by JAMES TARANTO
Friday, September 20, 2002 3:20 P.M. EDT

We Thought the Guy in the Beard Was Santa. Honest!
The lawyers for the six Lackawanna, N.Y., al Qaeda suspects are beginning to provide some comic relief with the excuses they're offering on behalf of their clients. Two of the six have admitted attending al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan, but, the Washington Post reports, the lawyer for one "described his client today as a loyal American who went to Pakistan seeking religious training and through his own naiveté wound up spending a few weeks in an al Qaeda terror camp in Afghanistan." The lawyer, James Harrington, quoted the defendant, Sahim Alwan:

" 'I was scared and missed my family, and on Day Six I pleaded [with guards] to let me go. I faked an ankle injury to get them to let me go.' "

Mukhtar al Bakri is the other defendant who's admitted going to the terror training camps, and United Press International reports that Bakri's lawyer, John Molloy, "told the court late Thursday that an e-mail proclaiming a new terrorist attack was a joke." The victims would have died laughing.

The New York Times quotes Alwan as telling investigators: "My purpose of attending the camp was to see what it was all about." La troppa curiosità spinge l'uccello nella rete.

The Times also reports that among the Yemeni-American community of Lackawanna, "many people say the government is trying to find the men guilty by association. . . . One of the men, they say, is too fat to be a trained terrorist." Let's hope the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance weighs in to condemn this stereotyping of people of size.

Mixed Nuts
A group calling itself "Not in Our Name" bought an ad in yesterday's New York Times proclaiming its opposition to America. (The ad, in PDF form, is here.) "We call on all Americans to RESIST the war and repression that has been loosed on the world by the Bush administration," it declares. "It is unjust, immoral, and illegitimate." Among the signers are such luminaries as "Hanoi Jane" Fonda, Ed Asner, Susan Sarandon, Casey Kasem (of "America's Top 40" fame), Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, Edward Said, Ben Cohen (of Ben & Jerry's), Kurt Vonnegut and murderer Mumia Abu-Jamal.

The ad adds: "The brutal repercussions have been felt from the Philippines to Palestine, where Israeli tanks and bulldozers have left a terrible trail of death and destruction." Not a word about Palestinian terrorism, or indeed about any kind of terrorism except for the attacks of Sept. 11, which the signatories dismiss by likening them to "similar scenes in Baghdad, Panama City, and, a generation ago, Vietnam."

Similar sentiments are on offer at the Web Site of the World Church of the Creator, an outfit the Anti-Defamation League in 1999 declared the "fastest growing hate group in America":

Demonstrate your opposition to the Jewish Imperialist War with Iraq! Go to your busiest local street corner and hold signs reading, "Don't fight for Jews!", "No War with Iraq."

This site is filled with truly vile stuff. With that caveat, here's the link.

These extremists of the left and the right have more in common than their opposition to toppling a genocidal tyrant. Both groups also portray themselves as civil-liberties martyrs--though if the portrayal were accurate, we wouldn't be able to read their loathsome views. The Not in Our Name statement declares that "the government has brought down a pall of repression over society. . . . Dissident artists, intellectuals, and professors find their views distorted, attacked, and suppressed." The "church," meanwhile, offers "REAL Free Speech Web Hosting for White Civil Rights Activists . . . that is 100% JEWISH Censorship FREE!"

Will the Guard Guard Saddam?
"Elite forces from Iraq's Republican Guard may not be called upon to protect Saddam Hussein in the event of an American attack--for fear that they might turn against him," reports Brian Whitaker in Britain's Guardian. "Although highly privileged and well-equipped in comparison with the regular army, it has become less trusted as a result of several coup plots involving officers from the Guard," Whitaker reports.

Whitaker quotes "a non-Iraqi source with well-placed contacts in Baghdad," who says: "The officer corps in the Republican Guard are highly trained and motivated, but they hate Saddam Hussein. They also hate the United States."

Ivy League Sanity
While we've reported on outbreaks of idiocy at such academic backwaters as Concordia University, Colorado College and San Francisco State, there's evidence sanity has broken out in the Ivy League. Earlier this week Harvard's president, Lawrence Summers, spoke out against anti-Semitism, and specifically against the efforts at Harvard and MIT to boycott Israel, which he called "anti-Semitic in their effect if not in their intent." The Harvard Crimson reports:

"Where anti-Semitism and views that are profoundly anti-Israeli have traditionally been the primary preserve of poorly educated right-wing populists, profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities," he said. . . .

Summers also said that "events to raise funds for organizations of questionable political provenance that in some cases were later found to support terrorism have been held . . . with at least modest success and very little criticism."

The full text of the speech is here. The Boston Globe quotes Elizabeth Spelke, a Harvard psychology professor who favors boycotting the Jewish state: "To dismiss this petition as anti-Israeli is to make a highly questionable assumption--that the escalation of violence in the Middle East, which we denounce, is good for Israel." This quote neatly encapsulates the difference between "poorly educated right-wing populists" and members of "progressive intellectual communities": While the former are straightforward about their prejudices, the latter dress theirs up in tortured logic.

Writing in the Columbia Spectator, meanwhile, junior Eric Chen opines that "after years of fatalistic acceptance, Columbia students are beginning to rise up against the unbalanced and unfair political culture on campus":

On campus, a new crop of patriotic student groups openly challenging Columbia's anti-military reputation is quickly gaining support. The sizeable veteran population in Columbia's student body is organizing with the intent to fairly portray the military culture that is often grossly misunderstood by their classmates. Alumni who long ago abandoned Columbia's affairs in disgust over the Spirit of '68 are turning back to Alma Mater. Columbia's ROTC cadets, who have been marginalized since ROTC's was ousted from Columbia in 1968, are organizing to represent their interests in the Columbia community. This year, for the first time in over 30 years, Columbia's ROTC cadets were in uniform, openly representing the military on campus during the University's student activities day. Aside from a token protest by a few campus radicals, the majority of students responded with curiosity and praise.

He's Just Like Hitler, and I Didn't Just Say That
Germany's justice minister is furiously backpedaling from her comparison of President Bush to Hitler, London's Daily Telegraph reports:

In a bid to soften her remarks, she said: "I did not compare the persons Bush and Hitler, but the methods."

As the opposition called for her resignation she issued a statement saying: "It is erroneous and inflammatory to imply that I compared a man who was democratically elected, the American President George W Bush, and the Nazi era.

"I have always said to what point such a comparison would be unacceptable and false. That was, by the way, implicit in this confused article that some are now using for political ends."

CNN reports Sen. Jesse Helms, ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, has floated the idea of "withdrawing U.S. forces from their bases in Germany if [Chancellor Gerhard] Schroeder wins re-election and Germany fails to join a 'constructive' dialogue on Iraq." Even Schroeder's opponent, Edmund Stoiber, is threatening not to allow the U.S. to use those bases if the U.N. doesn't approve an effort to liberate Iraq.

Yasser Who?
Remember Yasser Arafat? (He's the guy who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994.) Back in the spring, it was big news when Israel besieged his compound in Ramallah in pursuit of terror suspects who had taken refuge inside. Today much the same thing is going on, and the world seems to be yawning. "The IDF finished demolishing Friday afternoon most of the Ramallah buildings that make up the headquarters compound of Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat, . . . leaving only two of the largest building in tact [sic]," the Jerusalem Post reports.

Twenty terror suspects are holed up in the building, the Post says. Among them, the Associated Press reports, is Tawfik Tirawi, who, as the Post reported last month, is an enforcer of the Palestinian Arabs' policies of apartheid: "The head of the Palestinian Authority's General Intelligence Service in the West Bank, Gen. Tawfik Tirawi, has admitted that his men were responsible for the 1996 kidnapping and killing of several Palestinians suspected of selling land to Jews."

What Would You Do for $62
"The Shin Bet security service recently foiled a plan by some Gazan Islamic Jihad activists to poison the drinking water at one of Jerusalem's hospitals," Ha'aretz reports:

According to the charge sheet, Iyad Hassan Mohammed Salame, 18, from the Bureij refugee camp in Gaza, had been involved in various attempted terror activities during the last two years. . . . The plan called for Salame to go to Jerusalem for treatment at the hospital's ophthalmology department. He was then supposed to drop the poison, made from a combination of baking powder and an unnamed liquid poison, into the hospital's drinking water reservoirs. In return, he would be paid NIS 300.

Three hundred new Israel shekels is the equivalent of about $62, so he couldn't have been doing it for the money. It must've been a labor of hate.

Meanwhile, the Jerusalem Post reports the death toll in yesterday's Tel Aviv suicide bombing is up to six. Jonathan "Yoni" Jesner, a 19-year-old Scotsman, succumbed to his wounds this afternoon.

Holding Terrorists Accountable
A lawyer representing Sept. 11 victims says that "preparations for the September 11 attacks were part-funded via a network of fictitious Saudi and Spanish companies controlled by an ex-accountant of the Saudi royal family," Agence France-Presse reports:

A former accountant who worked for members of the Saudi royal family, Mohammed Galeb Kalaje Zouaydi, arrested in Spain last April, is considered to be the "big financier" behind an al-Qaeda network in Europe.

And how's this for an accounting scandal: "A Russian-born Canadian is under arrest in Germany as the key suspect in a multimillion-dollar arms-smuggling operation that shipped weapons to Middle Eastern countries, including Iraq, that are under a UN arms embargo," the Toronto Globe and Mail reports. The man's name? Arthur Andersen.

Violent Khartoum Character
"A Sudanese air force pilot who planned to hijack an airliner and smash it into the White House has been taken into custody," Fox News reports. "The pilot has ties to Al Qaeda and was trained in a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan, sources said." The Washington Times originally reported the pilot was thought to be at large in Canada.

Have a Heart
Back in June, we noted the heartwarming story of Masai tribesmen in Kenya who had donated 14 cows to America in a show of sympathy after Sept. 11. Now some Americans have returned the favor. A group of students and parents from the tony Washington suburb of McLean, Va., were on safari at Kenya's Mara National Reserve in June, when a teacher, Joseph Lekuton, learned of a six-year-old Masai girl, Mantaine Minis, who had a life-threatening heart disease. The Washington Post reports:

He helped launch a campfire discussion about the Masai gift and about what a group of people from an American suburb could do to return a kindness.

"It wasn't a lot of money, but they gave those cows to say, 'Here, we feel your loss,' " Lekuton said he told the group before telling them Mantaine's story. "So, I asked the children, 'What can we do to help them?' . . . Really, it was magical. In just a short moment everyone agreed 'We can help her.' "

One of the parents on the trip, Edward Lefrak, is chief of cardiac surgery at Inova Fairfax Hospital. He "borrowed a stethoscope to listen to Mantaine's heart and agreed to treat her in the United States. Don Hutchins, on the trip with his wife and two teenage children, offered to pay the airfare." Yesterday "a team of doctors led by pediatric cardiac surgeon Bechara Akl and assisted by Lefrak sealed an open blood vessel near her heart. In less than two hours in the operating room, the little girl's life was turned around." Says Mantaine's father, Stephen Minis: "It is only God that would send Dr. Lefrak into the Mara."

Gratuitous Sept. 11 Reference of the Day
"How does something this sick, this demented, happen only a year and eight days after Sept. 11?" asks Chicago Sun-Times columnist Jay Mariotti. To what is he referring?

1. Anti-Semitic riots on college campuses.
2. The alleged terror plot of the Lackawana, N.Y., al Qaeda suspect.
3. The Sudanese pilot's alleged plan to slam a plane into the White House?

The correct answer, of course, is d. None of the above. He was referring to an incident in which a pair of idiots jumped onto the field at Chicago's Comiskey Park during a game last night and started pummeling Kansas City Royals first-base coach Tom Gamboa. It's an appalling (and appallingly stupid) crime, to be sure, but not exactly on the scale of Sept. 11.

Krugman Watch
Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman waxes nostalgic:

This really is like the early 1990's all over again. The economic similarity between our current difficulties and the slump under the first George Bush is stronger than most people realize. In 1990, as in 2001, the economy went into a recession in part because of past excesses--though those quaint old scandals involving junk bonds and real estate speculation seem very tame in the age of Enron and Tyco. In the early 1990's, as today, recession was followed by a "jobless recovery," in which G.D.P. grew but employment didn't. And then as now there was concern that interest rate cuts by the Fed might not be enough to turn the economy around--though back then we didn't yet have the example of Japan to show that the "liquidity trap," in which even a zero interest rate isn't enough to produce an economic recovery, was a real possibility in the modern world.

Krugman doesn't note that whereas President Bush cut taxes last year, his father had just raised them back in the early '90s.

Dispatch From the Porn Belt
The Associated Press reports from Olympia, capital of Washington state (Gore by 5.58%), that the state Supreme Court ruled yesterday that "photographing or videotaping up a woman's skirt in a public place doesn't violate a voyeurism law. . . . The unanimous ruling found that the law only protects people in places where they have a reasonable expectation of privacy. The court rejected prosecutors' arguments that people reasonably expect privacy under their clothing."

A Snowball in Hell
"Peruvian anti-narcotics police incinerate a bag containing cocaine after making drug-busts in Lima," reads the caption on a Reuters photo. What's next, flying pigs?

She's Got the Beat
"Actress Tawny Kitaen agreed Wednesday to a plea bargain on spousal abuse and battery charges alleging she attacked her husband, St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Chuck Finley," the Associated Press reports:

Under the deal, Kitaen didn't admit guilt but agreed to enter a spousal battery counseling program. If she completes the program and other conditions of the deal, the case could eventually be dropped.

Kitaen, 41, also must avoid contact with her husband and make a $500 donation to a battered-women's shelter.

Pardon us for asking, but if she battered a man, why is the court making her donate money to a shelter for battered women?

Diaper Rash
"A plan by city fathers to diaper carriage-drawing horses in order to keep streets clean has animal lovers and horsemen up in arms," the Associated Press reports from Vienna. "Donning diapers themselves, animal rights activists lined up at Heroes' Square in front of the former imperial Hofburg Palace Thursday to protest the plan."

In a related story, USA Today founder Al Neuharth devotes his column today to a description of his personal struggle with incontinence. We never thought we'd say this, but Neuharth and USA Today are providing their readers with too much information.

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Today on OpinionJournal:

• Benjamin Netanyahu: The case for toppling Saddam.
• Daniel Henninger: The return of the American melting pot.
• Peggy Noonan: Muslims demand sensitivity. They ought to show some too.

And on the Taste page:

• Review & Outlook: Santa Monica's latest economic lunacy.
• Tony & Tacky: A visit to the Spam Museum.
• Tunku Varadarajan on the iconography of tyranny.
• Robert Messenger on literature and war.
• Michael Freedman on an Amish newspaper columnist.

And don't miss "WSJ Editorial Board With Stuart Varney," tonight at 9 EDT and PDT on CNBC.