My “technical advisor” has started work on the changes to the blog, since the nuts and bolts of this type of thing is not my forte. It will take a while, probably as much as a week, but I wanted to let you know that it’s at least a work in progress. Patience.
Inside the mind of the Times
Cassandra at Tigerhawk speculates on how the NY Times, in its infinite wisdom, decides for us what is newsworthy and what is not.
Islamist totalitarianism
I’ve written before about the dilemma of choosing a term to describe our enemies in this war.
Islamofascists? No, not exact enough; and misleading, hearkening back to our World War II enemies who had different political ideologies and methods. Islamic fundamentalists? Incorrect as well; not all Islamic fundamentalists have adopted violence as a way of life. “Jihadis” is too inclusive and not specific enough.
Austin Bay has called attention to a recent article appearing in the London Times, written by Michael Gove. Well worth reading, it is a good summary of the aims and ideology of the enemy, as well as offering the useful and descriptive term “Islamist totalitarians” to refer to the movement.
The piece is an excerpt from Gove’s recently published book, Celsius 7/7. The thrust of Gove’s article is that the enemy we face is, first and foremost, our old nemesis: totalitarianism. The jihadis are at war not only with the West, but with most of their co-religionists, whose version of Islam they consider fatally compromised and in need of revision, violent if necessary (and they deem violence to be necessary).
“Islamist totalitarianism” may indeed be the very best name of all for those who adhere to this vision, since it places the movement firmly in the twentieth/twenty-first century context in which it belongs, which is one of world dominance through force, and the negation of human freedom. That is why all totalitarian movements are, in their dark hearts, a reaction to and a profound rejection of the Enlightenment. Islamist totalitariansim is no exeption to this rule.
As Gove writes:
Islamism is a twentieth-century phenomenon. Like its sibling ideologies, fascism and communism, it offers followers a form of redemption through violence. Like fascism, Islamism envisages the creation of a purified realm purged of toxic outside influences and internal corruption. Like communism, Islamism is not ethnically exclusive, it seeks to enlist new converts through proselytisation, political education and military advances. Like both, it reserves a special hatred for the West, for political freedom the separation of the public and private realms, dissent, sexual tolerance and a belief in the sanctity of individual life. And like both it finds a dark and furious energy in hatred towards the Jewish people.
Politically correct thinking dictates that we respect all religions. When Islamist totalitarianism is described as the enemy, many have a kneejerk response that such thinking as anti-Moslem or racist in some way. But it is not. Make no mistake about it. The war the Islamist totalitarians have decreed is every bit as much against the everyday, garden-variety Moslem as it is against all the rest of us.
The ailing NY Times: the watchdog has rabies
Recently the NY Times has been engaged in what appears to be a campaign of its own: the publication of security secrets in the current war (on terror, on jihadis, call it what you will) waged by the US. Why is the Times bent on forcing the issue, publishing secrets that appear to violate no known rule or law, using as its excuse the public’s need to know?
Yesterday, in response to that question, I discussed one possible motivation for the Times’ behavior: to relive the glory days of the Pentagon Papers case. But there’s more.
The issues are large; see Alexandra’s post of today for a further discussion and roundup of the case against the Times. Also today, columnist Michael Barone ups the ante, asking, “Why does the NY Times hate us?”, writing that the paper’s editors, “have gotten into the habit of acting in reckless disregard of our safety.”
Towards the end of the piece, Barone asks:
Why do they hate us? Why does the Times print stories that put America more at risk of attack? They say that these surveillance programs are subject to abuse, but give no reason to believe that this concern is anything but theoretical.
I submit the following answer:
The press has long seen itself as a watchdog protecting the people. I’m not sure when this attitude began, but it was certainly present in the activities of the muckrakers of the early years of the twentieth century, journalists and writers who saw it as their calling to expose and publicize some of the excesses of big business, especially trusts. As such, they were crusaders, but they never (at least as far as I can determine) published secret information that threatened national security. Their concerns were almost exclusively domestic.
That changed, as so much did, during the Vietnam and Watergate era, in which national security concerns were added to the muckraking function of the press. I’ve delineated and explored the change in many previous posts (see this and especially this, for example).
Here’s an especially relevant quote from the latter:
The antiwar movement that rose as a result of the Vietnam War had a distrust of American power and intelligence gathering and of agencies such as the CIA. The events of Watergate only “deepened the aversion,” since the burglars included former intelligence officers, and Nixon also used the CIA to obstruct the work of the FBI in trying to investigate the break-in. Furthermore, the CIA was engaged in some domestic spying scandals and other acts considered excesses, such as attempts to assassinate foreign leaders (investigated by the Congressional Church Commission of the mid-70s). The upshot of all this was, among other things, a desire to limit the power of the executive branch of government and of intelligence-gathering, because the fear was that these entities, unchecked, could (and would) combine in corrupt ways to undermine our liberties.
Some have said, cynically, that the Times editors are simply out to sensationalize and boost readership. This certainly may be operating, at least in part. But in my opinion that it’s not the main motivation. I see the driving force for this campaign as the editors’ deep conviction that providing this information to us is their way of protecting us: it’s the muckraking impulse gone mad.
In the decades since the 60s, the press has come to see itself as a sort of secret society, bound to protect and serve us by curbing what it sees as a government that–as in Watergate, as in 1984–is bound and determined to spy on us and curb our liberties. As such, editors make the decisions as to what is in our best interests, and they have deemed the threat from the actions of our own government to be far greater than any threat from jihadis.
This is both arrogant and an inappropriate throwback to the Vietnam-Watergate era, but I actually believe (and call me naive, if you like) that the vast majority of these MSM campaigners (such as Keller, Times editor) are convinced of their own rightness and self-rightousness, and that this is primarily what fuels them. And their arrogance has continued to grow because they have suffered virtually no consequences for their actions; they have become a law unto themselves.
Alexandra’s post quotes Glenn Reynolds, who makes the important point that:
The founders gave freedom of the press to the people, they didn’t give freedom to the press. Keller positions himself as some sort of Constitutional High Priest, when in fact the “freedom of the press” the Framers described was also called “freedom in the use of the press.” It’s the freedom to publish, a freedom that belongs to everyone in equal portions, not a special privilege for the media industry.
Reynolds refers to the Times editor’s position as “hubris,” and I think he is exactly right, at least in the metaphoric sense. And Austin Bay sums it up quite succintly when he says that, “exposing the terrorist finance-monitoring operation information amounts to spying for terrorists.”
There is really no other way to put it. The press considers itself to be a watchdog, but the Times is a rabid one that has turned on its owners and keepers, the people.
What to do? One possibility is the passage of a National Secrets Act, as I’ve discussed here and here. But perhaps that’s not necessary. The current Espionage Act may be enough, as Barone suggest in his column; rather than prosecute the Times itself, the leakers who are breaching national security by divulging information to the Times could themselves be prosecuted, and in the course of discovery for such a case, the Times would have to testify as to who the leakers are or face contempt of court charges.
Would that be enough? Hard to say, but I think it should be done. The watchdog is ill, and needs to be curbed.
NY Times cruising for a court battle?
The Anchoress has an excellent roundup of posts about the recent publications by the NY Times of security leaks.
The Anchoress asks whether the Times “is trying to force a legal confrontation”¦are they actively trying to have members of the fourth estate brought up on charges of treason? To what purpose?”
I submit the following answer to the Anchoress’s question: The Times is trying to relive its glory days. Don’t forget that, as I described in this post, a lawsuit by the Nixon White House against the NY Times to stop the publication of Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers in 1971 was a seminal step in determining the freedom of the press to publish national security secrets. Although the security breaches involved in the publication of the Pentagon Papers were smaller than those involved today, the precedent is there. The Times was victorious, and the case set the stage for the publication of today’s security leaks.
In that earlier post, I quoted from a book on the Court’s decision in the Pentagon Papers case, written by David Rudenstine and entitled The Day the Presses Stopped. I’ll quote the book again:
Despite Americans’ constitutional right to a free press, certain government information–particularly that concerning military affairs–has been placed beyond the realm of public access. A U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1971, however (brought about when the Nixon administration sued the New York Times) knocked a howitzer-sized hole in that theory when the case allowed the New York Times and the Washington Post to print excerpts from the Pentagon Papers, a 7,000- page document regarding U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
Why wouldn’t the Times think that history will repeat itself? After all, it’s been clear for a while that Vietnam is the liberal template for the Iraq war. The left is counting on it.
Islam: tear down this wall
San Francisco is one of the most “progressive” (read: liberal) cities in the US. And, as this NY Times article describes, there’s a movement there to modernize Islam, at least in a small way.
As part of renovations to the Darussalam mosque in San Francisco last fall, a wall separating the women worshippers from the men was demolished and not reconstructed. This was the result of a campaign by what the Times calls “a small if determined band of North American Muslims, mostly younger women,” to change practices they feel are discriminatory, and not a necessary part of Islam.
The women point to the fact that the tradition of separation is a relatively recent one, the result of Wahabism’s ascendance in 18th-century Saudi Arabia. Wahabism is, of course, the extremely strict sect of Islam, still based in Saudi Arabia, responsible for much of the growth of what might be called fundamentalist Islam, and to which many jihadis, including Osama Bin Laden, ascribe.
It’s a commonplace to say that Islam needs a reformation; but in fact, technically, Wahabism was a reformation. But let’s not get so technical; I think what is meant is that Islam needs a reforming and modernizing movement–as in, for example, Reform Judaism. And of course, anyone who is aware of Reform Judaism knows that one of its changes was exactly the one that has occurred in the Darussalam mosque: the mixing of men and women in worship.
Reform Judaism was a product of the Enlightenment and the relative assimilation and freedom afforded Jews in 18th century Germany (hmmm, same century as Wahabism, different direction). We tend to associate Germany and Jews with the later horrific events of the Holocaust, so its easy to forget that–as far as human and civil rights for Jews went–Germany was probably the most “enlightened” country in the world in the 18th century. And it was that freedom that allowed and fostered the changes and modernizations resulting in the birth of reform Judaism.
I’m not equating Judaism with Islam; there are tremendous differences. But if Islam requires reform–and I believe it does–it stands to reason that reform would begin in the climate of the freedoms afforded by a Western country such as the US or Canada.
Of course, as the Times article states, reform and change can cause backlash and retrenchment. And there isn’t much cross-fertilization between what happens in a mosque in the US and what happens in mosques in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan.
But it’s still an encouraging sign that this was allowed to go forward. And the spread of such changes in the Moslem third world, not just in the West, is one of the possible benefits of events such as the Iraq war, and increasing freedom in that country. A backlash is possible, but so is a ripple effect.
The tearing down of the wall in the Darussalam mosque is a small change, it’s true. It may not even rise to the level of a pebble being dropped in a lake; perhaps, instead, a tiny grain of sand. But even a grain of sand can cause ripples.
Patience
Those of you who read this blog regularly have no doubt noticed that trolls have virtually taken over many of the comment threads. You’ve also probably seen me state that a reordering of the blog is going to be occurring soon in order to eliminate the problem.
It can’t happen soon enough; I agree. Trolls are edifying up to a point, because they’re instructive about a certain mindset and a particular type of puerile emotional behavior. However, enough is enough–and it’s definitely been more than enough, here. We get it; no further demonstration is necessary.
But there are various options to be studied and considered, and this takes quite a bit of time. Then, implementing the change takes time as well. And I have an enormous number of other backlogged things to do after getting back from my vacation. So, although I’m working on this and I definitely plan to get to it some time this coming week (or almost definitely the next), I ask for your patience and forbearance. I am aware of the problem, I am on the task, and it will be done.
In the meantime, I can only repeat that you not feed the trolls, although the temptation seems to be great–and, for some, apparently irresistible. Feeding the trolls brings the worst out in everyone.
And the voice of neo-neocon is heard in the land
If you’ve ever had a yen to hear my voice, now’s your chance. Here’s an interview I did for “Blog Week in Review” at Pajamas Media.
I was in illustrious company, at least in blogosphere terms: Austin Bay is the moderator, and my fellow-interviewees were Glenn Reynolds and Marc Cooper.
WMDs and true believers
There are those who remain convinced that prewar intelligence was not incorrect–that Saddam was still cranking out WMDs prior to the war, and that these weapons are hidden somewhere and could be found if a proper search were ever to be mounted.
And, according to this NY Times article, this group is not limited to fringe-y lunatics. Those espousing the view, and who are still trying actively engage an effective search, include such figures as:
…retired Air Force lieutenant general, Thomas G. McInerney, a commentator on the Fox News Channel who has broadcast that weapons are in three places in Syria and one in Lebanon, moved there with Russian help on the eve of the war.
“I firmly believe that, and everything I learn makes my belief firmer,” said Mr. McInerney, who retired in 1994. “I’m amazed that the mainstream media hasn’t picked this up.”
Also among the weapons hunters is Duane R. Clarridge, a long-retired officer of the Central Intelligence Agency who said he thought that the weapons had been moved to Sudan by ship.
“And we think we know which ship,” Mr. Clarridge said in a recent interview.
Are these guys the equivalent, on the right, of those who believe that 9/11 was planned and orchestrated by Bush (the latter of whom, by the way, are not shy about spamming me to tell me so, day after livelong day)?
No; McInerney and Clarridge seem more rooted in realistic possibilities, although I have come to believe that the probability of their being correct at this point is 10% or less (and probably much less, at that).
But the task of ascertaining whether any post-1991 WMDs are still kicking around somewhere is a difficult one. How can one prove whether something purported to be hidden does or does not exist?
The only way the issue could be absolutely resolved is by either of these two things occurring:
(1) A post-1991 WMD cache is found; or
(2) Every inch of the earth, including underground to a reasonable depth, is searched and found to be empty of post-1991 WMDs.
Since #2 is not possible, the possibility of #1 remains, although the likelihood of its occurrence shrinks over time.
When a person is heavily invested in a particular thing being true, it is ordinarily very difficult to give up the idea that it is so. This is the case whether the believer is on the left or on the right. In my opinion, those in the middle are less likely to be so firmly anchored to their beliefs in the face of overwhelming evidence, for the simple reason that their identities are not so deeply and rigidly tied to them in the first place.
Why we should consider a National Secrets Act
Dr. Sanity has this to say on the most recent spilling-of-the-national-security-beans by the MSM (see this for Jeff Goldstein’s take on the story, as well).
For those of you who may have missed it, back in early May I posted an in-depth discussion of the basic issues involved, offering a possible remedy based on a law in Britain known as the National Secrets Act. It provides penalties not only for national security employees who leak, but also for the press publishing such secrets, as well.
When I wrote that post, I stated I wasn’t sure exactly where I stood on the issue of whether such a law should be passed in this country. However, since then, I have become more convinced that penalties–at the very least, for the leaker–would be a good idea.
After all, it’s not as though there aren’t other avenues to follow short of disclosure to the press and to the world. A relevant excerpt from my post:
It seems logical to me that in order to have any sort of workable national security at all, it should only be breached for extremely serious governmental offenses, and then only after other ordinary channels have been exhausted and found wanting. My suggestion would be penalties for national security leakers who go to the press first, without trying other remedies, as well as penalties for the press if the information damages national security as defined by the courts (and I would hope they would define it at least somewhat less narrowly than in the Pentagon Papers decision).
Amnesty International tiptoes around third-world torturers
Amnesty International is oh so very careful not to offend the tender sensibilities of those responsible for the brutal torture, killing, and mutilation of two captured US soldiers.
Note the two qualifiers in the Amnesty statement: “if” and “may.” It’s the “may” part that Belmont Club–and myself–find so especially offensive.
{And see this for my own small previous efforts to try to communicate with the folks at Amnesty.)
Home again
I’m back!
The redeye flight was fine and uneventful, just as a flight should be–but of course I’m exhausted, although I also slept a few hours in an actual bed on my return.
The garden’s overgrown. The mail has to be picked up. The bags need to be unpacked. Groceries must be bought. My mother should be visited. And on and on and on….
I’m taking the rest of the day (evening?) off from blogging.
See you tomorrow!