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about all my life, I have heard calls for, and vows of, “getting
tough on terrorism” — so forgive me if I yawn just a little,
particularly as concerns U.S. yelping about the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The most recent
State Department spokesman, Richard Boucher, says, “It’s essential
that acts of terrorism and violence end now.”
Oh? It has
never been essential that acts of terrorism and violence
end now, at least for the State Department (and don’t you love
that exquisitely passive voice? Our spokesman would never say, “It’s
essential that Palestinians cease their acts of mass murder against
Israelis”).
I’ll tell
you why Boucher’s statement should be met with skepticism:
These acts of terrorism always occur, and the State Department —
and our government more broadly — have gone right on as if
they hadn’t. We have never proved it “essential” that terror
“end now”; instead, through our actions and words, we have disproved
it. Yasser Arafat was the number-one most-frequent foreign visitor
to the White House during the eight years of Bill Clinton. Ariel
Sharon asks for “ten days of quiet,” or “seven days of quiet” (which
means, to put it in an American context, no 9/11’s), and we
jump on him as an unreasonable, unrealistic hard-liner. Seven
days.
Israel experiences
these little 9/11’s every other week or so, and the truth is,
most of the world doesn’t care. Israeli bodies are strewn over
Jerusalem streets, and we regard that as almost natural. Too few
Americans — and especially too few at high levels — have
been prepared to grant Israel the right of self-defense that we
have unhesitatingly demanded for ourselves.
We have been
awfully good at making excuses for Arafat and the P.A. Monday’s
New York Times headline read, “15 Israelis Die in Bus Attack;
Militants Jailed by Arafat.” This jailing typically means a grudging
recognition that the “militants” have to lie low for a while; then
they are let out, while no one — except Israeli intelligence
— is looking. Meanwhile, Arafat congratulates the families
of the suicide bombers, hailing the young murderers as heroes and
martyrs.
For many, many
years now, we have smiled at, or looked away from, Arab grossness.
The (official) Egyptian press is full of blood libel. Yasser Arafat’s
mouth — when speaking Arabic, of course — is full of the
same. The First Lady of the Palestine Authority, with the First
Lady of the United States sitting right beside her, declared that
Israel was poisoning the drinking water of Palestinian children,
and gassing them. The dictator of Syria rolls out the hoariest libels,
with the Pope standing right there. That dictator’s late father
has the U.S. secretary of state, Warren Christopher, cool his heels
for a couple of hours, waiting to see him. We coddle and cajole
and humor these liars and thugs, calling it “realism,” sometimes.
And then the reality hits: in the form of bombs.
No, the realists
are those who recognize the futility of trying to appease those
who have shown themselves to be unappeasable. When will the West
take Arabs seriously, instead of condescending to them in
quasi-racist fashion? When they say they wish to destroy Israel,
and will never cease until they do so, they mean it — and ought
to be credited with meaning it. When they say that the suicide bombers
are doing God’s work, we ought to concede that they mean what
they say — and respond, or adjust our thinking, accordingly.
Pro-Israel
optimists say that the Bush administration is newly aroused on the
troubles that Israel faces, troubles not dissimilar to our own,
new ones. Well, as the Missouri politicians like to say, show me.
 Symbolism
isn’t everything, but it’s not nothing, either, and some
symbolism in Afghanistan has been stirring: The U.S. Marines hoist
the New York City flag over a base — a flag that came from
Ground Zero. I can’t help feeling a shiver.
A soldier —
Cpl. Steve Cardella, as quoted in the New York Post —
says, “You can tell the Taliban any time they come up against the
U.S. Marines, they’re going to die real soon.” How is that
for stirring, direct, American speech? “You can tell the American
and Afghan people they don’t have to worry about the Taliban
anymore. The U.S. Marines are on the job.”
If I’m
especially impressed by this, please forgive me: I was raised in
a fiercely anti-military environment, in which soldiers were portrayed
as dumb, ignorant cannon fodder at best, mindless, bloodthirsty
animals at worst. And when I hear, “The U.S. Marines are on the
job” — what a job. I’m glad they’re on it. And I
realize that, in a sense, they’re doing it in my stead, as
soldiers have done for other citizens from time immemorial.
FUN
FACT OF THE DAY: Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar are each other’s
father-in-law. They are each other’s son-in-law, too. Bin Laden
is married to one of Omar’s daughters; Omar is married to one
of bin Laden’s daughters. Each man is both father-in-law and
son-in-law to the other.
We now resume
our normal broadcast day.
It
will surprise no regular reader that I am not surprised that
the University of Michigan, my risible alma mater, has proudly refused
to help the federal government interview Middle Eastern students
here on temporary visas. If federal agents were to interview those
students, however, I suspect they might find out some interesting
and some useful things — based on my experience in the Near
Eastern Studies Department and in that community generally. Let’s
just say that Ann Arbor should not be assumed to be a hotbed of
anti-Osama feeling.
The worst thing
about such stands as Michigan’s is that those who take them
do so with such preening and self-satisfaction. They think of themselves
as civil libertarians (though, of course, we’re not talking
about American citizens here) and as Defenders of the American Way
(though if a conservative were to present himself as a Defender
of the American Way, he’d be attacked as a jingoist, McCarthyite,
and boob). But they are not princes of liberty; they do not act
with Jefferson in mind. I believe I know this crowd exceedingly
well, having lived among them and been part of them: They simply
wouldn’t lift a finger to help the United States.
A
plan is afoot to export MTV to the Middle East, so as to get the
darker and more sheltered types hip to American culture. I join
the fuddy-duddies who aren’t so keen on MTV as a star-spangled
export. I’m not so keen on MTV at home — or does
that make me a Talibanist, as those who believe that the war is
for Britney Spears’s navel might assert?
In this regard,
I was interested in a story from England — linked by Drudge
— that begins, “An alarming spread of violent American-style
gang culture — prompted by rap videos on MTV — has been
uncovered by Scotland Yard.” This may sound like a laughing matter;
but as you read into the story, you see that it isn’t. And
these gangs are definitely no laughing matter when your children
are caught up in them, or brutalized by them.
The effect
of “hip-hop” entertainment on real life is one of the great underexplored
subjects of our time.
Speaking
of England, I saw the other night what must be the dumbest show
in the history of shows — By Jeeves, an Alan Ayckbourn/Andrew
Lloyd Webber semi-musical. Now, I say this as a) a Wodehouse nut,
b) an Anglophile, c) an anti-snob — someone who is utterly
open to silly, light entertainment, and d) a longtime defender of
Lloyd Webber. But really: This was the kind of thing that only a
second-grader could find amusing. The show has only a few good lines
and about two and a half enjoyable songs — and yet the people
around me were chuckling and purring throughout.
I didn’t
scorn them; actually envied them.
Larry
King, a smart man, has said something amazingly stupid. According
to fab N.Y. Post gossip columnist Cindy Adams, he said, “I
love bums. Bums in New York are literate. Bums in New York could
run a grocery chain in Des Moines.”
Only someone
who a) doesn’t know New York (at least anymore) and b) doesn’t
know Des Moines (ever) could have said this. The bums I encounter
can’t zip their flies.
I will simply
never get over the idiocy that coastal elites constantly express
about life in the Midwest. And I don’t say this in a pose of
populism; I mean, just as a gray-matter matter, it’s . . dumb,
untrue.
One
chapter in the Lewinsky affair is over, and it ended the wrong way.
The Pentagon officials who played a dirty trick on Linda Tripp —
releasing classified information about her to a Clinton-friendly
reporter — were cleared. Well, not quite cleared. A district-court
judge ruled that they couldn’t be held personally liable for
the invasion of Tripp’s privacy. The men — Kenneth Bacon
and Clifford Bernath — had already been found guilty of violating
the Privacy Act (though Janet Reno refused to prosecute; Tripp pursued
the case on her own).
I wrote, I
believe, four articles on this affair for The Weekly Standard
magazine. It is a disgusting affair, involving exactly the kind
of dirty trickery that Charles Colson went to jail for, in the bad
ol’ Nixon days. The Clinton people, however, have simply skated
by.
Another
entry in “Bad Guys Finish First”: Lee Brown has triumphed over Orlando
Sanchez in the Houston mayoral race. Brown and the Democrats employed
just the kind of racial dirty tricks that Gore and the Democrats
employed in the last presidential campaign — complete with
filthy use of the James Byrd lynching. By the time the Democrats
were through with him, Sanchez — a Cuban-American — looked
like a Klansman.
Frankly, I
tire of castigating the Democrats for their racial demagoguery;
I have made something close to a career of it. But if I tire, the
terrorists will have . . . oh, no, that’s another line, sorry.
The
crudity of our politics was summed up by Nita Lowey’s statement
“Bottom line: This is George W. Bush’s recession.” Lowey is
head of the Democratic congressional campaign committee, and she
spoke these words for the country’s press. You can just hear
the meeting, as the spinmeisters decide what to say: “There’s
this, that, and the other thing, but bottom line: This is George
W. Bush’s recession!” So, instead of saying something semi-artful,
the politician just says, “Bottom line: . . .”
Remember “Message:
I care”? At least that was kinda nice.
News
comes that a gentleman is suing a strip club because a dancer, swinging
on a pole, accidentally struck him with a high heel. There is so
much to say here: about Litigious America, about the Mainstreaming
of Porn, about . . . you know? You can write your own editorial.
Or just savor the thought.
QUOTE
OF THE MONTH: That would go to Mark Steyn, although perhaps that’s
not fair, because he would get the prize virtually every month.
This passage is from his current Spectator piece, in which
— as I have done, ad nauseam — he complains about the
false, mindless egalitarianism of our airport-security regime: Everyone
is an equal suspect, no profiling, or emphasis, allowed. “The guy
[a poor slob whose effort to retrieve a Palm Pilot shut an airport
down] didn’t fit the profile of the suicide bombers, but neither
does your 88-year-old granny, and that’s why we’re emptying
out her underwear on the conveyor belt. Under our new high-alert
procedures, security personnel demonstrate their sensitivity by
looking for people who don’t look anything like the people
they’re looking for. Never in the field of human conflict have
so many been so inconvenienced to avoid offending so few.”
And never has
Churchill been so merrily and aptly paraphrased.
In
the previous
Impromptus, I wrote — bitterly — about Bush’s
renaming the Justice Department Building after RFK. I said, “Why
not Griffin Bell” (if we’re talking Democratic attorneys general)?
A reader wrote in to say, “Why not Ramsey Clark?” Well, I
could say why not.
Another reader
wrote, “I think that politicians in Washington, D.C., should take
a look at corporate sponsorship of landmarks and buildings, taking
their lead from the wonderful world of sports [that would be wonderful,
wide world of sports, bub]. Perhaps some of the public tax
burden for the maintenance of our monuments and government buildings
could be subsidized in this way, and all partisan issues could be
put aside. For instance: How does ‘The Stayfree Maxi-Pads Justice
Department Building’ strike you?”
Not favorably.
Still another
reader wrote, “I’m surprised someone has not pointed out that
Robert Kennedy wiretapped Martin Luther King. Given that RFK’s
daughter bashed Bush for ‘violating’ civil liberties,
does this mean she would also reject such an honor for her father?”
I
also spotlighted the reader who went way out of his way for a lamp
not made in China. Another reader wrote, “I live in Colorado. I
need a new lamp. I don’t want a Chinese lamp. I can’t
find a non-ChiCom lamp. Apparently the forces of darkness are heavily
into light.”
Too bad.
Another reader
wrote, “I bought a protective leather case for my favorite Bible,
one with carrying handles and a separate compartment for a notebook.
After using it for several months, I noticed the little tag in the
back proclaiming the case to be ‘Made in China.’ The retailer
— a Christian bookstore — refused to refund the purchase
price, which was understandable; the case was visibly worn. However,
when I suggested to the store’s owner that there might be a
conflict in trading with a government that persecutes Christians
systematically, he gave me one of those are-you-visiting-from-another-dimension
looks. According to him, no other supplier could touch the Chinese
price, and that was that.”
But, as our
reader knows, that is not that.
Thanks.
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