by JAMES TARANTO
Wednesday, November 13, 2002 12:29 P.M. EST

Keep Your Laws off My Poster
You'd better sit down before you read this item, that's how shocking it is. An anonymous blogger called "The Mighty Barrister" reports that SaveRoe.com, a Planned Parenthood Web site, is running an "artwork and poster contest" in honor of next year's 30th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Entrants are invited to submit "an original piece of artwork or poster that celebrates 30 years of choice and illustrates the concept that 'Behind Every Choice is a Story.' " So far, so good. But scroll down to "terms and conditions" and you find this:

Children under age 18 must have a parent or legal guardian's permission to submit their designs and for us to publish it along with their name.

Does the First Amendment have an age limit? There's no age limit in the amendment that guarantees the right to abortion (sorry, but we forget the number), at least according to Planned Parenthood. So how come if a kid is old enough to have an abortion, she's not old enough to make a poster celebrating choice? Oh sure, most kids will consult with their parents before sending in a poster, and we're all for parental involvement, but what if a would-be entrant's parents are abusive or, heaven forbid, antichoice?

This is not mere alarmism. Parents have been known to exploit their children for political purposes. The California Patriot reports that some 200 little kids got dragged to Berkeley City Hall for an "antiwar" protest yesterday:

Armed with protest signs, microphones, and Harry Potter lunch-boxes, elementary and pre-school children demanded city leaders contact President Bush and halt his hawkish "war for oil." . . .

Though most students at the rally could not even name Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, many seemed certain the pending U.S. led war in Iraq is about oil.

Celia, age 6, who could not spell her hyphenated last name, told the crowd President Bush "wants to make war because he wants oil."

"What is so important about cars anyway," she asked.

Later, when asked if she could name the president of Iraq, Celia, stumped, turned to a friend and asked, "Is it a boy or a girl?" Her friend, equally puzzled, responded, "I think it's a boy."

Noah, who declined to give his last name, also age six, asserted the looming war is not only about oil, but also "other things, like Bush wanting land."

"It is like us squashing ants," he said. . . .

Skyler Johnson, 5, hadn't learned much about the conflict in Iraq. When he was asked who is the President of Iraq, he shrugged his shoulders and said, "My mom might know." After she came over and gave him little coaching, he was able to muster, "We don't want war. Oil kills lots of people."

Requiring "parental consent" for political speech produces just this kind of coercion. If Planned Parenthood does not drop its unconscionable, unconstitutional, extremist, out-of-the-mainstream, antiwoman, antichild, antichoice policy, America risks going back to the dark days of back-alley posters.

C'mon, Vlad, Tell Us How You Really Feel
Russia's President Vladimir Putin apparently doesn't buy all that religion-of-peace stuff. The Washington Post describes his comments about Chechen terrorists at a news conference yesterday:

"They talk about setting up a worldwide [Islamic state] and the need to kill Americans and their allies," Putin said. "They talk about the need to kill all . . . non-Muslims, or 'crusaders,' as they put it. If you are a Christian, you are in danger.

"If you decided to abandon your faith and become an atheist, you also are to be liquidated according to their concept. You are in danger if you decide to become a Muslim. It is not going to save you anyway because they believe traditional Islam is hostile to their goals."

He also told a reporter for Le Monde: "If you want to become an Islamic radical and have yourself circumcised, I invite you to come to Moscow. I would recommend that he who does the surgery does it so you'll have nothing growing back afterward."

Mikhail Gorbachev, one suspects, would be more conciliatory. The Boston Globe reports that the Soviet Union's last dictator is calling for, as the Globe puts it, "a way short of war to defuse the threat posed by Iraq." Quoth Gorby: "I don't think we can build a better world through military domination." Why not? Military domination is what got us rid of the Soviet Union.

Getting to Yes
"Iraq's U.N. ambassador said on Wednesday he would be delivering to the U.N. Security Council shortly a letter that diplomats said would accept a U.N. resolution ordering Baghdad to disarm," Reuters reports. That means Saddam Hussein has vetoed a unanimous decision of the Iraqi Parliament! What does he think he is, a dictator?

You Don't Say
"If bin Laden's voice is authenticated, his references to recent events would be the clearest indication the terrorist mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks survived U.S. airstrikes in Afghanistan last year."--Associated Press dispatch on a purported Osama bin Laden audiotape, Nov. 12

The Nativists Are Restless
Saudi Arabia's regime is spending buckets of money on PR flacks and admen in an effort to improve its image among Americans. Then there's the Arab News, the Jeddah-based English-language paper whose mission seems to be to prove that Saudi Arabia really is as ghastly as its critics say. Here's an Arab News translation of a foreigner-bashing article from the Abha-based Al-Watan newspaper:

I wish I could take His Excellency the Minister of Labor and Social Affairs on a five-day journey to five Saudi cities. I want him to see for himself how certain urban centers have become Little Dhaka and Little Delhi--or something in between.

If His Excellency's time allows, I will take him to every lane and alley where our youth are experiencing the bitter taste of unemployment. I will show the minister, whom I am sure knows these things inside out, how our youth and many others have been turned into "mercenaries" knocking at the doors of businesses owned by foreigners. Things have taken a turn for the worst with our youth hired and sponsored by the very people who were brought here to work. . . .

If my financial conditions allowed, I would buy His Excellency the Minister five air tickets to five world cities. Together we would see how London is indeed for the British, how Madrid is for the Spanish, how Peshawar is the city of the Pakistani and the Afghan.

'The Jews of the Arabs'
"A Kuwaiti court has ordered Al-Jazeera television to pay $16,670 in damages to four Kuwaiti lawyers who sued it for slandering their country," the Associated Press reports. What was the slander? "In an episode aired Feb. 5, a guest on the live talk show, Sayyed al-Nassar, described Kuwaitis as 'the Jews of the Arabs.' The term 'Jew' is considered derogatory to some people in the Arab world."

Mars Attacks!
Ibrahim Hooper, head of the Council on American Islamic Relations, complains (as usual) that Muslims are getting a bum rap. "When people of other faiths commit crimes or violent acts, people don't generalize to the whole faith, but when a Muslim commits a violent act, somehow it is an indictment to their entire faith," Hooper tells CNSNews.com. He adds: "Muslims occasionally do bad things, so do Jews, so do Christians, so do Hindus, so do Martians."

Yeah, well, we all know that Martians are the Jews of the space aliens.

The Massacre That Wasn't--XXI
IMRA has a translation of an article from the Hebrew-language paper Ma'ariv about a "documentary"by Muhammad Bakri called "Jenin, Jenin," which was screened in Jerusalem. Writes David Sangan:

Dr. Abu Riali, director of the hospital in Jenin, claims in the film that the western wing of the hospital was shelled and destroyed and that the IDF knowingly hit the hospital's water and power supplies. There never was any such wing and in any case, no part of the hospital was either shelled or blown up. IDF soldiers took care not to enter its grounds even though we knew that it was serving as a refuge for several wanted fugitives. We guarded the water, electricity and oxygen supplies to the hospital all throughout the fighting and assisted in setting up an emergency generator after the city's electrical system was damaged. Bakri himself is seen in the film wandering the hospital's clean and well-kept corridors, but not in the blown up wing. I met him outside the theater and asked him if he had visited the western wing. At first he said no, then he corrected himself and said, "You remember one moment in the film with shattered glass--it was from there."

Who but those wily Israelis could find a way to blow up buildings that never even existed?

All in the Family
Sirhan Sirhan apparently isn't related to Sirhan Sirhan. The Jerusalem Post reports that the second Sirhan, suspected to be the Arab terrorist who murdered two children and three adults in Israel Sunday, was thought to be a distant relative of the first Sirhan, the Arab terrorist who murdered Sen. Robert Kennedy in 1968. But Israeli officials "later withdrew that claim."

Look Who's Clucking
Writing in National Review Online, Stanley Kurtz has an interesting thought on the "chicken hawk" smear and the Iraq war:

All the talk about "chicken hawks" hasn't done much to deter or discourage the hawks from pressing their case, but I do think the "chicken hawk" theme helps explain why the Democrats are incapable of coming to grips with this war (even to coherently critique it, much less embrace it--as their Democratic forbears surely would have).

You see, when they talk about the so-called chicken hawks, the Democratic Left is really talking about themselves--about the way they would feel about themselves were they to accept the case for this war. To become a hawk, even in circumstances very different from Vietnam, would activate intolerable shame and self-doubt in those who avoided service under the banner of the peace movement. These people went beyond mere opposition to the tactics or pragmatics of Vietnam and turned anti-militarism into a kind of quasi-religious imperative. So to acknowledge that there are circumstances when patriotism, strength, and the use of force are not only justified, but noble, would shatter a moral self-image cultivated over literally decades.

There's probably some truth to this, though its explanatory power is somewhat limited. After all, the most hysterically antiwar senator is Robert Byrd of West Virginia, was already middle-aged when America got into Vietnam, and the Baghdad Boys, Reps. David Bonior and Jim McDermott, actually did serve in the military in the 1960s, albeit not in Vietnam.

Stupidity Watch
Remember Michael Niman? He's the journalism prof from the prestigious Buffalo State College who penned an article two weeks ago suggesting that Paul Wellstone may have been murdered. Andrew Sullivan blasted Niman in Salon, and now Niman has fired back. He claims there was nothing out of the ordinary about his floating the notion of a Wellstone murder, apparently mistaking America for some Third World banana republic: "It is quite normal to have a comprehensive investigation when a leader of the political opposition anywhere in the world meets with an unexpected death. The more international involvement there is in that investigation, the more credible the results are. The concept is painfully simple, and it's not new." Niman adds:

Sullivan's zeal in attacking a journalist for raising difficult questions is chilling. For debate to survive in a democratic society, we need dissent. It is the responsibility of the press to provide a space for opinions that deviate from the status quo. Questions about Wellstone's death fit into this category. While Sullivan certainly has a right to disagree with my call for an international investigation, his baseless personal attack against me, for the crime of writing about an unpopular subject, is also a stifling attack upon our free press.

Of course, by this logic, isn't Niman's attack on Sullivan for Sullivan's attack on Niman also "a stifling attack upon our free press"?

Meanwhile, the delightfully named actor Kevin Spacey is speaking out in favor of keeping Saddam Hussein in power. The New York Daily News quotes him: "I hope that wisdom will prevail, that we'll find a a way to diplomatically solve what is no bigger a crisis than the missiles of October"--that is, the Cuban missile crisis. Yeah, the Cuban missile crisis was nothing! It only brought the world to the brink of nuclear holocaust. What's the big whoop?

Diabolically Funny
In a letter to the editor of the Lincoln Journal Star (third letter) Randall Rimovsky weighs in:

The dictatorship begins as the diabolical Republican party rises to power.

We will see senior citizens shivering, begging for food, and dying a tortuous [sic] death after George W. Bush shoves them into the streets.

Hospitals and care facilities will suffer neglect as the attention to health care is diverted by the worship of war.

Calamity inevitably abounds. Terrorists will unleash horror as we've never seen before, because the warmongering dictator, George W. Bush, will now have his way, and the terrorists are really going to get mad at us now.

Pollution will proliferate and thousands will perish by poisoning through our food, water and air. The delicate environment will deteriorate before our very eyes.

Children, especially black children, will starve in our schools. Schools? What am I saying? There won't be any schools.

Black Americans and all Americans of color will now be thrust into oblivion as affirmative action is thrashed and discrimination flourishes throughout the nation. We will see unemployment numbers among minority citizens soar like never before.

Corporate executives will line their pockets with gold while we watch the average workers' income plunge.

Roe vs. Wade is inevitably history, and we will see stories abound of bloodied girls in the streets desperately trying to rid themselves of the horrible inconvenience of an illegitimate child.

Yes, the dictatorship begins. George W. Bush and the diabolical Republicans will reign over a nation of barbaric horror.

As we all know, there are many cable news networks that are constantly battling each other to increase their respective audience.

We undoubtedly will have the ugly misfortune of witnessing these deliberate acts of violence upon our nation.

Is Rimovsky a brilliant satirist or just a nut? We report, you decide.

A Robert Fisk Wannabe
A mountain lion administered what one might call a "fisking" to a Boulder, Colo., man, the New York Times reports:

When Greg McCoy found Oreo, his daughter's house cat, in the jaws of a mountain lion early this year, he grabbed the big cat by the tail with both hands, dragged it onto his front lawn and jumped on top of it.

With his left arm, he tried to hold the writhing lion in a headlock. With his right hand, he attempted to yank Oreo from the lion's mouth.

As Mr. McCoy, 37, and 215 pounds, tugged on the bloodied house cat, the lion--an adult female weighing perhaps 100 pounds--struggled out of his headlock. Before it ran off to eat Oreo, it swatted Mr. McCoy across the face with a rear paw.

McCoy's reaction to the incident is remarkably reminiscent of that incident in which anti-American polemicist Robert Fisk got beaten up by a mob of Afghans, but explained the whole thing away as an example of justified anti-Western animus. Here's the Times again:

Rangers in Boulder will destroy a lion that harms people, but Mr. McCoy did not report the incident.

"I deserved every piece of what happened to me," he said. "We choose to live in their backyard, so we got to put up with them."

One wonders if McCoy would have felt the same way if the mountain lion had ended up killing or injuring one of his neighbors.

Homer Nods
Yesterday's item on David Duke overstated the credentials of the white-supremacist pol: He is a former Louisiana state representative, not a former Louisiana state senator.

Sensitivity on Parade
The Warner Grand Theatre, a city-run movie house in the San Pedro section of Los Angeles, has canceled a showing of "Tora! Tora! Tora!," the 1970 movie about Pearl Harbor, that had been scheduled for Pearl Harbor Day, Dec. 7. The Torrance Daily Breeze reports that "Los Angeles City Councilwoman Janice Hahn concluded that the event would have been insensitive to the Japanese-American community."

This is one of the dumbest things we've heard all week. As blogger Eugene Volokh points out, Japanese-Americans are Americans. "The attack on America was an attack on their country. Suggesting that recalling the events of that day is somehow 'insensitive to the Japanese-American community' is an insult to that very community."

Say What?
"Academic Integrity Still Plagues Campus"--headline, Michigan Daily (University of Michigan), Nov. 12

A Free-Speech Victory
In a case we first noted in June 2001, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals has overturned a decision of the district's Commission on Human Rights that would have forced the Boy Scouts to allow a pair of openly gay men to serve as scoutmasters. The commission had defied a Supreme Court decision that recognized the Scouts' right, as an "expressive association" to bar openly homosexual members or leaders.

Quack Power
A pair of social workers and a psychologist "are writing a book about what they call 'post-traumatic slavery disorder'--a derivative of post-traumatic stress disorder," the Boston Globe reports. "They are holding workshops to propose to fellow professionals that drug abuse, broken families, crime, and low educational attainment in segments of the black community can be directly linked to the trauma of slavery, and that 'black people as a whole are suffering from PTSD.' "

Reader Mark Schulze comments: "Post-traumatic potato disorder--that's what I'm going to claim about my Irish heritage if this one goes anywhere. I go into convulsions whenever I hear someone refer to a police van as a paddy wagon!"

Do you have an idea for a new psychological disorder? If so, e-mail it to us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and if it's witty enough, we just might use it.

(Elizabeth Crowley helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Jim Dolas, Drew Hanser, Ray Dunn, Mark Schulze, Rob Federle, Robert Duncan, Brian Herrick, Kay Hymowitz, Chris Hayes, Leslie Baynes, David Simon, Joshua Trevino, Erik Moy, Michael Segal, Elena Matis, Joel Goldberg, Marie Bourgeois, Natalie Cohen, Barak Moore, Carl Sherer, Monty Krieger, Rajan Raman, Michael Zukerman, Mara Gold, Bill Harrison, Elliot Ganz, Jerome Marcus, John Hartness, Ryan Horn, Ed Graff, Alex Lubarov, Yuri Krongauz, Brett Angal, Scott Siegel, Adam Ginensky, Miriam Himmelfarb, Russell Depalma, Laurence Rothenberg, Dave Purrington, D. Sweeney, Leo O'Drudy, Catherine Lassen, Edward Lilly, Greg McAllister, Anthony Brunsvold, Justin Shubow, Richard Haisley, Dan Lupfer, Ed Jasaitis and Ron Robertson. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)

Today on OpinionJournal:

• Karen Elliott House: The eclipse of North Korea's "sunshine" policy.
• Pete du Pont: Nancy Pelosi is true to her ideals. What a disaster for the Dems.
• James Q. Wilson: Can Islam reconcile religion and freedom?