Ivana Trump Escorted Off Plane: Napolitano Declares 'The System Worked'
by Ann Coulter

In response to a Nigerian Muslim trying to blow up a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day, the government will now prohibit international travelers from going to the bathroom in the last hour before the plane lands.

Terrorists who plan to bomb planes during the first seven hours of the eight-hour flight, however, should face no difficulties, provided they wait until after the complimentary beverage service has been concluded.

How do they know Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab didn't wait until the end of the flight to try to detonate explosives because he heard the stewardess announce that the food service was over and seats would have to be placed in their upright position? I can't finish my snack? This plane is going down!

Also prohibited in the last hour of international flights will be: blankets, pillows, computers and in-flight entertainment. Another triumph in Janet Napolitano's "Let's stay one step behind the terrorists" policy!

For the past eight years, approximately 2 million Americans a day have been subjected to humiliating searches at airport security checkpoints, forced to remove their shoes and jackets, to open their computers, and to remove all liquids from their carry-on bags, except minuscule amounts in marked 3-ounce containers placed in Ziploc plastic bags -- folding sandwich bags are verboten -- among other indignities.

This, allegedly, was the price we had to pay for safe airplanes. The one security precaution the government refused to consider was to require extra screening for passengers who looked like the last three-dozen terrorists to attack airplanes.

Since Muslims took down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, every attack on a commercial airliner has been committed by foreign-born Muslim men with the same hair color, eye color and skin color. Half of them have been named Mohammed.

An alien from the planet "Not Politically Correct" would have surveyed the situation after 9/11 and said: "You are at war with an enemy without uniforms, without morals, without a country and without a leader -- but the one advantage you have is they all look alike. ... What? ... What did I say?"

The only advantage we have in a war with stateless terrorists was ruled out of order ab initio by political correctness.

And so, despite 5 trillion Americans opening laptops, surrendering lip gloss and drinking breast milk in airports day after day for the past eight years, the government still couldn't stop a Nigerian Muslim from nearly blowing up a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day.

The "warning signs" exhibited by this particular passenger included the following:

His name was Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

He's Nigerian.

He's a Muslim.

His name was Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

He boarded a plane in Lagos, Nigeria.

He paid nearly $3,000 in cash for his ticket.

He had no luggage.

His name was Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

Two months ago, his father warned the U.S. that he was a radical Muslim and possibly dangerous.

If our security procedures can't stop this guy, can't we just dispense with those procedures altogether? What's the point exactly?

(To be fair, the father's warning might have been taken more seriously if he had not simultaneously asked for the U.S. Embassy's Social Security number and bank routing number in order to convey a $28 million inheritance that was trapped in a Nigerian bank account.)

The warning from Abdulmutallab's father put his son on some list, but not the "no fly" list. Apparently, it's tougher to get on the "no fly" list than it was to get into Studio 54 in the '70s. Currently, the only people on the "no fly" list" are the Blind Sheik and Sean Penn.

The government is like the drunk looking for his keys under a lamppost. Someone stops to help, and asks, "Is this where you lost them?" No, the drunk answers, but the light's better here.

The government refuses to perform the only possibly effective security check -- search Muslims -- so instead it harasses infinitely compliant Americans. Will that help avert a terrorist attack? No, but the Americans don't complain.

The only reason Abdulmutallab didn't succeed in bringing down an airplane with 278 passengers was that: (1) A brave Dutchman leapt from his seat and extinguished the smoldering Nigerian; and (2) the Nigerian apparently didn't have enough detonating fluid to cause a powerful explosion.

In addition to the no blanket, no computer, no bathroom rule, perhaps the airlines could add this to their preflight announcement about seat belts and emergency exits: "Should a passenger sitting near you attempt to detonate an explosive device, you may be called upon to render emergency assistance. Would you be willing to do so under those circumstances? If not we will assign you another seat ..."

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Israel: Small Miracle
Cliff May

People forget how small Israel is. Its entire population is a little over 7 million - smaller than Lima, Peru. Its land area is about 8,000 square miles, smaller than New Jersey or Belize. By comparison, Jordan, its neighbor to the east, occupies 35,000 square miles; Egypt, its neighbor to the West, covers 386,000 square miles.

There are more than 20 Arab states with a combined population of 325 million, and more than 50 majority-Muslim states with a combined population of well over a billion. By contrast, Israel is the world's only Jewish-majority state- and 20 percent of its population is Arab, most of them Muslim.

So why is so much attention -- and firepower - focused on this tiny nation? Israel's many enemies and critics say it is because the Jewish state has deprived Palestinian Arabs of a homeland. But Jordan, situated on the three-quarters of historic Palestine lying east of the River Jordan -- from which the country took its name when it was created in the 1920s - is populated, not surprisingly, mostly by Palestinians. As for the royal family that rules there, it was exiled from its ancestral home in Mecca, after the Saudis - a warrior clan subscribing to Wahhabism, a radically fundamentalist version of Islam - conquered the lion's share of the Arabian Peninsula and named it after themselves.

Palestinians also inhabit Gaza, from which Israel withdrew every settler and soldier four years ago. And, under various peace proposals, Israel has offered to remove its citizens from more than 90 percent of the West Bank, a territory occupied in 1967 at the end of a war with Egypt (from which it took Gaza), Jordan (from which it took the West Bank) and other Arab neighbors whose explicitly stated goal was Israel's eradication.

Defenders of Israel argue that it is despised for different reasons, not least because it is an outpost of Western values in a region, the broader Middle East, engaged in a long-term project of religious and ethnic cleansing. One country after another has become inhospitable toward its minorities. As a result, Jews, Christians, Baha'i's and Zoroastrians are among the minority groups that have been eliminated, decimated or compelled to flee to more tolerant corners of the world.

There also is the fact that, economically, Israel punches way above its weight. As Dan Senor and Saul Singer describe and document in a fascinating new book, "Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle," the "greatest concentration of innovation and entrepreneurship in the world today" is found in the Jewish state: a higher percentage of GDP devoted to research and development than anywhere else in the world; more high-tech start-ups per capita than any other country; 80 times as much venture capital investment per capita as in China; more companies on NASDAQ than all of Europe combined.

What's more, Senor and Singer believe the conventional and sometimes stereotypical explanations for this success - e.g. Jews work hard, Jews are smart - are either wrong or insufficient.

An overlooked and key contributing factor, they theorize, is that virtually all Israelis serve in the military where a specific set of skills and values are pounded into them. They learn for example, "that you must complete your mission, but that the only way to do that is as a team. The battle cry is ‘After me': there is no leadership without personal example and without inspiring your team to charge together and with you. There is no leaving anyone behind. You have minimal guidance from the top and are expected to improvise..." The Israeli military encourages a kind of entrepreneurship: the assumption of both responsibility and risk at a young age, coupled with on-the-job experience making life-and-death decisions.

European troops, by contrast, rarely venture onto battlefields and, when they do, as in Afghanistan, too often are instructed to serve as peacekeepers -- where there is no peace to keep. What does that teach?

In recent years, American military men and women have been facing - and overcoming - daunting challenges. Senor and Singer suggest that upon return to civilian life they should not "deemphasize their military experience when applying for jobs," and that employers should recognize the skills and habits that young Americans are now acquiring while fighting for their country and to ensure that freedom has a future.

That is not an argument in favor of war. But war has been both declared against us and thrust upon us. Those who believe otherwise indulge a dangerous delusion. What's more, the inconvenient truth is that war, not peace, has been the norm throughout history. And reports of history's death have been exaggerated.

The "greatest generation" was forged in the crucible of a global conflict. If the global War Against the West produces a second "greatest generation," that will be a bitter defeat for Osama bin Laden, Mahmud Ahmadinejad and all those sympathetic to their medievalist and supremacist ideologies.

America is an exceptional nation. But each generation of Americans must decide whether to assume the burden required to continue that tradition.

Israel, too, is unique: Unlike the vast majority of states born in the second half of the 20th century, Senor and Singer observe, "Only Israel's founders had the temerity to try to start up a modern first-world country in the region from which their ancestors had been exiled two thousand years earlier."

The problem is that in the eyes of much of the world Israel is both a "start-up nation," and an upstart nation. It defies the "international community" by daring to defend itself, and it prospers even while under attack. To many people, such behavior is unforgiveable.


Copyright © 2009 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

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American Jews and Obama’s
Abandonment of Israel

Many American Jews place their commitment to leftist politics before the survival of the Jewish state.

by Abraham H. Miller

When the Israel Bonds appeal was made in many synagogues this year, congregants heard something that would have been unnecessary a generation ago: a strong reminder of the ties that bind American Jews to Israel.

Given a choice between ties to Israel and commitments to leftist politics, American Jews will choose their politics.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the support among Jewish Democrats (92%) for the policies of Barack Obama and their contrasting rejection by Israelis (4% support Obama’s policies).

The explanation for the divergence is typical of the hubris of leftist Jews. They see themselves and President Obama as the embodiment of Democratic and Jewish ideals, while Israeli Jews, especially the Orthodox and Russian immigrants, have moved decidedly to the right and spurned both Jewish and Democratic values.

In the boardrooms of Jewish organizations, discussion of “divergence,” as it is being called, takes place with the consummate acceptance of this explanation.

I will not dispute the numbers, but as any undergraduate with an exposure to the logic of inference will note, there is no concatenation between the data and the explanation. What exists is a bunch of brain-atrophied liberals sitting around a table indulging smug notions of their political self-esteem.

The strange thing about leftist Jews, who are generally secular, talking about Jewish values is those values are always aligned with Democratic policy positions.

Perhaps in their version of Exodus, Franklin Roosevelt led the Israelites out of Egypt, climbed atop Mt. Sinai, and returned with two tablets, on which were etched the New Deal.

The policy implications for divergence is that the Israelis had better return to the same Jewish values as leftist American Jews, or there will be no affinity between the two communities and no support for Israel.

The hubris of this is seen in just what Jewish values the Obama administration represents.

I never thought that the intrusion of government into every private sphere was somehow a Jewish value. Tzdaka (charity) isn’t socialism. If it were, the Orthodox Jews, who appear to know something about Jewish values, wouldn’t have voted disproportionately Republican.

Centralization has never been a democratic value. If it were, Stalin, not Jefferson, would be the paragon of democracy.

An administration that in nine months created more czars than the Romanovs were able to create in three hundred years does not seem to embrace democratic values.

What liberal American Jews don’t want to confront is they have helped put into power an administration that is more vexed over a Jew building a home in Jerusalem than a Muslim building a nuclear bomb outside of Tehran.

Liberal Jews don’t want to admit that in Cairo and again at the United Nations, President Obama not only recited the Arab narrative of the Palestinian-Israeli dispute; he embraced the Palestinian position a priori before forthcoming negotiations.

As Poland and the Czech Republic were taking the knives out of their backs after Obama’s abrogation of American commitments on missile defense, Israelis were finding they were next on the list of Obama’s betrayal.

But liberal American Jews lusting after Obama as some political messiah who will bring peace to the Middle East can’t deal with the dissonance of what they are witnessing. Like all true believers who end up facing what sociologists call the “crisis of non-appearance,” liberal Jews simply have increased their zealotry and sought a convenient scapegoat, Israel.

It is not that liberal American Jews helped elect one of the most intrusive and authoritarian administrations to ever come to Washington or one of the most anti-Israel. It is that those stiff-necked Israelis, especially those Russian immigrants, just haven’t been properly socialized into Democratic values the way America socializes its immigrants.

Have you been to the parking lot of a Home Depot lately? Take a look and then tell me about the glories of America’s immigration and socialization policies. I’m sure all that exploited day labor is just bursting over with concerns for democracy, especially if ACORN signs them up to vote.

I wonder, do you press “8” in Tel Aviv for Russian?

What explains divergence is that on the one hand you have a group of Jews living in the security and luxury of American suburbia, whose primary existential threat is whether the crabgrass will take over their backyard. On the other hand, you have Israeli Jews living in a state of perpetual war, who worry about where the next missile or suicide bomber will come from.

The Jews living in such upscale suburbs as Evanston, Illinois, pontificate about moral equivalence and what the body count in Sderot should be in order to justify a military incursion into Gaza. All the time, they worry about what they need to say to stay in the good graces of their interfaith neighbors and colleagues.

Leftist American Jews should realize that there is no rationale that will make the Obama administration anything other than the political fiasco it is. It is an administration honed in the machine politics of Chicago, where perpetuating power is the paramount goal. It is an administration that buys every leftist shibboleth about the causes of and solutions to the Middle East conflict. It is the most treacherous and anti-Israel administration ever to come to power.

American Jews need to stop blaming Israel for their own political failures. If American Jews are the embodiment of Democratic and Jewish values, where is the Jewish value in scapegoating one’s brethren?

The Jewish community has made a terrible political mistake. Among the delegations that had no shame, no decency, and no commitment to truth and listened to Ahmadinejad spew his venom at the UN was an American delegation that accepts his narrative of Middle East history. It is time for American Jews to face the reality of what they have created.My Irving Kristol and Ours

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What the master taught his apprentices.
by Mary Eberstadt
10/05/2009

A young woman came by to visit the Policy Review offices a few weeks ago. Fresh out of a prestigious graduate school, enamored of both philosophy and creative writing, she'd been sent by a mutual friend and was looking for work. How, she wondered, might someone who loved reading and writing, but had no background in publishing or anything else of professional relevance, break into what used to be called "the higher journalism"--and make a living at it?

Though not exactly the stuff of Proust's madeleine, her question did send me wandering back in time. Twenty-five years ago, in 1984, I'd been a girl much like her--straight out of college with similar interests and questions, as eager to make a mark as a writer as I was unqualified for any such thing. Unlike her, however, I'd gotten lucky--about as lucky under the circumstances as it was possible to be. Back when I was in her shoes, I'd had the fantastic good fortune of putting that same question--and as it later turned out, many more as well--to an already legendary writer and editor named Irving Kristol, who died last week at the age of 89.

"More than anyone alive, perhaps, Irving Kristol can take the credit for reversing the direction of American political culture." These words taken from the Nation a few years back signal the Irving Kristol the world knows best: the godfather of neoconservatism. As that other titan of neoconservative thought, Norman Podhoretz, has suggested, "grandfather" may be the better label, given the generations of writers influenced by that family of ideas. For years now, at least since Peter Steinfels's 1979 book The Neoconservatives, articles and books and documentaries--including several essays by Irving himself--have wrestled with the question of his singular and manifold influence, in the process turning Kristol-gazing into a minor industry of its own.* Cold Warrior, ex-Trotskyist, coeditor with Stephen Spender of Encounter, coeditor with Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell of the Public Interest, founder with Owen Harries of the National Interest, public intellectual for nearly seven decades, contributor during those same years to the most influential journals and magazines of the day, from Commentary and the New Leader half a century ago to the New York Times Magazine and the Wall Street Journal, member of countless boards and all-around intellectual impresario: These are just some of the faces of Irving with which critics and fans alike must reckon.

Yet if history has given us two, three, many Irving Kristols, it has also stinted on the Irving whom I and many other people were privileged to know best. That is the amusing, avuncular, sometimes delphic boss we saw day in and day out thanks to the unique system of apprenticeship that he devised for the Public Interest. For almost two years between 1983 and 1985, I was one of the interns privileged to toil for great profit (if little salary) in the tiny, smoky, one-room magazine office in New York--that "halfway house," as David Skinner accurately dubbed it in these pages a few years ago, "for dozens and dozens of young assistants, who typically arrived fresh out of college and stayed a year or at most two before leaving for grad school, or government, or other jobs in journalism."

Only slightly larger than a college dormitory room, that Public Interest office was as stuffed with manuscripts and books and magazines as it was with people maneuvering around all the obstacles, including two or three interns, a managing editor, Irving's longtime (and universally adored) secretary Rita Lazzaro, and of course Irving himself, issuing a steady stream of wisecracks, phone calls, and dictated correspondence into the chaos. There were also the phones ringing on everyone else's desks, the banging Selectric II typewriters, the coffee cups, ashtrays, and cigarettes; some of the interns (like Irving too, back then) puffed away incessantly. Everyone including the boss ate lunch at their desks most days, adding further to the clutter and assault on the senses; and any authors or other hapless types visiting the magazine were further shoehorned into our hazy, bustling little office cubby. In truth, an environment more inimical to concentration and privacy can scarcely be imagined. On the other hand, as many were to find out, neither could a more fascinating or rewarding place to pass the days.

I arrived on the fabled doorstep in 1983. At that moment Irving was 63, the magazine, which later moved to Washington, was still in New York and it was roughly halfway through a tenure as remarkable for its longevity (40 years) as for the enduring high quality of its pages. Like most such hopefuls who made their way to Irving, I'd been sent by someone else who knew the shop--in this case Jeremy Rabkin, a professor at Cornell--and also shared the same simple if grandiose ambition of the other interns: We all wanted to be writers when we grew up.

Unlike most of the other helpers hired for the place, though--and herewith my perversely unique credential for offering an essay about Irving--I was unqualified for any such thing: no published work whatsoever to my credit, no background in economics or public policy, no understanding of urban planning, welfare initiatives, or other subjects for which the magazine's pages were renowned. Similarly did I lack any editorial or fact-checking experience, unless one counts a job in college spent poring over the footnotes in that undiscovered masterpiece of opinion journalism, The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy. And when asked by then-managing editor Mark Lilla to produce a piece of writing for Irving to read, I proudly brandished one document that has probably never been used as an entrée to journalism either before or since: a 40-page college paper on "Immanuel Kant's Theory of Aesthetic Judgment." Book Three.

As Irving cheerfully pointed out during the job interview, such was not exactly the stuff of which Horatio Alger stories in journalism are made, and he further observed that he could see no good reason to hire me. But he just as cheerfully did it anyway, thus fortuitously throwing me into the company of a number of other apprentices who by contrast had begun making marks of their own. This cast in 1984 included Tod Lindberg, who had cofounded a magazine at the University of Chicago and was already a paid contributor to numerous magazines (and subsequently an author, columnist, newspaper editor, Hoover Institution research fellow, and now editor of Policy Review). Managing editor Mark Lilla would go on to become a professor of social thought at the University of Chicago (and, as it turned out, an itinerant professional critic of his former boss). Thomas J. Main, another assistant editor, had already transformed thinking in public policy circles about a critical social issue, with a seminal essay in the Public Interest on "The Homeless of New York."

Those both ahead of and behind us in the intern line showed similar seriousness of purpose. Foreign policy strategist Robert Kagan had passed through the place earlier, as had at various times Steven Lagerfeld (editor of the Wilson Quarterly), author and publisher Robert Asahina, defense expert Seth Cropsey, journalist and Reader's Digest editor Rachel Flick Wildavsky, the late magazine editor and author Michael Scully, and a slew of others launched into a life of journalism or politics or both by their time at the PI. The masthead in the years to follow would witness a similar procession: Richard Starr (now deputy editor of this magazine), columnist and author Diana West, speechwriter and political consultant Daniel Casse, and David Skinner, editor of the National Endowment for the Humanities' magazine Humanities, among others. All these and more had Irving Kristol to thank, whether they ever did so or not, for their first and formative experience of what it meant to read and edit and write their way into the world.

This track record is all the more striking because Irving's intern "program" was less an actual curriculum than a glorified system of learning in a far more effective way--mainly, by grappling with the work of the distinguished authors the magazine published, and by eavesdropping on Irving's dictation and phone calls in that teeny-tiny office. Such eavesdropping, consisting as it did of listening to Irving talk with some of the most interesting and influential people around, turned out to be essential to our crash course in journalism.

So was the Public Interest's salary, which was so low that it was practically guaranteed to jump-start our literary ambitions. To be fair, the workload of a quarterly journal was light enough for Irving to grant us the boon of a four-day work week. But those Fridays off were meant to be used productively, reading and writing. Interns were expected to publish--if not in the PI then elsewhere, and if not for literary glory then because it was the only way of paying the rent. Getting a piece into the hallowed precincts of Norman Podhoretz's Commentary (where Norman's deputy Neal Kozodoy policed the pages with a legendary editorial ferocity) was a particular coup for those who managed it; so too was any appearance in Bob Tyrrell's American Spectator or Bob Bartley's Wall Street Journal. Writing and publishing as Irving expected his interns to do also meant making more connections in the wider world, of course. It was this fact, and not the sinister imaginings of subsequent critics of some neoconservative "cabal," that helped Irving's apprentices end up where they did.

Fortunately for us, Irving could no more help teaching young people than we could help taking his extraordinary interest in us for granted. Be brief: This was something we learned (or tried to) from Irving's dictations; long before email and instant messaging, his many letters covering all kinds of ground were typically just one or two sentences long. About editing: Always just cut the text if you have to, he advised, never add to what's there. How well he understood that most writers over-think and over-write, typically burying the lamp of their thought under bushels of dead words. About responding to critics en masse in a published venue: When answering letters written in response to something you've written, don't use the authors' names. Just lay out their common themes. That way you won't get caught up personally and can just stick to the ideas.

He taught a thing or two about religion and philosophy, too, to the long line of twentysomethings, some of whom outside the office lived a creed of personal nihilism whose origins he understood better than we did. A student of Gnostic movements throughout history, he recognized far better than we their reappearance on the world stage in modern and postmodern guises. "Think right, live left," we used to joke--though not around Irving; it was, we sensed, probably the one joke he wouldn't have shared.

In fact, though, he seemed to find just about everything else amusing--including some things that we interns did not think amusing at all, such as our all-too-serious ambitious young selves. This brings us to another fact about Irving's intern program: It worked because of his profound understanding of what young people are made of. He knew--and often wrote about--just how deeply modern and postmodern mores had penetrated into young souls. Decades before anyone but George Gilder and Midge Decter were saying so, he knew also that the sexual revolution had been a nearly unmitigated disaster for many people and their families, especially though not only the poor, and especially though not only young women. He knew, in other words, just how consequential the social changes from the 1960s on had been for one particularly vulnerable subset: the young.

That was how he could speak with such authority about "their turbulent sexuality, their drug addiction, their desperate efforts to invent new 'lifestyles,' and their popular music, at once Dionysiac and mournful." I remember those words leaping from the page upon reading them years later. In New York in the 1980s, new wave and punk rock were still reigning but on the way out, hip-hop and techno on the way in, and like everyone else I'd spent plenty of time slumming in clubs and other waystations of the popular culture, imbibing nihilism. Yet here was Irving, a 65-year-old bookworm who probably couldn't have found CBGB's if he were dropped off in front of it on a Friday night (and certainly wouldn't have gone in if he had), managing a decade later in just a few words to speak more truth about the scene than any of its itinerant habitués.

Irving understood what few in our post-authority age understand, which is that a great deal of contemporary youthful anomie is a cry of frustration against the disappearance of orthodoxy itself--and a substitute search for something higher than the low down, dirty, stifling counterculture. "Young people," he observed to a group of divinity professors and students back in 1979, "do not want to hear that the church is becoming modern. Go tell the young people that the message of the church is to wear sackcloth and ashes and to walk on nails to Rome, and they would do it." Furthermore, "young people, especially, are looking for religion so desperately that they are inventing new ones. They should not have to invent new ones; the old religions are pretty good." These knowing words, incidentally, were written on the cusp of the evangelical explosion, and well before the unforeseen turn to neo-orthodoxy by small but significant numbers of young Catholics and Jews.

Working for Irving at the Public Interest was an education in other unexpected ways. In particular, it left most of us permanently immune to at least two prominent stereotypes about neoconservatism that have been making the fevered rounds of commentary ever since. One of these was the charge that those on the right were somehow in it for the money--that nefarious corporate largesse rather than actual conviction accounted for the swelling ranks of young neoconservatives and conservatives. Two-thirds of my Public Interest salary, I remember smartingly to this day, went to rent a fifth-floor walk-up in a neighborhood that kids today would call "sketchy" if they were given to understatement. During those years the assistant editors lived off the free lunch Irving provided at Hamburger Heaven (often eating like trenchermen to make the food last into the night) and, many nights, on the free meatballs at happy hour at O'Lunney's bar on Second Avenue. Sometimes for entertainment in the most thriving city on earth, we'd get together and play the board game Jeopardy late into the night--because at least that was something we could do for free. (When one of the players, John Podhoretz, became an actual Jeopardy champion years later, it was clear that something good had come from our penury.) So much for the neoconservative gravy train!

Irving and his wife Bea, for their part, lived in an inviting and book-stuffed apartment near the New York Athletic Club on Central Park South--in which cozy quarters they made a habit of generously entertaining the interns alongside established writers and other prominent guests. For that reason among others, Irving's interns felt as warmly toward Bea Kristol as they were simultaneously in awe of her public persona, Gertrude Himmelfarb, historian. Irving himself encouraged such intimidation via his omnipresent adulation of her; he made sure we interns were aware of her many distinguished works, and remarked more than once in the office that in a hundred years' time, Bea would be the intellectual whose oeuvre would be left standing. Like Midge Decter, whose offices at the Committee for the Free World were at that time another hangout for young conservatives in New York, Bea took both a personal and an intellectual interest in Irving's apprentices, reading our fledgling writing and unfailingly extending to all the pleasure of her conversation and company.

A couple of times a year the mail would bring individual invitations, set out in Bea's perfect and perfectly tiny handwriting, for a soirée at the Kristols' apartment. There the office team got to meet the regulars on their social and intellectual list--Walter and Irene Berns, Martin and Sydnee Lipset, Midge Decter and Norman Podhoretz, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Robert Nisbet, H. J. Kaplan, Roger Starr, George Will, Bob Bartley, and many other writers and editors who would be influencing ideas and politics for years to come. And these are just names from an aperture of two years in the mid 1980s; one can only imagine the parade in full across the decades. Also in the Kristols' apartment, of course, the PI interns met the rest of the family. Their children Bill and Liz knew most everyone on the masthead, and many interns over the years became personal friends. Such are among the true and apparently terrifying origins of the "neoconservative media machine" that has since given so many swooning critics a case of the vapors.

The second stereotype that anyone who actually worked around Irving finds very funny in retrospect is the conflation of neoconservatism with Zionism. Going through piles of mail in the hobbity Public Interest office, one would occasionally come across a crazy letter--the kind that, back before email made all communications look alike, was identifiable by caked glue and cutout letters, say, or elaborate scrawling script running over both sides of the envelope (always a bad sign). Often such missives turned out to be passionately executed exercises in anti-Semitism, undertaken by correspondents who knew all too well that somewhere between the Trilateral Commission and the Public Interest offices lurked a conspiracy of Jews trying to rule the world. In fairness to them, of course, these correspondents may just have been ahead of their time; after all, any number of authors complaining about neocons in recent years have managed to make related, feverish cases, and in some of the best publications--rather than, say, in red magic marker on a dirty envelope.

Sometimes whichever intern was lowest on the totem pole would read aloud these ravings about how the Public Interest magazine was the red-hot center of one or another Jewish conspiracy--a ritual that we junior editors found all the more entertaining since most of us during those particular years were cradle Catholics. If the offices of neoconservative magazines really were what so many hysterical critics before and since have insisted, i.e., treacherous tools doing Israel's bidding, it was clear from the kind of people working in them that these Jews must be a lot dumber than their enemies otherwise seemed to think.

A one- or two-year berth at the Public Interest also enabled the apprentices to study Irving Kristol in one other way that demands to be mentioned, because it is the most significant of all: as a writer and man of letters par excellence, a virtuoso of his chosen literary form.

None of which is to say that Irving comported himself thus. As Nathan Glazer notes in his essay in The Neoconservative Imagination, Irving himself never kept track of his own publications, and "responded with disdain that he keeps no bibliography of his writing, that he leaves that to the scholars, who do indeed keep coming up with pieces he has forgotten" (it is one of many virtues of that book that compiler Mark Gerson has appended his own best stab at a thorough bibliography at the end). Nor did Irving write books proper, which might have made following his chain of thought somewhat easier (though he once told Tod Lindberg and me of having written, and then burned, a youthful novel). Rather, his chosen vessel throughout the decades was the essay--that deceptively limited-seeming form that is nevertheless, as Aldous Huxley once put it, "a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything."

And so Irving did, in one venue after another, as the piles of magazines around the office went to show--in Commentary, the Reporter, the New Leader, Encounter, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times Magazine, and other venues where one could then measure out one's thoughts in thousands rather than mere hundreds of words. These essays are almost invariably pithy, but they stood on the shoulders of prodigious reading and learning. Irving read incessantly--not only magazines but books, and not only books but good and deep ones--as well as murder mysteries and English novels, Straussian arcana and business lore, everyone else's manuscripts, and a great deal else. That depth is part of why his essays reveal not one writerly virtue or two, but the whole tool kit: epigrams, irony, sustained logical argument, humor, dramatic closings, a knack for translating arcane points of argument into lively prose.

So many of Irving's one-liners have passed into the vernacular that even some of his admirers may not recognize their origins: "The major political event of the twentieth century is the death of socialism." "An intellectual may be defined as a man who speaks with general authority about a subject on which he has no particular competence." "The danger facing American Jews today is not that Christians want to persecute them but that Christians want to marry them." "The enemy of liberal capitalism today is not so much socialism as nihilism." "Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions--it only guarantees equality of opportunity."

Yet the flair on display in this body of work goes beyond such bons mots. His regular Wall Street Journal essays, for example, are easily among the best the newspaper has ever published, as are those he did for the New York Times Magazine. Many of his longer essays in the "higher journalism" genre, the ones that show up in the collected volumes, are truly great, far outlasting their immediate moments and capable of being read and re-read with profit long after whatever ostensibly occasioned them had passed from the scene. This is true whether the occasion was the American bicentennial ("Adam Smith and the Spirit of Capitalism," 1976), say, or a chance gathering of professors and students of divinity ("Christianity, Judaism, and Socialism," 1979), or even--witness numerous articles on socialism and Freudianism--an entire intellectual movement.

In "God and the Psychoanalysts," for example--written in 1949, a moment when Freudian thought was preeminent, and decades before it would finally be forced into intellectual exile by the accumulated weight of criticism from all sides--Irving not only anticipates the coming psychoanalytic crackup, but also foresees why it is coming: because the understanding of human nature on which the Freudian edifice depends is itself fundamentally cracked. Man's "flight from God," he observed in this essay written six decades ago, "has also been a flight from his true self, which had been made in His image. So it was that Freud could build a theory of human nature on the basis of his experience with hysterics and neurotics." This fact, Irving could see clearly, was "a unique and strange achievement which testifies to our modern psychic equilibrium."

It is this gift for penetrating through any number of epiphenomena to the real fault lines beneath that transforms so much of Irving's writings from opinion pieces into lasting essays and at times profound meditations. Consider as one more example a Commentary essay written almost fifty years later, in 1994, humorously (if also bitingly) titled "Why Religion Is Good for the Jews." Ostensibly occasioned by a now-forgotten news blip--a prominent fundamentalist's remark that only Christians would get into heaven when the time came--it makes points far less transient than the event. First comes a gentle if rather obvious religious lesson ("As it happens, Jewish theological teachings do not recognize the doctrine of a second coming of Jesus (or a first), so it is hard to see why Jews should take such offense at these statements"). And second comes the inevitable wisecrack: "It is almost as if Jewish organizations, having fought (quite successfully) against Jewish exclusion from country clubs, now feel it necessary to take on the specter of discrimination in that Great Country Club in the Sky." Both moves are vintage Irving.

Reading through them again now suggests that two features of these essays have gone chronically under-appreciated by critics. One is the importance of religion to even his earliest thought. "I was born 'theo-tropic,'" Irving observes in his autobiographical memoir written in 1995, "and not even my dismal experience of a decadent orthodoxy could affect this basic predisposition." At another, earlier point in his writing he describes religion as always his favorite subject. It is from religion that Irving reasons time and again to the conservative conclusion that politics is not everything--one of several convictions unifying his thought across the years.

This fact also gives the lie to the frequently thrown contemporary jab about neoconservatism being somehow "messianic," an idiocy that no one actually reading the written record could pen with a straight face. Irving himself specified several times over the decades that neoconservatism was not a movement but a "persuasion" or "impulse" ("more descriptive than prescriptive," as he put it once). Moreover, his most explicit writing on the subject--his introduction to the 1983 collection Reflections of a Neoconservative--discusses several points he deems integral to neoconservatism, not one of which concerns foreign policy, which is where the bugaboo about "messianism" is typically lodged.

"The real trouble," he wrote in surveying American society for another jewel of an essay, a 1972 piece called "About Equality,"


is not sociological or economic at all. It is that the "middling" nature of a bourgeois society falls short of corresponding adequately to the full range of man's spiritual nature, which makes more than middling demands upon the universe, and demands more than middling answers. .  .  . [The critics of bourgeois society] may speak about "equality"; they may even be obsessed with statistics about equality; but it is a religious vacuum--a lack of meaning in their own lives, and the absence of a sense of larger purpose in their society--that terrifies them and provokes them to "alienation" and unappeasable indignation. It is not too much to say that it is the death of God, not the emergence of any new social or economic trends, that haunts bourgeois society. And this problem is far beyond the competence of politics to deal with.


If these are the words of a messianic thinker, then he is writing himself out of a job.

Similarly, not nearly enough has been made of Irving's sense of humor (perhaps not surprisingly, given the dour critics who have made themselves neoconservatism's Monday morning quarterbacks). Many essays sparkle with good-natured wit--as did Irving in person--and never more than when he is self-deprecating. "I really cannot believe that Americans are a historically unique and chosen people," he observes drolly in one example. "I am myself a Jew and an American, and with all due respect to the Deity, I think the odds are prohibitive that He would have gone out of His way to choose me twice over."

This comedic flair is evident early in Irving's writings. Two of his first Commentary essays are overt treatments of humor, one of them the magnificently wistful "Is Jewish Humor Dead?" (1951). Then there are the covert treatments. Another early essay in Commentary notes of some forgotten American humorists that "they may not be entirely out of mind, but they are quite out of print--deservedly so." Similarly, in an essay written in 1979 (itself slyly titled "Confessions of a True, Self-Confessed--Perhaps the Only--'Neoconservative' "), he issues his opinion of Peter Steinfels's The Neoconservatives thus: "I do not wish to suggest that the book is without merit. There is, for example, an excellent couple of sentences on page 4."

To write about Irving Kristol without understanding either his ineradicable respect for religion or his liberal sense of humor is like trying to describe food without tasting or smelling it. Facts not always being stubborn things, many self-appointed critics of neoconservatism have nonetheless done just that in absurdly offering up the portrait of a godless neoconservative ideologue. Even so, one suspects another, deeper reason for why certain detractors have failed to give Irving his literary due: their resentment of his longstanding and resolutely unapologetic attack on the counterculture and its legacy.

This is the Irving whom critics have truly wanted to hate: Irving the social conservative. As he put it in one 1993 essay that made waves called "My Cold War," what saddened him above all were "the clear signs of rot and decadence germinating within American society--a rot and decadence that was no longer the consequence of liberalism but was the actual agenda of contemporary liberalism. .  .  . It is an ethos that aims simultaneously at political and social collectivism on the one hand, and moral anarchy on the other. It cannot win, but it can make us all losers." Today, of course, many on the right as well as the left would drive social conservatives from the fold if they could. How quickly they have forgotten just which opinion writers consistently delivered the sharpest and most knowing critiques of modern morals during the past several decades--Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, and other prominent neoconservatives. Social conservatism itself has been a bigger tent than is typically appreciated.

All of which brings us back to that little smoky office a quarter century ago. One day shortly before leaving the Public Interest for good, I was treated by Irving to one other rite of passage in the program, a lunch away from our desks at the New York Athletic Club. He mentioned something that seemed surprising--that, in the long run, he thought the internship program would prove more influential even than the magazine itself. I thought at the time he was referring to the careers that many of his former apprentices would go on to, and maybe he was. A quarter century later, though, I like to think that there may have been another, deeper way in which we interns had given something back to Irving.

After all, for years and years that one-room office amounted to a two-way eavesdropping street. In some sense that we didn't understand, we interns were all babbling Londoners to his pacing Dickens, the background voices to many a passing or written thought. Maybe listening to us was part of how Irving came to know what many people, including many people fighting over neoconservatism today, did not. The figurative kids of the world after the social revolutions of the sixties weren't quite all right after all--but they were worth trying to reach anyway, in whole or in part, one essay, one argument, at a time.

One afternoon in 1985 we were all sitting around the office when a call came in from one of the television networks. Someone was putting together a panel show on censorship, and they were interested in hearing Irving discuss one more essay that had turned into a lightning rod, "Pornography, Obscenity, and the Case for Censorship." Would Irving care to make an appearance on the show? they asked. No, he told them, Irving would not. Why not? Because, Irving deadpanned to us, he never did television. He had done it just once before and regretted it--because "when I saw myself on film, I couldn't believe it. I did not in fact look anything like what I know I look like, which is Cary Grant."

In a way that seems impossible to convey, he was just such an outsized, witty, urbane, and perpetually amusing gentleman to his apprentices--and by extension to the many other people he advised over the years, from his business students at NYU to the parade of writers and editors and politicians and more who sought his counsel. Such is even true of the readers who never knew him, but who found in his literary company a most agreeable and persuasive companion.

The critics who have charged neoconservatism with "selling out" its intellectual pedigree have gotten one thing right: Any writer following in Irving's footsteps would likely look inferior by comparison. But that does not make his intellectual heirs and beneficiaries wrong. When all is said and done about the contested particulars--the neocons, the magazines, the Jews, the Irvings both real and imaginary about whom his biographers may quarrel till the time comes when we find out who really does get into that Great Country Club in the sky--we are left with the same Irving who's been there all along. That's the writer whose lightning pen willed a whole new political world to life and made a great many people proud to consider themselves his fellow conservatives. Neither his personal nor his literary example will likely be matched in the higher journalism, or what's left of it, ever again.


Mary Tedeschi Eberstadt is a research fellow with the Hoover Institution, consulting editor to Policy Review, contributing writer to First Things, and author most recently of The Loser Letters: A Comic Tale of Life, Death and Atheism, forthcoming in spring 2010 from Ignatius Press.

__________________________________________

No Laughing Matter

By MARK STEYN
10/09/2009

The most popular headline at the Real Clear Politics website the other day was: “Is Obama Becoming A Joke?” With brilliant comedic timing, the very next morning the Norwegians gave him the Nobel Peace Prize.

Up next: His stunning victory in this year’s Miss World contest. December 12th, Johannesburg. You read it here first.

For what, exactly, did he win the Nobel? As the president himself put it: “When you look at my record, it’s very clear what I have done so far. And that is nothing. Almost one year and nothing to show for it. You don’t believe me? You think I’m making it up? Take a look at this checklist.”

And up popped his record of accomplishment, reassuringly blank.

Oh, no, wait. That wasn’t the real President Obama. That was a comedian playing President Obama on “Saturday Night Live.” And, for impressionable types who find it hard to tell the difference, CNN — in a broadcast first that should surely have its own category at the Emmys — performed an in-depth “reality check” of the SNL sketch.

That’s right: They fact-checked the jokes. Seriously. “How much truth is behind all the laughs? Stand by for our reality check,” promised Wolf Blitzer, introducing his in-depth report with all the plonking earnestness so cherished by those hapless Americans stuck at Gate 73 for four hours with nothing to watch but the CNN airport channel.

Given the network’s ever more exhaustive absence of viewers among the non-flight-delayed demographic, perhaps Wolf could make it a regular series: Who was that lady I saw you with last night? That was no lady, that was my wife.

“In fact, our sources confirm, his wife is, biologically speaking, a lady. Joining us now is our Medical Correspondent Dr Sanjay Gupta. Sanjay, we all like a joke, but how much truth is behind the laughs?”

Fortunately, the Nobel Committee understands that President Obama’s accomplishments are no laughing matter. So they gave him the Peace Prize for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”

I assumed this was a reference to his rip-roaring success in winning the Olympic Games for Rio, but as it turns out the deadline for Nobel nominations was way back on February 1st.

Obama took office on January 20th. Gosh, it’s so long ago now. What “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy” did he make in those first 12 days? Bowing to the Saudi King? Giving the British Prime Minister the Wal-Mart discount box of “Twenty Classic Movies You’ve Seen A Thousand Times?”

“Er, Barack, I’ve already seen these.” “That’s okay. They won’t work in your DVD player anyway.” 

For these and other “extraordinary efforts” in “cooperation between peoples,” President Obama is now the fastest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in history. Alas, the extraordinary efforts of those first 12 days are already ancient history.

Reflecting the new harmony of US-world relations since the administration hit the “reset” button, The Times of London declared the award “preposterous” and Svenska Freds (the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society) called it “shameful.”

There’s something almost quaintly vieux chapeau about the Nobel decision, as if the hopeychangey bumper stickers were shipped surface mail to Oslo and only arrived last week. Everywhere else, they’re peeling off: The venerable lefties at Britain’s New Statesman currently have a cover story on “Barack W Bush”.

Happily, there are still a few Americans willing to stand by Mister Saturday Night. “I am shocked at the mean-spirited comments,” wrote Judi Romaine to The Times in protest at all the naysaying.

“I’m afraid I’ve registered into a very conversative (sic), fear-based world here, but I’d like to suggest the incredible notion we all create our worlds in our conversations. What are you building by maligning rather than creating discourses for workability? Bravo to Obama and others working for people, however it appears to cynics.”

If that’s the language you have to speak when you’re “working for people,” I’d rather work for a cranky mongoose. Yet to persons who can use phrases like “creating discourses for workability” with a straight face, Obama remains an heroic figure.

Like Judi Romaine, he works hard to “create our worlds in our conversations”. Why, only the other day, very conversationally, the administration floated the trial balloon that it could live with the Taliban returning to government in Afghanistan. A lot of Afghans won’t be living with it, but that’s their lookout.

This is — how to put this delicately? — something of a recalibration of Obama’s previous position. From about a year after the fall of Baghdad, Democrats adopted the line that Bush’s war in Iraq was an unnecessary distraction from the real war, the good war, the one in Afghanistan that everyone — Dems, Europeans, all the nice people — were right behind, one hundred per cent.

No one butched up for the Khyber Pass more enthusiastically than Barack Obama: “As president, I will make the fight against al-Qaida and the Taliban the top priority.” (July 15, 2008)

But that was then and this is now. As the historian Robert Dallek told Obama recently, “War kills off great reform movements.” As the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne reminded the president, his supporters voted for him not to win a war but to win a victory on health care and other domestic issues.

Obama’s priorities lie not in the Hindu Kush but in America: Why squander your presidency on trying to turn an economically moribund feudal backwater into a functioning nation state when you can turn a functioning nation state into an economically moribund feudal backwater?

Gosh, given their many assertions that Afghanistan is “a war we have to win” (Obama to the VFW, August 2008), you might almost think, pace Judi Romaine, that it’s the president and water-bearers like Gunga Dionne who are the “cynics.”

In a recent speech to the Manhattan Institute, Charles Krauthammer pointed out that, in diminishing American power abroad to advance statism at home, Obama and the American people will be choosing decline.

There are legitimate questions about our war aims in Afghanistan, and about the strategy necessary to achieve them. But eight years after being toppled, the Taliban will see their return to power as a great victory over the Great Satan, and so will the angry young men from Toronto to Yorkshire to Chechnya to Indonesia who graduated from Afghanistan’s Camp Jihad during the 1990s.

And so will the rest of the world: They will understand that the modern era’s ordnungsmacht (the “order maker”) has chosen decline.

Barack Obama will have history’s most crowded trophy room, but his presidency is shaping up as a tragedy — for America and the world.

© Mark Steyn, 2009

________________________________

Death of the World's
Greatest Entertainer

____________________________

January 6, 2009

Enough of Radical Islam
Ben Shapiro
Wednesday, December 03, 2008
 

Enough with the pseudonyms. Western civilization isnt at war with terrorism any more than it is at war with grenades. Western civilization is at war with militant Islam, which dominates Muslim communities all over the world. Militant Islam isnt a tiny minority of otherwise goodhearted Muslims. Its a dominant strain of evil that runs rampant in a population of well over 1 billion.

Enough with the psychoanalysis. They dont hate us because of Israel. They dont hate us because of Kashmir. They dont hate us because we have troops in Saudi Arabia or because we deposed Saddam Hussein. They dont hate us because of Britney Spears. They hate us because we are infidels, and because we dont plan on surrendering or providing them material aid in their war of aggressive expansion.

Enough with the niceties. We dont lose our souls when we treat our enemies as enemies. We dont undermine our principles when we post more police officers in vulnerable areas, or when we send Marines to kill bad guys, or when we torture terrorists for information. And we dont redeem ourselves when we close Guantanamo Bay or try terrorists in civilian courts or censor anti-Islam comics. When it comes to war, extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

Enough with the words. Talking with Iran without wielding the threat of force, either economic or military, wont help. Appealing to the United Nations, run by thugs and dictators ranging from Putin to Chavez to Ahmadinejad, is an exercise in pathetic futility. Evil countries dont suddenly decide to abandon their evil goals -- they are forced to do so by pressure and circumstance.

Enough with the faux allies. We dont gain anything by pretending that Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are true allies. They arent. At best, they are playing both sides of the table. We ought to be drilling now in order to break OPEC. Building windmills isnt going to cut it. We should also be backing India to the hilt in its current conflict with Pakistan -- unless Pakistan can destroy its terrorist element, India should be given full leeway to do what it needs to do. Russia and China, meanwhile, are facilitating anti-Western terrorism. Treating them as friends in this global war is simply begging for a backstabbing.

Enough with the myths. Not everyone on earth is crying out for freedom. There are plenty of people who are happy in their misery, believing that their suffering is part and parcel of a correct religious system. Those people direct their anger outward, targeting unbelievers. We cannot simply knock off dictators and expect indoctrinated populations to rise to the liberal democratic challenge. The election of Hamas in the Gaza Strip is more a rule than an exception in the Islamic world.

Enough with the lies. Stop telling us that Islam is a religion of peace. If it is, prove it through action. Stop telling us that President-elect Barack Obama will fix our broken relationship with the Muslim world. They hate Obama just as much as they hated President George W. Bush, although they think Obama is more of a patsy than Bush was. Stop telling us that we shouldnt worry about the Islamic infiltration of our economy. If the Saudis own a large chunk of our banking institutions and control the oil market, they can certainly leverage their influence in dangerous ways.

Enough. After the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, the plane downed in Pennsylvania, the endless suicide bombings, shootings and rocket attacks in Israel, the Bali bombings, the synagogue bombing in Tunisia, the LAX shootings, the Kenyan hotel bombing, the Casablanca attacks, the Turkey synagogue attacks, the Madrid bombings, the London bombings, and the repeated attacks in India culminating in the Mumbai massacres -- among literally thousands of others -- its about time that the West got the point: were in a war. Our enemies are determined. They will not quit just because we offer them Big Macs, Christina Aguilera CDs, or even the freedom to vote. They will not quit just because we ensure that they have Korans in their Guantanamo cells, or because we offer to ban The Satanic Verses (as India did). They will only quit when they are dead. It is our job to make them so, and to eliminate every obstacle to their destruction.

So enough. No more empty talk. No more idle promises. No more happy ignorance, half measures, or appeasement-minded platitudes. The time for hard-nosed, uncompromising action hasnt merely come -- its been overdue by seven years. The voice of our brothers blood cries out from the ground.

Copyright © 2008 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

--------------------------------------

A 12 Step Program for Recovering Liberals
By Burt Prelutsky
Friday, March 7, 2008
 

Most 12-step programs start out by requiring that people have to understand that they’re powerless over their addiction and that only by turning their lives over to a Power greater than themselves can they be restored to sanity. Far be it from me to suggest that I am that Power, but clearly someone has to step in and try to rescue these poor liberal souls. Even the most harebrained among them deserves that much.

First, though, they have to acknowledge that Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi, John Murtha, Dick Durbin, Charles Rangel, Harry Reid and Charles Schumer, are not moderates, but, rather, leftists with a Socialist agenda. Furthermore, they must recognize that the New York Times, the Washington Post, the L.A. Times, CNN, the three major networks, the news magazines and the New Yorker, are not objective in their reporting of political events, and neither are Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann and Bill Maher, in their commentary. If these entities and individuals are not on the payroll of the DNC, they certainly should be. They certainly put in longer hours than Howard Dean.

Step #1: It is high time that every American be guaranteed the right to speak freely. It is not reserved solely for left-wing college students who wish to take advantage of the first amendment to shout down conservatives. At the same time, they must not construe the conservative’s right to dismiss them as arrogant idiots as censorship.

Step #2: Affirmative action argues that African Americans and Latinos are intellectually inferior and are unable to compete academically unless other students are handicapped because of their race. Interestingly enough, when blacks and Hispanic students are given these unfair advantages, it’s rarely at any cost to white students, whose rate of college admissions remains constant; instead, it’s nearly always another minority group, Asians, who pay the price. This is what left-wingers refer to as leveling the playing field.

Step #3: Liberals always claim to be in favor of higher taxes, agreeing with Bill Clinton that the government invariably spends money more wisely than those who actually earn it. However, such prominent proponents of higher taxes as George Soros, Ted Kennedy and Mr. and Mrs. John Kerry, protect their own otherwise taxable income through trusts and offshore accounts. Obviously, any American who believes higher taxes are a good thing can do the honorable thing by spurning all deductions and paying Uncle Sam everything up to 100% of his income.

Step #4: Even the most secular of liberals seems to believe that Jimmy Carter is a saint. The evidence for this seems to be that he has on occasion posed with a hammer in his hand at Habitant for Humanity building sites and is constantly walking around with a expression on his face that suggests he has just forgiven Pontius Pilate for betraying him. This is the same fellow, let us never forget, who called Yasser Arafat his good friend and who has accepted untold millions of dollars from Arab cut-throats, who ask nothing in return except that he go on insisting that there would be peace in the Middle East if only those darn Israelis would disappear from the face of the earth.

Step #5: Stop insisting that all wars are bad. It only makes you sound daft. Carrying signs that equate a U.S. president, any U.S. president, with Adolph Hitler is not only rude, but suggests you’re certifiably nuts. Every president has left office right on schedule. Aside from FDR, who just happened to get elected four times, not one of them has remained in office beyond eight years. On the other hand, Hitler ran Germany for 12 years and only death and the allied forces brought that to an end; Stalin ran the Soviet show for 31 years; while that hero of the left, Fidel Castro, held the reins, not to mention the whip, for about 50 years.

Step #6: Repeat after me, “Separation of church and state” exists nowhere in the Constitution. The first amendment does not require the removal of Christmas trees from the village green, the 10 Commandments from court house walls or “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance. All it does is forbid Congress from establishing a state religion, such as the Church of England, and anybody who tells you otherwise is a liar and, most likely, a card-carrying member of the ACLU.

Step #7: Stop using the word “big” as a pejorative. There is nothing intrinsically bad about big oil, big agriculture or big pharmaceuticals. Overall, they do a very good job of keeping our cars on the road, food on our tables and most of us over 50 alive and functioning. On the other hand, big government, which so many liberals simply adore, represents a usurpation of the allegedly inalienable rights of individuals. A quick perusal of the Constitution should convince you that beyond declaring war, forging treaties, overseeing patents, printing money, running the post office, collecting taxes and protecting our borders -- and a few other things that Washington doesn’t do at all well these days -- the federal government has very limited responsibilities.

Step #8: Acknowledge that the United Nations is, in the main, an aggregation of venal diplomats who live high off the hog in New York City while representing the most corrupt and vicious regimes in the history of the world. Only a fool or a diplomat would continue to suggest that this gang of well-dressed thugs possesses anything resembling moral authority.

Step #9: Do not keep insisting that at a time when nearly all the large scale evil in the world is being perpetrated by Muslims that racial profiling is anything but a sensible approach to airport security. During WWII, Swedish Americans were not suspected of performing espionage for the Axis powers and for a very good reason; namely, because they weren’t performing espionage for the Axis powers. These days, their Swedish American children and grandchildren are not suspected of trying to blow up airlines, but the smarmy bureaucrats insist on pretending that they’re every bit as likely to be up to mischief as a bunch of 25-year-old Osama bin Laden look-alikes from Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

Step #10: Stop trying to pretend that illegal aliens are the same as legal immigrants just so you can claim the moral high ground and accuse those of us who are opposed to open borders of being racists.

Step #11: Once and for all, stop forgiving murderers. Whether or not you’re in favor of capital punishment, only the victim of a crime has the right to grant forgiveness. And inasmuch as the killer has deprived his victim of that ability, don’t take it upon yourself. It doesn’t prove how compassionate you are, only that you’re as sanctimonious and as self-aggrandizing as, say, Jimmy Carter.

Step #12: Stop bashing the U.S. military and the Boy Scouts. The only reason you have the ability to shoot your mouth off is because men and women braver and better than you sacrificed life and limb for your right to do so. As for the Boy Scouts, they are absolutely right to keep homosexuals from taking youngsters on camping trips. While it’s true that many gays are perfectly fine people and that very few homosexuals are pedophiles, there’s no reason on earth to take unnecessary risks just so we can all prove how broadminded we are. For what it’s worth, as decent as most Catholic priests are, I wouldn’t let them take youngsters into the woods, either. It’s fine to be compassionate and understanding, but let the gays among us be understanding for a change and acknowledge that, every so often, commonsense should trump political correctness.

And, finally, making this a baker’s dozen, Step #13: Let us all agree that while being a woman, a black, a Jew, a Catholic, a Mormon or even a gay, for that matter, should in no way preclude anyone from being elected president of the United States, none of those things constitutes a very good reason to vote for someone.

 

W. Burt Prelutsky is an accomplished, well-rounded writer and author of "The Secret of Their Success: Interviews with Legends and Luminaries."

Copyright © 2006 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

 

The Hidden Basis for Hostility to Israel
-and America
By Michael Medved

On Saturday in Jerusalem, I participated in a moving religious service to honor one of Israel’s most celebrated heroes from last summer’s war against the Hezbollah terrorists.
Lieutenant Eli Kahn, 23, led a unit of elite Paratrooper Commandos advancing against heavily defended Hezbollah positions in the Southern Lebanon town of Maroun al-Ras in the early days of the fighting. The Israelis, hoping to knock out Katyusha rockets that had already taken a bloody toll on civilian targets, drew unexpectedly intense fire from the enemy and sustained heavy casualties.
While tending to one of his wounded paratroopers, Lt. Kahn saw a terrorist run toward them and throw a grenade that landed at their feet. Rather than jumping out of the way and abandoning his comrade to certain death, Lt. Kahn immediately picked up the grenade and threw it directly back at the Hezbollah fighter --- killing the terrorist and turning the tide of battle. For his leadership and quick thinking, he received the Medal of Valor – Israel’s equivalent of America’s Medal of Honor. The young hero’s father, Howie Kahn, remembered that his boy played Little League before the family immigrated to Israel from the United States and suggested that his skills as a slick-fielding shortstop paid off with that one fateful and well-aimed toss on the field of battle.
Hearing the story of Eli Kahn, most Americans would feel gratified and inspired but the service I attended at the lieutenant’s Orthodox synagogue nonetheless serves to highlight the deeper, unspoken reasons that Israel provokes such visceral hostility from the international left.
The Middle East’s only democracy has recently enjoyed spectacular economic progress and unprecedented success in blocking and deterring terror attacks from its many Islamo-Nazi adversaries. Why, then, the increasingly shrill demands from politically correct activists throughout Western Europe and from college campuses in the United States for boycotts, UN condemnation, sanctions and diplomatic isolation aimed at punishing the Jewish state?
Why does the death of a few dozen Palestinians (mostly gunmen or racketeers from Hamas and Islamic Jihad) provoke more international indignation than the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocents in Darfur, or the butchery of additional thousands by Muslim terrorists in Pakistan, Indonesia, India, Algeria, Yemen, the Philippines and even Thailand?
The common explanations for singling out Israel for international denunciation make no sense when placed in any reasonably well-informed historical context.
For instance, leftist critics like to suggest that Israel deserves the world’s hostility because of its long-term “occupation” of lands captured in defensive wars. But the Jewish state has already withdrawn from the overwhelming majority of the disputed territory it ever controlled, hoping to demonstrate its eagerness to trade land for peace—abandoning the vast area of the Sinai Peninsula in 1978, its South Lebanon “Security Zone” in 2000, and all the Gaza Strip in 2005. Moreover, in the remaining zone of “occupation” in the West Bank, the results of Israeli rule can hardly count as brutal: according to UN figures, by all measures of economic prosperity, public health, and standards of living before the Second Intifada broke out in the Fall of 2000, West Bankers did better than their fellow Arabs in neighboring countries like Syria, Egypt and Jordan.
The historical record makes clear that Arab fury against Jews in the Middle East bears no connection to any occupation policy or to the plight of refugees, since this murderous rage claimed countless victims long before Israel occupied a single square inch or territory and before a single Palestinian had fled his home.
A brief history of the early conflict (published by the indispensable Israel Pocket Library) offers a necessary reminder of Palestinian terrorism as long ago as 1929. In that year, the bitterly anti-Semitic Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (who later traveled to Berlin and spent most of the war years at Hitler’s side) claimed that the largely unarmed and loosely organized Jewish community harbored secret “designs” on Muslim holy places, and launched bloody attacks on the Jews of Jerusalem. As the grim story unfolded, “The violence spread to other parts of the country. On Sabbath, August 24, the Arabs of Hebron fell upon the small, defenseless Jewish community in the town and slaughtered some 70 men and women. Old people and infants were butchered; the survivors, numbering several hundred, being evacuated to Jerusalem.
Attacks on Tel Aviv and the Jewish quarter in Haifa were repulsed, but on the fifth day of the riots an Arab mob killed 18 Jews and wounded many more before the Jews could take refuge in the police headquarters while the mob ransacked and burned the historic Jewish quarter. In Be’er Toviyah all the settlers held out in a cowshed while the mob plundered and destroyed the village. Huldah, too, was destroyed after the Jewish defenders held out for many hours against thousands of Arabs and were evacuated by a British army patrol.”
A mere eight years later, in 1937, unprovoked Palestinian violence broke out once again with even bloodier results: “415 Jews were killed by the terrorists in the period 1937-39, over half of them between July and October 1938.”
The most striking revelation in these all-but-forgotten chapters of Middle East history involves the brutal, determined, vicious nature of Palestinian terrorism before Israel occupied any territory whatever, or caused the departure of any refugees (the Palestinian population went up sharply – never declining for even a single year – as Jewish return to the ancient homeland intensified). As a matter of fact, the devastating riots of 1929 and 1937-39 (not to mention other deadly attacks in 1921, 1926 and 1936) occurred long before the state of Israel even existed—making clear that Palestinian violence against their Jewish neighbors arose from fanatical Jew-hatred, not any objection to the specific policies of a non-existent state.
Clearly, the same deep-seated anti-Semitic instincts help to explain some of the hostility to the Jewish state today, especially among purportedly enlightened Europeans.
There’s also the undeniable factor of worldwide anti-Americanism – Israel earns contempt as one of the closest, most reliable allies of the Superpower labeled by many leftists (including Michael Moore in his previous America-bashing film, “The Big One”) as “the real Evil Empire.” But other nations (like Britain, Canada and Australia, most obviously) align themselves equally closely with the United States and even more enthusiastically embrace America’s reviled culture, without provoking the animus that faces Israel in many corners of the globe.
One of the secrets of the world-wide suspicion and resentment toward the Jewish state involves the unmistakably prominent, even dominant, Israeli role for two institutions loathed by leftists everywhere: religion and the military.
While two-thirds of Israelis describe themselves as secular, the increasing popularity and influence of Orthodox religiosity remains an undeniable factor in Israeli society. Meanwhile, even the state’s famously agnostic and atheist founders made regular reference to Bible in urging their compatriots to return to Zion. The fact that Israel counts as the “Holy Land” to the world’s more than two billion Christians also provides a religious flavor and perspective to the nation’s existence that makes secular purists distinctly uncomfortable.
Meanwhile, the military continues to play a huge and necessary part in the life of the perpetually embattled nation. Some 75% of young people still do three full years of military service after their high school graduation, and continue with yearly reserve duty for 25 years after that. Even the leader of Israel’s leading party on the left (former Prime Minister Ehud Barak) is a one-time war hero and the most decorated soldier in the country’s history.
In other words, for trendy liberals who feel profound, instinctive distaste for the influence of armies and organized faith in human life, it’s only natural to feel somewhat uncomfortable with Israel.
The same attitudes, by the way, help to explain some of the fashionable anti-Americanism that’s taken hold among European and other international elites. Religion remains a vastly more potent force in the US than in any other Western nation, and our military remains far larger, more potent and more revered than the armies of other major nations. Those who love to denounce the impact of militarism and organized faith will inevitably find much to dislike about America – and about our close ally in the Middle East.
This US and Israeli devotion to both armed forces and religious institutions brings me back to the synagogue celebration I witnessed for Lt. Eli Kahn. Called to the Torah before a clapping, singing, admiring congregation, the young war hero chanted the weekly “Haftorah” (a passage from Isaiah) and received a good-natured pelting of candy tossed at him from all directions by his friends and neighbors. This treatment had little to do with his battlefield exploits of exactly one year earlier, but actually reflected his status as the community’s next bridegroom: in Jewish tradition, all young men receive similar honor on the Sabbath before their weddings. (Lt. Kahn stands under the wedding canopy with his bride tomorrow night, Thursday).
In Israeli eyes, there’s no contradiction between love of God and admiration of the military – between celebrating the beginning of a loving new family along with the courage and dedication of a battle-hardened soldier. Both religious and military institutions exist to promote life, not death; to facilitate peaceful communities and growing families, not bloodshed and martyrdom.
Americans and Israelis understand the connection between our soldiers and our survival, between faith in a compassionate God and the maintenance of military strength that allows decency and kindness to flourish. And of course, much of the rest of the world that believes that they’ve already moved on beyond such outmoded relics as organized religion and mighty armies, hates us for our decidedly different perspective.
Michael Medved is a film critic, best-selling author and nationally syndicated radio talk show host.