Updated: Muhammad on the Cover of "The New Individualist"

Islam, The Zeitgeist

The winter-2006 issue of The New Individualist should be on sale any day now. Robert J. Bidinotto, TNI’s perfectionist editor (actually, he’s a slave driver), reveals that:

[H]e is the editor of the first magazine in America (to the best of his knowledge) to have PUBLISHED THE MOST “OFFENSIVE” OF THOSE DANISH CARTOON DEPICTIONS OF MUHAMMAD RIGHT ON THE MAGAZINE’S COVER.

And that:

The issue… contains a number of great articles, essays, and reviews by the likes of constitutional law expert Henry Mark Holzer, columnist Ilana Mercer, filmmaker Duncan Scott, art expert Michelle Marder Kamhi, and essayists Roger Donway and Lou Villadsen.

I review Paul Sperry’s Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington.

You can find out about The New Individualist, get a free sample copy, or subscribe, by clicking here.

Update: Robert Bidinotto’s cover-art decision has generated tons of support. Read Michelle Malkin’s write-up. Praise from Samizdata is here. This is a good time to subscribe to the only magazine in the country to have featured the most controversial drawing, smack-dab where it can’t be missed.

Updated: Muhammad on the Cover of “The New Individualist”

Islam, The Zeitgeist

The winter-2006 issue of The New Individualist should be on sale any day now. Robert J. Bidinotto, TNI’s perfectionist editor (actually, he’s a slave driver), reveals that:

[H]e is the editor of the first magazine in America (to the best of his knowledge) to have PUBLISHED THE MOST “OFFENSIVE” OF THOSE DANISH CARTOON DEPICTIONS OF MUHAMMAD RIGHT ON THE MAGAZINE’S COVER.

And that:

The issue… contains a number of great articles, essays, and reviews by the likes of constitutional law expert Henry Mark Holzer, columnist Ilana Mercer, filmmaker Duncan Scott, art expert Michelle Marder Kamhi, and essayists Roger Donway and Lou Villadsen.

I review Paul Sperry’s Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington.

You can find out about The New Individualist, get a free sample copy, or subscribe, by clicking here.

Update: Robert Bidinotto’s cover-art decision has generated tons of support. Read Michelle Malkin’s write-up. Praise from Samizdata is here. This is a good time to subscribe to the only magazine in the country to have featured the most controversial drawing, smack-dab where it can’t be missed.

Continuously Updated: Harvard Hucksters Hype Israeli Pseudo-Historians

Anti-Semitism, Israel, Middle East, Pseudo-history

The real rock stars of the Israeli intelligentsia—Israel’s own Ward Churchills —are the pretentiously self-styled “New Historians.” This is a group of popular far-left fabricators (one of whom facetiously boasted: “We perform at weddings and bar mitzvas”), who’ve cocked a snook at the liberal country in which they’ve thrived, so as to gain admittance into the fashionable Palestinian pantheon…
…the “New Historians'” most flamboyant and fishy associate [is] Benny Morris. In fact, it was Morris’ bowdlerization of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s words that first prompted Karsh to investigate the fraud perpetrated by these hip historians and expose it in his masterful book, “Fabricating Israeli History: The ‘New Historians.'”

The excerpt is from my new WorldNetDaily column, “Harvard Hucksters Hype Israeli Pseudo-Historians.”

Updated continually: Harvard and the University of Chicago have distanced themselves from “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” study, issuing emphatic disclaimers to that effect. The “study” was fraught with logical and factual infelicities and fell foul of minimal scholarly requirements.

“Harvard Hucksters Hype Israeli Pseudo-Historians” dealt with a little-discussed aspect of the “study.”

The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting writes that

“[E]ven a cursory examination of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy reveals that it is riddled with errors of fact, logic and omission, has inaccurate citations, displays extremely poor judgement regarding sources, and, contrary to basic scholarly standards, ignores previous serious work on the subject. The bottom line: virtually every word and argument is, or ought to be, in ‘serious dispute.'”

Read CAMERA’s detailed analysis of the study here.

Also of interests is “Yes, It’s Anti-Semitic” by Eliot A. Cohen, who writes the following about the paper:

Inept, even kooky academic work, then, but is it anti-Semitic? If by anti-Semitism one means obsessive and irrationally hostile beliefs about Jews; if one accuses them of disloyalty, subversion or treachery, of having occult powers and of participating in secret combinations that manipulate institutions and governments; if one systematically selects everything unfair, ugly or wrong about Jews as individuals or a group and equally systematically suppresses any exculpatory information–why, yes, this paper is anti-Semitic.

A doff of the hat to Walter Block for sending this along.

Melanie Phillips offers a characteristically superb analysis of a Kafkaesque strategy, whereby, “The enemies of antisemitism are the new McCarthyites’… —anyone who called attention to the outbreak of Judeophobia was a McCarthyite, because they were trying to sanitise the crimes of Israel…”

And from civil libertarian Alan Dershowitz: “Debunking the Newest—and the Oldest—Jewish Conspiracy: A Reply to the Mearsheimer-Walt “Working Paper’”

James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal has more on the straw produced by libertarians who are “pretty much indistinguishable from the far left and the far right” in the unenlightened heat they generate. Read “The Ugly Side of Libertarianism.”

Overstating Jewish Power By Christopher Hitchens

Afghani Judiciary is Criminal, Not 'Conservative'

Criminal Injustice, Islam, The State

In the matter of Afghanistan V. Abdul Rahman: Rahman faces the death penalty for converting to Christianity. The Christian Science Monitor characterizes the case as showing “the tension between the more Western approach being advocated by Karzai’s government, and more conservative elements in the country.”

Come again! Conservative elements? These are criminal, not conservative, elements.

By natural law standards, to kill someone for of his beliefs is a crime. Natural justice is immutably true; it is the ultimate guide to what’s right or wrong. The law of the state—any state—ought to be rejected and condemned when it conflicts with natural law.

Most of what Bush does is naturally illicit, but that’s another story.