Party of Traitors

Britain, Democrats, Republicans

“The Republican Quislings have contributed greatly to the convergence of Left and Right. What we have now is a cartel, the traditional ideological differences between the political parties having been permanently blurred (both Democrats and Republicans, for instance, see merit in wars for democracy, limitless immigration, and a massive expansion in Medicare and other entitlements). If anything, antitrust laws ought to be deployed, not against business, but to bust this two-party monopoly, which subverts competition in government and rewards the colluding quislings with sinecures in perpetuity.”

The excerpt is from my new column, “Party of Traitors,” in which I quote Sean Gabb, Director of Communications at the Libertarian Alliance of Britain, extensively. (The above lines are my own, though.) Sean and I had admired one another’s work from afar, until we met at a Liberty-Fund colloquium, last month.

What I find so extraordinary is that Sean is very involved in Britain’s public political life. He is on the television or radio (BBC, no less) just about every week , discussing the issues of the day from a libertarian perspective.

Enron: Criminal Conviction Absent Proof of Intent

Criminal Injustice, Enron

As the Associated Press has reported, “Former Enron Corp. chiefs Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling were convicted [today] of conspiracy to commit securities and wire fraud in one of the biggest business scandals in U.S. history.” (Curious about what Stephen Bainbridge has termed the Left’s penal philosophy? Check out “Bend over Kenny-Boy” at Air America. Foul and cruel).

Securities Fraud? Read “Communism in Capital Markets” to find out what I think of that charge. Wire fraud? Observe what libertarian economist Pierre Lemieux has to say: “Mail and wire fraud are just manufactured crimes by the Surveillance State—crimes that do not exist in civilized countries. Fraud, defined in its politically correct, anti-business, catchall sense of today, has come to mean what the state does not like.”

But mainly, has intent been proven? Have the self-righteous prosecutors, preening for the cameras, proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the men at the helm of this once-fantastic corporation intentionally made predictions that didn’t pan out? Or that their exuberant optimism, which translated—if my recollection serves me—into aggressive bookkeeping, was intended to deceive and defraud?

Has this been proven? Hardly. Even so, as Bill Anderson has repeatedly maintained, cases like this belong in civil court.

As for the market, it certainly doesn’t need the prosecutors or the regulators. The market punctured the dot.com hype, and it did the same to Enron. If you recall, the saga began when Enron came up with an innovative way to trade energy. Soon, other companies got a whiff of the initial exorbitant profits, entered the same market, and competed away the Enron advantage, putting the squeeze on the company’s margins.

When the company emerged as no more than hedge funds and hot air, the same self-regulating market saw companies wooing the wary investor with open accounting practices, offering transparent, cash-flow-based financial statements, as well as vouching that their auditors do not double up as consultants, ala Arthur Andersen.

However, the people were angry, even though many of Enron’s employees had made the kind of money off the company you and I will not see in our lifetimes. They hoisted their pitchforks, and Bush responded with regulation first (The “Sarbanes-Oxley Act” aka the Corporate Corruption Bill), and prosecutions later. All very sad.

Updated: Did the Mohammedans Invent Profiling (and Ghettos)?

Anti-Semitism, Islam

Just so you know, the Nazis were not the originators of the yellow cloth with which they tagged Jews. The odious tagging rag has its origins in the laws of the Charter of Omar—a set of vicious anti-infidel rules that were applied to Jews with extra vim. These laws were introduced by the caliph who succeeded the prophet Mohammed.

Prior to the prophet, Jews and Arabs did indeed live in relative harmony, but when Mohammed failed to convert the Jews to Islam, the proselytizing prophet of peace exterminated at least one Jewish tribe, etched the Koran with anti-Jewish vitriol, and launched centuries of brutality against Jews. Arabs also preceded the Nazis by centuries with the Jewish ghetto—they pioneered a dwelling designated specifically for Jews and known in Arabic as the hara or mellah.*

Why is this currently relevant?

Over to Andy Bostom, reporting for The American Thinker: “Controversy still swirls over allegations that Iran’s government plans to require non-Muslims to wear identifying clothing. The Canadian National Post has retracted its May 19, 2006 report about a putative Iranian Law requiring non-Muslim minorities—Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians—to wear color-coded strips of cloth attached to their garments, to distinguish them from Muslims. Mr. Amir Taheri, author of the article, is standing by his report.”

Dependably ignorant, Jewish leadership, such as The American Jewish Committee, has done as it invariably—and perennially—does: invoke the Nazi experience as the proper historical context for the alleged reinstitution of the badge in Iran. This is how Dr. Stephen M. Steinlight distilled their ignorance vis-a -vis the nature and source of the existential threat facing the community:

“There is a sad if also somewhat comic irony to the fact that legions of employees at organizations like ADL, the American Jewish Committee, and the Presidents’ Conference must pass through a gauntlet of concrete barriers, armed guards, metal detectors, and double bulletproof anterooms as they come to work each morning to protect them from radical Islamic terrorists, in order to spend their days studying and then disseminating reports on the ‘threat’ posed by Evangelical Christians or the non-issue of Mormon conversion of dead Jews or the imaginary anti-Semitism that ‘The Passion of the Christ’ did not produce. Meanwhile, the legislative affairs staffs of these same organizations are directed to lobby against the very immigration reforms that could minimize the danger.”

Bostom, for his part, has patiently explained to an official at The Wiesenthal Center that, “While memories of the Holocaust are fresher and more widely held than memories of traditional Islamic oppression of Jews, such comparisons should be avoided. To invoke the Holocaust blinds us to the far longer and much more deeply-rooted traditions in the Islamic world which predate the rise of Nazism by well over a millennium.”

To no avail…

* From Andy Bostom more on the meaning of “mellah”: “‘salted, cursed grounds,’ which were in fact the Jewish ghettoes of the Maghrib (North African) cities under Muslim rule. This derives from the fact that Jews were forced to salt the decapitated heads of those the Muslims decapitated (for whatever reason), thus preserving the heads for public display. Jews alone were designated to do this dehumanizing work by their Muslim overlords.”

Savage Society

Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Members of Hamas and Abbas’ terrorist militia are duking it out on the streets of Gaza. The latest casualty of these contemptible criminal gangs is the Jordanian ambassador’s driver—he was killed in an exchange. DEBKAfile reports that at least eight others died in the street fights: “The feuding sides also engaged in sniping, kidnapping and planting bomb devices at the homes of rivals.”

Mainstream Media, which in every other instance adheres to the “if it bleeds it leads” axiom, has been unsurprisingly silent on the perpetual civil war in the Palestinian territories. To read the BBC’s dispatches, you’d think that the chaos is 1) recent 2) part of the rough-and-tumble of a fledgling democracy—the warring gangsters they call “security forces”; the urban warfare these ruffians wage nothing but the odd, boisterous “clash.”

The submerged story is the story of Palestinian-on-Palestinian violence—it “saturates the territories,” writes Stephanie Gutmann. Do read her outstanding book, “The Other War: Israelis, Palestinians and the Struggle for Media Supremacy.” For a second opinion consult Fred Reed. (Incidentally, Reed describes his column about the press’s scandalous coverage of Israel as “A Nonconforming View.” For once a writer who doesn’t fob off the manufactured, mob consensus on all things Israel as gritty, independent thinking.)

According to Gutmann, Khaled Abu Toameh of the Jerusalem Post is one of the few reporters who has not capitulated to the PA’s campaign of intimidation against anyone who tells the truth about what goes on in that hell on earth:

“The dead formed an endless daily procession in his stories. They were members of feuding Arab tribes, rival factions and warring families. They were wives deemed immodest, girlfriends deemed treacherous, daughters deemed disobedient, and always, always there were those executed in gruesome ways for having collaborated, in some loosely defined way, with Israel.”

I can confirm this blood-drenched reality. I grew up not far from what is called the Triangle: Tira, Tulkarem, and Jenin. My stepfather was a dedicated Israeli government doctor who worked in these villages. One of the activities he undertook (but didn’t have to) was to surgically stitch up the hymens of young girls so as to prevent their barbaric mothers and fathers from slaying them. He was always very sad when his secret patchwork failed to convince the clan, and the girl was found the next day with the customary axe in her spine. Sometimes a virgin was slaughtered if she didn’t bleed “sufficiently” on her wedding night. As the chief medical man in the region, my stepfather was at the interface of this “violence-saturated society.”