From the WSJ Opinion Archives
We're Back
Most days we write this column from home. The usual exception
is Tuesday, on which we try to make it into the office for a weekly editorial
meeting. Sept.
4, 2001--a year ago tomorrow--was the last time we filed a column from The
Wall Street Journal's headquarters at the World Financial Center in downtown Manhattan.
The following Tuesday we ended up having to work at home.
Today we are back at the WFC. Our new office in our old building looks down on a 16-acre pit several stories deep. During our first stint in this place--from May 1996 to September 2001--we would occasionally look over at the World Trade Center and try to imagine what it was like when a bomb went off there in February 1993. Now we look at the enormous hole in the ground and try to remember what it was like a year ago, when two homely yet majestic buildings still stood on the site.
Then, to put things in perspective, we look at a map of the Muslim world and imagine what it will be like when the dictators are gone and the countries they now rule have joined the civilized world. If this strikes you as fancifully optimistic, look at a map of Germany, Italy, Japan or even Russia and remember what those countries used to be like.
Our
Friends the Saudis
The Jerusalem Post picks up a Sunday Times of London
report that "senior members of the Saudi royal family paid some $300 million to
Osama bin-Laden and the Taliban to prevent them attacking Saudi Arabia," according
to documents filed in a lawsuit brought by victims of the Sept. 11 attacks. "According
to the documents, the deal was struck after two secret meetings involving members
of the Saudi royal family and al-Qaida leaders, including bin-Laden. The cash
enabled al-Qaida to fund training camps in Afghanistan that are said to have been
attended by the September 11 bombers."
A front-page New York Times story last week reported that the Saudis have spent more than $5 million on "well-connected lobbyists and national television advertisements since Sept. 11 in a drive to improve its image among Americans and is poised to spend more as the anniversary of the events approaches":
In one ad produced by the public relations firm Qorvis Communications, the Saudi and American flags are hoisted together while a narrator intones over soothing piano music: "In the war on terrorism we all have a part to play. Our country has been an ally for over 60 years." A second ad shows Saudi leaders meeting with an unbroken string of American presidents since Roosevelt.
Qorvis Communications, which presented Saudi Arabia with a short-term and long-range media strategy, is paid $200,000 a month.
The Times reports, however, that as of two weeks ago, "Americans' negative opinion of Saudi Arabia had surged to 63 percent, from 50 percent in May." The Times story itself is evidence of the PR effort's failure. After all, the Saudis would like us to be reading articles about what good friends they are to America, not about how many millions they're spending in an effort to persuade us of their loyalty.
Maybe Riyadh's PR men ought to be trying to influence the Saudi press. The Middle East Media Research Institute has collected Saudi responses to the Sept. 11 families' lawsuits, and they certainly don't leave the impression that the Saudis have great affection for the U.S. A sample:
Al-Riyadh editorial: "If America wants to open up the issue of compensation for those who died in the two towers, it must agree to the establishment of an international court that will examine [its own] war crimes, plundering, coups, what American intelligence did with the drug barons, the policy of abductions and murder, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, the claims still pending regarding the black slave trade, and the deliberate annihilation of the Indians--and apply all this to all countries, without statute of limitations, so that we feel we live on one planet that functions according to the same moral principles."
Saleh Al-Shihi, a columnist for the Saudi daily Al-Watan: "America, that erected the Statue of Liberty so as to plunder others by it; America, that established liberty in order to kill millions of people in its name, from the Indians to Afghan children. . . . This is America, the tyrannous."
Ghazi Al-Qusaibi, the Saudi ambassador to London: 'The U.S.--the president, Congress, and public opinion--speaks from a starting point not much different than that of a man afflicted with paranoia. Psychiatrists know, as does any quasi-intellectual, that someone afflicted with paranoia is as afraid of his friend as he is of his enemy and sees danger where there is none."
Abdallah Al-Kaid, an Al-Riyadh columnist: "Most provocatively, Condoleezza Rice, adviser to the cowboy who rules the White House, said: 'We have moral justification for changing the regime in Baghdad.' Since when does the American administration attach any importance to the moral or human aspect? . . . We have no need to defend our good and clean name, as we are peace-loving people who never started a war against anyone throughout their history. As for you [Americans], no one needs proof of your crimes, written in history in ink as black as your history of murder and genocide. The land of Japan is the best proof of your barbarism!!!"
The Saudis might respond, echoing the Guardian's Brian Whitaker, that Memri is a pro-Israel organization and it selects the items it translates in order to present the Arab and Muslim worlds in an unfavorable light. (No one disputes the accuracy of Memri's translations.) At least one element of this accusation is true: Memri is pro-Israel. And it is imaginable that Saudi Arabia is less anti-American than Memri makes it out to be. If one were to draw excerpts exclusively from the Guardian, the Independent and the Mirror, one could easily depict Britain as an enemy of America.
So here's a suggestion for the guys at Qorvis, who are raking in $200,000 a month to improve the Saudis' image. Why not counter Memri by disseminating English-language translations of pro-American articles from the Saudi press and speeches by Saudi officials? This would be an easy way to add substance to the Saudis' claim of friendship--assuming, of course, that such articles and speeches exist.
Our
Friends the Syrians
Despite claims of Syrian cooperation in the war
against al Qaeda, "Damascus has allowed some 150-200 Qaida operatives to settle
in the Palestinian refugee camp Ein Hilwe near Sidon in Lebanon," Ha'aretz reports.
(A "Lebanese source" denies
the charge.) "After 9-11, the Syrians initially believed there would be no
significant change in the geopolitical developments," the Israeli newspaper says.
But when it became clear that America was serious about fighting terror, Bashar
Assad, the Damascus dictator, "changed position." The Syrians "said they were
ready for intelligence cooperation with the U.S. on the Qaida issue. But there
are now clear indications that it was tactical and only partial cooperation."
While the Syrians have provided the U.S. with some information about al Qaeda cells in other countries, "nowadays, they appear to be deliberately turning a blind eye to Qaida activity, particularly in Lebanon," Ha'aretz reports. The Syrians have also been unforthcoming with information about two or three visits honcho hijacker Mohamed Atta made to their country.
Speaking of Atta, Britain's Guardian reports that his father, Mohammed el-Amir Atta, insists his son is still alive and phoned on Sept. 12. "He is hiding in a secret place so as not to be murdered by the U.S. secret services," claims the Atta pop. But although he denies that his son was involved with the Sept. 11 atrocities, Atta père thinks mass murder of Americans is a dandy idea. "Every day our Palestinian brothers are being murdered, their houses destroyed. If their relatives were to fly a plane into the Empire State Building I couldn't hold it against them."
They
Ran to Iran
"Two figures who have assumed critical roles in the al
Qaeda hierarchy in recent months . . . are being sheltered in Iran along
with dozens of other al Qaeda fighters in hotels and guesthouses," the Washington
Post reports. "The two--Saif al-Adel, an Egyptian on the FBI's most-wanted list,
and Mahfouz Ould Walid, also known as Abu Hafs the Mauritanian, whom U.S. officials
reported had been killed near the eastern Afghan city of Khost in January--are
directly involved in planning al Qaeda terrorist operations," the Post reports,
citing "Arab intelligence sources" who are not from Saudi Arabia.
Good
Things Come to Those Kuwait
Kuwait has become the first Arab state
to acknowledge publicly that it will support an American action to topple Saddam
Hussein. "If America asks for support Kuwait will give it," an unnamed Kuwaiti
official tells London's Telegraph. "I expect the same response from all Gulf states.
There may be the need publicly to be anti-war, but under-the-table deals are being
struck." Kuwait's foreign minister, Sheikh Mohammed Sabah Salem al-Sabah, adds:
"While Saddam Hussein continues to keep Kuwaiti prisoners of war, and continues
to televise threats against Kuwait, we consider the war against Iraq to have never
ended."
The
Saudis Find a Pro-Nazi Jew
The National Alliance, a neo-Nazi group,
held an anti-Israel rally in Washington Aug. 24. "Despite displaying slogans in
support of Palestinian independence, the group made their real agenda known by
also protesting non-white immigration to the United States and shouting racial
and anti-Semitic epithets," reports the Anti-Defamation League. The ADL says the
250 white supremacists were outnumbered by some 500 counterdemonstrators, "including
left-wing anti-racist and anarchist groups."
In advance of this event, the Arab News managed to outdo itself. The English-language Saudi newspaper's house Israeli, Israel Shamir, actually wrote a piece blasting an e-mail from an unnamed pro-Palestinian activist who urged his supporters not to make common cause with the National Alliance. "The letter of this 'Anti-Fascist Network' looks like an attempt of the Jewish lobby to make its adversaries to fight each other," Shamir writes. "This thing has no end. Today they want us to fight NA, tomorrow they would ask us to condemn Farrakhan, and next day--to reject Hezbollah and Hamas."
"These people should be worked with, not rejected out of hand," Shamir adds. "Some of their erroneous ideas could be corrected. If they would just say 'affirmation of European legacy' instead of 'white supremacy' you would discover that the arguments against them collapse. The meaning is quite similar, but wording is important." The Washington Times reports that at the rally, "alliance members held signs that read 'Nuke Israel' and 'We Don't Care About Your Holohoax.' " Yes indeed, wording is important.
McKinney
Gets the Boot
Michael
Barone has the definitive analysis of the election two weeks ago in which
Georgia voters gave one of America's most loathsome politicians the heave-ho.
Rep. Cynthia McKinney, a Georgia Democrat, lost her primary to former judge Denise
Majette by an impressive 58% to 42%.
McKinney, a five-term member of Congress, has long been known for racial invective; more recently, she accused President Bush of concealing foreknowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks in order somehow to profit from them--though it later developed that she had taken thousands of dollars in donations on Sept. 11 from Arab-Americans, some of whom backed or allegedly participated in terror groups. In the only understatement of her political career, McKinney declared in her concession speech: "It looks like the Republicans wanted to beat me more than the Democrats wanted to keep me."
Even more surprisingly, McKinney's father, state Rep. Billy McKinney, was forced into a runoff. McKinney père managed only 48% of the vote against political unknown John Noel, who got 47%. Billy McKinney is openly anti-Semitic; on the eve of his daughter's defeat, he declared, "Jews have bought everybody. Jews. J-E-W-S." McKinney and Noel face off a week from today, so we'll have the results for you in our Sept. 11 column.
Cynthia McKinney's defeat vindicates the Supreme Court's wisdom in limiting states' ability to create racially segregated voting districts. McKinney and Majette are both black, and Barone reckons that McKinney got some two-thirds of the black vote, in a district that is roughly half black. But as Majette realized, a hater can't win in a diverse district. And as blogger Nick Marsala notes, Majette is a moderate Democrat, favoring low taxes, gun rights and a strong defense and endorsing Supreme Court rulings limiting racial preferences. It's easy to imagine Majette as an attractive statewide candidate--something that can't be said of McKinney, or of many other black congressmen, who've never had to compete for votes outside their own community.
More good news for black political aspirations: Writing in the Washington Post, American University's David Lublin notes that two other black Democrats in Georgia--state Sen. David Scott and Champ Walker--are likely to win election to Congress in November from districts that are less than 45% black. (Scott won his primary; Walker is favored in a runoff.) Just about everyone has reason to celebrate--except Republicans, who had benefited from racial gerrymandering, since concentrating heavily Democratic black voters into segregated districts made it easier for the GOP to win neighboring ones.
Also losing in last month's primary was Rep. Bob Barr. Democrats controlled Georgia's redistricting, and they drew the lines so that Barr ended up facing another conservative Republican incumbent, Rep. John Linder. Barr has a rather grating personality, while Linder is inoffensive, but Barone notes that the real reason Barr lost was that many more of Linder's constituents than his were in the new district.
One pol who won't suffer the ignominy of a primary defeat is Andrew Cuomo, the erstwhile housing secretary, who has dropped out of next week's Democratic primary for the governorship of New York, which father Mario once held. New York 1, a cable news channel, reports that Cuomo, trailing by 22 points in the polls to state comptroller Carl McCall, "is looking to secure his viability for a future run at political office." Cuomo's departure makes McCall a shoo-in in next Tuesday's primary; he'll face Gov. George Pataki, the man who beat Cuomo's dad, in November.
Those
Peace-Loving Palestinians
Israelis aren't the only victims of Palestinian
terrorism; Arabs often murder fellow Arabs as well. Yasser Arafat's Palestinian
Authority is imprisoning "at least 200 Palestinians suspected of collaborating
with Israel," the Jerusalem Post reports. On Aug. 24 members of Arafat's al-Aqsa
Martyrs Brigades "shot and killed a mother of seven in Tulkarm" it accused of
"collaboration." Ikhlas Khouli's "bullet-riddled body was found lying in the street
Saturday after she was kidnapped a day earlier." Ha'aretz
reports that her son "said gunmen tortured him until he invented a story about
his mother's involvement in a militant's death." On Friday Palestinian sources
told Ha'aretz that the Martyrs Brigade had also shot to death Khouli's niece,
18-year-old Rajah
Ibrahim, again purportedly for "collaborating" with Israel.
The two women's killer, who uses the nom de guerre Abu al-Majd, tells the Jerusalem Post that his victims "deserved death" because information he says they gave Israel let to "the cold-blooded killing" of Ziad Da'as, an al-Aqsa terrorist. It's interesting that so many Palestinian Arabs are willing to risk death in order to help Israel.
Writing in the New York Sun, Michael Ledeen notes that Abu Nidal, the Palestinian terrorist retiree who died last month in Iraq--by some accounts suffering multiple gunshot wounds in a suicide--murdered many of his own followers:
Accused followers were tortured to confess, then executed on the basis of that confession . . . Over three hundred hard-core operatives were murdered (in Lebanon) on Abu Nidal's order. On a single night in November 1987, approximately 170 were tied up and blindfolded, machine-gunned, and pushed into a trench prepared for the occasion. Another 160 or so were killed in Libya shortly thereafter Abu Nidal's paranoia, fed by our crusade against him, caused him to destroy his organization.
Ledeen also disputes the conventional wisdom that Nidal and Arafat were foes:
Although he was universally considered to be a mortal enemy of Mr. Arafat (Fatah passed a death sentence on him in the seventies), there is good reason to believe that this was a monumental deception. According to Ion Mihai Pacepa, the former acting chief of the Romanian intelligence service during Ceausescu's dictatorship, the Abu Nidal Organization was actually created by Mr. Arafat with a double purpose. On the one hand, it enabled Mr. Arafat to pose as a moderate, compared to the violent acts carried out by Abu Nidal. On the other, it provided Mr. Arafat with a band of assassins that could eliminate any PLO leader that met with Mr. Arafat's disapproval. Mr. Pacepa has proved to be an extremely accurate source of information ever since he defected to the West in 1978, and he says that the information about Abu Nidal comes straight from Mr. Arafat himself during a conversation with Ceausescu.
The secret alliance between Mr. Arafat and Abu Nidal reminds us that there is no such thing as a "moderate" leader of a terrorist organization, and that we cannot expect to win the war against terror until the entire network--starting with the regimes of the terror states and finishing with the tens of thousands of trained killers--has been brought to justice.
Arafat won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1994.
'It
Gets Hard When They Cheer'
The Weekly Standard's "contributing humorist,"
Larry Miller, visits an Israeli hospital, whose head, an Israeli woman named Audrey,
explains that they treat Arabs as well as Jews. Describing her Arab patients'
reactions to terror attacks, Audrey tells Miller: "It gets hard when they cheer
when the bodies are brought in."
Your
Tax Dollars at Work
The Public Broadcasting Service is commemorating
the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks by wiping Israel off the map, the New
York Sun reports. The Sun's Ira Stoll notes that a Web page accompanying a PBS
program called "Caught in the Crossfire: Arab-Americans in Wartime" shows a map
of the Middle East on which Israel, Gaza and the West Bank are depicted as one
contiguous entity and labeled "Palestine." (The map is actually labeled "Lebanon,
Yemen and Palestine [1941-2002]," so it is accurate for the first seven years
of that 61-year period, when Palestine was under British control.) Stoll notes
other ways in which the Web site whitewashes Arab history:
- "Yasser Arafat is described as 'leader of the movement for a Palestinian state' with no mention of his connections to terrorism."
- "The site makes it sound like Jordan did not participate in the 1948 Arab attack on Israel."
- "The Web site lists the election of [Benjamin] Netanyahu and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin as setbacks to peace negotiations in the 1990s, but makes no mention of terrorist bombings by Hamas against Israeli civilians."
- "The site includes a timeline with an entry for when [Ariel] Sharon 'provokes al-Aqsa intifada.' In fact, Palestinian Arab officials, including Mr. Arafat's justice minister and communications minister, have acknowledged that the violence was planned by the Arabs weeks before Mr. Sharon's visit."
Who's paying for this anti-Israeli propaganda? You are. Notes Stoll: "The program and Web site were produced by the Independent Television Service, an arm of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The CPB gets about $342 million a year from the federal government."
Meanwhile, Colorado College has invited Hanan Ashrawi, a spokeswoman for the Palestinian Authority, to be the keynote speaker at its "9/11 symposium" (she's actually speaking on Sept. 12). Ashrawi is a Palestinian "moderate," which means she opposes the murder of Israelis when it does not benefit the Arab cause (an "extremist" is one for whom killing Jews is an end in itself). Joshua Sharf, a frequent contributor to this column, is helping organize a counterdemonstration at the Colorado Springs campus, with sponsorship from the Rocky Mountain Rabbinical Council and Americans Against Terrorism.
And
the Word 'Gullible' Isn't in the Reuters Stylebook
"Iraq showed reporters
a warehouse stuffed with baby milk and sugar . . . to repudiate a U.S.
newspaper report that the building was being used to produce biological weapons,"
Reuters reports. Uh, hello? Doesn't anyone remember that CNN's Peter Arnett fell
for this
very hoax a decade ago?
Two
Cheers for France
Are our friends the French actually starting to
show signs of good sense? So it would appear. The Jerusalem Post reports Paris
has withdrawn its ambassador to London, who eight months ago referred to Israel
as "that sh--ty little country." And the New
York Times reports that Paris "has decided to stop criticizing American war
planning against Saddam Hussein and instead maximize its leverage with the United
States by stressing areas of agreement." Both newspapers say the developments
are outgrowths of the center-right's victory in the spring elections.
A
Teen Blogress: Now That's Progress
The New York Times magazine reports
from Iran on the difficulties of maintaining a culturally backward society amid
technological progress:
The computer has become particularly important in the lives of urban girls, often confined at home by traditionalist parents who, by the same token, have absolutely no clue what their daughters are doing online.
A lot of what they're doing, it turns out, is blogging. For the uninitiated, a blog is a Web log, a kind of online diary or journal. Many blogs, Iranian or otherwise, are boring accounts of people's daily lives, or gibberish-like streams of consciousness. But in Iran, bolstered by the anonymity their computer screens provide, female bloggers are catching attention for their daring and articulate mix of politics, dirty jokes and acid comment.
Here a female blogger simply lets rip: "I hate those people who pray and with their prayers make our life a disaster. I hate all those dumb people who go to those marches and shout 'Down with America.' I hate those people I am supposed to bribe for no reason." And then: "I hate cigarettes, I hate men and I hate my emotions as a woman. I hate that feeling of lust and I hate my big nose." In a country where a court can sentence a woman to be stoned to death, and 13-year-old brides are nothing extraordinary, such words amount to the most outrageous sedition and heresy.
Here's an example of what motivates the young blogresses:
Soon a police doctor will administer a compulsory virginity test, the result of which may have a profound effect on the rest of Fatimah's life. . . . In Tehran, some surgeons specialize in restoring a girl's virginity, technically speaking at least. This illegal operation costs $50. Abortion, of course, is also strictly illegal, except under certain conditions, like a threat to the woman's life. So the current price of a back-alley abortion can run as high as $500. If the father has fled, . . . young women have been known to sleep with another man and convince him that the pregnancy is his responsibility.
Meanwhile, the Guardian quotes a "senior Western diplomat" in Tehran: "No one is saying it out loud, but the secret hope of many Iranians is that if the US army takes neighbouring Iraq, it will come and straighten out this place as well."
This
Oughta Rattle Saddam
The U.S. Navy will begin flying the Gadsden Flag--bearing
a rattlesnake on a yellow background with the slogan DONT [sic] TREAD ON ME--aboard
all its vessels. "Navy Secretary Gordon England's directive said the resurrected
flag 'represents an historic reminder of the nation's and Navy's origin and will
to persevere and triumph,' " Time reports. FoundingFathers.info
has background on the flag.
Dressed
to Kill
The Target discount-store chain is pulling baseball caps "that
feature an insignia with the number 88 on them," the New York Daily News reports.
"The number is said to be code among some neo-Nazi groups for 'Heil Hitler' because
H is the eighth letter of the alphabet." Of course, if they'd bothered to read
our column last
April, the Targeteers would have known better.
Meanwhile, Ha'aretz reports that the British shoe company Umbro says it is "an 'unfortunate coincidence' that its Zyklon shoe, on sale since 1999, bore the name of the poison gas Zyklon B" of Nazi death-camp infamy.
The Jerusalem Post reports an Israeli Arab fashion designer is "being attacked"--though thus far only verbally--by the Islamic Movement in Israel and by the terror group Hamas because of a dress she designed. "Not only do they consider the dress immodest, but it carries on it three of the 99 asma, or attributes, of Allah," the Post reports.
Metaphor
Alert
From "Pop Culture Takes On Terrorism" by Robert Thompson in
the New York Times, Aug. 19 (italics ours):
As George Santayana said, "American life is a powerful solvent." Our national entertainment has an uncanny ability to dissolve just about anything and incorporate it, transformed and repackaged, into the body politic.
In less than a week popular culture began to pour its digestive juices upon Sept. 11. It rushed in, as it always does, where more sober institutions feared to tread. Before the smoke had cleared, TV series like "The West Wing" had begun to include the colossal day in their dramatic repertoire. . . . Before long, some familiar American appetites, spoiled for a time, began to return.
Life Imitates Fairy Tales
"Oh my goodness! The sky is falling! I must go and tell the king."--Chicken Little
"Let us not be deceived, when looking at a clear blue sky, into thinking that all is well. All is not well."--U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan
The
World's Smallest Violin
"[The
thing] that bothers me the most is that you really don't see your grandchildren
or great-grandchildren grow up."--Robert Thieman, a 69-year-old Minnesota state
prison inmate, quoted by the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Sept. 1.
Shirley Sahf doesn't get to see her grandchildren or great-grandchildren grow up ei
