My in-laws (The Houseguests) have just departed after inflicting on us unimaginable horrors, the last of which necessitated a visit from a 911 emergency team (yes, it got that bad; they turned our home into a hospice). From them I learned what it means to lead unexamined lives. Despite it all, they retained an inordinate amount of compassion…for themselves. Thanks to all my epistolary friends who held my hand throughout the 8 weeks, especially to my mom, and to the gentleman who kept me smiling with lines like, “Even a dog wags his tail when someone serves him dinner” (as opposed to…)
Death By The West
The so-called occupied territories are really disputed territory, gained due to acts of aggression by the Arab states against Israel. There was no Palestinian State in 1967 when the territories were captured. What kind of morality is it, then, to return territory to the aggressor? And where’s the precedent? It rewards aggression—and guarantees it’ll reoccur. If anything, by returning land to the aggressors—the Sinai first—Israel violated Nullum crimen sine poena, the imperative in international law to punish the aggressor. Writer William Anderson pointed out to me that had the Arabs seized parts of Israel in one of their many failed campaigns, there would be no calls to return the land. Come to think of it, before the brutal Muslim conquest, the land was Christia—Egypt, Libya, North Africa, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and Asia Minor were Christian, not so? In Israel the West has reclaimed a small spot of sanity in a sea of savagery, where enlightened Western law prevails, and where Christians and Jews and their holy places are safe. (By the way, not once is Jerusalem mentioned in the Qur’an. Muslim fondness for Jerusalem is almost as recent, and certainly as innovative, as the discovery of Palestinian nationhood.) Yet, what is the West feverishly fighting for? The utter emasculation of Israel. The Bully Bush administration is now talking about Israel’s return to the 1949 “Armistice lines.” Amazing—and all the more so when such “thinking” is applauded by paleoconservatives (and by many libertarians). Aren’t they forever decrying the Death of the West? Paleocons certainly stood firm behind the Christian side in Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Chechnya, Cyprus, Sudan, East Timor and Kashmir. And so they ought to have: Muslims have wiped out entire Christian communities in these places, not that the strongmen in power or the talking twits on television have noticed. Yet you’ll often hear paleoconservatives condemn Condi R. and Genghis B. for leaning on, say, Vladimir Putin; but celebrate when they sunder Israel’s sovereignty. It is becoming apparent that to some, bringing about the end of Israel is well worth the deadly price of reviving and consolidating a caliphate. There’s a word for that (besides insanity).
On Houseguests, Holidays, And Homosexual Rights
Business, Homosexuality, Labor, libertarianism, Media, Republicans
My house guests have left for a precious week. At long last some respite. So far The Occupation has lasted six weeks. Another three to go. The first order of the day was to scrub down the house. Olfactory restoration was followed by auditory revival: music is the best antidote to the aftereffects of non-stop carping. And who better than Brahms—the maestro’s Sextets, in particular. So on went the Sextets, and out gushed the tears. Perfection makes me cry, and String Sextet No. 1 in B Flat op 18 is achingly sublime. I’m now almost as good as new, ready with a few updates:
First up: the presenters of Connected Coast to Coast have a message for overworked Americans battling to keep their professional edge in the age of inflation, taxation, never-ending government deficits and wars, and the threat of outsourcing: Don’t Worry, Be Happy. Befitting the season, the convivial—and deeply connected—pundits urged Americans to follow the Commander-in-Chief’s lead and go on holiday—lots of them. Contra the CIC, Americans on average take only 12 vacation days, admonished our TV personalities. Don’t you know that it takes a toll on your health?
One of Connected’s hosts is Ronald Reagan’s son, no less. A liberal, Ron Reagan’s sense of the working world is as sound as his grasp of free market economics. The other presenter is a woman who has always worshipped at the GOP altar, devotion which tends to be very well-rewarded. The commentariat, of course, is a mirror image of the political class, reflecting and reinforcing the opinions—and the reality—of the elites. More often than not, the chattering classes are as privileged—and protected—as their masters.
No wonder, then, that the hosts of Connected Coast to Coast can jest about what compulsive workers Americans are. For your information Monica and Ron, most corporations give their workers ten working days off a year! Americans take so few days off because they get so few days off. If they took more, they’d probably be fired. The market place is competitive. While conformity (“team player” is the private-sector synonym) is as prized, say, in high-tech companies as it is among the punditocracy, ultimately, staying ahead of the game boils down to being capable of producing the goods. Politicians, however, create their own employment conditions, from job description down to the exorbitant pay they extract from taxpayers. The media talking heads are props to the politicos. As long as they play to the “Demopublican Monopolists,” and sustain the respective parties’ constituencies, media “mavens” will retain their perches, their pensions, and their sizable salaries. Connected? Disconnected is more like it.
Next: Did Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr help the “gay-rights” movement win its most important legal victory? The case was “Romer vs. Evans,” and it “struck down a voter-approved 1992 Colorado initiative that would have allowed employers and landlords to exclude gays from jobs and housing.” That’s The Los Angles Times’ take on a state law that denied special rights and protections to homosexuals. To be fair, Roberts was, at the time, in private practice. He’d have had a hard time refusing his employers. Yes, he offered his services pro bono, but the firm, Hogan & Hartson, expected “partners to volunteer time in community service.” Gay activists consider the decision Roberts helped them win the “single most important positive ruling in the history of the gay rights movement.” Libertarians should consider it in the tradition of 14th-Amendment jurisprudence—a violation of private property and freedom of association and of Coloradans and their constitution. I suspect Roberts would dissent.
Many thanks to Dr. Daniel Pipes. He has posted More Fatwa Fibs on his exceedingly popular and highly regarded website, DanielPipes.org
Neocon Tales Of The Arabian Nights
Curiously, those who advocate aggressive and futile wars against Muslims are equally devoted to promoting the Religion-of-Peace pie-in-the-sky, and the attendant misconceptions about Islam. Yes, neoconservatives, led by the Bush/Blair pair, have managed to anesthetize their subjects to a faith that defies sanitation. As you know, neoconservatives implicate “Radical Islam” in our woes, by which they mean a splinter of Islam. Indeed, an estimated 100 to 300 million Muslims are active adherents of Islamism: small potatoes, right? Yet to listen to our globalists, you’d think that Jihadists are as alien to Islam as edelweiss is to the Kalahari.
Ad nauseam we hear it chanted that the Religion-of-Peace was doing what it does best–inspire serenity and prosperity–when suddenly, ex nihilo, radicals materialized and derailed it. Of course, this nonsensical incantation is both ahistorical and illiterate–it’s easily corrected with the aid of a good history book and a Quran.
The first will show that the sword has always been integral to Islam, and that conversion has invariably meant conquest and untold carnage. The second will prove that, to be fair to Islam’s alleged hijackers, the’ve done no more than act on the dictates of their faith. Bin Laden is an obedient Muslim. He has obeyed the Quran. The Call to Jihad instructs Muslims that, “When you meet those who disbelieve smite at their necks till when you have killed and wounded many of them.” Holy war, which is demanded in Islamic law, is not defensive war as the Western students of Islam would like to tell us, warns Serge Trifkovic, foreign affairs editor of the paleoconservative magazine Chronicles, and author of The Sword of the Prophet.
Islam, moreover, has changed little over 1,400 years. Unlike the Jewish (and no doubt Christian) holy texts which have been reinterpreted by the sages over the centuries, the Quran has not; ”its decrees are not debatable and are to be taken literally.” Bin Laden may not be a perfect Muslim–he prefers bombing to beheading. But the times they have changed. Allowances must be made for technological advances and expediency.
A geopolitical blind spot tops the historical and textual deficiencies characteristic of the administration’s approach to terrorism and Islam. Agree or disagree with it, an aggressive war, launched against a sovereign Muslim nation–Iraq–was bound to serve as a catalyst for Jihadists. But the policy pinheads who extol Islam refuse to factor American foreign policy into the terrorism equation. Supporters of Bush’s foreign policy would do well to remember that, even if they believe, as Bush expects them to, that war in Iraq and terrorism in America are mutually exclusive conditions, they must at least concede that the president’s domestic positions on immigration, border security, and the imperative to be “minimally observant” about America’s enemies (comedian Dennis Miller’s term for racial profiling), amount to a reckless indifference to the sovereignty and safety of Americans.
But as I’ve previously observed, “Inviting an invasion by foreigners and instigating one against them are two sides of the same neoconservative coin.”