"Your response to your "Jonah-is-a-racist" critics omits the most obvious
point: there is no parallel between Black History Month and the kinds of
ethnic pride celebrations your quoted critic refers to. Or have I just not
noticed the national celebration of Irish, Italian, Polish, Catholic, and
Jewish History Months? Neighborhood parades are hardly comparable to
national indoctrination programs implemented in the public schools upon our
impressionable youth."

"Plenty of other groups in this country have celebrations of their own cultures and histories. Hispanics have theirs. The Irish, the Italians, and the Polish have theirs. So do southern whites. Catholic have theirs. And yes, the Jews (meaning YOU AND YOUR PEOPLE) have plenty. Yet out of all these groups who gather to study and celebrate their culture, it is only a problem when BLACKS do it, as far as conservatives are concerned, despite the fact that NONE of these observances (including your Jewish holidays and menorahs) originated in America or celebrate anything at all to do with America. Unlike black history month! "

"Mr. Goldberg...you need to comprehend...white America is deeply ignorant about black America. Black history month is intended to remedy this fact."

MAIL BAG I: [Jonah Goldberg]

A movie-buff reader writes:

"You MUST see KUNG PAO: ENTER THE FIST. Three conditions I'm confident you
meet (I confess I dunno about the middle one): 1) A sense of humor with a
high taste for the shamelessly stupid; 2) familiarity with the Bruce
Lee/Chop Socky Movies it's parodying; and 3) an overwhelming desire to see
France as the Evil Empire."

Just as it did last year, my black history month column has inspired dozens of nervous parents and grandparents to search through the course catalogs of their college-bound or college-attending loved-ones. One reader sent me this description of the course on the American Revolution at Kansas University:

Second, as a voluptuary of Burke, I'm not about to argue that sudden, dramatic, society-wide change is ever a purely good thing.

But, I think you're wrong when you say it can't happen. You shouldn't necessarily look to Turkey's experience with the veil, so much as it's experience with men's hats. In traditional Muslim society, the kind of hat you wore defined your station (and occupation) in life. Tombstones in Ottoman cemeteries depicted the kind of hat the deceased wore to signify who he was. The Turkish phrase "to put on a hat," Bernard Lewis tells us, long had the same significance for Turks that "turncoat" had for English society; To change your hat meant you changed your loyalties.

Sultan Mahmud II abolished this system early in the 19th century and mandated the wearing of the Fez (AKA The Shriner Hat). At first the Fez was fiercely resisted, but eventually it became symbolic of Muslim pride. By 1925, when Kemal Attaturk banned the Fez and encouraged Western headwear as an indispensable step toward modernization, he also met with fierce resistance.

Here's how Ataturk defended the Fez ban:
"It was necessary to abolish the fez, which sat on the heads of our nation as an emblem of ignorance, negligence, fanaticism, and hatred of progress and civilization, to accept in its place the hat, the headgear used by the whole civilized world, and in this way to demonstrate that the Turkish nation, in its mentality as in other respects, in no way diverges from civilized social life."

You'd think the hard left (giggle) would rally behind the war effort now that we've liberated the pederasts.

This story's not for the squeamish. But this is damn funny:

"Such is the Pashtun obsession with sodomy — locals tell you that birds fly over the city using only one wing, the other covering their posterior..."

Contrary to what I stated last night, two other columnists have also whacked Geraldo after his move to Fox. Brent Bozell

"So trust me on this one. If you skinny little whitebread college kids, with your “coalitions” for this and your “actions” against that, think you’re going to come into our town and mess things up again just for kicks—right when we were getting it cleaned up, too!—I think you’re going to be in for a rude awakening. We’re feeling a little cranky, and are in no mood for your shenanigans right now. "

PUNDIT REFORM?: [Rich Lowry]
I don't buy the whole pundit-gate story. But the beginning of Howard Kurtz's Washington Post column today mentions campaign-finance reform, which makes me wonder: Shouldn't John McCain, who believes that $100,000 in Enron money can corrupt entire political parties, now be denouncing Bill Kristol as a hopelessly tainted and corrupt Washington insider? (It would be an absurd charge, of course, but when has that stopped McCain before?)

FRIEDMAN ROLLS ON: [Rich Lowry]
I loved the bit from today's column about Arafat wanting two Palestianian states, one in the West Bank, the other in Israel (thanks to the "right of return"). A very apt formulation.

Like President Bush, Gephardt didn’t associate positions with parties—but in his case out of justifiable fear rather than personal inclination.

Gephardt called for people to call or write their congressmen about campaign-finance reform. Let’s see if that groundswell of support materializes tomorrow.

"What we have found in Afghanistan confirms that - far from ending there - our war against terror is only beginning. Most of the 19 men who hijacked planes on September 11th were trained in Afghanistan's camps - and so were tens of thousands of others. Thousands of dangerous killers, schooled in the methods of murder, often supported by outlaw regimes, are now spread throughout the world like ticking time bombs - set to go off without warning."

NY Times columnist Paul Krugman, as many of us know, was horribly burned by Andrew Sullivan's "pundit-gate" disclosures, specifically that Krugman took $50K from Enron and never disclosed it. And now Krugman's clearly over-compensating to show his "independence." In today's column he writes:

"I predict that in the years ahead Enron, not Sept. 11, will come to be seen as the greater turning point in U.S. society."

Eric Boehlert has a very excited piece in this morning's Salon (most of it is in their "premium" section -- i.e. that place where few bother to tread, but I got the whole thing through Nexis). Boehlert argues that since conservative pundits (including me) think Dick Cheney has a political problem by keeping these energy meetings secret, we must all agree that Enron is a political scandal. Here's a quote from the free section:

"This rare public split between the administration and its media faithful highlights just how toxic the Enron scandal may be. Clearly, nervous conservatives see a political dark side as new revelations continue to tumble out and polls suggest the company's collapse is taking a greater political toll on Republicans than Democrats. The split also makes clear that it was wishful thinking to suggest that the Enron story was a business scandal, not a political one, unless someone could come up with solid evidence of a White House quid pro quo for all that campaign cash. Even Kate O'Beirne of the conservative National Review conceded that on CNN over the weekend: "It's taken hold in Washington and it is not going away. It will be a big political story."

Someone get Boehlert a paper bag. He's hyperventilating. There's a difference between a political story and a political scandal. The trick I use for remembering this is that the two words are spelled differently. There are now ten or eleven Congressional probes; There's a Justice Department probe; An SEC probe...hell you can find fewer probes at a proctological trade show. Of course this is a political story. That doesn't make it a political scandal.

"It was not by cheer [sic] coincidence that Hezbollah turned into a struggle movement against the “Israeli” occupation. Because Hezbollah’s ideological ideals sees no legitimacy for the existence of “Israel” a matter that elevates the contradictions to the level of existence."

THANKS…: [Rich Lowry]
…for all the under-reported suggestions Friday. I went with the story of this Medal-of-Honor guy who got harassed by airport security. Here is NR’s take from new issue: “The business of screening passengers at airports has now passed beyond mere comedy into a realm of gibbering lunacy. Under the dogmatic guidance of “profiling”-obsessed transportation secretary Norman Mineta, a doctrine of anti-profiling seems to have taken hold, in which those passengers who are, on any commonsense grounds, the least likely to pose a security risk are harassed, abused, and insulted. Examples abound, but one that particularly caught our eye concerned retired Marine Corps general Joseph J. Foss, aged 86. At the airport in Phoenix, Gen. Foss was held up for 45 minutes at the airport while security officials deliberated over a potentially dangerous item he was carrying on his person. The item? A Congressional Medal of Honor, received—as is plainly stated on the obverse side of it—from President Roosevelt in 1943, for exceptional valor in the Pacific. (Gen. Foss was carrying the medal because he had recently spoken to cadets at West Point, whom he had showed the medal in order to make a point.) Does anybody think that an 86-year-old retired general and his Congressional Medal of Honor pose any threat? Well, yes—the security screeners at America West obviously think so. These nitwits—and their superiors, all the way up to Secretary Mineta—are plainly operating at levels of stupidity, incompetence, and mindless political correctness so far beyond the boundaries of reason they should not be allowed anywhere near an airport, nor any other place where large pieces of machinery are present.”

But it seems that Mark actually agrees with the thrust of the administration's position when he says a terrorist is "a war criminal out of uniform." Exactly. Another word for that is an "unlawful combatant." And the Geneva Conventions doesn't apply to such combatants.

In the meantime, calling them POWs is a Trojan horse for moral equivalence. Mark's example about Hezbollah is telling. Sure, Hezbollah kills soldiers from time to time. But more often they -- and their ilk -- kill school children, old ladies and any other civilian noncombatant they can find. Nevertheless, Israel's critics and friends alike often fall into a trap of asserting a moral equivalence between what Hezbollah does -- try to kill as many civilians as possible -- and what Israel does -- target military targets while trying to minimize civilian Palestinian casualties.

Folks: What's all the fuss about classifying the Taliban and al Qaeda detainees as POWs? My international-law professor at Fletcher (Alfred Rubin) eventually persuaded me that all combatants, even irregulars, should be considered soldiers--and treated that way. For those who are captured, there is one big advantage--they can be held until the war is over and, as the president has been repeating at every turn, the current war is against terrorism, not Islam or Afghanistan, and it isn't going to be over for quite a while. "Unlawful combatants," meanwhile, have to be charged or released at some point. There's no real downside, since we're going to be treating them like POWs anyway, with catered meals and prayer rugs. If they're POWs, we can keep them locked up for as long as we please--and if we decide to release them before we consider the war to be over, we can parole them, which in POW terms means that of they are ever captured again, they can be summarily executed.

"But they're terrorists!," you say. Well, what's a terrorist but a war criminal out of uniform. A Hezbollah guy who attacks an Israeli military installation is no terrorist--he's a soldier. He gets killed, surely--and not a moment too soon -- but he dies like a man. A terrorist, if the term means anything, is someone who kills teenagers at a bar mitzvah or toddlers and their moms at a pizza parlor. There's a more accurate word for such a person--it's "war criminal." Preemptively classifying all terrorists as combatants means that if we capture them we can try them as war criminals and execute them. And if they're not war criminals, then they're regular POWs, whom we can detain until the war is over. In other words, every captured terrorist is either executed or detained indefinitely--it works for me.