SOBRAN'S --
The Real News of the Month
November 2001
Volume 8, No. 11
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
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CONTENTS
Features
-> The Moving Picture
-> Why?
Nuggets (plus Exclusives to this edition)
List of Columns Reprinted
FEATURES
The Moving Picture
(pages 1-2)
"Terrorist" is such an ugly word. Why don't we call
Osama bin Laden a "terror provider"?
* * *
The country that freaked out over a few bottles of
Tylenol was bound to go berserk over one of the most
spectacular crimes of all time. A few days later I spent
nearly two hours waiting in line (a line about 200 yards
long) at an airport before my flight to Los Angeles was
canceled. Enormous precautions were being taken, at
incalculable cost, against an exact repetition of the
deed whose whole effect depended on surprise. Folks, they
aren't going to try the same stunt twice.
* * *
The 9/11 attack will be a tough act to follow; but
it may not even be necessary to follow it. It has already
changed America forever -- or at least made certain
American habits worse, and incorrigible. Even the one
congressman I've always admired, Ron Paul of Texas,
joined the stampede to give the president
unconstitutional powers to fight terrorism. The only
dissenting vote was cast by an idiot black communist
woman, which ensured that the anti-war cause would be
seen as leftist.
* * *
Anyone who thinks the U.S. Government contributed to
the situation by making enemies around the globe is now
"anti-American," an "America-hater," et cetera. This is a
natural but infantile reaction: people under stress
revert to the primitive feeling that their government is
their nation, "us." "We" are innocent, because "we" stand
for freedom and all that. Never mind that the U.S.
Government has killed far more civilians in Iraq than
Osama's boys killed in New York; as Madeleine Albright
once put it: "We think the price is worth it." We.
* * *
By the same token, the "lesson" people are drawing
from their government's failure to protect them from the
violence it provoked is that "we" need the government to
protect us. Liberal pundits have been quick to spell it
out. Al Hunt of the WALL STREET JOURNAL crows that it's
"time to declare a moratorium on government-bashing....
For the foreseeable future, the Federal Government is
going to invest or spend more, regulate more, and
exercise more control over our lives. There is no real
debate over expansion [of government power] in general."
In the same vein, Jim Hoagland of the WASHINGTON POST
comments: "Ideologues on the right saw government as an
evil to be rolled back.... The terror assaults on the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon ... should profoundly
shake the less-is-more philosophy that was the driving
force for the tax-cut politics of Bush and conservative
Republicans." By this logic, communism was finally
vindicated on September 11. Not exactly the argument Marx
would have made, but hey, you've got to grab your
opportunities as they present themselves.
Why?
(pages 2-6)
"Go home, Martins. You don't know what you're getting
into."
-- THE THIRD MAN
On September 15, the talking heads show INSIDE
WASHINGTON discussed the 9/11 attacks and the reasons for
them. The host, Gordon Peterson, asked panelists Charles
Krauthammer, Nina Totenberg, and Jack Germond an obvious
question: "Why do they hate us?" The resulting exchange
was revealing:
KRAUTHAMMER: These people that have been
after us? Because we represent everything that
they hate: Individualism, modernism,
secularism, human rights, women with work,
women who go to school, all these things --
TOTENBERG: And Israel, let's not monkey
around here. Also Israel --
KRAUTHAMMER: No, I think that is absolutely
wrong. Islamic fundamentalism, the
radicalization of Islam, long predates the
establishment of Israel. Osama bin Laden --
the bombing of our embassies in Kenya and
Tanzania happened on what anniversary? The
founding of Israel? The Six Day War? No, on
the anniversary of the arrival of American
troops in Saudi Arabia.
GERMOND: Oh, you can't blink at the antipathy
to Israel among the Islamic fundamentalists.
That's ridiculous. Of course it's Israel, it's
part of it.
TOTENBERG: It's part of it, and it's
probably --
KRAUTHAMMER: Osama bin Laden was an ally of
the United States in the 1980s. He did not go
after Israel at the time. He decided he would
become an enemy of the West and attack the
West when we went to Mecca and Medina, the
holiest places in Arabia, in the Gulf War. And
it was our occupation, as he sees it, our
protection of corrupt as he sees it Islamic
regimes by infidels that inspires him. Israel
of course is an enemy, but the great enemy is
America because it protects and defends all of
the values that he hates.
Since the attack a new Zionist party line has
emerged, repeated incessantly by Benjamin Netanyahu,
Norman Podhoretz, Krauthammer, and {{countless}} others,
expressed in Netanyahu's aphorism: "They [the radical
Muslims] don't hate America because of Israel; they hate
Israel because of America." Further: "They would hate
America even if Israel had never existed."
Are these folks really deluded enough to believe
this, or do they merely think the gentiles (the goyim)
are sufficiently gullible ("goyischkopf" -- gentile-
headed) to swallow it? By their logic, Israel would be
better off if it had never gotten mixed up with the
United States! But for this country, it might be living
at peace with its Arab and Muslim neighbors, its
occupation of Palestine accepted without resentment.
What makes this assertion even more audacious, a
specimen of distilled chutzpah, is that it's the first
time in recorded history that the Zionist Jews have been
willing to acquit their enemies of anti-Semitism. Until
now the party line has been that the Jews are hated "not
for what we do, but for what we are." Now it seems
they're hated for what the *gentiles* are! Ah, the poor
Jews, to be burdened with allies like us! The Muslims
aren't anti-Semitic; they're anti-American. They hate
Israel only, as it were, incidentally, as the carrier of
Western "values."
Why is this absurd theme being repeated so
insistently? Obviously the Zionists are in panic: there
is a terrible danger that the goyim, having seen the
Pentagon smashed and the Twin Towers dissolved into
rubble and dust, will finally come to their senses about
the terrible price of their support for the Jewish state
in the Muslim world. Even at this hour, they hope to
prevent Osama bin Laden's pretty unambiguous message from
getting through.
Or, at least, they hope to maintain the taboo on
public criticism of Israel. In this, so far, they are
succeeding. The major media are barely touching the
*Why?* question. Most journalists are still more afraid
of Jewish power than of "terrorists."
But it's true enough that by now the United States
has done plenty, beyond supporting Israel, to earn Arab
and Muslim hatred. Bin Laden himself mentions the Gulf
War and the occupation of Saudi Arabia ahead of Zionism,
though the Zionists promoted these things too. (In the
close 1991 debate over whether to go to war, they made
the difference, with the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee, no doubt driven by its American patriotism,
lobbying hard on Capitol Hill.)
As for the touchy business of "values," it's not as
if America had imposed old-fashioned New England town
meetings on the Muslim world. In case you haven't
noticed, this country no longer exports Puritanism; it
exports things that would have sickened its own ancestors
-- abortion, pornography, total license. Much to the
point is a photo that has circulated throughout the
Muslim world, of two American soldiers with their shirts
open in Saudi Arabia, the land of the Prophet himself. It
might have caused less offense if the soldiers had {{not
been men. But they were girls.}}
A little {{thing, a tiny detail,}} to the
contemporary American sensibility, where nudity is
{{now}} common even in advertising. We're used to it. And
it's pertinent to observe how rapidly, historically
speaking, we've *gotten* used to it. Within a few
generations we, the sons of Christian Europe, have
repudiated ancient moral traditions that we once shared
with Jews and Muslims -- and we blame the Muslims for not
keeping up with us and accepting "change."
But Muslims don't believe in "change," let alone
idolize it. They believe in the eternal. And a deviation
from Allah's law is not "progress." It's an abomination,
crying out to heaven for revenge. The Muslims know only
too well that they are not immune to "change." They know
their children can be lured into fornication and idolatry
and all other alien "values" that the West is eager to
thrust on them. And they are not particularly eager to
see Mecca transformed into Las Vegas.
Yes, Muslim hostility to the West goes far beyond
Israel. But that anti-Western sentiment is focused on the
United States specifically because of American support
for Israel. And yes, Israel is hated not just for being
Jewish, and for usurping lands claimed by Islam, but also
for being a vehicle of the debauched morals this country
has come to stand for in the Muslim mind. Still, there it
is, and the darkest warnings of our diplomats and
strategists of a half-century ago -- that U.S. support
for a Jewish state in the Muslim world would only breed
trouble for this country -- have been fulfilled in a more
horrible way than anyone imagined at the time.
While the U.S. Government has imposed lethal
sanctions on Iraq, it has supplied lethal weapons to
Israel. No matter what it does to innocent Palestinians
or Lebanese, Israel faces no U.S. sanctions.
Israel is far from being the whole story of our woes
in the Middle East; but it has added a special element of
constant provocation to the Muslims, bringing to the fore
tensions that might otherwise have remained latent. If
this can't be discussed publicly now, it can never be,
and the Zionists do indeed have a stranglehold on
American public discourse.
American moral degeneracy, if it stayed home, might
provoke only Muslim contempt; but when it becomes part of
the package of a powerful American presence within the
Muslim world -- think "infidel whores in our holy places"
-- it can only ignite unfathomable rage. Such "values"
disgust many Americans too, including Orthodox Jews; but
imagine the feelings they create when they appear in
conjunction with an alien military invasion. Is it any
wonder that ordinary Muslims cheered the violent fall of
the proud infidel monuments?
An Italian journalist in Beirut reports that even
*Christian* Arabs took satisfaction in the attack on
America. Anti-Americanism is no longer a mere fad of
Marxist university students; it's a profound reaction of
traditional societies against a corrupt and corrupting
modernization that is being imposed on them, by both
violence and seduction. The very word *values* implies a
whole modern culture of moral whim, in which good and
evil are matters of personal preference and sodomy and
abortion can be treated as "rights." Confronted with
today's America, then, the Christian Arab finds himself
in unexpected sympathy with his Muslim enemy.
Not that you have to be an Arab to get it. Jerry
Falwell drew fire even from his fellow conservatives when
he suggested that the 9/11 attack was a divine judgment
on what this country has become. He said it awkwardly and
foolishly, and he quickly retracted his remarks; but
there was more truth in his reaction than in all the smug
commentary that insisted that we (and the Israelis) are
hated only "because we are good." {{(That must be why
they call us "the Great Satan.")}}
If final proof of American degeneracy is needed, it
can be found in the conviction that anti-Americanism is
the hatred of goodness as such. On this view, the
backward Muslim world recognizes our superiority -- that
is, our *moral* superiority, as well as our technical
power -- and enviously resents it. That is, they really
see us as we see ourselves. They *know* our way of life
is better than theirs, and they can't stand it. So they
avenge themselves by embracing "terrorism," the ultimate
evil.
This melodramatic view exposes something curious:
the moral aggressiveness of moral relativism. A
consistent relativist would admit that Muslim "values"
are just as "valid" as liberal "values." Since all
"values" are equally "subjective," and none can claim to
be "absolute," the Islamic preference for stern morality
is merely different from, not "worse" than, the New
Morality we have lately adopted.
In fact, a consistent cultural relativist -- or what
we now call a multiculturalist -- would admit that the
views of those who think the World Trade Center should be
left standing are no "better" than the views of those who
think it should come down. Surely this diverse society
has room for both viewpoints!
But the tone of reproach with which liberals are now
discussing Islam implies that the Muslims have failed in
the presumably universal duty to adopt "change" without
complaint. Their "values" are felt to be impermissibly
rooted in superstition, which history now summons them to
abandon. The West represents the future, and it works.
Why can't these fools reconcile themselves to the
inevitable? Why must they insist on making trouble?
The liberals, in this discussion, include alleged
conservatives, who agree that anti-Americanism is the
hatred of our goodness. To hear Rush Limbaugh or read
NATIONAL REVIEW, you would think this was still Norman
Rockwell's America, incomprehensibly loathed by sinister
Orientals. But older generations of Muslims could co-
exist with that America; no doubt the infidel was damned,
but as long as he stayed in his own quarters he posed no
immediate threat to Islam.
These conservatives, who once wanted to "stand
athwart history yelling *Stop!"* (in Bill Buckley's
famous phrase), used to object to the same trends that
the Muslims are still trying to resist. They wanted to
conserve a *Christian* America. No longer. They have
triumphantly adapted to "change," and they take anti-
Americanism as an affront to the optimism they share with
liberals. They feel no sense of loss in the
transformation of America into something that can't even
be called pagan. As C.S. Lewis once observed, an apostate
Christian can no more become a pagan than a divorcee can
become a virgin.
By the way, NATIONAL REVEIW, forgetting its own
past, has become totally devoted to Israel, emitting the
most naive Zionist mythology of Israel as a sinless land
of victims and heroes. Many of the magazine's
contributors are out-and-out Israel Firsters. Once upon a
time, guided by James Burnham and other realists, it was
sharply critical of the sacrifice of American to Israeli
interests. Today Burnham's essays would be unprintable --
unthinkable -- in the magazine.
I might add a brief anecdote. {{Late in 1990, during
the debate over going to war with Iraq, I was the only
senior editor of NATIONAL REVIEW to oppose the idea.}}
Buckley sent a special-delivery ultimatum to my home {{in
Virginia:}} unless I immediately retracted the charge
that my fellow editors were in essence Israeli stooges, I
would be fired.
I was dumbfounded. I had made no such charge; it
hadn't even crossed my mind, so preposterous it seemed.
But the guilty flee when no man pursueth, and Buckley had
somehow managed to construe a remark in one of my
newspaper columns as a reflection on the patriotism of my
fellow editors. I {{solved the problem, and}} saved my
job for the moment, by writing that I hoped nobody had
misunderstood my column as implying that my colleagues
were Israeli stooges. But I realized that somebody inside
NATIONAL REVIEW -- not just the Zionists of the
COMMENTARY crowd -- was gunning for me. Today the writers
of both magazines are interchangeable, but even then,
it's now clear, Buckley had surrendered control of his
own magazine to Norman Podhoretz. Maybe I *should* have
made the preposterous charge after all.
Today Zionist subversion has riddled the
conservative movement much as Communist subversion once
infiltrated liberalism. If you want to be a conservative
"spokesman," you had better follow the party line; as
witness Buckley, Limbaugh, George Will, Cal Thomas, and
many others. The idea that American and Israeli interests
might sometimes, even once in a blue moon, be in tension,
not to say opposition, is simply out of the question.
Both "nations" stand for the same "values," and it's in
the interest of both to assert those "values" wherever
they are "threatened."
Not all conservatives buy this nonsense, but those
who dissent from it internally must do so with extreme
discretion and outward conformity. And only those who
openly espouse the party line can hope for promotion.
Christians must speak of "the Judaeo-Christian tradition"
as a single and simple thing, which of course embraces
Zionism among its basic tenets.
Among other things, this produces deracinated
versions of both Christianity and Judaism, but this can
trouble only those eccentrics who give religion priority
over politics. Nobody has formally said that Jesus Christ
would be a Zionist, probably of the Likud faction, but
this is implicit in the conservative-Zionist fusion. And
make no mistake, this is an alliance rooted in fear: the
conservative fear of the Zionists, and not vice versa.
The conservatives try to hide their fear by affecting
bravado when they defend Israel. In them one hears
pathetic echoes of liberals defending Communists from Joe
McCarthy, with perhaps a cock crowing in the background.
Why does it matter? Because the country badly needs
a real conservative presence, and real conservatives have
been marginalized. Some have long suspected Buckley of
serving the function of thought-policeman for the
liberal-Zionist establishment; be that as it may, it has
certainly been eons since any liberal or Zionist saw him
as a threat. At 75, he is venerated as only the truly
toothless conservative can be. {{His role in the
conservative movement reminds one less of Whittaker
Chambers than of Alger Hiss.}}
The most thoughtful conservative analysis of the
present crisis, as far as I know, is that of Fr. James
Schall, who reminds us that Hilaire Belloc foresaw an
Islamic resurgence in the 1930s, when most of the West
had nearly forgotten Islam's existence. Belloc saw Islam
as a Christian heresy, a more extreme form of Arianism,
which denied the divinity of Christ. To Christians it
seems an arid religion, yet it has had an amazing
tenacity: very few Muslims have converted to
Christianity.
The Muslim mind, as I understand Father Schall,
rejects not only the Incarnation, but the whole Christian
view of creation and nature stemming from that central
doctrine. Allah is all-powerful. Everything that exists
or occurs, exists or occurs because of his direct action.
He does not act through the mediation of the created
world; there are no "natural" laws, physical or moral,
for he has not given nature autonomy; he is not even
bound by the laws of logic -- he can make square circles
or decree contradictory truths. His sovereign will is
inscrutable and arbitrary; if he wished, he could make
murder and theft obligatory rather than illicit.
All this, according to Father Schall, makes the
Muslim refer all questions directly to Allah's will. For
him Allah is always immediately present, though also
infinitely remote. The believer and the infidel are
enemies. The infidel, being also the enemy of Allah, is
entitled to no mercy from the believer. Every believer
must be willing to die for Allah. The natural world,
including the political, has very little authority for
the Muslim. Of course the individual Muslim may fall
short of these demanding standards, but he recognizes
their authority.
If all this is so, we can expect war with the Muslim
to be a ferocious affair; the Muslim fights with
concentrated purpose and high morale. The Christian
recognizes his enemy as a fellow human being, made in the
image of God; even the apostate recognizes his enemy as
an objective reality, by analogy with himself. The code
of chivalry and just war theory, though honored only
sporadically, are ways of applying Christian doctrine
even to war; constitutional government is an attempt both
to legitimize and to limit the authority of politics; the
separation of church and state (when it does not
degenerate into mere secularism) reflects the Christian
distinction between the secular and the sacred. All these
things are alien to Islamic culture, which is unclouded
by refinements of moral ambiguity.
To the Christian mind, Islam seems fantastic and
crude. The Muslim may have four wives, any one whom he
may divorce by a simple verbal act of renunciation. In
the Muslim heaven, the believer is promised not the
Beatific Vision but the attentions of 70 virgins; where
do they come from? Are they real creatures? How, the
Christian wonders, can anyone take this stuff seriously?
Nevertheless, Islam has held a civilization together for
many centuries, and it demands some sort of respect.
None of this is to minimize the sheer evil of the
9/11 attack. But to say that it represents a perversion
of Islam, though perhaps true, is a little too easy.
Every religion can be taken to extremes by fanatics. But
I also notice that even more moderate Muslim leaders are
reluctant to condemn these horrible murders out of hand,
let alone to demand retribution, or to urge their
followers to report suspected terrorists to the legal
(infidel) authorities. Still less are they willing to say
that the atrocities were motivated by envy of the sheer
goodness of America.
Tension between Islam and the modern West is coming
to a head. American foreign policy, yanked about by
Israeli interests and the need for oil, has created this
situation with a long series of crimes and blunders, made
all the worse by the eternal American naivete about
foreign cultures. The radical Muslims are capable of
enormous evil, but at least they are lucid. A handful of
them, armed with the crudest weapons, have found at least
one way of turning all our technological sophistication
against us, and we live in dread that they may find
others.
The modern West is what remains of what used to be
called Christendom. It is Christendom minus Christianity
-- secularized goyim and infidels, faced with a hostile
culture that still knows what it is. The West's rulers
prate, with grotesque moralism, of "democracy" and
"freedom" as its defining abstractions, as if we could or
should die for such vague ideas. The modern West really
wants luxury and safety, and nobody is going to sacrifice
his life for those things. Hedonism boasts no martyrs.
Osama bin Laden is our enemy. But, stunned as we are
by his astounding crimes, which naturally seem to us the
height of irrational aggression, we should understand
that in his own mind they were acts of Islamic self-
defense. He doesn't hate "democracy" and "freedom" -- to
him, these are meaningless words. He hates *us,* the
infidels who have invaded and defiled his world, and he
struck back. We owe it not to him but to ourselves to
understand how he sees his own role, because countless
other Muslims interpret the situation as he does. They
may not like him or approve of his methods, but it would
be a mistake to force them to choose between him and us.
Yet President Bush has announced to the Muslim world
that it is either for us or against us. This is cowboys-
and-Indians talk, and it's no way to deal with a truly
tragic situation. The essence of the problem is American
hubris -- not because Islam is right, but because it is
stubbornly Islamic. In the classic movie THE THIRD MAN,
the American hero Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), a writer
of cheap Westerns, tries to solve the supposed murder of
his best friend, who turns out to have been a major
figure in Vienna's postwar black market. A British
occupation officer, Major Calloway (Trevor Howard),
reproaches his innocent arrogance: "Go home, Martins. You
don't know what you're getting into. This isn't Texas."
Neither is the Middle East.
* * *
POSTSCRIPT. As we go to press, American and British
forces are bombing Afghanistan. Given that this was more
or less inevitable, I was somewhat heartened by the
relative caution with which the Bush administration
proceeded, aware of the danger of an all-out war with the
Muslim world -- which was exactly what bin Laden and the
Zionist propagandists wanted. (The Zionist press in this
country, leery of attacking Bush himself, blamed
Secretary of State Colin Powell for the policy of
moderation.)
Yet the danger remains. It's safe to say that the
average Muslim is no more sensible than the average
American, especially in moments of passion, and it's
probably vain to suppose that he will make careful
distinctions when the infidel bombs are falling.
Let's put the sandal on the other foot. Imagine (as
Yale's Paul Kennedy suggests) a world dominated by a
single Arab superpower, with North America divided among
several fractious countries; suppose the Arab empire kept
a huge military force here, extracted our natural
resources, manipulated our rulers, and encouraged what we
considered grossly immoral behavior among us. If it began
bombing one of the North American countries, would we
cheerfully accept its assurances that it wasn't hostile
to all of us, but only to the evil rulers of the targeted
country?
We have debated the question of a military response
as if the issue were solely whether retaliation is
morally justified by the enormity of the crime, when the
real issue is whether it will make things worse. To most
Americans the Gulf War seemed both justified and, in
terms of its immediate aims, successful; but if we count
the 9/11 attack as part of the ultimate cost of that war,
can anyone be sure it was worth it?
The 9/11 attack was shocking, stunning, horrifying,
and terrifying; yet I can't help feeling we are
overreacting to it. Objectively, it poses no peril
comparable to the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when we
faced the prospect that every major American city might
become a white-hot crater. Bin Laden's forces can't
destroy us; they can only harass us. With no-tech weapons
-- boxcutters -- they staged an amazing crime; but they
may not be able to duplicate even that, now that our
guard is up.
At the same time, there may be no real defense, let
alone remedy, at this point. Terrorism is likely to
continue indefinitely, with or without bin Laden. And in
their panic, too many Americans are rushing for
protection to the same government, the same politicians,
the same policies that did so much to make this awful
mess. Psychologists have a name for such self-defeating
but incorrigible behavior patterns: neurosis. The
Israelis have been "cracking down" on terrorism for
decades; today the problem is worse than ever. Are we
determined to follow their example of adopting a solution
that aggravates the original problem?
NUGGETS
HISTORY, ANYONE? I warmly recommend a new book by Thomas
Fleming, THE NEW DEALERS' WAR: F.D.R. AND THE WAR WITHIN
WORLD WAR II (Basic Books). It's a scalding expose of
Franklin Roosevelt's cynical and fatuous efforts to get
the United States into war, to win by immoral means, and
to build a postwar global imperium in partnership with
Stalin. We're relatively lucky, now, to have a Bush
instead of a Roosevelt; yet Bush is carrying on
Roosevelt's legacy uncritically at a time when it's
urgent to retrace the steps that brought us to this pass.
(page 8)
AND NEVER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET: "Multiculturalism" may
be defined as the refusal to take *any* culture
seriously. Maybe the collision of Islam, Christianity,
and Judaism will finally teach Americans that a culture
is something more than a lot of colorful costumes and
spicy foods; it's finally an essentially religious way of
seeing and representing the universe, which finds
expression even in the smallest details of secular life
(including dress and cuisine). Any culture is bound to be
in tension, if not conflict, with others. Only a decadent
culture can fail to face this fact. (page 9)
TOUCHE: When NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE dropped her column (I
regret to say it was a little too militant even for that
war-mad crowd), my friend Ann Coulter made a shrewd
comment: "If NATIONAL REVIEW has no spine, they are not
my allies. I really don't need friends like that. Every
once in a while they'll throw one of their people to the
wolves to get good press in left-wing publications." I
know. (page 11)
PEACE WITHOUT PAP: I don't want war with the Muslim
world, and it sounds nice to repeat the comforting slogan
that Islam is "a religion of peace." But we should bear
in mind that the Prophet himself ordered the beheading of
the Jewish men of Beni Quraidha who refused to adopt the
new faith; the widows and children were sold into
slavery. For centuries thereafter Islam grew by conquest.
Its achievements are not to be despised; but neither
should they be sentimentalized. At the very least,
different cultures mean very different things when they
speak of "peace." (page 12)
Exclusive to the electronic version:
BUILDING HIS LEGACY: Lest you think I see no good
whatsoever in our government, I gratefully acknowledge
that Bill Clinton has now been banned from practicing law
before the U.S. Supreme Court. After millions of cynical
jokes about lawyers' ethics, it's nice to know that even
the legal profession can draw the line somewhere.
PARDONABLE PANDERING: When a visiting Saudi prince
suggested that American foreign policy may have led to
the 9/11 attacks, New York's Mayor Rudy Giuliani
denounced him and rejected his proffered gift of
$10 million to help the widows and children of the city's
dead firemen. Rudy isn't going to let a little thing like
the fate of widows and orphans interfere with his
political priorities. And he's just lent new support to
the Arab belief that the Jews run America.
IN LIEU OF EULOGY: Herbert Block, "Herblock," the famed
editorial cartoonist of the WASHINGTON POST, has died at
91. I once counted more than 80 words in a single
Herblock cartoon. His politics were liberal, his drawings
crude, his humor witless, his style heavy-handed: he
labeled every item in each cartoon, just so nobody would
miss the point. Some liberals, like Pat Oliphant, can
make me laugh; Herblock, never.
PAT THE PROPHET: Patrick Buchanan got it right: the
United States was supposed to be "a republic, not an
empire." Last year he warned that an imperial U.S.
foreign policy might bring a "terrible retribution." Now
that the costs of unlimited government have been vividly
brought home to us, unqualified support for the Empire,
equated with "patriotism," is being demanded of all
Americans.
REPRINTED COLUMNS (pages 7-12)
* After the 9/11 Attack (September 13, 2001)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/010913.shtml
* Following the Script (September 18, 2001)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/010918.shtml
* Is It Worth It? (September 20, 2001)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/010920.shtml
* Accuracy and Other Illusions (September 25, 2001)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/010925.shtml
* Dad and Uncle Joe (September 27, 2001)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/010927.shtml
* Bin Laden's Modest Goals (October 2, 2001)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/011002.shtml
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
All articles are written by Joe Sobran
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Copyright (c) 2001 by The Vere Company. All rights
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Distributed by the Griffin Internet Syndicate
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[ENDS]