About terror, and the flag, and the homefront’s responsibility, &c.

December 4, 2001 8:50 a.m.

ust 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.