely because I often don't agree with their viewpoints and want to understand their reasoning rather than dismiss them out of hand, or worse, caricature them. These are intelligent people who persuasively argue their points, and have on occasion gotten me to rethink or at least revisit my own stands on issues. If you do not normally have much in common with conservatives, and can put your own preconceptions on hold long enough to listen to what's being said, you may find that there's a lot more real thinking going on out there and it's a lot more nuanced than the commonly held stereotype would suggest. Al Franken's Air America should go to school on hosts like those mentioned above, rather than merely trying to out-O'Reilly their right-wing counterparts.

And by the way, if you have never read P.J. O'Rourke (and you may have without realizing it, since he used to write for the National Lampoon), by all means get hold of one of his books. He has a new one coming out this month, but for the moment I'd recommend Eat the Rich, Parliament of Whores or Give War a Chance. "Funny conservative" is definitely not an oxymoron.

UPDATE: O'Rourke's newest book, Peace Kills, has apparently been out for more than a month but it only recently showed up at my neighborhood bookstore. Based on a totally unscientific quick glance, it belongs in the group mentioned above. If you've already read it, please share your opinions below.

A Profile of Roger L. Simon

National Review profiles screenwriter, mystery novelist and blogger Roger L. Simon. His wildly popular blog is one of my favorites and a regular read. Simon began his career as a radical leftist, but in one of those ironic twists of fate today finds himself supporting Bush and the War on Terror. He remarks that he is probably "the first American writer to be profiled both by Mother Jones and National Review."

Some of Simon's popularity undoubtedly stems from his ability to render complex, deadly serious subjects in a disarmingly breezy, conversational writing style. Simon believes his blog took off because there are so many others searching for a home somewhere between traditional conservative and doctrinaire liberal.

"It caught on because I'm a disaffected liberal," he muses. "There's a lot of others like that out there."

He also stands out as one of the few Hollywood players who support the war on terror, including the war in Iraq. Has this affected his career in any way? "I don't know," he responds frankly.

Despite his avid support for Bush's reelection, though, Simon doesn't consider himself a conservative. In fact, he hates ideological labels. "They're just an excuse not to think," he declares.

On foreign policy and defense, Simon is a fierce hawk. On economic issues, he says, "I am puzzled. I'm more pro-market than I was. I'm pro-free trade, pro-NAFTA. Socialism has failed. There's no denying it; it's empirical. "

But when it comes to social policy, he continues to lean hard to the left. "I'm very liberal on social issues: pro-gay marriage, pro-choice, separation of church and state," he says. "I think racism and sexism are the greatest evils in the world."

I have to confess I enjoy reading Simon's blog because his views are close to my own, and he skews right and left at about the same places I do. He is similar to other "disaffected liberal" bloggers like Charles Johnson and Michael J. Totten, who post-9/11 found themselves supporting George Bush and Tony Blair for their determination to eschew politics as usual and deal forcefully with regimes and ideologies whom they perceived as a threat to Western civilization, and who had demonstrated a willingness to commit mass murder. They saw the overthrow of Saddam Hussein as a blow for human rights at least as important as stopping Slobodan Milosevic, and more urgent in terms of the potential danger he posed.

(Hat tip: Instapundit)