Jeremayakovka

Happy Easter

Catholic: Is Paris Praying? (w/ pics)
Gospel: According to Al Green (w/ video)

Former Hamas Member Sees The Light

Mosab Hassan Yousef, former Hamas "militant," now evangelical Christian convert, speaks about Hamas's culpability for fueling violence between Palestinian Arabs and Israel:

The Hamas leadership, including my father, they're responsible; they're responsible for all the violence that happened from the organization. I know they describe it as reaction to Israeli aggression, but still, they are part of it and they had to make decisions in those operations against Israel (for) which there was the killing of many civilians.

Mosab is profiled in "Escape From Hamas," which airs TONIGHT, Saturday, January 3 on Fox at 10:00PM. It will be rebroadcast Sunday at 1:00AM, 4:00AM, 9:00PM, and Midnight, and Monday at 2:00AM (EST).

Passionate Arson In Alaska

With a recent attempt to burn down Gov. Sarah Palin's church (and whoever happened to be inside it at the time), this is a good time to revisit The Passion Of The Death Threats Against Jerry Falwell.

Forest, Meet Trees

The Republican brand may be "tarnished," John McCain definitely is "tarnished" (as in finished), but through it all conservatism sparkles: Kevin McCullough predicted Obama's ascension 23 months ago. Five decisive factors: raging liberals, disgusted conservatives, exhausted moderates, energized blacks, gullible evangelicals. Read it all.

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More: Two red-blooded, blue-state residents (one Christian, one Jewish) don't need Weathermen to know which way the wind blows. Read "President Fraud."

A Worldview Without Zionism

Senator Obama's political coming-of-age memoir, The Audacity of  Hope, contains not one mention of the State of Israel, reports Gay Patriot. Who knew that the candidate of Hope and Change is equally the candidate of Imagination?

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too....

Sandra Does Sarah

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You can put lipstick, pearls, and even a cocktail dress on a self-pitying, rage-filled, liberal snob of a Jewish dyke, but it's still a self-pitying, rage-filled, liberal snob of a Jewish dyke.

Sandra Bernhard on Sarah Palin:

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Not included in the video: Bernhard's boast that Palin, in New York, would be gang-raped by blacks. The threat (or, more perversely, the taunt) of rape to keep disagreeable women in their place. Original.

Later Bernhard explains: [The gang rape comment] is part of a much larger, nuanced, and yes, provocative (that's what I do) piece from my show about racism, freedom, women's rights and the extreme views of Governor Sarah Palin, a woman who doesn't believe that other women should have the right to choose, Bernhard told the Daily News today.

Women deserve better, she continued. I certainly wish Governor Palin no harm. I'd just like her to explain to me how she can hold such outrageous views - and then go back to Alaska.

[Update: Women do deserve better - better than you, that is. S.E. Cupp replies in the Daily News.]

Palin's "extreme" and "outrageous" views are hers alone and she owns them. Her influence with them as vice-president would be slight, and even as president, while real, would be far from absolute. One aspect which Bernhard ignores, as do most pro-choice advocates, is that to people who are pro-life, any abortion is extreme.  (And to people of mixed opinion, either extreme is dispiriting to listen to for very long.) If Bernhard were serious about wanting an explanation from Palin, she would ask politely but firmly, then listen. She would not turn her comedienne's stage into a bully pulpit. Further, it's not as if explanations of pro-life positions aren't readily available. It's just that seeking them out would mean Bernhard would have to do some legwork to understand how somebody who disagrees with her thinks.

Bernhard's claim that she wishes Palin no harm is highly disingenuous. Of course she wants Palin "harmed": humiliated (which all threats of rape are - humiliations - in this case even more so because it's public) as a preliminary step to being politically diminished, neutralized, and - if possible - banished from the national stage. As for physical harm, what Bernhard means is, I wish that Palin comes to no physical harm as a direct result of my comedy routine. Shit, then I'd be in real trouble!

That trope of  criminally rebellious black men (or boys) being Bernhard's "brothers" - as rapists-on-call or as a tangental, amorphous punishing force or as some kind of Black Avenging Angels - is contemptible. It's worn-out "black Orpheus" or "white Negro" attitudes that poisoned the Western intellectual well the moment Sartre and Mailer poured them in over 50 years ago. In short, Sandra Bernhard needs to grow up. Finding her own power will have little to do with put-downs that trickle down from "Fight The Power." But if she insists on buying in to the myth of demonic, black moral and sexual potency (or supremacy), then emptor caveat: Give V.S. Naipaul's Guerillas a go before going any further, girl.

Oh, and Governor Palin went back to Alaska because that's where her home, her job, and her family are. Of course, I realize that what Bernhard means is Get the hell away from New York!

This is timely, Gentle Reader. At stake right now is that Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, the Republican vice presidential nominee, is insisting on representing America, alongside certain New York Jews and in solidarity with the State of Israel, to castigate the Islamic Republic of Iran for its nuclear, jihadist, and genocidal ambitions. So don't let any media hype surrounding Sandra Bernhard, nor any other snobby, liberal Jews in New York, divert you from what Governor Sarah Palin, one righteous gentile, is trying to do.
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Israel, Heart of the Middle East

Golda Meir's famous precis of what fuels the Arabs' war against Israel is vindicated in this current English-language Muslim news article. As Meir once said, Peace will come when Arabs love their children more than they hate Jews.

But until then....

There are eleven Iraqi children being treated in Israel, sponsored by Save a Child's Heart (SACH) [link provided by JMK, not Islam Online - but, of course], a humanitarian organization founded in Israel in 1996 and supported by Christian charity groups.Some parents still fear the stigma of being treated in Israel. Mustafa, 4, has undergone two heart operations in Israel in six months.

"My only fear, which spoils my joy at my son's escape from death, is the revenge my family can expect when we go back to Iraq," says his mother.

Other parents rule out any possibility of getting help from Israel.

"We've been foes of Israel since before we were born," Shatha, whose two-year-old baby Sara needs surgery for a defective heart valve, told The Times. She has turned down an offer to get her baby treated at the Edith Wolfson medical center in Israel.

"We firmly believe that they are our enemies. You can't change this overnight."

She is now planning to have the operation for little Sara performed in Algeria whose government has agreed to pay for 14 Iraqi children to be treated there rather than be sent to Israel.

Shatha's Kurdish friend has also rejected a similar offer of a free heart surgery for her son Ahmed in Israel.

"Now I can sleep with a clear conscience," she told The Times, requesting anonymity. "I'm able to hold my head up high and not be ashamed by having my son treated in Algeria."

Married to the Mob

Pat Buchanan's world is "Post-Christian America" and we're just living in it. He may be an incorrigible antisemite whose "America First" stances are too stark. He also firmly puts his foot down against gay marriage:

Homosexual marriage is not in the California constitution, else someone would have discovered it in 160 years. Where, then, did the state Supreme Court find this was a right?

Four of seven justices unearthed this right by consulting what Orwell called their "smelly little orthodoxies." They then decided to overturn the expressed will of the voters, declare their opinion law and order the state of California to begin recognizing homosexual unions as marriages. And they did it because they know the Times types will hail them as the newest Earl Warrens.

Related: Gay Patriot asks whether he's a Nazi sympathizer?
Previous JMK post on Buchanan.

Now And Zen Cohen

I have abdicated the throne
both the temporal and the spiritual
-- Leonard Cohen, Book of Longing

[Welcome, readers referred by online muses, Fausta's Blog and Atlas Shrugs and Alarming News.]

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Yesterday I read the bestselling collection of latter-day Leonard Cohen poetry and drawings, Book of Longing. Read it start-to-finish and in silence, the way it's intended, I sense. For one thing, the bulk of it was written inside a Zen monastery.... A daintier presenter will give readers leave to "pick and choose" through this 229-page volume, but Jeremayakovka does not advise that.

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Leonard's longing is longer than any of the Book of Longing's 100-something individual compositions and 40-something drawings. The little works smolder in the ear and/or eye, bolder than quips or limericks yet shy of odes or elegies. Taken individually in short-footed, almost sing-song cadence, their form contradicts the pretended gravity of Leonard's notoriously heat- (and wet-) seeking flesh. Some of the Book of Longing's freshest moments are stringent admissions of his own, often priapic, aporias. Out of context they would rateas just an old man's dirty dunceries. Here they ring in deadpan, almost comic relief:

still looking / at the girls / but there are / no girls / none at all / there is only / (this'll kill ya) / inner peace / & harmony (p. 207)

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Leonard is neither gone nor forgotten of course, but either state can turn inert. Neither guarantees a just appreciation. For "appreciation" without estimation is flattery; if not, it might render one vulnerable to flattery. One thing Leonard reminds by the Book of Longing is that he's always longed for order. Not an angelic order (his order being baser), but something closer to that of Rilke who elegized Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel / Ordnungen? Who, if I cried out, would hear me out of the orders of the angels?

Still, the Canadian Jew is not as transcendent as his German predecessor. Leonard's verses (as Rilke's) do not scream so much as murmur, murmuring of the heart while filtering through feminine flesh. This order is, as it must be, of Leonard's own devising. The trick (and this is every artist's acid bath) is that it also be a calling, and that the calling, if it doesn't do the devising, then revises it.

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Whatever may be Crooner Leonard's proven power, Poet Cohen writes at times in the baffled habit of the ex-monk. The habit fits too close for confidence as well as for comfort. Wrestling not with an angel, the ex-monk eats the embarrassment of having stumbled out of that order. His witness  is always to a kind of beauty. It's just that the witness is sometimes lowly and at most just short of holy. Or holy only inadvertently (see p. 207, above):

taxes / children / lost pussy / war / constipation // the living poet / in his harness / of beauty // offers the day / back to g-d (p. 175);

Anyone who says / I'm not a Jew / is not a Jew / I'm very sorry / but this decision / is final "Not a Jew" (p. 158)

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--Hypocrite Leonard,--mon semblable,--mon frère!
--Mon vieux,--mon pauvre,--mon debonaire!
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the road is too long / the sky is too vast / the wandering heart / is homeless at last (p. 215)
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(p. 167)

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For you, Gentle Reader. Verses I jotted, and worked, since opening the Book of Longing:
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Fanfare

My genius is an anchor
Grappling o'er the waves.
Hauled 'weigh by steaming Rancor
The calm seabed it craves.

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This Birthmark On My Skin

Thinking about my father
Gets in the way of thinking
About the men I admire.
Which is how he thinks
About his father.

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California Hotel #1

Having me put out of mind
Once inscribed I on your heart,
     Your inmost rind
     Is where they'll find
Your torrents bloodying my mark.
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California Hotel #2

Come! Nibble at my rotted heart.
Speed your tongue along wormworn trails.
Pay no heed when the thing falls apart.
     Feed then, Liebe. Bitte,
     Feed on the frittered entrails.

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Tenderloin Hotel #1

You know it is no casting chore
     to lick you by the bushel.
Just nod a knee to bid me more
     or sigh my first initial.
How tyrant Time tricks every whore.
     Dare you defy the benevolent official?
Go, then! Anoint your imperious store
     whose lounging supple diadem
     wrings reign o'er brittle thistle.
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Happy Birthday, Whittaker Chambers

** Update (04/10) ** New site! WhittakerChambers.org

For all the tricks Fate played on you -- you who labored so hard to take leave of trickery --  it's no surprise you were born on April Fool's Day.

Last year's commemorative post, "True Whit."

Evangelicals Say, "Mitt's No Savior, He's Just Another Caesar"

That's my only explanation for Huck's continued progress -- not toward the nomination, of course, but toward becoming kingmaker at the Republican National Convention. His victory in Iowa was the iceberg hitting the hull; crushing victories today in West Virginia, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia constitute the crack-up of the luxury liner S.S. Romney, now going down during its maiden, transnational voyage. Romney's forces, if that's not too strong a word (for he vows to keep on) might broker with other factions at this summer's convention, but -- barring a brokered convention that doesn't break in his favor -- McCain is the man for this season, likely for this fall, and just possibly next winter.

Huck's evangelical votes fill the void of confidence left not just by Romney's record in Massachusetts but by the Bush Administration's tepid accomplishments in their regard. Bush often took evangelicals for granted, except when it became impossible to do so (e.g., when Miers was forced to step down from SCOTUS consideration). Somewhat like Obama's deep support tonight among Southern blacks (which might serve notice to the Clintons to deliver better there), it's payback time for lifetime, beltway Republicans. Professional Republicans who backed Romney and who are also professing Christians have a lot to think about. Or pray about.

Preacher credentials aside, does anyone mistake the former Arkansas governor -- a fisher of votes -- for a fisher of men? It's just that, in flocking to Huck, Southern evangelicals are saying, "Mitt's no savior, he's just another Caesar."

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More:

Conservatives to begin a strategic retreat within the GOP
(Right Wing Nuthouse)

Podhoretz fils differentiates between a party and a movement
(Contentions)

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As for the Democrats:

[T]he bitterness of [Hillary Clinton's victories in the Democratic primaries] may have done irreparable harm to relations with African-Americans..
(Contentions)

If Democratic superdelegates end up securing the nomination for Ms. Rodham Clinton, [t]he African-American vote would see this as a stolen nomination and could walk away from the Democrats.
(Ed Morrissey)

Christianity and Culture and War

Continuing to track down sources of recent reads, this week I acquired a copy of  T. S. Eliot's Christianity and Culture (1948). The collection of lectures and essays is referenced in Pat Buchanan's The Decline of the West (2000) (see previous post), also Robert Bork's Slouching Towards Gomorrah (1996).

Eliot's abiding concern here is to make Christianity central to Western nations during the modernist era. He does not intend any "social justice" agenda. He does not advocate a faith that would conform to conditions created by modernization -- technology, political liberalism, and "the mob." This last phrase (Eliot's word choice) is similar to what Ortega y Gasset scrutinized in The Revolt of the Masses (1930). Eliot affirms, rather, a particular and enduring power for Christianity. Yet it's not a preacher's sermon, elaborating on scripture. Nor is it the feminist critique of pacifism that is Virgnia Woolf's Three Guineas (1938), nor the decadent road recits, of Greece and America (respectively), that are Henry Miller's The Colossus of Maroussi (1941) and The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945). 

The first half of the book, "The Idea of Christianity," was originally a series of lectures he delivered in early 1939. They conclude with remarks referencing the Czechoslovakia crisis Hitler had provoked the previous year, the one "resolved" by the now infamous Munich Agreement and Chamberlain's fallacious declaration of "Peace in our time."
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The term "democracy," as I have said again and again, does not contain enough positive content to stand alone against the forces that you dislike -- it can easily be transformed by them. If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God) you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.

I believe that there must be many persons, like myself, who were deeply shaken by the events of September 1938, in a way from which one does not recover; persons to whom that month brought a profounder realisation of a general plight. It was not a disturbance of the understanding: the events themselves were not surprising. Nor, as became increasingly evident, was our distress due merely to disagreement with policy and behaviour of the moment. The feeling which was new and unexpected was a feeling of humiliation, which seemed to demand an act of personal contrition, of humility, repentance, and amendment; what had happened was something in which one was deeply implicated and responsible. It was not, I repeat, a criticism of the government, but a doubt of the validity of a civilisation. We could not match conviction with conviction, we had no ideas with which we could either meet or oppose the ideas opposed to us. Was our society, which had always been so assured of its superiority and rectitude, so confident of its unexamined premises, assembled round anything more permanent than a congeries of banks, insurance companies and industries, and had it any beliefs more essential than a belief in compound interest and the maintenance of dividends? Such thoughts as these formed the starting point, and must remain the excuse, for saying what I have to say.
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Note well, from Eliot's postscript to this (dated September 6, 1939):
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[T]he possibility of war, which has now been realised, was always present to my mind.

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Support Huckabee? In Your Dreams!

On the overnight of Jan. 2-3 I had an arresting dream about the front-runner and now-proven winner of Iowa's 2008 Republican presidential caucus. The following narration of images and phrases -- not horrific, just lucid -- sums up my sense of our current political moment:
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Amidst a small sea of campaign staffers, potential caucus-goers, and even Huckabee himself, we found ourselves in nondescript quarters (a pscyho-schematic composite of veterans' hall, church basement, hotel conference room...). From the speaker's platform Huck corralled all his people into a rows-deep line-up, as an aerobics instructor would for a workout. Despite our slacks, dress shirts, and leather shoes, Huck actually was gearing up to lead us through a workout. To promote fitness and weight-loss it was -- and it was only because television cameras were on hand to can Huck's unique, can-do message in that department. But I wasn't there to dance for a dieting Mike Huckabee. I certainly didn't want to be part of any dog-and-pony show. Initially curious to be there, I wanted to be elsewhere.

Then ... as if my wish were answered ... Huck and I stood together on an open, empty, grassy slope, peering up at a winterbright sky. Sharp sunlight caught edges of occasional little clouds, wispy and curly-cued, that scripted the overhead blue. Silvery light slivers glinted off  them and jabbed our nearly rapt eyes. Dreamy in our admiration Huck and I stared at the authority those otherwise insubstantial clouds enjoyed -- so aimless and freefloating, yet captivating ... vaguely. Fresh, crisp, winter air gusted against our faces which, slightly flushed, kept taking in a great heartland sky, capping the little, providential patch of green earth we'd been given to occupy.

A wordless understanding might have been passing between Huck and me. A communion almost, but then he disturbed the calm. For we'd been gazing at the little silver against bigger white against biggest blue when The Voice of Huck pronounced in his soft, folksy tone:

That's God's light....

The thing is, I couldn't tell whether Mike Huckabee was preaching to me personally -- talking man-to-man, heart-to-heart, soul-to-soul; whether, overcome by conviction, he was testifying to no one in particular; or whether he was politicking in the worst way -- bullshitting and bullying me, messing with the moment by saying something he knew factually to be true, but which we both knew didn't need to be said (indeed, needed to not be said) because it was beyond anyone's power of speech. I didn't know whether Huck had had the authority to say what he'd just said, or, if he'd had it, whether he'd used that authority properly or improperly, righteously or unrighteously. So what had started out for me as an inspired moment that happened to take place alongside Huck was turned into an anxious and nauseous one.

I knew exactly where we were, but I couldn't tell where Mike Huckabee was coming from.

A man can -- always should -- show himself to you as a man. A politician can't ever avoid it -- and a good one shows himself to you precisely when, precisely because he's vying for you to accept him as a leader. Every politician who becomes a leader of men shows himself to every man without fail. Sadly any politician who fails to lead falters in sustaining himself before the public, as a man. But the ones who do lead, they step forward. They insert themselves between the public (plebian and noble alike) and the nation's calling, its destiny. They step forward and they remain there, bringing the public (plebian and noble alike) with them -- keeping them there ... sustaining them there ... urging them on ... to their destiny.

When an ordinary man -- a man of little or no ambition --  falters there, that's forgettable. When an ordinary politician -- a man of minor ambition -- falters there, that's disappointing. But when A Man Who Would Be President of The United States of America falters there, that's unforgivable. The anxiety of my dream about Mike Huckabee, momentary front-runner of my party, is that the truest thing he could have uttered at the dream's truest moment, admittedly something entirely in his rights and reach to say -- which he did say, to the letter -- could have been in spirit just cold calculation. Whatever scrutiny I'll give to the real Mike Huckabee will probe, in real life and real time, such concerns as were present in my -- my Huckmare.
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Expectation

When will we see Him face to face?
Each day, He shines through darker glass.
In this small town where everything
is known, I see His vanishing
emblems, His white spire and flag--
pole sticking out above the fog,
like old white china doorknobs, sad,
slight, useless things to calm the mad.

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from "Waking Early Sunday Morning" by Robert Lowell
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Audio interview with his biographer, editor Ian Hamilton.
Review of Paul Mariani's Lost Puritan.

Whew! Reason And Religion

Dobson praises Romney's faith speech:

Gov. Romney’s speech was a magnificent reminder of the role religious faith must play in government and public policy. His delivery was passionate and his message was inspirational. Whether it will answer all the questions and concerns of Evangelical Christian voters is yet to be determined, but the governor is to be commended for articulating the importance of our religious heritage as it relates to today.

An indication, hopefully, that the Christian Right will not bolt the GOP next year. Something similar in 1992 helped usher in a Democratic victory.

If there's one good thing about the protracted presidential election, it allows an extended period during which each party can air, negotiate, wrangle over its values, vision, direction. Mitt Romney just provided some leadership in that department for the GOP, and even for the country.

FWIW, Hitch couldn't be more unimpressed.

Pamela IS The Candle

Worthy of the first night of Hanukkah is Pamela's editorial "US: State Sponsor of Judeaphobia":

Under the auspices of a global "peace" conference, the White House sanctioned Jew hatred. The Jew is contemptible, inferior, ignorant, politically, socially disenfranchised. Separate entrance ways, service entrances for the Jews, refusal to  touch or shake hands with a Jew by the so called moderate members of the Arab world , refusal of members to wear the translation earphones when Olmert spoke.

Worthy of the entire tradition is Robert's "The Power of Hanukkah."

The Passion Of The Death Threats Against Jerry Falwell

** Welcome, Conservative Grapevine and Political Party Poop readers. **
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In the early 1980s homosexual savages* [scroll to the end], inspired by 1969 riots at the Stonewall Inn bar, made death threats against this influential opponent of gay civil rights, over 100 pages of recently released FBI files suggest. From the Washington Post's "Investigations" blog:

[Jerry] Falwell's FBI file contains a 1983 letter sent to his television ministry that concluded with the words, "Hoping you will die soon." It was accompanied by a small plastic box containing a live scorpion. One threat involved calls to Liberty Baptist College in Lynchburg in 1983, warning that a $10,000 reward had been offered for Falwell's "assassination" and that it was to be carried out by "gays in Cincinnati." One caller advised, "I know this is true, because my brother is one of them." Said another, "I intend to be the one to collect that money."

As disturbing as these threats (and one attempt, if you count the scorpion) is that WaPo phrases the item (and frames the issue) in banality bordering on the fickle and the reckless. Called simply, "Exclusive: Jerry Falwell's FBI File," the blogpost begins:

The Rev. Jerry Falwell , founder of the Moral Majority, stirred up passions with his attacks on abortion and homosexuality. Now, the FBI's confidential file on Falwell, who died in May at age 73, reveals that he also stirred up death threats....[emphases added]

Think about it. No matter how much authority the verb "to stir up" implies, only something pre-existing can be set in motion. Which is to say that neither Falwell nor the Devil made those ostensibly "passionate" homosexuals do it. (Granted, the Reverend might have disagreed with my take on the Devil's role in the matter.) People prone to passion will be found on each side of any debate, but making death threats catapults one beyond the pale of what is acceptable (indeed, of what is possible) as civil discourse. Because death threats destroy civil discourse. Like the bullying which taunts and torments another who is perceived to be "different," death threats against a public personality convey an aggressive contempt for the targeted individual. They also convey a cowardly disdain because they attempt -- always in futility, I should add -- to coerce through terror what one shrinks from achieving through debate.
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Unfortunately WaPo's "stirred up" phrasing suggests that deficient from Falwell's manner were reason, civility, and a certain love that dare not speak its name in the mainstream media, Christian love. Yet among the first news reports after his death was, from Falwell's most prominent public opponents, testimony to the contrary.

Pornographer Larry Flynt:

My mother always told me that no matter how much you dislike a person, when you meet them face to face you will find characteristics about them that you like. Jerry Falwell was a perfect example of that. I hated everything he stood for, but after meeting him in person ... Jerry Falwell and I became good friends.  He would visit me in California and we would debate together on college campuses. I always appreciated his sincerity even though I knew what he was selling and he knew what I was selling.

Openly-gay activist Rev. Mel White cried at news of the death of this adversary whom he also considered "a friend": 

"It breaks my heart," he said. "I feel sorry for his family. He had a huge presence in this town [White lives in Lynchburg, Virginia, in the vicinity of Falwell's Thomas Road Baptist Church] and the country."... He said while Falwell often condemned him from the pulpit, he would say hello every time he saw him around Lynchburg.... White said if anyone needs to learn anything from his and Falwell's relationship, it's that people should get their private and public lives in sync.

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Should WaPo's 400-word blogpost take pains to refer to Flynt's and White's statements? Probably not, Gentle Reader, but I feel I have to, even if it takes three times as long. Because the way WaPo reports those death threats accommodates their intellectual violence, which compromises the information conveyed. Why does the blogpost state in its short space twice that no assassination attempt had been made? If any had, then the attempt(s) would already be public knowledge, and even part of the public lore. Long ago they would have boosted Falwell's visibility; vividly they would have been evoked during our public remembrances. Obviously none had been attempted. So why does WaPo overstate the obvious? To understate what it intends to be less obvious: that gay radicals are a philosophically violent lot with latent and at times overt tendencies.

Sometimes this violence turns against their own. Many Americans, for example, know that two assassination attempts were made against President Gerald Ford. Not many know that one of them was thwarted by Oliver Sipple, a man who happened to be gay (and closeted). Gay radicals, including Harvey Milk, urged the compliant mainstream media to out him, which they did. That led directly to Sipple's estrangement from his family, and indirectly to his precipitous health decline and premature death. Even a framed letter from the White House didn't help him much (not in this life, anyway). The lesson to be learned here is not the insidiousness and ubiquity of "homophobia," but that any movement desperate for heroes is also a movement desperate for martyrs.

Sipple's heroic intervention on behalf of President Ford (indeed, on behalf of the country) had been back in 1975. Responding in 1983 to one of the assassination threats against Reverend Falwell, the FBI managed to locate an "informant" within Cincinnati's gay community. The facts he provided, quoted verbatim in the blogpost (grammatical errors included), read as sardonic mockery of the Bureau's interest and ability in obtaining any relevant information, whether about attested assassination threats or about the gay community generally. The quoted passage concludes, Source restated the general dislike for Falwell within the Cincinnati area, before the blogpost paraphrases another document, [T]he informant led the agents through the history of New York City's Stonewall riots -- a watershed in the early gay rights movement.... Even without access to any of the 100+ pages of Falwell's FBI file (a portion available here), an inquiring mind would figure that the ones WaPo references are not those most relevant to unearthing who, exactly, was behind these assassination threats. For example, spelled out in at least one other document (imaged above) is that one potential assassin had been a candidate for Congress in Santa Cruz, California in 1982. Surely that deserves further attention.

Instead of sifting through the most salient details of these assassination threats -- including, in fairness, asking whether any were made by heterosexuals (or even closeted gays) seeking to defame LGBTetc. people -- the Washington Post's "Investigations" blog cultivates in the reader's mind the image of a presumably "powerless" homosexual presumably "speaking truth to power." Whatever the ideological or agitational purposes that might serve, serving them up in a disorienting sentimentality ignores, if only temporarily, real evidence of crime and real clues as to the crime's origin and magnitude. The contemporary LGBTetc. movement would call this "queering" the profession of journalism. It's also what that movement would call "queering" the civic duty of cooperating with the FBI. The effect of all this "queering" is to make WaPo refrain, counter-intuitively and unprofessionally, from asking hard-hitting questions about a number of blood-thirsty, presumably merry gay homosexual pranksters -- and potentially murderous plotters.

WaPo, WaPo, why hast thou forsaken truth?
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[*]: Some readers have expressed apprehension at the phrase "homosexual savages."

It recalls a point Robert Bork makes early on in Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline: Every new generation constitutes a wave of savages who must be civilized by their families, schools, and churches. (Chapter 1, "The Vertical Invasion of the Barbarians.") Whether "families, schools, and churches" civilize our young regarding LGBTetc. issues, or rather how they do so, is obviously a crucial dispute in "the culture war." Certainly anyone with an appetite for violence needs to be civilized.

I also have in mind two French films of the 1990s, Les Nuits fauves (Savage Nights) and, to a lesser extent, Les Roseaux sauvages (Wild Reeds). The latter, a slow-paced, art house triumph, is the delicate coming-of-age tale of four adolescents, one of whom is just recognizing his homosexuality. Savage Nights on the other hand is about a young bisexual man, HIV-positive, hellbent on avoiding maturity and mortality. Its succes de scandale was enhanced when writer-star-director Cyril Collard died of AIDS just three days before the film took home four Cesar awards (the French Oscars).

One of Savage Nights's more irksome moments is when it snatches a line from the notoriously homoerotic writer Jean Genet. Collard acknowledges who wrote the line while ignoring where it originally appeared. It's from "Violence and Brutality" (included here), an essay which has nothing directly to do with the story of Savage Nights, and which is, in fact, an apology for terrorism: Violence alone can put an end to the brutality of man....  

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America Is More Christian Than Israel Is Jewish

When I point out that Jews have enjoyed unprecedented freedom and prosperity in a Christian nation -- namely, the United States -- my friends insist that it's not Christian. At which point, I have to laugh.

The fact that we're not a theocracy does not make their case, no matter how loudly they may insist on it. When we say that Turkey, for instance, is an Islamic nation and that India is Hindu and that Italy is Catholic, although none of them is a theocratic state, how can we deny that America, whose population is overwhelmingly Christian -- and is only 2% Jewish -- is Christian?!

Romans 12

The whole chapter is so inspirational, I am moved to type it out and post it in its entirety.
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1 I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. 2 Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

3 For by the grace given to me I bid everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith which God has assigned him. 4 For as in one body we have many members and all the members do not have the same function, 5 so we, though  many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. 6 Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; 7 if service, in our serving; he who teaches, in his teaching; 8 he who exhorts, in his exhortation; he who contributes, in liberality; he who gives aid, with zeal; he who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness.

9 Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good. 10 love one another with brotherly affection; outdo one another in showing honor. 11 Never flag in spirit, be aglow with the Spirit, serve the Lord. 12 Rejoice in your hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer. 13 Contribute to the needs of the saints; practice hospitality.

14 Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. 15 Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep. 16 Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; never be conceited. 17 Repay no one with evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. 18 If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. 19 Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God; for it is written, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord."* 20 No, "if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals upon his head." 21 Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
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*: a portion of verse 19 appears as the epigraph to Anna Karenina.

Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan Debate Religion

Via lengthy email exchanges, at BeliefNet, "Is Religion Built Upon Lies?"

"He Understands The Need For A Conservative Judiciary..."

* Updated (11/19)*

If Giuliani is elected, and he doesn't appoint constructionist judges, those are the words Robertson will have to eat. But if Pat's glowing (and noticeably unreligious) estimate proves accurate....

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* Update *

Giuliani's 200 reasons

"All The People In Iraq, Muslim and Christian, Is Brother"

(St. John's Church, Baghdad)
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As reported by Michael Yon in Iraq.
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(H/T JMK friend Carolyn)

Dinesh D'Souza Reporting For Duty

David Limbaugh reviews What's So Great About Christianity?:

D'Souza's approach is admirable because he doesn't allow himself to be on the defensive but aggressively highlights the weaknesses in atheistic thought and proves that professed intellectual objections to Christianity are often a cover for rebellion against Christian morality.

While atheists congratulate themselves for employing reason to follow the evidence "wherever it leads," D'Souza shows that their presuppositions, including their "unwavering commitment to naturalism and materialism," sometimes inhibit their objective inquiry.

Related: "Q&A With Dinesh D'Souza"

Yet More Historical Footage of Attempted Left-Wing Intimidation of Right-Wing Speakers

From a talk delivered by Rabbi Meir Kahane in Minnesota in 1990 (less than a month before he was assassinated by a future al-Qaeda operative).

It's always a pleasure to see Arabs in Minnesota. And I want to tell you something, with G-d's help, we're going to give you a lot of your cousins to come here, too.

Bear in mind that when they clapped they were clapping for the murder of three Jews.

Previous: "A Pie For A Pie Makes Whole World Blind, Deaf, Dumb"

Merry Christmas - Let's Rumble

It was just Labor Day and not quite Halloween, but now that temperatures are dipping and days are getting shorter, I want to get a head start on the Christmas season. (And I'm not talking about shopping.)

This means -- in open defiance of the intellectual and spiritual deathmarch the cultural relativists try to force upon the public every year -- celebrating the miracle birth of the Son that God sacrificed to redeem mankind's sins, that immaculate concept, the baby born in the manger, the one the three wise men visited, the one who would turn water into wine, heal the sick, throw the moneychangers out of the temple, and the one what would be betrayed by a kiss, denounced by the Jews, crucified by the Romans, and returned risen to the Lord.

In short:  Merry Christmas!

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Got a favorite, appreciative depiction of the birth of Christ?
Send it to me and I'll post it.

* * *

* Update (10/17) * From WillPower, Botticelli's Mystic Nativity

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There Is "A Gay Agenda," Isn't There?

Alan Chambers of the "ex-gay" Christian ministry Exodus International asks "Is There a Gay Agenda?".  The 1987 gay strategy paper which Alan reprints, "The Overhauling of Straight America," plus a few introductory remarks, allow for comments to fly.

The first clue that there is "a gay agenda" is that the 1987 article claims that there is a "straight America" -- as if the United States is anything other than one nation ("under God," as some of us pledge our allegiance). Since a house divided against itself cannot stand, why don't we come together and read Alan's post.

Other salient (and contentious) clues:

* Straight viewers must be able to identify with gays as victims.

* The main thing is to talk about gayness until the issue becomes thoroughly tiresome.

* [W]e intend to make the antigays look so nasty that average Americans will want to dissociate themselves from such types.

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Not unlike yesterday's post -- in which I pointed out that ACT-UP founder Larry Kramer admitted factually (though not morally, not as a declaration of conscience) to his agency in propagating the HIV virus -- "The Overhauling of Straight America" provides a rare, candid glimpse into not just why but how our public discourse and common culture have been and continue to be overhauled before our very eyes.

Also: Alan Chambers interviewed on NPR (audio) this past June.
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Michael Savage: "The Orthodox Jews Understand What A Gun Is"

Let this put the lie to the slander that Michael Savage is a "self-hating Jew."

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"You Don't Need To Know Arabic To Argue With A Muslim"

.You need only a critical sense, critical thought, and skepticism, says Ibn Warraq over at The New English Review.

IX-XI

What had been special ground is now sacred ground.
The line in the sand cut -- not drawn.
By force -- not by choice.

I'm off to a freeway overpass to wave my oversize American flag above rush-hour traffic for a few hours. When you hear horns honking out of the west, you'll know where they're coming from.

* Update 10:20 AM * Back from the overpass, was out there for two hours. A continuous breeze kept Old Glory flapping pretty much non-stop. Truckers and contractors -- i.e., our builders, movers, doers -- they're the greatest, the most generous and unrepressed when it comes to honking and waving. Lots of waves, some thumbs up, some #1's. One lady took her hands off the steering wheel to applaud.

Word of caution: one guy gave me finger and shouted some thing about Bin Laden. The jihad has landed....

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Print and read this at the dinner table tonight: If it is hard for Americans to forget September 11, it seems just as hard for Americans to remember that terrible Tuesday.

Here's my less summary, more reflective report from last year. (Note the animated comments.)

Gerard Van Der Leun reposts his across-the-harbor recollections of September 11, 2001 at American Digest.

Got a 9/11 story to tell? What are you doing to get your counterjihad on? Email me or leave it in the comments.

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The last pic is from Spiritual Oasis whose  Bill Williams volunteered as a chaplain in the aftermath. See his uplifting post, "From Ground Zero."

Jihadists Parade in NYC, Protected by Police, On Eve Of 9/11; Counterjihadists Out In Force

Summary, video, pics from the counterjihad's diva bravissima .
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Time to get your "counterjihad face" on: .

Trust Freedom - By One Righteous Gentile - Or, The Beginnings of a Rebuttal to Osama Bin Laden's Latest Jihad Video

Every once in a while the unabashedly Christian James Baxter leaves a long comment on the blog. This one is worth reprinting as its own post. I find it a stirring rebuttal to yesterday's OBL "convert, surrender, or die" video. Explicitly, it's about fighting for freedom; implicitly, it's a point in favor of the retaliatory "nuke Mecca" position....:

Every September, I recall that is more than half a century (62 years) since I landed at Nagasaki with the 2nd Marine Division in the original occupation of Japan following World War II. This time every year, I have watched and listened to the light-hearted "peaceniks" and their light-headed symbolism-without-substance of ringing bells, flying pigeons, floating candles, and sonorous chanting and I recall again that "Peace is not a cause - it is an effect."

In July, 1945, my fellow 8th RCT Marines [I was a BARman] and I returned to Saipan following the successful conclusion of the Battle of Okinawa. We were issued new equipment and replacements joined each outfit in preparation for our coming amphibious assault on the home islands of Japan.

B-29 bombing had leveled the major cities of Japan, including Kobe, Osaka, Nagoya, Yokohama, Yokosuka, and Tokyo.

We were informed we would land three Marine divisions and six Army divisions, perhaps abreast, with large reserves following us in. It was estimated that it would cost half a million casualties to subdue the Japanese homeland.

In August, the A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima but the Japanese government refused to surrender. Three days later a second A-bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki. The Imperial Japanese government finally surrendered.

Following the 1941 sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, a Japanese admiral said, "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant..." Indeed, they had. Not surprisingly, the atomic bomb was produced by a free people functioning in a free environment. Not surprisingly because the creative process is a natural human choice-making process and inventiveness occurs most readily where choice-making opportunities abound. America!

Tamper with a giant, indeed! Tyrants, beware: Free men are nature's pit bulls of Liberty! The Japanese learned the hard way what tyrants of any generation should know: Never start a war with a free people - you never know what they may invent!

As a newly assigned member of a U.S. Marine intelligence section, I had a unique opportunity to visit many major cities of Japan, including Tokyo and Hiroshima, within weeks of their destruction. For a full year I observed the beaches, weapons, and troops we would have assaulted had the A-bombs not been dropped. Yes, it would have been very destructive for all, but especially for the people of Japan.

When we landed in Japan, for what came to be the finest and most humane occupation of a defeated enemy in recorded history, it was with great appreciation, thanksgiving, and praise for the atomic bomb team, including the aircrew of the Enola Gay. A half million American homes had been spared the Gold Star flag, including, I'm sure, my own.

Whenever I hear the apologists expressing guilt and shame for A-bombing and ending the war Japan had started (they ignore the cause-effect relation between Pearl Harbor and Nagasaki), I have noted that neither the effete critics nor the puff-adder politicians are among us in the assault landing-craft or the stinking rice paddies of their suggested alternative, "conventional" warfare. Stammering reluctance is obvious and continuous, but they do love to pontificate about the Rights that others, and the Bomb, have bought and preserved for them.

The vanities of ignorance and camouflaged cowardice abound as license for the assertion of virtuous "rights" purchased by the blood of others - those others who have borne the burden and physical expense of Rights whining apologists so casually and self-righteously claim.

At best, these fakers manifest a profound and cryptic ignorance of causal relations, myopic perception, and dull I.Q. At worst, there is a word and description in The Constitution defining those who love the enemy more than they love their own countrymen and their own posterity. Every Yankee Doodle Dandy knows what that word is.

In 1945, America was the only nation in the world with the Bomb and it behaved responsibly and respectfully. It remained so until two among us betrayed it to the Kremlin. Still, this American weapon system has been the prime deterrent to earth's latest model world- tyranny: Seventy years of Soviet collectivist definition, coercion, and domination of individual human beings.

The message is this: Trust Freedom. Remember, tyrants never learn. The restriction of Freedom is the limitation of human choice, and choice is the fulcrum-point of the creative process in human affairs. As earth's choicemaker, it is our human identity on nature's beautiful blue planet and the natural premise of man's free institutions, environments, and respectful relations with one another. Made in the image of our Creator, free men choose, create, and progress - or die.

Free men should not fear the moon-god-crowd oppressor nor choose any of his ways. Recall with a confident Job and a victorious David, "Know ye not that you are in league with the stones of the field?"

Semper Fidelis
Jim Baxter
Sgt. USMC 
WW II and Korean War

Job 5:23  Proverbs 3:31  I Samuel 17:40
http://www.choicemaker.net/

On Jewish Extremism

Something to think about on the Jewish sabbath, from a long post by Sultan Knish, "The Torah is Extremist: Deal With It!":

The Torah was not written by comfortable people living in the suburbs. It was not a work of moderation. Moderate words are fine if you're writing a book of manners. Books of G-d are not moderate because neither G-d nor the worship of G-d is a moderate act. It is an extremist act to believe in a higher deity and to dedicate your life to serving him. Just ask any secularist.

Being Jewish does not mean being moderate. Being Jewish means carving out a place for G-d and for what he demands of us, by faith, by dedication and sometimes by force of arms. For many American moderate Orthodox Jews being Jewish has become about raffles and auctions, letters to the editor and politely worded complaints. For many of the more moderate Modern Orthodox Jews has become about futile grousing about Haredim which explains why the Haredi way is eating the Modern Orthodox way alive. Because in the end the Haredim are extremists and extremists win. Because they care. It doesn't mean that being extreme is necessarily right but it is the commitment required to win.

The Torah is an extremist work for extremist people. For people who actually care and are willing to fight for their beliefs. It has a lot for moderates to hate. It has a lot for them to distrust. Moderates love compromise and the word of G-d is uncompromising. Some time ago when the moderates turned Hellenist, the extremists slaughtered them. We call that Chanukah.

Russian Revolutionary Suicide

Truth ... I love much.
-- final words attributed to a dying Christian pacifist and aristocrat,
Count Leo Tolstoy (1910)
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* Update (8/23) * Comments on and from Fausta's podcast with Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch and with "Siggy" of Sigmund, Carl, and Alfred.

* Update (8/24) * We are interested in knowing the thoughts of the suicide murderer just before he detonates the explosive belt.
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The tactic of suicide (homicide) bombing is not exclusively Islamic. Nearly all of us are familiar with Japanese kamikazes from World War II and, some of us, with other contemporary practitioners like the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka who in 1999 famously assassinated Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi by this tactic.

More obscure and, because it grew out of Western values and Western philosophy, more haunting (therefore more familiar) and more tragic (because the character flaws leading to it are our own, are our inheritance), is that suicide bombing, or an impulse to it, made at least one appearance among anti-Tsarist militants in pre-Bolshevik Russia. Whatever the totalitarian theories that arose in modern history -- about underground parties, managerial distinctions between agitation and propaganda, "the art of insurrection," etc. -- there was also in the Western tradition, as product or by-product, an impulse to suicide on behalf of (even intrinsic to the adherence to) a cause.

Fortunately (if that is the proper adjective for it), when the taking of no other life is at issue, suicide as a soul's clarion call to a wayward society enjoys (if that's the proper verb for it) status as one of the most passionate, ultimate statements possible. Consider the examples of Thich Quang Duc, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk setting himself ablaze in the 1960s, of Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima committing seppuku in 1970, and of vicar Roland Weisselberg setting himself afire last year to lament loudly Europe's spiritual capitulation to secularism and Islamization.

Scarcely known is that an impulse to suicide bombing revealed itself in Russia in 1907. As Whittaker Chambers relates to William F. Buckley in a letter dated August 30, 1954:

One night, a fashionably dressed young woman called at the Central Prison in Petersburg and asked to speak with the commandant, Maximovsky. This was Ragozinikova, who had come to protest the government's policy [as Chambers mentions elsewhere, "systematically beating its political prisoners" (whatever "systematically" means, exactly)]. Inside the bodice of her dress were sewed thirteen pounds of dynamite and a detonator. When Maximovsky appeared, she shot him with her revolver and killed him. The dynamite was for another purpose. After the murder of Maximovsky, Ragozinikova asked the police to interrogate her at the headquarters of the Okhrana. She meant to blow it up together with herself; she had not known any other way to penetrate it. But she was searched and the dynamite discovered. She was sentenced to be hanged [an appropriate sentence, btw]. Awaiting execution, she wrote her family: Death itself is nothing.... Frightful only is the thought of dying without having achieved what I could have done.... How good it is to love people. How much strength one gains from such love. When she was hanged, Ragozinikovka was twenty years old.
-- from Odyssey of a Friend, published privately by The National Review, 1969, p. 77.

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* Updates *

Fausta's recent podcast with Robert Spencer, author of Religion of Peace?: Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn't, makes a point to not confuse the values of Judeo-Christianity with those of Islam. More precisely, to not confuse their ability (or inability) to proffer values, and for a civilization, as a consequence of those values, to develop, to innovate, to progress. In terms of that Russian revolutionary lore quoted above, consider that the impulse to sacrifice other's lives and, if necessary, one's life for a cause -- to presume to become, as Camus phrased it, one of "the just" -- has different sources, impulses, motivations than those which compel jihadist shahid ("martyrs") to their deeds and their ends.

Writes "Siggy": Robert Spencer also reiterates another unequivocal truth. It is the evolution of religion and the evolution of a believers relationship (or non relationship) with his or her faith that has powered human development. It is an absolute truth that modern society cannot exist alongside backward religious expressions. That is why nations predicated on a free and democratic Judeo-Christian ethics are producing nations and why virtually all of the Arab world are only capable of consumption. It is also an unequivocal truth that producing nations and societies are very different than consuming nations.

6 Fire Trucks Quell Mosque Fire In Under 30 Minutes, CAIR Fans Flames By Claiming "Terror"

* Update below: Politics is history in the present tense *

* Update (8/21) * Remember the Bob Marley lyric?
'Cause I feel like bombing a church
Now that I know that the preacher is lying.
-- "Talkin' Blues"
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In a late-breaking story yesterday, the San Francisco Chronicle, despite itself, reported that a fire set in an Antioch, CA mosque was extinguished rapidly and effectively by 6 great American fire trucks who responded promptly to the one-alarm incident. True to form, the Chron led with the following CAIR-centric headline: "Muslim leaders call Antioch mosque fire 'act of terror.'" (Click here for more about the implacable, pro-Islamic propagandists of CAIR.)

A local Islamic spokeswoman, speaking in predictable Islamic victimese, claimed the fire was "an act of terror." Cliche-stuffed article & video, told with a feminist angle, about the full-time Islamic activist here. This site captures (alongside irrelevant, postmodern Jewish blather about understanding the Other) her not inaccurate statements that Islamic terror kills Muslims, too. Unfortunately, because of taqiyya and jihad, we can never, never ever trust Muslims to speak truthfully about Islam. [Scroll halfway through "Islam 101" for summary of taqiyya (religious deception) --Thanks for the link, Carpe.]

Was the mosque fire vandalism? Harassment? Intimidation? Yes, it could be. Also possible is that Muslims set the fire in order to test first responders and garner media attention and sympathy. (You never know, that's why you have to ask -- a duty which the Chron abdicated.) But terror? No way, Hussein! Americans and Israelis and the occasional Brit, Dane, Pole, and Spaniard die every day to stop terror and the local CAIR rep cries "Victim!". How much are they paying her, anyway?

Fortunately, the Chron online version allows readers' comments to its articles. Here's the best one I saw out of the lot. If his take proves correct, then the fire definitely was not "terror" -- more like "sloppy counterjihad.":

I wouldn't do anything like this but a lot of people have had enough of the Muslim shakedown. In countries around the world ( Holland 50 % of births are Muslim - scarves in France - drivers licenses with veils - 5 time praying in schools that never had it before) alls we hear is how you hate us and want to destroy us. I use to go by the mosque in San Diego every day. If I'd of known what was going on in there - terror training for 9/11 ).....I would of burnt it down myself. People are very very mad. Muslims have come to our culture and tried to change us. You bring violence hate, destruction and despair. We gave you Iraq...only Muslims ( but you despise each other and slaughter ). The real truth is most of us thinks your nuts. Control your own or this is just going to escalate...Sorry those is the facts....

As the mosque's president said quite aptly, regarding previous incidents of harassment, Our praying has become a symbol of terrorism. No kidding.

What are you going to do about it!? Until Muslim terrorism is stopped, no amount of prayer -- Muslim, Jewish, or Christian -- will, by itself, do anybody any good.

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* Update: Politics is history in the present tense *

1. The Syrian ambassador recently described Dearborn, Michigan as a Lebanese city. (Syria, which has occupied swaths of Lebanon for decades, which is widely believed to have engineered the assassination of Lebanon's former prime minister....) 

2. Remember the liberation of Antioch (Syria). Among the earliest seats of Christianity, it was one of the earliest objectives of Crusades. Here's a passage from the account left by Peter Tudebode, describing events in 1097 Anno Domini. :

In the meantime the Antiochian Turks, those enemies of God and holy Christianity, after learning of the absence of Lord Bohemond and the Count of Flanders, swarmed out of the town and contemptuously moved to attack us. With their knowledge of the absence of some of our most experienced knights, they probed the weakest spots in our siege forces and discovered on Tuesday that they could strike and resist us. The accursed barbarians stealthily approached and, striking viciously the unwary and foolish Christians, killed many knights and footmen.  On this bitter day, the Bishop of the Cathedral of the Holy Mary of Le Puy lost his seneschal, the carrier and protector of his banner.  In fact, if the river had not flowed between us, the Turks would have struck our men more often and would have inflicted greater damage upon us, for to the camp our men fled in wild flight.

Excuse Me? "God Has Summoned Hillary Rodham Clinton"?

We're all evangelicals. The question is what we're preaching.
-- Alan Dershowitz, on CNN in June to promote his book
Blasphemy: How the Religious Right is Hijacking Our Declaration of Independence
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Up at Hillary's campaign site is a new video, "African American Men for Hillary." Watch it before her people pull it from YouTube (or scroll down here).

It's exactly what it says it is -- a series of outtakes from a gathering of African American leaders who endorse her for president. It's the usual stuff, chock full of familiar phrases like "leadership," "compassion," "the most important election in our lifetime," etc., etc. It's exactly what it says it is -- almost.

The five-and-a-half minute video begins Let's thank God for our senator and the next president of the United States, Senator Hillary Clinton. A presidential campaign video that leads with "God" makes me a little squeamish and more than a little suspicious. It's not called, after all, "Christian African American Men for Hillary." Don't get me wrong, I believe in religion in the public sphere. But there's a bit of bait-and-switch going on here.

Do other (especially Republican) politicians actually lead off with "God"? Not Mitt Romney, the Mormon candidate, and not George W. Bush, the born again Christian. [Update: Romney "acquits himself fairly well" on the subject.] If a Republican presidential campaign instructed an audience to thank God for their candidate, critics in the MSM and elsewhere would be up in arms, crying "Christian fascism!". We know that Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison enjoys hearing his faithful chant "Allahu Akbar!". Ann Coulter's latest book accuses liberals of belonging to a cult of godlessness; what we see in today's Democratic Party is, more precisely, a cult of selective godfulness.

This insertion of "God" into "African American Men for Hillary" is carefully crafted to make good with churchgoing black people. It happens also to be bad as a matter of intellect, bad as a matter of principle, and bad as a matter of faith. To wit, the video rises to a crescendo with a pseudo-sermon not from a man of the cloth, but from multimillionaire trial lawyer Willie Gary (as featured on Oprah and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous):

As I always do I have to just include God in the mix. God has a hand in all of this. No doubt about it. In her running for president, he has a hand in it. In her becoming president, he will have a hand in it. No doubt about it. As I was saying, and I thought about it, God is too wise to make mistakes. And I know that. So we have -- we've made the right choice. There's no question in my mind about that, because he has a hand in it. Oh! But now that the United States of America need a leader that's a mover and a shaker, God has summoned Hillary Rodham Clinton!
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God has summoned Hillary Rodham Clinton?

That's almost enough to make me an atheist.

 (Click here for all "Hillary Watch" posts.)

Narcissism in Power - The Clinton Inaugural

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For he that soweth to the flesh shall reap corruption;
but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting.
(Galatians 6:8)
-- Bible verse selected and sworn upon by William Jefferson Clinton
for his inauguration as 42nd president of the United States
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A consequence for all who pursue (or merely acquiesce in the pursuit of) social agendas set by radicals is the demolition of a strict sense of personal moral responsibility. Those convinced of the righteousness of morality and faith rightly mistrust such people. For with such people morality is relative and religion, inevitably, a ruse.

During that inauguration the profession of civic religion was also a ruse projecting, in the name of personal faith, a man's ill-acknowledged, personal folly. Political theater staging a solemn, sacred ceremony, its proportions were nevertheless narcissistic. Even Manchurian. The gesture of political theater was a proper public profession. The actual deeds: careless confession and pithy projection.

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What comes across as the most important source of Clinton's uniqueness as president is the nearly unbelievable degree of his essential unfitness to be president -- his profound immaturity, his pathological selfishness, his cynicism, above all his relentless corruption.
- Michael Kelly, Washington Post

Higher Powered Heat

One of my favorite things about blogging is being able to reach across the great religious divide that preoccupies this one nation under God. Here's a baseball story that fits the bill perfectly, from my favorite sportswriter, Yahoo!'s in-house baseball expert Jeff Passan. In today's column he tells the marvelous story of Jeremy Guthrie, a rookie pitcher with the Orioles boasting a smokin' 2.63 ERA halfway through the season:

During his two-year Mormon mission across the northern part of the country, Guthrie woke up every morning at 7 a.m. to teach English, pick up garbage on the streets and, most important, spread his religion. And on the rare occasion that baseball invaded his thoughts, Guthrie reminded himself that he didn't bring his glove for a reason: To him, pitching never equaled living.

So imagine the surprise when he picked up a baseball in July 2000 and tossed it with his father. Guthrie felt different. And when he walked on at Stanford, having run and lifted weights for only a month. His fastball popped like fireworks, and he located it with the precision of a scope, and, well, this wasn't just different.

It was special.

"Things I never did prior to the mission I was able to do afterward, even though it wasn't by my doing," Guthrie said. "It wasn't something I expected or asked for....

Dennis Prager: "America Needs a Fourth of July Seder"

National memory dies without national ritual. And without a national memory, a nation dies. That is the secret at the heart of the Jewish people's survival that the American people must learn if they are to survive....

Dennis's entire piece available here.

The 8-Ball Meme: Eight Previously Unknown Facts

Ok, Irina, you asked for it. Eight previously unknown facts about me:

1. While a child, our household had a leatherbound Holy Bible that had been printed in 1876.
2. Also while a child, I was photographed with Mayor Ed Koch in New York.
3. While a young adult I introduced myself to pan-Africanist socialist [euphemism for Black racist, antisemitic] Kwame Toure (Stokely Carmichael) in Berkeley, California to ask him his opinion (his advice, almost) about politics.
4. More than a decade later, returning from my informal political exile, I watched the 2004 Superbowl with Wesley Clark during a break from his presidential campaign in Flagstaff, Arizona.
5. I've spent a day in jail for something I (used to) believe in.
6. I've been to Windows on the World restaurant atop the former World Trade Center (when it was still possible) and have climbed to the top of the Statue of Liberty, up to and inside her crown (when it was still permitted).
7. While a teenager, when I went to get Allen Ginsberg's autograph after a public reading, the NAMBLA member lanced a sexually provocative comment at me in front of the tiny crowd that had gathered around him. During my adolescence I had the good fortune to know some consistently (in some ways outstandingly) "appropriate" gay men. (Allen Ginsberg wasn't one of them.)
8. Also while a teenager, I had the good fortune to be introduced to and spend quality time with William Bronk. During our conversations, he offered more than one memorable lesson about poetry, including: ..........................

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Eight other blogs "tagged" to answer this meme: West Bank Mama; Black Belt Mama; Cobb: Strictly Old School; Dancing in Tongues; Gay Patriot West; Right Truth; The Black Kettle; Bookworm Room. In addition to facts about yourself, you may also disclose "habits" (click to Irina's site for clarification).

Exodus International's 2007 Freedom Conference

* Updated *

Exodus International's 32nd annual Freedom Conference kicks off today and runs through July 1 in Irvine, CA. For those who don't know, Exodus International is dedicated to introducing its members to the teachings of Jesus Christ, to turning people of all ages away from a gay or lesbian lifestyle and toward forming committed, monogamous, heterosexual relationships, marriages, and families.

I'm happy to tip my readers to this year's Freedom Conference, not because I'll be attending (nor, for that matter, addressing it), but out of goodwill to its Executive Vice President, Randy Thomas, who has flown across the country to help lead it. Randy and I have had the opportunity to become acquainted this year. He's a good guy with a lot to say. I'm sure he'll be saying a lot in Irvine this week.

Since coming forward this spring with some critical comments about the gay community and my one-time place in it, I have found that with only one exception gay men -- those I knew long ago, relatively recently, and/or to whom I decided this year to introduce myself -- have shunned me. At first it was disheartening and disappointing. Now I see it as instructive: for one who's not "in the church" the gay community can be uncharitable, inhospitable, and un-gay (as in, not fun).

You shouldn't have to be a born-again Christian to be capable of recognizing the positive force of Christianity, and of religion generally. Just last week I went on the road to attend a very meaningful event at an Orthodox synagogue in Los Angeles. So best wishes to all the attendees and presenters at Exodus International's 2007 Freedom Conference -- we're not on the same road but we're kind of headed in the same direction.

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* Update * (6/27) Little did I know that a "counter conference" will take place this weekend, also in Irvine, run by "ex-ex-gay" activists -- i.e., people who understood themselves as gay, lesbian, etc. who became "ex-gay" and later became "gay" or "lesbian" again (and have remained so). All this would be funny except that, as I know from experience, real lives are at stake. Here's an open letter addressed from its leading organizers to Exodus International. May more light than heat be generated this weekend.

P.S. If you're new to this site, and have strong opinions on gay and lesbian issues, please sample my "Gay/Lesbian" category before you go. Thanks.

Into The Heart Of Primo Levi's Darkness

* Updated*

This post is a minor reflection offered in anticipation of the Fourth Annual Ariel Avrech ZT'L Yahrtzeit Lecture, to be delivered this Sunday at Young Israel of Century City (Los Angeles, CA). Professor David Shatz will be speaking on "Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik and the Problem of Evil." I'll be there.

Update (06/19): Ralphie posts his summary of Prof. Shatz's lecture at Kerckhoff Coffeehouse.
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By his indispensable works Survival in Auschwitz, The Reawakening, The Drowned and The Saved (and many more), Italian Jew Primo Levi ranks in the forefront of those who attempted to give literary expression to that ring of Hell on Earth known as Auschwitz. Levi was by trade a chemist who came of age, if not without a literary temperament, then apparently without literary ambitions. Yet through a dreadful and formidable combination of fate, history, and willpower Primo Levi, the nice Jewish boy from Turin, eventually became, as he is known today to millions, "Primo Levi" -- the world-class memoirist, novelist, poet, and essayist.
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Like most Jewish concentration camp survivors of a literary bent, Levi was far from a literal believer. Instead he essayed, for better or for worse, to recover traces of revealed truth through his own historical, and scientific investigations. His empirical method attempted to sketch (literally) an enlightened schema over the darkest reality of the univers concentrationnaire. This schema appears as the frontispiece to Myriam Anissimov's Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist: between two poles of experience -- "Job" and "Black Holes" -- stretch (or rather, bulge) four literary contuinua: "salvation through humor," "man suffers unjustly," "man's stature," and "salvation through understanding." Several writers or personalities populate each continuum -- for example, Shalom Aleichem (humor), Paul Celan (suffering), Joseph Conrad (stature), and Charles Darwin (understanding).

What sticks in my throat most, Gentle Reader, about Primo Levi is the poetic legacy he bequeathed in "Almanac." It's the last piece he published during his lifetime, dating from January 1987, a few months before he died under mysterious circumstances (either by accident or by suicide). Ms. Anissimov describes it, almost pithtily, as a farewell to the world, a farewell in the form of a prophecy, proclaimed by a follower of the Enlightenment who detested both prophets and their prophecies. "Almanac" strikes me as the admission -- by a rationalist, a scientist, a humanist -- of the eternal presence of evil, of man's agency in propagating evil.
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Almanac
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The indifferent rivers
Will keep on flowing to the sea
Or ruinously overflowing dikes,
Ancient handiwork of determined men.
The glaciers will continue to grate,
Smoothing what lies beneath them,
Or suddenly fall headlong,
Cutting short fir trees' lives.
The sea, captive between
Two continents, will go on struggling,
Always miserly with its riches.
Sun, stars, planets and comets
Will continue on their course.
Earth too will fear the immutable
Laws of the universe.
Not us. We, rebellious offspring
With great brainpower, little sense,
Will destroy, defile,
Always more feverishly.
Very soon we will extend the desert
Into the Amazon forests,
Into the living heart of our cities,
Into our very hearts.

- from Collected Poems

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This oblique measure of moral honesty, of the Timeless shooting (seeping) through the Temporal may be Levi's truest, if inadvertent, literary legacy.

Cho Seung-Hui - Not Beneficent And Not Merciful

* Update (Giovanni taught Seung-Hui poetry) *
* Update (Students feared Seung-Hui based on his plays) *
* Update (Screenwriter Robert Avrech deplores the media's attention to this mass murder) *
* Update (Seung-Hui inspires Muslims who rejoice in America's corruption, anticipate its destruction) *
* Update (Cho Seung-Hui and mental illness) *
* Final Update * (Muslim academic official forbids Muslim prayers for Seung-Hui's victims unless the prayers also are for the victims' conversion to Islam)
* Final Final Update * Pat Buchanan gets the last word (via Matt Sanchez): If there is a lesson to be taken away from this horror, it is that we, as a society, are becoming too tolerant of the aberrant.

Here are some comments on a recent AP wire article on Virginia Tech mass murderer Cho Seung-Hui. At this point I say we can eliminate the possibility that the killer was a devout Muslim at the time of the murders. That is, he did not commit his atrocity, as the saying goes, in the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful.... In the name of what, then, did he commit his atrocity?

No one should overlook that Seung-Hui provided, strategically provided, ample evidence of what we can term pop jihad or copycat jihad or secular jihad or mental illness jihad [see the most recent update (below)]. The killer had a gradual and irreversible breakdown of Judeo-Christian ethics -- if he ever had them in the first place. He then adopted rhetoric, costume, gestures, and victimology that have much in common with jihadists' homegrown ones, ones that have enjoyed much currency since 9/11 in the MSM, the Arabic-language media, and (albeit with intense scrutiny) the blogosphere. In addition, his rage against inherited wealth -- but without any responsible awareness that, as a VT student, he was at the same time inter pares -- was loud and clear. We may also be seeing echoes of the emptiness of someone who, in his moral and cultural deformation, suffered from a breakdown of Korean or, more generally, East Asian social (even martial) values -- again, if he ever had them in the first place.

Call me a D'Souzian, but all this, imho, points to an indictment of contemporary American (so-called) culture (and perhaps contemporary Korean and East Asian cultures) at least as much as an indictment of Islam.

Knowing that Seung-Hui was an English major, and having spent half my undergraduate time in and around lit departments, I am intensely curious as to what constituted his course cirricula, assigned readings (esp. postmodern critical writing), chosen paper topics, and any other of his formative undergraduate influences and experiences, in and out of the classroom and in terms of professional preparation (club and team membership, counseling, grad school options, etc.).
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* Update * The New York Times depicts Nikki Giovanni as the front line of moral decency because she allowed Seung-Hui's violent "poetry" to intimidate over 60 students into dropping her exclusive writing workshop at Virginia Tech. Then she devoted time to work with him in a one-on-one setting. In terms of the consequences, this outdoes Norman Mailer's advocacy for Jack Henry Abbott (the convicted murderer Mailer helped spring from prison on the basis of his writing promise -- the murderer who immediately murderered again). "The Professor Who Said 'Not In My Class'," harrumphs the Gray Lady. "... 'Not in my class, but in my office hour'," it should read. Thus he pursued his preoccupations, there and elsewhere, and over 30 students -- none of whom Giovanni had devoted one-on-one time to -- are dead. And what a disgusting choice of photo by the Times (above, right), given the subject. The literary Left's fascination with, facilitation of, and refusal (or inability) to discriminate against evil is truly deadly. [Virginia Tech alumn Gabe at Social Foundations sets the pace for the heavy lifting that remains to be done regarding -- how should I phrase it? -- Giovanni's classroom. Read: "Nikki Giovanni's Violent 'Poetry'" and "Bad Poetry".]

* Update * A Virginia Tech student reports: When we read Cho's plays, it was like something out of a nightmare. The plays had really twisted, macabre violence that used weapons I wouldn't have even thought of. Before Cho got to class that day, we students were talking to each other with serious worry about whether he could be a school shooter. Read "Richard McBeef" and "Mr. Brownstone" by Cho Seung-Hui (warning: graphic content).

* Update * From "The Killer and the Mainstream Media: A Love Story" (at Seraphic Secret): He is, of course, the ultimate, narcisisst, wallowing in too much self-esteem. Our sin? We did not recognize his greatness. NBC has done a great disservice by acting as the killer's PR machine.

* Update * Basharee Murtadd, a self-described "apostate of Islam" who testifies that "there is no deity but the Truth," provides a round-up of some internet-based Islamic reactions to Cho Seung-Hui's mass murder. The script on this image translates as: A Product of American [democracy + nationalism]. As Muslims, our real condolences to you is to help you absolutely destroy your criminal democracy. By the vulnerable people in the Earth.
That's not "closure" -- them's fightin' words.

* Update * It is widely suggested that Seung-Hui a) had some degree of severe mental illness and b) as this link indicates, had in the past received some attention from the (euphemistically termed) "mental health system." This brings into play numerous considerations as to the public and professional (mis)diagnoses and (mis)perceptions of mental illness, plus considerations as to the sufferer's (or rather, patient's) own responsibility in monitoring and managing his condition. In addition to the scrutiny I am trying to bring to bear on the cultural and political consequences and context of his mass murder, specific medical and legal issues seem to be germaine to understanding its cause. Keeping all these considerations in mind all the time is the best way to reflect -- with a surpassing beneficence and mercy -- on what came to pass on April 16. (Also, Sigmund, Carl and Alfred insists that the presence of mental illness does not obviate what should be regarded obviously as terrorism.)

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Now you can read for yourself what I originally read, and draw your own conclusions (emphases added):

Va. Tech gunman sent material to NBC
By MATT APUZZO, AP National Writer 1 hour, 56 minutes ago

BLACKSBURG, Va. - Midway through his murderous rampage, the Virginia Tech gunman went to the post office and mailed NBC a package containing photos and videos of him brandishing guns and delivering a snarling, profanity-laced tirade about rich "brats" and their "hedonistic needs.

"You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today," 23-year-old Cho Seung-Hui says in a harsh monotone. "But you decided to spill my blood. You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option. The decision was yours. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off."

NBC said the package contained a rambling and often-incoherent, 1,800-word video manifesto, plus 43 photos, 11 of them showing him aiming handguns at the camera.

He repeatedly suggests he was picked on or otherwise hurt.

"You have vandalized my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience," he says, apparently reading from his manifesto. "You thought it was one pathetic boy's life you were extinguishing. Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and the defenseless people."

The package arrived at NBC's headquarters in New York two days after Cho killed 32 people and committed suicide in the deadliest one-man shooting rampage in modern U.S. history. It bore a Postal Service time stamp showing that it had been mailed at a Virginia post office at 9:01 a.m. Monday, about an hour and 45 minutes after Cho first opened fire.

That would help explain one of the biggest mysteries about the massacre: where the gunman was and what he did during that two-hour window between the first burst of gunfire, at a high-rise dorm, and the second fusillade, at a classroom building.

"Your Mercedes wasn't enough, you brats," says Cho, a South Korean immigrant whose parents work at a dry cleaners in surburban Washington. "Your golden necklaces weren't enough, you snobs. Your trust funds wasn't enough. Your vodka and cognac wasn't enough. All your debaucheries weren't enough. Those weren't enough to fulfill your hedonistic needs. You had everything."

Some of the pictures show him smiling; others show him frowning and snarling. Some depict him brandishing two weapons at a time, one in each hand. He wears a khaki-colored military-style vest, fingerless gloves, a black T-shirt, a backpack and a backwards, black baseball cap. Another photo shows him swinging a hammer two-fisted. Another shows an angry-looking Cho holding a gun to his temple.

He refers to "martyrs like Eric and Dylan" — a reference to the teenage killers in the Columbine High massacre.

The package was sent by overnight delivery but did not arrive at NBC until Wednesday morning. It had apparently been delayed because it had the wrong ZIP code, NBC said.

An alert postal employee brought the package to NBC's attention after noticing the Blacksburg return address and a name similar to the words reportedly found scrawled in red ink on Cho's arm after the bloodbath, "Ismail Ax," NBC said.

NBC News President Steve Capus said that the network received the package around noon and notified the FBI. He said the FBI asked NBC to hold off reporting on it so that the bureau could look at it first, and NBC complied, finally breaking the story just before a police announcement of the package at 4:30 p.m.

Capus said it was clear Cho videotaped himself, because he could be seen leaning in to shut off the camera.

State Police Spokeswoman Corinne Geller cautioned that, while the package was mailed between the two shootings, police have not inspected the footage and have yet to establish exactly when the images were made.

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Jews Terrorized in Canada, Muslim Suspects Arrested

Two young Muslim men arrested for the bombings within the past year of Jewish schools in Montreal, the CBC reports.

Gettin' Down With Dostoevsky

Each of us hangs always upon the cross of himself.
-- Whittaker Chambers

Fyodor Dostoevsky is one of the most astonishing minds ever to have travelled the long road from youthful revolutionary socialism to chastened conservatism. In his case it was a wickedly brooding, often suffering, always passionate conservatism. A death sentence for belonging to a socialist organization commuted at the last minute to eight years' hard labor in internal Siberian exile, during the prime of his manhood, was the beginning of the high price Fyodor paid for his knowledge and eventual wisdom. That price -- which James Baldwin called "the price of the ticket" -- was higher than the one paid by most who undergo "second thoughts," although not that ultimate price paid by so many dupes, dissenters, and martyrs.

Rather than a shabby, pathetic substitute for what should have been the most vital, most potent season of any man's life, Fyodor's years of exile, imprisonment, and soul searching eventually furnished the gestation of a heroic Western intellect. Upon his return to cosmopolitan Russia, the poverty and general ignominy through which he toiled proved no obstacle to -- indeed, proved a kind of preparation for -- the realization, in the novel form, of a kind of secular, born-again Christianity. Those years brought forth Fyodor's greatest works and rank among the most influential works of all modern literature, influencing to this day partisans of the Left and Right alike: Notes From the Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and his masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov.

The following is excerpted from a little-known short story Fyodor wrote during that great, almost superhumanly productive period. "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" [*] is part science fiction (if you can believe that), part confession, and part barbed commentary on modern Western spirituality that, rather than transcendental, is instead as pretentious as it is naive. Frankly, I turn to it for clues as to what goes on in the wayward, fanatic intellects of the American, all-too-American John Walker Lindhs, Adam Gadahns, and Rachel Corries (and even the more rhetorically "moderate" conversos to Islam such as "Hamza Yusuf" (Mark Hanson)). Further, I turn to it because it presents me with clues as to what went on in my intellect when I tried to justify to myself (and occasionally to others) some vague, eventual good that would, in theory, result from Hamas's suicide bombing operations during the 1990s.

Like everything he wrote from Notes forward, "The Dream" is a record of Fyodor's prickly, often painful intellectual clash with -- and at the same time of his intellectual dependence upon --  a contemporary liberalism that is untested and unproven while at the very same time tried and failed. (The embedded links comment on a number of contemporary topics -- some worldly, some personal, some both.)
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At last these people grew weary of their senseless labours and suffering appeared on their faces, and these people proclaimed that suffering was beauty, for in suffering alone was there thought. They glorified suffering in their songs. I walked among them, wringing my hands and weeping over them, but I loved them perhaps more than before when there was no sign of suffering in their faces and when they were innocent and -- oh, so beautiful! I loved the earth they had polluted even more than when it had been a paradise, and only because sorrow had made its appearance on it. Alas, I always loved sorrow and affliction, but only for myself, only for myself; for them I wept now, for I pitied them. I stretched out my hands to them, accusing, cursing, and despising myself. I told them that I alone was responsible for it all -- I alone; that it was I who had brought them to crucify me, and I taught them how to make the cross. I could not kill myself; I had not the courage to do it; but I longed to receive martyrdom at their hands. I thirsted for martyrdom, I yearned for my blood to be shed to the last drop in torment and suffering. But they only laughed at me, and in the end they began looking upon me as a madman. They justified me. They said that they had got what they themselves wanted and that what was now could not have been otherwise. At last they told me that I was becoming dangerous to them and that they would lock me up in a lunatic asylum if I did not hold my peace. Then sorrow entered my soul with such force that my heart was wrung and I felt as though I were dying, and then -- well, then I awoke.
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And that, Gentle Reader, is not even the conclusion of the story.

[*]: from Great Short Works of Fyodor Dostoevsky. David Magarshack, trans. (Harper & Row, 1968).

Liberalism Delenda Est

* Updated and Expanded * (Jump into the Comments section, folks!)

[This post is a follow-up to "When In Sparta Do As A Spartan"; if you like this, you might love that.]

In the comments to the previous post a reader asks what I mean by "destroy an idea." As if there is something untrustworthy or dangerous about refuting -- beyond riposte and beyond reproach, where possible -- an idea. "Destroy an idea" has nothing to do with censoring thought or speech, but everything to do, whether in private discussion or public debate, with exercising thought and speech competently and morally.

For example, in an email a different reader told me he'd attended a lecture on the Roosevelt Administration's policy of not allowing mass immigration of Jews into the United States before World War II. This can be an anxious subject, of course, especially if you have or had (as I did) European Jewish kin who were slaughtered in World War II. He didn't pick my brain, but it turns out the subject is one I've thought about, sometimes been disturbed about, over the years.

The best single source on it I know of is David Wyman's The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-1945. I came across it when I was a very young adult trying to draw conclusions about the United States' general worth or reliability. The "conclusions" I drew then led to anxiety and mistrust toward American power and American purpose. Stuck inside this Jewish refugee issue, I'd refused to weigh more complex and obvious factors: namely, America's subsequent support for the State of Israel. Instead of free thinking I'd settled for fear and trembling. The first is the essence of a confident and truly liberal education; the second, a temperamental foundation of the postmodern mindset. Before too long fear and trembling led precipitously to taking intellectual refuge in the very desperate hope of revolutionary commitment. I went to the extreme Left. Some, disturbed by the very same issues, go to the extreme Right, like former Meir Kahane devotee, the Israeli journalist and New Republic Editor Yossi Klein Halevi. (Today, like me, he is closer to the center.) A minor detail at the time, but one not lost on me, is that one of the lifetime Jewish communist cultists who influenced me was also familiar with Wyman's book. (Similar to the Russian Bolshevik movement, very many of the American communists I knew were Jewish, a fact from which we constantly drew righteous solace for our otherwise stubborn and self-selecting self-righteousness.) As a result, I felt confirmed in my mistrust of America and more confident in the political direction she provided. This may sound trivial, but when you're 20, as I was -- and in the absence of more fully formed, discriminating values -- such a detail can be pivotal.

Back to the reader who'd attended a recent lecture on the subject. He didn't offer me any details of its content nor his reactions to it nor whether there had been a Q&A session. But I do know that the reader is a lifelong Democrat who thinks rather favorably of  Howard Dean. (Howard Dean, who in public has sported a Palestinian keffiyeh and who during his presidential campaign met and was photographed (all smiles) with one of the most prominent politicians of my former Marxist group.) So I felt adequately informed and obligated to set out not just to destroy, but to pre-emptively destroy, any America-doubting anxiety the lecture might have either instilled in or elicited from this reader. This is what I wrote:

Here are the essential points on the subject I would impart to anyone: In a time of widespread antisemitism around the world (including in America), it was a heartbreaking and tragic historical episode. BUT -- had Western European powers, the Soviet Union, and America braved Hitler's rise to power --had they braved it and denied it instead of enabled it [*] -- there would never have been a mass exodus of refugees to worry about. Assimilated liberal Jews were, in fact, among the appeasers (such as Leonard Woolf, Virginia's husband). So the moral and political onus is widespread and by no means merely a stain on the reputation of the Roosevelt Administration(s). Further, the three generations since World War II have seen the most far-reaching social, economic, and political (and military) gains ever for American and Israeli Jewry. G-d bless America! and G-d curse the appeasers of evil!

A severe, lazy, and fatal flaw of contemporary liberal culture (including scholarship) is to revisit those tragic historical episodes in a way that generates pseudo-intellectual fodder for those who TODAY despise American values and American power and who TODAY appease America's and Israel's GENOCIDAL enemies (witness, Pelosi's headscarved, near-treasonous trip to Syria). It allows them to believe that because American institutions in the past were less than providential (in an almost Biblical sense) that they do not deserve our proud, fierce, and abiding loyalty. That lady in New York harbor is the Statue of Liberty, not the Statue of Exodus or of Utopia. Had I attended that lecture I would have lit into the speaker or any commenters who would not have made that point clear. Why? Because for its continuous complicity in the last century's most monstrous historical crimes, modern liberals have conceded whatever moral high ground they possibly ever had.

Liberalism delenda est ("Liberalism must be destroyed"). It's what the Romans said -- and did -- about Carthage.

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[*]: The simplistic, Marxism-derived version of the rivalry between Germany's Nazis and Communist Parties is that Germany's industrial classes cynically, aloofly, and deludedly preferred Nazi ascent in order to purge the nation of "those rabble-rousing (but nonetheless promising)" Communists and thus -- in an archaically conservative sense that would appeal to old money -- restore order. This now is almost conventional American cultural wisdom, as a single line of dialogue in Bob Fosse's "dystopian", (allegedly) anti-escapist Cabaret conveys quite economically (it's Max speaking from his limousine).

That history is more complex. While Communists ended up being among the Nazis' first political victims (among the very first concentration camp inmates, tagged with a red triangle, etc.), the German Communist Party -- under orders from Moscow -- for a time actually allied with the Nazi Party. This is merely the subterfuge routinely practiced by every totalitarian political movement -- the agenda behind the agenda, etc. -- whether Nazi or Communist, Hezbollah or Hamas, or even Democratic. (Fans of The Manchurian Candidate, take note!) See, e.g., the entries here on the Nazi-Communist alliance in Germany's 1931 elections.

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Here is what I mean by "destroy an idea" or, as I wrote yesterday:

Destroy not their persons, of course, but their ideas and their justifications for their ideas. Destroy utterly their concepts and let the people -- if they can, if they have the will -- build new ideas and justifications from their dusty intellectual rubble. But first those ideas and justifications really must be pounded into rubble.

Debbie Does A Mitzvah

Ms. Debbie Schlussel, who blogs hard-on-the-Amerabian beat and often from the heart of I [heart] Hezbollah (aka Dearborn), Michigan -- who is several government agencies' most feared (but also respected) muckracker -- who reviews movies -- who is respected almost unanimously by members of our military and law enforcement -- and whom the Wall Street Journal last year named [in the running to become] "America's Next Top Pundit" -- that Debbie Schlussel was good enough today to post on her site an announcement of Jeremayakovka's recent blogiversary.

Bloggers are often accused (often accurately) of falling into "mutual admiration societies." Just read more about Debbie's personal, professional, political, and online accomplishments here. Read about them, Gentle Reader, then tell me: What's not to admire? What's not to emulate?

Many thanks, Debbie! Next year in Tehran!

Of particular interest to Debbie Schlussel readers will be my categories "Judaism (and other faiths)" -- including "My Kampf" (about my disillusionment with anti-Zionism) -- and "Hillary Watch". Enjoy.

(Yo, Sean, about that stain on your record ... the way to wash it out is not to Hannitize it -- just say "I'm sorry" and never do it again. You're a good American. This'll make you a better American.)

Chag Sameach Pesach

A subject from last April's post, "Living Passover Legends: Back from the USSR," emailed this. Twisted (given the nature of the holiday), but cute:

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See also: Joseph A. Klein's "Remembering the Passover Massacres"
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True Whit

Today, April 1st, is the birthday of Whittaker Chambers, a man who deserves to be commemorated -- and studied -- as nothing less than the spiritual father of modern American conservatism.

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Chambers's confessional autobiography Witness is a modern classic and should be required reading in college level American history cirricula, as well as in courses on the history of Christianity in America. The title derives, first, from him being the federal government's most authoritative witness during Congress's investigations of Communist spies and sympathizers within the federal government during and after World War II. These investigations, conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), were meticulous, overdue, and -- as a republic's exercise in the preservation of the integrity of its highest institutions -- above all honorable. As a result, one of HUAC's members, the young Congressman Richard Nixon (R-CA), was catapulted into the nati0nal spotlight, going on twice to land the vice-presidential nomination of the Republican Party's victorious national tickets of 1952 and 1956. (Click here for a short list of some of America's unsung HUAC heroes.)
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The most wrangling (and partisan) consequence of HUAC's anti-Communist investigations was the Alger Hiss perjury trials of 1948-50. In these Chambers's testimony was pitted repeatedly against that of his former Communist Party "comrade" Alger Hiss. With degrees from Johns Hopkins and Harvard, Hiss enjoyed a stellar, if behind the scenes, career in government. Since the 1930s he had held several high-ranking posts within the State Department and after World War II was a founder of The United Nations. At first it seemed that Chambers, a college dropout and self-confessed political subversive, couldn't hold a candle to the career public servant. Yet Hiss's eventual conviction in a court of law -- on charges of perjury, not treason (and therefore subject to a risibly soft sentence) -- vindicated Chambers's HUAC testimony. The court of public opinion, on the other hand, would remain sharply divided for decades, with Hiss being hailed as a hero for the rest of his life, and even afterwards, by nearly all liberals and leftists. Post-Soviet archival discoveries of the 1990s prove beyond considerable doubt that Hiss had spied for the Soviet Union and against the United States of America.
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It should be noted that Nixon facilitated Chambers's HUAC testimony years before the Army-McCarthy hearings. Therefore the two should not be confused. The latter (often referred to as "a witch hunt") were conducted in the Senate at the strenuous behest of Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI). They both of course shared important traits, but were and remain separate investigations. Their differences, in fact, were not lost on Chambers who, after publishing the account of his life, his HUAC testimony, and the Hiss trials in Witness, confided privately to William F. Buckley that he sensed McCarthy's theatrical tactics would, on balance, hurt the American anti-Communist movement. Above all, what the House and Senate investigative committees shared was to soldier on in the face of what was probably the most orchestrated obstruction and obfuscation ever brought to bear against the pursuit -- by the elected officials of a representative democracy -- of the unvarnished truth concerning native agents and abettors hard at work in the service of that democracy's sworn, mortal enemy. The obfuscation continues to this day: in the media, academia, professional letters, and popular culture.
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Alger Hiss had been an advisor to President Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference of early 1945. Whatever else it accomplished, Yalta is notorious for being where the liberal democratic West ceded influence over Eastern Europe to Communist tyranny. Yet during this time, as the American-Soviet alliance was drawing to a close, Chambers had become America's truest and highest-placed anti-Communist journalist. With a resume that included having written for and edited the Communist Party USA's leading journal New Masses, Chambers in 1939 had been brought on to the editorial board of Time magazine. There he quickly and habitually found himself at odds with a staff that was largely conciliatory towards the Soviet Union. Haunted by his past but undaunted by his present, he toiled to a tune he'd heard from a German ex-Communist: Hit them hard! This he did. Chambers emphatically lamented the Yalta Conference in his penetrating, prophetic essay, "Ghosts on the Roof." "Ghosts" broke the mould for editorial commentary when it appeared in Time's March 5, 1945 issue. In haunting tones it posited that the undead ghosts of Russia's assassinated Romanovs had gathered at Yalta to note, with wry brooding from beyond unmarked graves, the achievement by Soviet power of the fallen dynasty's own, long-coveted ambitions -- imperial domination over as broad a swath of humanity as possible.

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Decades later, when Harvard historian Richard Pipes set out (in his hefty study of the first years of Communist state power) to shift the public's understanding of those years from one of a popular revolution to one of a coup d'etat, he was granting, if only indirectly, an academic imprimatur to Chambers's long under-appreciated -- indeed, often scorned -- voice in the wilderness.
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An American Parable

Still very young and naturally pale, with supply curved shoulders and almost stout neck, with thick dark hair and deep dark brown eyes that shined without effort, she had boiled her life's story down to a few sentences for me -- a total stranger.

Her mother, a born-again Christian, had left the church when deciding to become a lesbian. That's how they landed in the Bay Area from Oklahoma. Now she (the daughter) and her boyfriend were expecting a child (which explained the shining eyes).

The least I could do was to ask her her name.

- Maranatha.
- Your name is what?
- Ma-ra-na-tha, she repeated placidly and more slowly.
- Is that ... Hindu?
- It's Aramaic. I nodded ignorantly. It means, she said, sliding a custodial palm round her belly, "The second coming of Christ."
- Well! ... You have a lot to look forward to.

Older Poem - "Kafka"

.....................Kafka


.....................those eyes
.....................dark and bright
.....................deep set
.....................in a chiseled
.....................visage

.....................two shining
.....................black lamps
.....................lit by the flame
.....................that shone
.....................through stone
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ENDNOTES and AFTERTHOUGHTS:

* Wrote it about ten years ago. It started out as a sentence in a journal entry that shattered, then set, into this little verbal crystal.

* I've blogged very little about Jeremayakovka's three great inspirations (Jeremiah, Mayakovsky, Kafka). The spiritual nourishment, however, that generating and offering "An Open Letter To Matt Sanchez" recently provided is akin to what this offers. Or to what this is evidence of.

* I'm not nearly as read in Kafka as are the professional litterateurs. His Diaries I find the most compelling, followed by his short prose, and only then by his novels. None of the novels have I read through to the end. (They just don't sustain my attention, can't say why.)

* The first (also lasting) impression Kafka made on me was thanks to an exhibit devoted to him at The Jewish Museum in New York during the 1980s. I didn't visit. It's just that every weekday of its duration our high school track team ran past that museum on the way to Central Park for our workout. The photo of Kafka that appears above figured prominently on the posters the museum had designed to advertise its exhibit. As one among many, mostly hale and hearty, mostly privileged, mostly Jewish, teenaged American boys, I would feel -- while fleetingly and somehow ashamedly looking up to watch -- Kafka watch us rush past him.

* Kafka, like Orwell, would doubtless have felt entirely violated had he lived to see his name neologized (Kafkaesque, Orwellian, etc.). As death closed in on him, he (now) famously demanded that his unpublished works be destroyed, a demand his best friend disobeyed. So the act of reading Kafka is, almost always, a conspicuous betrayal of his exceedingly private, ever-receding spirit. (Ever-receding as a man; as an author (auctor (Lat.): increase) he is diffusely immanent, ever-exodic.) Can someone say how many German lit professors and postmodern literary philosophers ever really (morally) weigh this? Of the ones who do, how many succeed in conveying that to their classroom charges? For to be visited and nourished by a (living) literary corpus is entirely different from swarming around and feeding upon a (dead) literary corpse. Given the nihilistic taint (if not intent) of postmodernism, how many are even capable of that? Or even care to? Or rather: How few?

* This is why, despite the leonine tendencies I sometimes display on Jeremayakovka, I always approach, always take leave of Kafka ... in silence.
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