Channeling Nazi Haj Amin al-Husseini

Anti-Semitism, Middle East

Alan Keyes is the only commentator to have had the heart and spine to express the existential meaning of the act of suicide bombing. Keyes delivered a magnificent sermon on his MSNBC television show, analyzing the evil that is buried in the heart of someone who can painstakingly—almost lovingly—pack parcels of shrapnel, ball-bearings, nails and rat poison, to lodge in the bodies of Israeli civilians.

The rat poison is a diabolic touch, intended to intensify internal bleeding. Surgeons must slice the victims of these fiendish devices open, picking from the flesh and burrowing in the bone for embedded shards of shrapnel, ball bearings and nails. Survivors are left maimed and wracked with life-long disfigurement and pain.

Keyes was man enough and moral enough to point out that this premeditated evil—supported by a majority of Palestinians—bespeaks the will to exterminate another and creates a deep and dark reality in the human heart.

Shortly after the Sermon on Slaughter by Suicide, Keyes’ program was axed.

Click on the link, “3 days in Israel,” for a rare glimpse of what he meant. Note that the horrible exhibit ends with a stupid exhortation to fight terrorism. As if what faces Jews daily in Israel is the upshot of some amorphous thing called “terrorism,” rather than a specific and finely honed hate.

Palestinian leadership and its followers are channeling Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Nazi Mufti of Jerusalem. Al-Husseini, Arafat’s hero, “supported the Nazis, and especially their program for the mass murder of the Jews. He visited numerous death camps and encouraged Hitler to extend the ‘Final Solution’ to the Jews of North Africa and Palestine.”

Run Little Man, If You Can

Feminism

In my column this week, “Run Little Man, If You Can,� I reveal how feminists, who once aimed to unseat men, are now actively engaged in queering them. This is their position, distilled to its essence:

“In every boy there’s a girl waiting to break free. If boys were only encouraged to get in touch with their Inner Whiner, the problems plaguing them in schools and society at large would likely dissipate.â€?

I never can tell what associations a topic will conjure, but if you want to know how Alexander Portnoy, the antihero of Philip Roth’s eponymous Portnoy’s Complaint, and the cult, 1967 British television series The Prisoner made their way into my column, you had better read it.

Ann On Israel

Israel, Middle East

JewishPress.com Interviewed Ann Coulter:

Jewish Press: What about the planned withdrawal from the West Bank, from which rockets can hit Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Israel’s International Airport?

Ann Coulter: If you start a war and lose, you lose your land. Next.

Such poetic justice would sure serve to curtail aggression. Ann, moreover, is clearly familiar with Nullum crimen sine poena, the imperative in international law to punish the aggressor—an imperative Israel has repeatedly breached together with its own national self-preservation.

The rest of the interview is here.

Updated: Plagiarism

Ethics, Etiquette, Morality

The dictionary defines plagiarism as “taking someone’s words or ideas as if they were your own.” Imitation might be the sincerest form of flattery. But unacknowledged, lifting a someone’s ideas without attribution is disgusting—it tells me all I need to know about a character.

I once submitted a version of “How Things Would Work in a Copyright-Free Universe” to the editor of a well-known American libertarian magazine. It had been published previously in the Canadian Financial Post. The editors there had been excited about it and were not disappointed—the piece generated a good deal of mail.

The editor of the libertarian magazine, however, replied that the thing was not comprehensive enough for his publication. A week or two later, the exact ideas appeared in his column, including a reference to one or two utterly obscure sources used in my article.

There have been other such unpleasant instances.

More recently, on March 3, 2006 in “The People Vs. Dubya & Dubai,” I observed that libertarians had joined neoconservatives to tarnish security conscious Americans as anti-Arab racists and Islamophobes for their rejection of the Dubai transaction.

On March 11, I reiterated that observation on Barely a Blog, writing that neoconservatives and their left-libertarian allies in this affair truly showed their skunk appeal, and that the Dubai debacle has served as the all-time low-life litmus test because of this lot’s self-righteous haste to substitute ad hominem arguments for substantive debate.

In the March-27 issue of a certain magazine, a member of the small and well-acquainted libertarian community of writers used the rather obscure observation vis-a-vis the neoconservative/libertarian momentary alignment to segue into a discussion of the Dubai debacle. Missing from the analysis were five words: “As Ilana Mercer has observed.”

At the time of writing, if you Googled Ann Coulter and H. L. Mencken together my name came up first. That’s how idiosyncratic my June-8 commentary on this pairing was. In his latest July-17 magazine article, the aforementioned libertarian uses the analogy (in a totally inappropriate context, mind you). Missing again are these simple words: “As Ilana Mercer has observed.”

Of course, this is not about an ignorance of the rules and etiquette of attribution, but about an unfamiliarity with morals. My

About the natural law, Sir William Blackstone noted that it “should include such precepts as that human beings should live honestly, hurt nobody, and render everyone their due” (in Conway, 2004). Clearly an instinct alien to some.

Update: a good friend and a professional writer offers that such practices are abominable, but points out that a well-known magazine gambit is to reject a query but take its ideas. Call me naive, but I once expected more from libertarians. No longer. Said writer has also directed me to Copyscape, another helpful online resource.