The Week

Appearing in the court where he is to be tried as the “20th hijacker,” Zacarias Moussaoui minced no words. The French-born Moroccan said he prayed for the “destruction of the United States of America” and the “destruction of the Jewish people and state.” They must have skipped the religion-of-peace lesson plan when Zach was at madrassa. Such stuff appears all the time in Middle Eastern newspapers and on al Jazeera, but it was good to hear it in an American court, where it couldn’t be ignored, or fuzzed away by make-nice translations. He will keep talking; America should keep listening.

The controversy over cloning involves complicated issues about which few people know much. So it’s understandable that both sides of the controversy would seek shorthand descriptions that incline the casual reader or viewer in their favor. But the pro-cloning lobby, confronted with polls suggesting that the public is against it, has crossed the line into deception. First they tried to pretend there was a distinction between “reproductive cloning” and “therapeutic cloning,” when in truth the procedures are the same except that in the former the cloned embryo is allowed to develop into a baby while in the latter the embryo is destroyed. Now a procloning group is running an ad that denies that therapeutic cloning is “cloning” at all. “Is it cloning?” asks one character in the ad. “Nooo …” comes the reply. “Uses an unfertilized egg and a skin cell.” But that’s the way clones are made, and until this point in the debate nobody has pretended otherwise. A new Senate bill to permit therapeutic cloning follows the same pretense as the ad: It defines “cloning” as the implantation of a cloned embryo in a womb, and so claims to outlaw cloning even though it actually authorizes it. Proponents of cloning are fond of presenting themselves as the party of science, reason, and knowledge. Their shabby tactics belie these claims.

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Appearing in the court where he is to be tried as the “20th hijacker,” Zacarias Moussaoui minced no words. The French-born Moroccan said he prayed for the “destruction of the United States of America” and the “destruction of the Jewish people and state.” They must have skipped the religion-of-peace lesson plan when Zach was at madrassa. Such stuff appears all the time in Middle Eastern newspapers and on al Jazeera, but it was good to hear it in an American court, where it couldn’t be ignored, or fuzzed away by make-nice translations. He will keep talking; America should keep listening.

The controversy over cloning involves complicated issues about which few people know much. So it’s understandable that both sides of the controversy would seek shorthand descriptions that incline the casual reader or viewer in their favor. But the pro-cloning lobby, confronted with polls suggesting that the public is against it, has crossed the line into deception. First they tried to pretend there was a distinction between “reproductive cloning” and “therapeutic cloning,” when in truth the procedures are the same except that in the former the cloned embryo is allowed to develop into a baby while in the latter the embryo is destroyed. Now a procloning group is running an ad that denies that therapeutic cloning is “cloning” at all. “Is it cloning?” asks one character in the ad. “Nooo …” comes the reply. “Uses an unfertilized egg and a skin cell.” But that’s the way clones are made, and until this point in the debate nobody has pretended otherwise. A new Senate bill to permit therapeutic cloning follows the same pretense as the ad: It defines “cloning” as the implantation of a cloned embryo in a womb, and so claims to outlaw cloning even though it actually authorizes it. Proponents of cloning are fond of presenting themselves as the party of science, reason, and knowledge. Their shabby tactics belie these claims.