Friday, October 21, 2005

Mike Adams: "We Have to Exterminate White People"

By Mike Adams
http://www.frontpagemag.com/
October 21, 2005

Columnist Jon Sanders of the John Locke Foundation in Raleigh, NC, has written a blog entry that reveals just how easy it is to get a job teaching Africana Studies at North Carolina State University. It also demonstrates how the diversity movement is bringing people together in the great state of North Carolina.

Sanders’ recent blog directs readers to C-SPAN online, where they can click on the recent archives and scroll down until they find the “Black Media Forum on the Image of Black Americans in Mainstream Media.” This was a program presented on October 14th at Howard University. Dr. Kamau Kambon makes his appearance about three hours into the four-hour event.

Dr. Kambon's closing remarks – given about twenty minutes before the program’s conclusion - are chilling:

And then finally I want to say that we need one idea, and we're not thinking about a solution to the problem. We're thinking about all these other things, but we're not dealing with a solution to the problem. And we have to start to think about a solution to the problem so that these young brothers and sisters who are here now, who are 15, 16, or 17, are not here 25 years later talking about these same problems.

Now how do I know that the white people know that we are going to come up with a solution to the problem? I know it because they have retina scans, they have what they call racial profiling, DNA banks, and they’re monitoring our people to try to prevent the one person from coming up with the one idea. And the one idea is, how we are going to exterminate white people because that in my estimation is the only conclusion I have come to. We have to exterminate white people off the face of the planet to solve this problem. Now I don’t care whether you clap or not, but I’m saying to you that we need to solve this problem because they are going to kill us. And I will leave on that. So we just have to just set up our own system and stop playing and get very serious and not be diverted from coming up with a solution to the problem and the problem on the planet is white people.

Dr. Kambon also said that “white people want to kill you…because that is part of their plan” and that “the only n**ger on the planet is the white man and the white woman, and our people are not n**gers, they are imitation n**gers.”

An official at North Carolina State University claims that Dr. Kambon – once a visiting professor being paid by the taxpayers of North Carolina – is no longer affiliated with the university. But, if that is true, why is he still listed on the university’s Africana Studies faculty page?

After you visit that site, I bet you’ll have the same question. And, like me, I hope you’ll write the Africana Studies Department demanding an answer. And while you’re at it, ask them why they hired a genocidal racist in the first place.

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Thursday, October 20, 2005

Ann Coulter: Who Was the 2nd Choice?

Ann Coulter
http://www.frontpagemag.com/
October 20, 2005

I have finally hit upon a misdeed by the Bush administration so outrageous, so appalling, so egregious, I am calling for a bipartisan commission with subpoena power to investigate: Who told the president to nominate Harriet Miers? The commission should also be charged with getting an answer to this question: Who was his second choice?

Things are so bad, the best option for Karl Rove now would be to get himself indicted. Then at least he'd have a colorable claim to having no involvement in the Miers nomination.

This week's Miers update is:

* Miers is a good bowler (New York Times, Oct. 16, 2005, front page – Joshua B. Bolten, director of the Office of Management and Budget: "She is a very good bowler"), which, in all honesty, is the most impressive thing I've heard about Miers so far;

* In 1989, she supported a ban on abortion except to save the life of the mother.

From the beginning of this nightmare, I have taken it as a given that Miers will vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. I assume that's why Bush nominated her. (It certainly wasn't her resume.) Pity no one told him there are scads of highly qualified judicial nominees who would also have voted against Roe. Wasn't it Harriet Miers' job to tell him that? Hey, wait a minute....

But without a conservative theory of constitutional interpretation, Miers will lay the groundwork for a million more Roes. We're told she has terrific "common sense." Common sense is the last thing you want in a judge! The maxim "Hard cases make bad law" could be expanded to "Hard cases being decided by judges with 'common sense' make unfathomably bad law."

It was "common sense" to allow married couples to buy contraception in Connecticut. That was a decision any randomly selected group of nine good bowlers might well have concurred with on the grounds that, "Well, it's just common sense, isn't it?"

But when the Supreme Court used common sense – rather than the text of the Constitution – to strike down Connecticut's law banning contraception, it opened the door to the Supreme Court rewriting all manner of state laws. By creating a nonspecific "right to privacy," Griswold v. Connecticut led like night into day to the famed "constitutional right" to stick a fork in a baby's head.

This isn't rank speculation about where "common sense" devoid of constitutional theory gets you: Miers told Sen. Arlen Specter she would have voted with the majority in Griswold.

(Miers also told Sen. Patrick Leahy – in front of witnesses – that her favorite justice was "Warren," leaving people wondering whether she meant former Chief Justice Earl Warren, memorialized in "Impeach Warren" billboards across America, or former Chief Justice Warren Burger, another mediocrity praised for his "common sense" who voted for Roe v. Wade and was laughed at by Rehnquist clerks like John Roberts for his lack of ability.)

The sickness of what liberals have done to America is that so many citizens – even conservative citizens – seem to believe the job of a Supreme Court justice entails nothing more than "voting" on public-policy issues. The White House considers it relevant to tell us Miers' religious beliefs, her hobbies, her hopes and dreams. She's a good bowler! A stickler for detail! Great dancer! Makes her own clothes!

That's nice for her, but what we're really in the market for is a constitutional scholar who can forcefully say, "No – that's not my job."

We've been waiting 30 years to end the lunacy of nine demigods on the Supreme Court deciding every burning social issue of the day for us, loyal subjects in a judicial theocracy. We don't want someone who will decide those issues for us – but decide them "our" way. If we did, a White House bureaucrat with good horse sense might be just the ticket.

Admittedly, there isn't much that's more important than ending the abortion holocaust in America. (Abortionist casualties: 7; Unborn casualties 30 million.) But there is one thing. That is democracy.

Democracy sometimes leads to silly laws such as the one that prohibited married couples from buying contraception in Connecticut. But allowing Americans to vote has never led to creches being torn down across America. It's never led to prayer being purged from every public school in the nation. It's never led to gay marriage. It's never led to returning slaves who had escaped to free states to their slavemasters. And it's never led to 30 million dead babies.

We've gone from a representative democracy to a monarchy, and the most appalling thing is – even conservatives just hope like the dickens the next king is a good one.

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Ann Coulter is a bestselling author and syndicated columnist. Her most recent book is
How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must).

P. David Hornik: Politically-Correct Hell

P. David Hornik
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
October 20, 2005

Two politically-correct statements:

1. There is no worse fate for Palestinians than to be ruled by Israel; any Palestinian rule is better.

2. There is no worse fate for Israel than to rule Palestinians; any way of leaving the territories, whether by bilateral agreement or unilateral withdrawal, is better.

Regarding the first statement, a moment’s thought reveals that actually it is far from axiomatic. Terrible things can happen to Arabs who live under rule by other Arabs—merely saying the words Iraq, Algeria, or Syria is enough to illustrate this.

Even in “moderate” Jordan with its affable, Western-educated leader, Freedom House reports that “citizens enjoy little protection from arbitrary arrest and detention. . . . Even . . . minimal protections are denied to suspects referred to the SCC [State Security Court].” And in “moderate, pro-Western” Egypt, the UN Committee against Torture has said that there is “widespread evidence of torture and ill-treatment.”

Added to this is the fact that, as detailed in a 2002 Commentary article by Efraim Karsh that left little imprint, Israeli rule in the territories was decidedly beneficial. Living standards and life expectancy rose sharply, mortality and infant mortality rates plummeted. “Perhaps most strikingly,” Karsh noted,

"during the two decades preceding the [first] intifada . . ., the number of schoolchildren in the territories grew by 102 percent, and the number of classes by 99 percent, though the population itself had grown by only 28 percent. Even more dramatic was the progress in higher education. At the time of the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, not a single university existed in these territories. By the early 1990’s, there were seven such institutions, boasting some 16,500 students. Illiteracy rates dropped to 14 percent of adults over age 15, compared with 69 percent in Morocco, 61 ercent in Egypt, 45 percent in Tunisia, and 44 percent in Syria."

To be sure, well before Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza it had transferred almost all aspects of rule over the Palestinians to the PA. The results in terms of arbitrary arrests, torture, executions, a collapsing economy, the regime’s plundering of aid money, the transformation of schools into genocide-indoctrination centers, and so on are not a secret.

None of this, however, prevented an almost universal lauding of Israel’s removal of the last vestiges of its control from Gaza—even though, with Hamas now reportedly ruling whole areas and constantly gaining in strength, and Al Qaeda and other terrorist cadres pouring across the newly “liberated” border, the prospect for Gazans is one of even worse oppression than under the official PA.

One could argue that this is not Israel’s problem and it is still better off having left. Yet, a world that seemingly makes the Palestinians the apple of its eye appears—beyond mouthing the usual inane pieties about the PA “disarming the terrorists”—blithely unconcerned about the transformation of Gaza into a radical-Islamist redoubt, with all that implies for its residents’ rights. It reinforces the impression that this supposed compassion for the Palestinians has always been a smokescreen for downsizing Israel and appeasing the Arab oil barons.

As for the second above politically-correct statement, the notion that relinquishing control over the territories is the best thing for Israel has not exactly emerged unscathed over the past twelve years. Ynetnews.com calls the recently concluded Jewish year a “year of relative quiet”—in it, 57 Israelis were killed and 516 injured in terrorist attacks, but this is less than 135 and 567, respectively, the previous year (all this in a country whose population is 2 percent that of America).

By comparison, in the three years of the Netanyahu government during 1996-1999—the only relative lull in the Oslo period—a total of 46 Israelis died in terror attacks; for the fifteen years before the Oslo period, the average was 15 per year.

The ynet article also notes that “26,159 terror attacks against Israeli targets were recorded over the last five years”—which, as Daniel Pipes has observed, comes to an average of 14.33 attacks per day. The toll is 1,064 Israelis dead and 6,089 injured.

With such outcomes of Israeli territorial withdrawals in the framework of agreements with the Palestinians, the early returns on Israel’s recent venture at unilateral withdrawal are not much better. The short time since the last Israeli troops left Gaza on September 11, 205 has seen—among other things including stabbing and shooting attacks against soldiers—the firing of dozens of rockets at Israeli communities bordering Gaza, the entry into Gaza of vast quantities of weapons along with the terrorist cadres under the winking gaze of Egyptian “guards,” the first Zarqawi-style abduction, videotaping, and killing of an Israeli citizen by Palestinian terrorists, and a drive-by massacre against a hitchhiking post that killed three and wounded five.

Both of the politically-correct statements, then, seem to be false. Handing territory from Israel to the likes of the PLO and Hamas has been no boon for the Palestinians, and certainly not for Israel. Indeed, by any normal moral compass, what is required is for Israel to reconquer the territories and put an end to the constant bloodshed that its retreat from them enabled.

By now, though, the disengagement has put a stamp of permanency on Palestinian rule, and that suggestion is so politically incorrect as to be risible. Better that the oil should keep flowing and the politically-correct hell should continue.

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P. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator living in Jerusalem who has contributed recently to The Jerusalem Post, The American Spectator Online, and Israeli news-views websites.He can be reached atmailto:pdavidh2001@yahoo.com.

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Paul Craig Roberts: How to End the War

Posted Friday, October 14, 2005
http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org

George W. Bush is a natural born liar. He lied us into a war, and now he is lying to keep us there. In his Oct. 6 self-congratulatory speech at that neoconservative shrine, the National Endowment for Democracy, the president of the United States said: “Today there are more than 80 Iraqi army battalions fighting the insurgency alongside our forces.”

Eighty Iraqi battalions make it sound like the United States is just lending Iraq a helping hand. I wonder what Congress and the U.S. commanders in Iraq thought when they heard there were 80 Iraqi battalions that American troops are helping to fight insurgents? Just a few days prior to Bush’s speech, Gens. Casey and Abizaid told Congress that, as a matter of fact, there was only one Iraqi battalion able to undertake operations against insurgents.

I wonder, also, who noticed the great contradiction in Bush’s speech. On the one hand, he claims steady progress toward freedom and democracy in Iraq. On the other hand, he seeks the American public’s support for open-ended war.

In her Princeton speech, Condi Rice made it clear that Iraq is just the beginning: “We have set out to help the people of the Middle East transform their societies. Now is not the time to falter or fade.”

On Oct. 5, Vice President Cheney let us know how long this commitment was to last: “Like other great duties in history, it will require decades of patient effort.”

Who’s going to pay for these decades of war to which the Bush administration is committing Americans? Already, the United States is spending $7 billion a month on war in Iraq alone. The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service says that if the Iraq war goes on another five years, it will cost at least $570 billion by 2010.

Bush’s war has already doubled the price of gasoline and home heating oil. Americans are being laid off right and left, as corporations outsource their jobs to China, India and Eastern Europe.
With U.S. forces bogged down in Afghanistan (invaded Oct. 7, 2001) and Iraq (invaded March 20, 2003), Bush is plotting regime change in Syria and conspiring to set up Iran for attack.

Is there a single person in the Office of Management and Budget, the U.S. Treasury, the Congressional Budget Office or the Federal Reserve who thinks the United States, already drowning in red ink, has the resources to fight wars for decades?

And where will the troops come from? The United States cannot replace the losses in Iraq. We know about the 2,000 American troops killed, but we do not hear about the large number of wounded. UPI correspondent Martin Sieff reported on Oct. 7 that U.S. wounded jumped from 16.3 per day at the end of September to 28.5 per day at the beginning of October. Multiply that daily rate by 30 days and you get 855 wounded per month. Approximately half of these are wounded too seriously to return to combat.

Has anyone in the administration pointed out to Bush, Cheney and Condi Rice what decades of casualties at these rates mean?

Insurgents are killing Iraqi security personnel who are collaborating with the U.S. occupation at the rate of 200 to 300 per month. The wounded numbers are much higher.

Last month, suicide bombers killed 481 Iraqis and wounded 1,074.

Has anyone in the administration put these numbers in a decades-long context?
Apparently not. Once these numbers are put on paper, not even Bush administration speechwriters can continue to pen rhetorical justifications for war and more war.

The neoconservative Bush administration prides itself on not being “reality based.” Facts get in the way of the administration’s illusions and delusions. Bush’s “80 Iraqi battalions” are like Hitler’s secret weapons. They don’t exist.

Iraqis cannot afford to collaborate with the hated Americans or with the puppet government that the United States has put in place. Out of desperation, some do, but their heart is not in it. Few Iraqis are willing to die fighting for the United States and Likudian Israel.

When the 2nd Iraq Battalion graduated from U.S. training camp on Jan. 6, 2004, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and U.S. commander in Iraq Gen. Ricardo Sanchez expressed “high expectations” that Iraqi troops, in the general’s words, “would help us bring security and stability back to the country.”

Three months later, when the 2nd Battalion was brought up to support the U.S. invasion of Fallujah, it refused to fight and returned to its post. “We did not sign up to fight Iraqis,” said the troops.

Readers write in frustration, “Tell us what we can do.” On the surface, it doesn’t look like Bush can be stopped from trashing our country.

The congressional midterm elections are a year away. Moreover, the Democrats have failed as an opposition party and are compromised by their support for the war. Bush has three more years in which to mire America in wider war. If Bush succeeds in starting wars throughout the Middle East, his successor will be stuck with them.

Congressional Democrats and Republicans alike have made it clear that they are going to ignore demonstrations and public opinion. The print and TV media have made it clear that there will be no reporting that will hold the Bush administration accountable for its deceit and delusion.

There still is a way to bring reality to the Bush administration. The public has the Internet. Is the antiwar movement well enough organized to collect via the Internet signatures on petitions for impeachment, perhaps one petition for each state? Millions of signatures would embarrass Bush before the world and embarrass our elected representatives for their failure to act.

If no one in Congress acted on the petitions, all the rhetoric about war for democracy would fall flat. It would be obvious that there is no democracy in America.

If the cloak of democracy is stripped away, Bush’s “wars for democracy” begin to look like the foreign adventures of a megalomaniac. Remove Bush’s rhetorical cover, and tolerance at home and abroad for Bush’s war would evaporate. If Bush persisted, he would become a pariah.

Americans may feel that they cannot undercut a president at war, in which case Americans will become an embattled people consumed by decades of conflict. Americans can boot out Bush or pay dearly in blood and money.

COPYRIGHT 2005 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
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Robert Bork: Slouching Towards Miers

Bush shows himself to be indifferent, if not hostile, to conservative values.

The Wall Street Journal
Wednesday, October 19, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

With a single stroke--the nomination of Harriet Miers--the president has damaged the prospects for reform of a left-leaning and imperialistic Supreme Court, taken the heart out of a rising generation of constitutional scholars, and widened the fissures within the conservative movement. That's not a bad day's work--for liberals.

There is, to say the least, a heavy presumption that Ms. Miers, though undoubtedly possessed of many sterling qualities, is not qualified to be on the Supreme Court. It is not just that she has no known experience with constitutional law and no known opinions on judicial philosophy. It is worse than that. As president of the Texas Bar Association, she wrote columns for the association's journal. David Brooks of the New York Times examined those columns. He reports, with supporting examples, that the quality of her thought and writing demonstrates absolutely no "ability to write clearly and argue incisively."

The administration's defense of the nomination is pathetic: Ms. Miers was a bar association president (a nonqualification for anyone familiar with the bureaucratic service that leads to such presidencies); she shares Mr. Bush's judicial philosophy (which seems to consist of bromides about "strict construction" and the like); and she is, as an evangelical Christian, deeply religious. That last, along with her contributions to pro-life causes, is designed to suggest that she does not like Roe v. Wade, though it certainly does not necessarily mean that she would vote to overturn that constitutional travesty.

There is a great deal more to constitutional law than hostility to Roe. Ms. Miers is reported to have endorsed affirmative action. That position, or its opposite, can be reconciled with Christian belief. Issues we cannot now identify or even imagine will come before the court in the next 20 years. Reliance upon religious faith tells us nothing about how a Justice Miers would rule. Only a commitment to originalism provides a solid foundation for constitutional adjudication. There is no sign that she has thought about, much less adopted, that philosophy of judging.

**********

Some moderate (i.e., lukewarm) conservatives admonish the rest of us to hold our fire until Ms. Miers's performance at her hearing tells us more about her outlook on law, but any significant revelations are highly unlikely. She cannot be expected to endorse originalism; that would alienate the bloc of senators who think constitutional philosophy is about arriving at pleasing political results. What, then, can she say? Probably that she cannot discuss any issue likely to come before the court. Given the adventurousness of this court, that's just about every issue imaginable. What we can expect in all probability is platitudes about not "legislating from the bench." The Senate is asked, then, to confirm a nominee with no visible judicial philosophy who lacks the basic skills of persuasive argument and clear writing.

But that is only part of the damage Mr. Bush has done. For the past 20 years conservatives have been articulating the philosophy of originalism, the only approach that can make judicial review democratically legitimate. Originalism simply means that the judge must discern from the relevant materials--debates at the Constitutional Convention, the Federalist Papers and Anti-Federalist Papers, newspaper accounts of the time, debates in the state ratifying conventions, and the like--the principles the ratifiers understood themselves to be enacting. The remainder of the task is to apply those principles to unforeseen circumstances, a task that law performs all the time. Any philosophy that does not confine judges to the original understanding inevitably makes the Constitution the plaything of willful judges.

By passing over the many clearly qualified persons, male and female, to pick a stealth candidate, George W. Bush has sent a message to aspiring young originalists that it is better not to say anything remotely controversial, a sort of "Don't ask, don't tell" admonition to would-be judges. It is a blow in particular to the Federalist Society, most of whose members endorse originalism. The society, unlike the ACLU, takes no public positions, engages in no litigation, and includes people of differing views in its programs. It performs the invaluable function of making law students, in the heavily left-leaning schools, aware that there are respectable perspectives on law other than liberal activism. Yet the society has been defamed in McCarthyite fashion by liberals; and it appears to have been important to the White House that neither the new chief justice nor Ms. Miers had much to do with the Federalists.

**********

Finally, this nomination has split the fragile conservative coalition on social issues into those appalled by the administration's cynicism and those still anxious, for a variety of reasons, to support or at least placate the president. Anger is growing between the two groups. The supporters should rethink. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq aside, George W. Bush has not governed as a conservative (amnesty for illegal immigrants, reckless spending that will ultimately undo his tax cuts, signing a campaign finance bill even while maintaining its unconstitutionality). This George Bush, like his father, is showing himself to be indifferent, if not actively hostile, to conservative values. He appears embittered by conservative opposition to his nomination, which raises the possibility that if Ms. Miers is not confirmed, the next nominee will be even less acceptable to those asking for a restrained court. That, ironically, is the best argument for her confirmation. But it is not good enough.

It is said that at La Scala an exhausted tenor, after responding to repeated cries of "Encore," said he could not go on. A man rose in the audience to say, "You'll keep singing until you get it right." That man should be our model.

Mr. Bork is a fellow of the Hudson Institute and editor of "A Country I Do Not Recognize: The Legal Assault on American Values" (Hoover, 2005). He is co-chairman of the Federalist Society.

Pat Buchanan: Faith-Based War

October 19, 2005

"This is a very positive day ... for world peace," said President Bush, following the referendum on a new Iraqi constitution. "Democracies are peaceful countries." Considering that Iraq is perhaps the least peaceful country on earth, the statement seemed jarring.

It should not be. For it reflects a quasi-religious transformation in George W. Bush -- his political conversion to democratism, a faith-based ideology that holds democracy to be the cure for mankind's ills, and its absence to be the principal cause of terror and war.

In the theology of a devout democratist, if Americans will only persevere in using their power to convert the Islamic world, then the whole world, to democracy, we will come as close as mankind can to creating heaven on earth.

As Bush said in his second inaugural, "So, it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."

Speaking, three weeks ago, to the 20th birthday conclave of the National Endowment for Democracy, Bush recited the true believer's creed: "If the peoples (of the Middle East) are permitted to choose their own destiny ... by their participation as free men and women, then the extremists will be marginalized and the flow of violent radicalism to the rest of the world will slow and eventually end."

The president was seconded by Vice President Cheney on CNN: "I think ... we will, in fact, succeed in getting democracy established in Iraq, and I think that when we do, that will be the end of the insurgency."

Upon this faith Bush has wagered his presidency, the lives of America's best and bravest, and our entire position in the Middle East and the world. But as the Los Angeles Times' Tyler Marshall and Louise Roug report, U.S. field commanders George Casey and John Abizaid are skeptical that any election where Iraq's Sunnis are dispossessed of pre-eminence and power will ensure an end to terror. It may, they warn, bring new Sunni support for the insurgency.

Also challenging the Bush faith is Brian Jenkins, a terrorism specialist at RAND. He cites Colombia, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Northern Ireland as countries where democracy has failed to end political violence.

Nathan Brown, a Mideast expert at the Carnegie Endowment, agrees: "The democratic process as it has worked so far (in Iraq) has certainly done nothing to undermine the insurgency."

But the most sweeping challenge to President Bush's faith-based war comes from F. Gregory Cause III in Foreign Affairs. Writes Cause: "There is no evidence that democracy reduces terror. Indeed, a democratic Middle East would probably result in Islamist governments unwilling to cooperate with Washington."

In Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria, it is anti-American Islamists who seem positioned to seize power should it fall from the hands of the authoritarian rulers the National Endowment for Democracy and its neoconservative allies seek to destabilize and dump over.

If Cause is right and Bush wrong, the fruits of our bloody war for democracy in Iraq could mean a Middle East more hostile to American values and U.S. vital interests than the one Bush inherited.

That would be a strategic disaster of historic dimension.

Not only does democracy offer no guarantee against terror, writes Cause, democracies are the most frequent targets of terror. Not one incident of terror was reported in China between 2000 and 2003, but democratic India suffered 203. Israel, the most democratic nation in the Middle East, endured scores of acts of terror from 2000 to 2005. Syria's dictatorship experienced almost none. While Saddam's Iraq was terror-free, democratic Iraq suffers daily attacks.

Researching 25 years of suicide bombings, scholar Robert Pape found the leading cause was not a lack of democracy, but the presence of troops from democratic nations on lands terrorists believe by right belong to them.

The United States was hit on 9-11 because we had an army on Saudi soil. Britain and Spain were hit for sending troops to occupy Iraq. Russia was hit at Beslan because she is perceived as occupying Chechnya.

Democracy is thus no more a cure for terror than its absence is the cause. Osama has no moral objection to dictatorships. He means to establish one, a caliphate where mosque and state are joined, and sharia law is imposed without recourse to referendum.

As with Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Ho and Castro, so, too, with bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Such men seek absolute power and use revolutionary terror as the means to establish their dictatorships.

By January, we shall know whether Iraqi democracy is the antidote to terror Bush believes it to be. If it is not, he and we will have to face the grim consequences of his conversion to a utopian ideology in the name of which he pursued a potentially calamitous three-year war.

Copyright 2005 Creators Syndicate

Tuesday, October 18, 2005

Daniel Pipes: Europe Under Siege

, Daniel Pipes
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
October 18, 2005

Two recent stories dramatically illustrate Europe’s looming immigration problem.

One concerns a gang estimated to have smuggled 100,000 illegal immigrants, mainly Turkish Kurds, into Great Britain. These economic migrants paid between £3,000 and £5,000 to be transported via an elaborate and dangerous route. The Independent explains: “Their journeys lasted several weeks and involved safe houses, lorries with secret compartments and, in some cases, clandestine flights to airfields in the South-east.”

A senior British police source commented that “It’s a tortuous journey, full of discomfort and danger, but they are determined to get here, given the particular attraction of London’s established Turkish community.”

Turks are hardly alone in wanting access to Europe; the second story concerns human waves of impoverished sub-Saharan Africans storming and breaching fences to enter two tiny Spanish enclaves on the Mediterranean coast of Morocco, Ceuta and Melilla.

Until recently, these Iberian vestiges of the Crusades appeared to be curious remnants of a bygone age. Now, however, they are (along with the Canary Islands, Lampedusa, and Mayotte) among the European Union’s most isolated and vulnerable entry points, stepping stones feeding illegal immigrants to the whole of the European Union.

Melilla is a town of 60,000 with a six-mile [ten-kilometer] border with Morocco, protected by Spanish Legion and Moroccan civil guard units, high fences bristling with razors, and the latest anti-personnel technology (sensor pads, movement detectors, spotlights, infrared cameras).

The typical African migrant travels across the Sahara desert to reach the Mediterranean coast, where he idles nearby until the right moment for a run to Spanish territory. “We were just tired of living in the forest,” explained a young man from Guinea-Bissau. “There was nothing to eat, there was nothing to drink.”

In mid-September, the Africans began assaulting the frontier en masse. Deploying crude ladders made of branches, they used their weight to bring the fences down in places. As one of them put it, “We go in a group and all jump at once. We know that some will get through, that others will be injured and others may die, but we have to get through, whatever the cost.”

The tactic works. When over 1,000 persons tried to enter Melilla at a single go in September, an estimated 300 succeeded. In early October, 650 persons ran for the fence and 350 are said to have made it. “There were just too many of us” to be stopped, observed one Malian. An estimated 30,000 more Africans await their turn.

The confrontation can resemble a pitched battle. The Africans throw rocks at the security forces, which respond with bayonets, shotguns, and rubber bullets. The assaults left about a dozen Africans dead, some trampled in the rush to Spanish territory, others shot by Moroccan police.

Madrid eventually prevailed on Rabat to crack down on the remaining Africans-in-waiting, which obliged by flying some 2,000 of them to their countries of origin and exiling another 1,000 to Morocco’s southern desert, far from the Spanish enclaves. The removal was done with some brutality, dumping the Africans and leaving them to fend off the harsh elements almost without help. But the unwelcome signal was received. “I will go back now,” said another Malian, in tears. “I will not try to come back. I am exhausted.”

Modern communications and transportation increasingly inspire Turks, Africans, and others (such as Mexicans) to leave their native lands, taking extreme risks if necessary, to reach the West’s near-paradise. In response, Europeans are baring their teeth, brushing aside multicultural pieties such as Kofi Annan’s statement that “What is important is that we don’t make a futile attempt to prevent people from crossing borders. It will not work.”

But preventing people from crossing borders is very much on the agenda; it is probably only a matter of time until other Western states follow Spain and Australia and resort to military force.

Giant smuggling rings and human waves cascading over fortified positions represent the starkest manifestations of profound and growing dilemmas: how islands of peace and plenty survive in an ocean of war and deprivation, how a diminishing European population retains its historic culture, and how states from Turkey to Mali to Mexico solve their problems rather than export them.

With no solutions in sight, however, there is every reason to expect these problems to worsen.

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Mr. Pipes (http://www.danielpipes.org/) is director of the Middle East Forum and author of Miniatures (Transaction Publishers).

John Leo: Class(room) Warriors

John Leo
http://www.townhall.com
October 18, 2005

The cultural Left has a new tool for enforcing political conformity in schools of education. It is called dispositions theory, and it was set forth five years ago by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education: Future teachers should be judged by their "knowledge, skills, and dispositions."

What are "dispositions"? NCATE's prose made clear that they are the beliefs and attitudes that guide a teacher toward a moral stance. That sounds harmless enough, but it opened a door to reject teaching candidates on the basis of thoughts and beliefs. In 2002, NCATE said that an education school may require a commitment to social justice. William Damon, a professor of education at Stanford, wrote last month that education schools "have been given unbounded power over what candidates may think and do, what they may believe and value."

NCATE vehemently denies that it is imposing groupthink, but the ed schools, essentially a leftist monoculture, use dispositions theory to require support for diversity and a culturally left-wing agenda, including opposition to what the schools sometimes call "institutional racism, classism, and heterosexism."

Predictably, some students concluded that thought control would make classroom dissent dangerous. A few students rebelled when a teacher at Brooklyn College School of Education showed Michael Moore's movie Fahrenheit 9/11 in class and dismissed "white English" as "the language of oppressors." Five students filed written complaints and received no formal reply from the college. One was told to leave the school and take an equivalent course at a community college. Two of the complaining students were then accused of plagiarism and marked down one letter grade. The two were refused permission to bring a witness, a tape recorder, or a lawyer to meet with a dean to discuss the matter.

Robert Davd "K. C." Johnson, a history professor at the school who defended the dissenting students, became a target himself. After writing an article in Inside Higher Ed attacking dispositions theory as a form of mind control, Johnson faced a possible investigation by a faculty Integrity Committee. The Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights in Education entered the case on Johnson's behalf, accusing the college of viewpoint discrimination and a violation of academic freedom. FIRE is a national civil liberties group that does what the American Civil Liberties Union should be doing but usually won't. FIRE said: "Brooklyn College must confirm that it tolerates dissent, that it is not conducting another secret investigation of one of its own professors." FIRE says the college has "disavowed any secret investigation."

Another battle over dispositions theory has been unfolding at Washington State University's college of education. The college threatened to terminate a student, Edward Swan, 42, for failing four "professional disposition evaluations." Swan, a religious man of working-class background, has expressed conservative opinions in class. He opposes Affirmative Action and doesn't believe gays should adopt children. His grades are good, and even his critics say he is highly intelligent. One teacher gave Swan a failing PDE after spotting the statement "diversity is perversity" in Swan's copy of a textbook.

At the start of the current semester, Swan was offered a choice: Sign a contract with the college or be expelled. The contract included mandatory diversity training, completing various projects at the faculty's direction, and the possibility of above-normal scrutiny during Swan's student teaching this fall. Instead of signing, Swan contacted FIRE. "Almost immediately, Swan's situation changed," said an article in the local newspaper, the Moscow-Pullman Daily News. The faculty told Swan he did not have to sign the contract and would not be expelled.

Judy Mitchell, dean of the college of education, said the school would continue using the PDEs. A reporter asked her if Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia would pass a PDE if he were a student at the college. "I don't know how to answer that," Mitchell replied. David French, president of FIRE, then jumped in. "I commend the dean for her honesty," he said. "But the answer is alarming because Scalia shouldn't fail any 'character' test because of his beliefs."

Obviously, the dean had a problem. She couldn't say that no conservatives need apply, and she couldn't tell her faculty that the PDE s would be waived for someone like Scalia. In both the Johnson and the Swan cases, the colleges backed down when FIRE went public, but neither agreed to avoid using dispositions theory for apparently ideological purposes. The lesson for education students is clear: Say what you think in class, and if the administration moves against you, give FIRE a call.

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John Leo writes for U.S. News & World Report.

Monday, October 17, 2005

Concert Review: Springsteen in Madison


The Boss is back
Springsteen shows us what we've missed
By Rob Thomas
The Capital Times
October 17, 2005

It's bad enough that Bruce Springsteen hasn't played Madison for decades. What's worse is that, by giving such a fantastic show at the Alliant Energy Center Coliseum on Saturday night, he reminded us of what we've been missing out on all these years.

Springsteen said he was told that it had been 30 years since he played Madison (aside from an October 2004 campaign rally for John Kerry), but the Springsteen fan magazine "Backstreets" dates his last local appearance as Feb. 2, 1981.

Springsteen's show was a solo acoustic performance, so it lacked the dancing-in-the-aisles party atmosphere of his recent Milwaukee shows with the E Street Band. But instead of straitjacketing Springsteen's performance, performing solo gave him the flexibility to introduce all sorts of different colors and textures into the show, with songs ranging from the glorious to the grim, his voice going from a hush to a howl.

It was a show that could have the audience singing along to a joyful "Blinded by the Light" (one of several requests Springsteen took) and then, immediately afterward, pinned to their seats in silence by the powerful "The Promised Land."

To preserve an intimate, Overture Hall-like vibe, promoters had originally planned on selling only 4,000 tickets to the show, intending to draw a giant black curtain around the remainder of the arena. But when those nearly sold out within hours of going on sale, they added another 2,000, and it was only upper-level seats at the back of the arena that got partitioned off. In the end, some of the available upper-deck seats went unsold.

The promoters also enforced some etiquette rules that certainly weren't in effect when Nine Inch Nails or Alice in Chains graced the Coliseum stage earlier in the season. Concessions were mostly cut off after the show started, and if someone had to use the bathroom, they were supposed to wait until a song was over to leave their seat.

Some might chafe at such ground rules, but they helped conjure up the right environment for a show that was about spontaneity, unpredictability and intimacy, and needed an attentive crowd that wouldn't be disappointed not to hear "Glory Days" or "Born in the U.S.A." And the crowd seemed to dig the house-concert atmosphere, respectfully silent during the quieter numbers and enthusiastically applauding when they ended.

Clad in a plaid shirt and jeans, Springsteen set the tone from the start with the snarling "Idiot's Delight." As if such an obscure choice wasn't distancing enough, he sang the fire-and-brimstone lyrics through an old microphone that made his voice sound like it was coming out of an old radio. Not exactly a warm welcome to the crowd, but a fitting choice for a 150-minute concert that was full of surprises.

The first few songs of the show continued in that dark vein, from the grieving "Empty Sky" to the piercing title cut on Springsteen's new "Devils and Dust" album, for which Springsteen's vocal phrasings for lines like "fear's a powerful thing" seemed particularly Dylan-esque. There were a lot of instruments lying around the stage and Springsteen used them all, including an acoustic guitar, electric guitar, piano, organ, harmonica, ukulele and autoharp, which added to the musical richness of the show.

Springsteen played several songs off the new album; "All I'm Thinking About" was just achingly sweet, with Springsteen adopting a rare falsetto, while the sexually explicit "Reno" was haunting. And the set closer, "Matamoros Banks," was a truly powerful song about an illegal alien who dies in an attempt to swim across the border.

In introducing "Matamoros," Springsteen called for a humane U.S. immigration policy. It was a rare political statement for the night, although Springsteen did take a sly shot at the current administration by mentioning that he has been to the White House. "Not lately, of course," he said. "Back when it was fun, that's when I got my invitation."

But otherwise, Springsteen generally let the music deliver the message, and the lyrics express his commitment to compassion and community, and his hopes that those values could find their way back into politics again. He talked about the importance of faith in his life during "Jesus Was an Only Son," wryly wondering if, as he walked his last steps, Jesus Christ dreamed of living a long, ordinary life instead of being a martyr. And at the end of the five-song encore, Springsteen sang "Follow That Dream," a song that implores a lover not to give up hope. But as Springsteen repeated the same few lines over and over, his voice filling the arena as he walked to the front of the stage, arms outstretched, you couldn't help but think he was singing to an entire country that he felt had lost its way.

At the end of the show, Springsteen vowed that he'd be back soon, and with the full E Street Band in tow. "When?" yelled someone in the audience. "I don't know when," Springsteen quipped. "If I knew when, I wouldn't be me."

E-mail: rthomas@madison.com
Published: 9:28 AM 10/17/05

Book Review: Louis Freeh's 'My FBI'

My FBI
By Patrick Devenny
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
October 17, 2005

Former FBI director Louis Freeh’s recently published memoir, My FBI, is one of the more enlightening literary treatments of the travails and failings of the Clinton administration. It is written by a man who -- whatever his faults as a bureaucrat -- appears to be of the highest professional and personal character. Unfortunately, Freeh’s dedication and professionalism did little to endear him to an administration which valued petty political acumen far more than it did efficacy or integrity.

Initially, the Freeh-Clinton relationship appeared to be destined for success. The new director was astounded by the President’s vigor and intelligence, attributes which he expected to translate into a presidency actively involved in matters of security and intelligence. Nothing could have been further from the truth, as Freeh would quickly realize. Over his seven year tenure as FBI director, Freeh met privately with Clinton on no more than three occasions, causing Freeh to lament, “[Clinton] just wasn’t very interested in intelligence gathering or law-enforcement.”

The relationship between the two men worsened precipitously as the FBI was forced to assume an antagonistic role in reaction to the President’s never-ending stream of scandals. As Clinton’s indignities mounted, Freeh was determined to maintain a respectful distance between himself and the man whom he was investigating, a move which irked the loyalty-obsessed President. In reaction to Freeh’s sensible stance, Clinton took to calling his FBI director “that f***ing Freeh” during casual conversations, while letting it be known that Freeh was a “non-entity.” True to form, Clinton refused to even speak with the director from 1996 to 2000, ignoring Freeh’s numerous requests for meetings on issues pertaining to terrorism and economic security.

The war between the FBI and the Clinton administration became especially pronounced over the controversy surrounding Chinese attempts to influence the 1996 elections through large campaign contributions. Freeh and the Bureau’s counter-intelligence investigators were convinced that Chinese intelligence had authorized and supervised the overall operation. Fearful of the political fallout resulting from the release of such information, the White House repeatedly attempted to derail the investigation, with administration members -- including future 9-11 commission member Jamie Gorelick -- citing “national security” as a pretext for their demands of total access to the investigation’s findings and its ongoing activities. When Freeh successfully resisted these efforts at sabotage, obfuscation was employed, with President Clinton publicly blaming the FBI for not telling him about the Chinese involvement, a claim which stretched the limits of credulity even for Bill Clinton, considering the fact that FBI agents were briefing NSC members on an almost weekly basis.

Freeh, to his credit, holds little back in his cutting assessment of the President, suggesting that Clinton “lacked discipline,” while deeming his second term of office “farcical.” This moral contrast between the leader of the free world and his abused underling is startling, to say the least.

It did not take long for Freeh to realize that the immorality and strategic indecision that so defined the Clinton White House would adversely affect American efforts against international terrorism. Perhaps Freeh’s most devastating critique of the Clinton administration’s criminally negligent response to terrorism comes when he discusses the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing, a case which he has admirably adopted as a personal crusade. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, which killed 19 American servicemen, the White House expressed total support for an expansive FBI role in the Saudi-led investigation, with National Security Advisor Sandy Burger personally assuring Freeh that the President was squarely behind him and had conveyed his level of support to the Saudis.

This preliminary rhetoric evaporated as soon as the investigation began to implicate the terrorist group Hezbollah and its masters in Tehran. Connecting Iran to the murders of 19 American servicemen was hardly politically expedient for the Clinton White House, which had dedicated itself wholly to a policy of accommodation towards the world’s biggest sponsor of terrorism. Freeh recounts how the State Department -- desperate to protect their guiding principle of Iranian relations -- essentially began running cover for Tehran, foiling FBI investigations into Iranian spies while denying travel permits to federal agents attempting to travel to Saudi Arabia. In one conversation, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright confronts Freeh, warning him that “the Iranians are complaining,” as if the mullah’s tetchy response was a compelling reason to alter the focus of the investigation.

The White House’s disinterest in a successful investigation was more covert than Foggy Bottom’s but would prove no less devastating. When high-ranking administration officials -- such as Vice President Al Gore -- were to meet with Saudi officials, the FBI would provide them with detailed talking points, only to see them consistently ignored. During a meeting with Saudi Prince Abdullah in 1998, Clinton again disregarded Freeh’s appeals, neglecting to mention the faltering investigation but evidently finding time to press Abdullah for a contribution to the Clinton Presidential Library.

Constantly stringing Freeh along with platitudes and broken promises was Mr. Berger, who led the attempt to cover-up Iranian involvement in the Khobar bombings. When presented with nearly-incontrovertible evidence of the Iranian connection by Freeh, Berger’s first response was “who knows about this?” At meetings of the National Security Council -- chaired by Berger -- the topic of discussion was not retaliation, but ensuring that proof of Iran’s role would be suppressed. This policy of concealment permeated the entire administration, with Freeh recalling a “celebratory attitude” holding sway at the White House when a bombing suspect -- who had inconveniently testified to Iran’s involvement in the operation -- was released for lack of evidence.

Freeh’s disillusionment with the executive branch’s role in derailing the Khobar Towers investigation soon colored his entire outlook on the administration’s response to the rising tide of Islamic terrorism. Throughout his book, Freeh decries the lack of meaningful retaliatory measures carried out by the United States in response to the bombing of the East African embassies in 1998 and the USS Cole in 2000, suggesting that the consistently weak response hurt morale at the agencies -- such as the CIA and FBI -- tasked with tracking Bin Laden’s growing army. During his recent 60 Minutes interview with Mike Wallace, Freeh harkened back to an earlier example of American weakness, questioning why an assassination attempt engineered by Saddam Hussein’s intelligence service against the first President Bush in 1993 elicited only a tepid military response -- which resulted in little more than the abrupt rearrangement of Iraqi intelligence’s office supplies. Even fervent Bush critics, such as former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer, have attested to the fact that hard-line military options were declared “dead on arrival” by Clinton administration officials, who Freeh declares lacked the “political will” to respond in a truly effective manner.

Special derision is reserved for former NSC staffer Richard Clarke, a man who Freeh calls “the self-appointed Paul Revere of 9/11.” Freeh -- who has been criticized as thoroughly incompetent by Clarke -- deems Clarke a “second-tier player,” a figure barely noticed by those responsible for combating terrorism. Freeh could not recall a single memo of consequence authored by Clarke, while also claiming that Clarke never attended any of the high-level “principals” meetings held at the White House. The inconsequential nature of Clarke’s White House role is echoed in another memoir, the 2004 American Soldier, authored by General Tommy Franks, who recalled then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Hugh Shelton warning him about Clarke: “He likes to talk, drops a lot of names, and thinks highly of himself. But in many ways he's not very practical. Be careful in dealing with him.” After working with Clarke, Franks concurred with his superior’s assessment.

Additionally, Freeh charges Clarke with promulgating outright lies, such as his accounts of meetings during which Sandy Berger supposedly proposed strenuous anti-terrorist measures; Freeh contends -- convincingly -- that such gatherings simply never occurred. Clarke alleged in Against All Enemies that Freeh is a member of Opus Dei (not true), and that Clarke was at the epicenter of millennial counter-terrorist operations (also false). In order to increase his marketability -- Freeh hypothesizes -- Clarke has created a series of myths which position him as an ignored intellect, inventing a “rebellious genius” persona for himself that has no basis in fact. Given the bombastic and politically motivated nature of Clarke’s activities since leaving the government, Freeh’s allegations strike one as eminently credible.

While Freeh’s lamentations on the reckless disregard of national security displayed by the Clinton administration are numerous, the memoir finds little reason to fault its author. This is a weak point of the book, as serious questions have been raised concerning the former director’s managerial ability and his recognition of the threat posed by terrorism. The 9-11 report, while mostly praising the director’s efforts to expand the Bureau’s presence abroad and giving it a more preemptive approach to terrorism, criticizes Freeh for not successfully shifting emphasis from anti-drug and anti-organized crime efforts to counter-terrorism. Freeh offers up the lethargy of an ignorant Congress as an explanation, pointing out how legislators consistently refused to fund his terrorism-related requests.

Freeh’s excuses do not explain why he, as director of the nation’s most important law-enforcement agency, did not use the stature of his office to sway public opinion along with Congressional willingness to spend the requisite amounts on counter-terrorism. While he privately may have detested the Congressional refusal to take terrorism seriously, he never pronounced this in a sufficiently provocative manner.

Additionally, the 9-11 Review Commission charged Freeh with failing to impose his vision of aggressive counter-terrorism on the dozens of FBI field offices -- a flaw which allowed a July 2001 memo from the Minneapolis Field Office stating that a large number of Middle Eastern men were attending U.S. flight schools to go largely unnoticed. In his defense, Freeh offers only his own personal regret, hardly comforting to those who still see problems in the ways by which FBI headquarters communicates with agents in the field.

Responding to one of the more prevalent criticisms levied against Freeh’s FBI -- their astonishing technical backwardness -- Freeh can only plead guilty, stating “we were in the dark ages.” Freeh again goes on to blame a cheap Congress for not properly funding modernization efforts. Such equivocation tends to ring hollow, as Freeh -- who famously refused to use email -- cannot point to a single instance of his personal leadership concerning the issue over his eight year tenure. If he was profoundly disturbed by the antiquated nature of the FBI’s computer system, he rarely expressed it, even when bombarded by numerous external criticisms of the FBI’s technical performance.

While Freeh is hardly worthy of extensive praise, his honest assessment of the national security-related calamities of the Clinton White House is refreshing, coming from a man who had much to gain by towing the Clinton line. As is made clear throughout his commendable book, those who argued for an aggressive stance against terrorism -- including Freeh himself -- were consistently overruled by an administration which saw little political value in pursuing Islamic fundamentalists. To Freeh’s horror, when confronted with a choice between forceful action that would help ensure America’s national security or reckless indolence that would insulate him from political risk, President Clinton would invariably choose the latter. The American people have had to deal with the repercussions ever since.

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Patrick Devenny is the Henry M. Jackson National Security Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington D.C.

Sunday, October 16, 2005

Mark Steyn: Media Utters Nonsense, Won't Call Enemy Out

October 16, 2005
Chicago Sun-Times

From Thursday's New York Times: ''Nalchik, Russia -- Insurgents launched a series of raids today in this southern Russian city, striking the area's main airport and several police and security buildings in large-scale, daytime attacks that left at least 85 people dead.''

"Insurgents," eh?

From Agence France Presse:
"Nalchik, Russia: More than 60 people were killed as scores of militants launched simultaneous attacks on police and government buildings . . ."

"Militants," you say?

From the Scotsman:
"Rebel forces battled Russian troops for control of a provincial capital in the Caucasus yesterday . . ."

"Rebel forces,'' huh?

From Toronto's Globe & Mail:
"Nalchik, Russia -- Scores of rebels launched simultaneous attacks on police and government buildings . . ."

"Rebels," by the score. But why were they rebelling? What were they insurging over? You had to pick up the Globe & Mail's rival, the Toronto Star, to read exactly the same Associated Press dispatch but with one subtle difference:

''Nalchik, Russia -- Scores of Islamic militants launched simultaneous attacks on police and government buildings . . ."

Ah, "Islamic militants."

So that's what the rebels were insurging over. In the geopolitical Hogwart's, Islamic "militants" are the new Voldemort, the enemy whose name it's best never to utter. In fairness to the New York Times, they did use the I-word in paragraph seven. And Agence France Presse got around to mentioning Islam in paragraph 22. And NPR's "All Things Considered" had one of those bland interviews between one of its unperturbable anchorettes and some Russian geopolitical academic type in which they chitchatted through every conceivable aspect of the situation and finally got around to kinda sorta revealing the identity of the perpetrators in the very last word of the geopolitical expert's very last sentence.

When the NPR report started, I was driving on the vast open plains of I-91 in Vermont and reckoned, just to make things interesting, I'll add another five miles to the speed for every minute that goes by without mentioning Islam. But I couldn't get the needle to go above 130, and the vibrations caused the passenger-side wing-mirror to drop off. And then, right at the end, having conducted a perfect interview that managed to go into great depth about everything except who these guys were and what they were fighting over, the Russian academic dude had to go and spoil it all by saying somethin' stupid like "republics which are mostly . . . Muslim." He mumbled the last word, but nevertheless the NPR gal leapt in to thank him and move smoothly on to some poll showing that the Dems are going to sweep the 2006 midterms because Bush has the worst numbers since numbers were invented.

I underestimated multiculturalism. After 9/11, I assumed the internal contradictions of the rainbow coalition would be made plain: that a cult of "tolerance" would in the end founder against a demographic so cheerfully upfront in their intolerance. Instead, Islamic "militants" have become the highest repository of multicultural pieties. So you're nice about gays and Native Americans? Big deal. Anyone can be tolerant of the tolerant, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of pleasure to the multiculti- masochists. And so Islamists who murder non-Muslims in pursuit of explicitly Islamic goals are airbrushed into vague, generic "rebel forces." You can't tell the players without a scorecard, and that's just the way the Western media intend to keep it. If you wake up one morning and switch on the TV to see the Empire State Building crumbling to dust, don't be surprised if the announcer goes, "Insurging rebel militant forces today attacked key targets in New York. In other news, the president's annual Ramadan banquet saw celebrities dancing into the small hours to Mullah Omar And His All-Girl Orchestra . . ."

What happened in Russia on Thursday was serious business, not just in the death toll but in the number of key government installations that the alleged insurging rebel militants of non-specific ideology managed to seize with relative ease. The militantly rebellious insurgers of no known religious affiliation have long said they want a pan-Caucasian Islamic state from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea, and the carnage they wreaked in the hitherto semi-safe-ish republic of Kabardino-Balkaria suggests that they're more likely to spread the conflict to other parts of the Russian Federation than Moscow is to contain it.

Did you see that news item in Stavropolsky Meridian last October? "Strontium, Uranium And Plutonium Found In Train To Caucasus." When a region already regarded as a Bud's Discount Warehouse for nuclear materials is getting sucked deeper into the maw of Islamism, why be so sheepish about letting us know the forces at play?

The Russians couldn't hold on to Eastern Europe. They couldn't hold on to Central Asia. Why would they fare any better with the present so-called Russian "Federation"? The country is literally dying. It's had a net population loss every year since 1992, one of the lowest fertility rates in the world -- 1.2 children born per woman -- and one of the highest abortion rates: some 70 percent of pregnancies are terminated. Russian men now have a lower life expectancy than Bangladeshis -- not because Bangladesh is brimming with actuarial advantages but because, if he had four legs and hung from a tree in a rain forest, the Russian male would be on the endangered species list.

Yet, within their present territory, there remain a few exceptions to the grim statistics cited above, parts of Russia that retain healthy fertility rates and healthy mortality rates. And guess what? They're the Muslim parts. Or, as the New York Times/NPR/Agence France Presse/Scotsman/Toronto Globe & Mail would say, they're the insurgent rebel militant parts. Many of these Russian Muslim areas -- like Bashkortistan (and no, I didn't make that up, it's a real stan. Check it out in the World Book Of Stans) -- are also rich in natural resources.

If you're an energy-rich Muslim republic, what's the point of going down the express garbage chute of history with the Russian Federation? The Islamification of significant parts of present-day Russia is going to be a critical factor in its death spiral.

I'm aware the very concept of "the enemy" is alien to the non-judgment multicultural mind: There are no enemies, just friends whose grievances we haven't yet accommodated. But the media's sensitivity police apparently want this to be the first war we lose without even knowing who it is we've lost to. C'mon, guys, next time something happens in the Caucasus, why not blame the "Caucasians"? At least that way, we'll figure it must have been right-wing buddies of Timothy McVeigh.

Clemens' Heroics Add To His Legend

By
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
10/15/2005

HOUSTON- The Pecos Bill of the mound, a John Wayne in cleats, a Paul Bunyan with his blue-hot fastball, righthander Roger "Rocket" Clemens came to his hometown team toting six Cy Young Awards and was already a figure of Texas-sized proportions.

Now, with each outing possibly his last, the legend grows as he faces the Cardinals today in Game 3 of the National League Championship Series.

Think of the tales of yore that come to the mound with Clemens. The eye black, the temperamental, fireballing years at Fenway Park. His sons, all of whose names start with K, and the 4,500 other K's he has in his Hall of Fame career. The four Cy Youngs and two World Series titles that followed his departure from Boston. His retirement, as a Yankee, after 2003. His return to pitch for his hometown Astros. All well-known chapters of his career.

"What Roger has accomplished is absolutely phenomenal - the longevity and to be good over a long period of time is a trademark of a true Hall of Famer," Houston manager Phil Garner said. "Then I think you've got to put a special wing in the Hall of Fame for the Rocket. ... Who knows how that is going to turn out, but our kids will be reading about the Rocket for a number of years to come. People will write stories about it, books about it, and they will write essays in high schools about him."

This season may be the tallest tale of them all.

Coaxed out of retirement for the second consecutive season, Clemens, at 43, had the lowest ERA in the majors and was a candidate to win his eighth Cy Young. On the day his mother, Bess, died, he pitched in the midst of the wild-card race and held Florida to one earned run over 6 1/3 innings to get the win.

Less than a week ago, the Astros were locked in an extra-inning tussle with Atlanta in the first round. He volunteered to go to the bullpen, entered in the 16th inning and allowed just one hit over three innings as the Astros won in the 18th. It was his first relief appearance since his rookie season, 21 years ago. Garner said he doubts he could "have gotten the ball out of (Clemens') hand. It was his game."

One for the ages from the aged.

"You know, things have changed for me over the last couple weeks," Clemens said. "There's a big part of my heart that's missing now with my mother gone. That's just the way it is. I knew I pitched for her, but I didn't realize how much that I did.

"Every time I hear the anthem, I think about her. I think about seeing her face for the last time, and that's where I'm trying to draw my strength from. I owe that to my teammates."

dgoold@post-dispatch.com 314-340-8285