Goldstone and goose feathers

Judge Richard Goldstone, author of the infamous United Nations report blaming Israel for intentionally targeting civilians during the recent Gaza conflict, conceded in an op-ed published in the Washington Post on April 1 that Israel did not do so. He also conceded that Hamas was guilty of such conduct. I'm reminded of the story that opens Joseph Telushkin's Words That Hurt, Words That Heal (one of my favorite books). In it, spreading slander is compared to scattering the feathers from a pillow to the winds. Collecting the feathers is impossible, as is repairing the damage done by the slanderous words. Goldstone lent his name and prestige to a genocidal hatchet job; one op-ed now cannot remedy the consequences.

Same old, same old

Classic novels are classic for a reason. If you're feeling despondent about wars being declared overnight, about government incomptence and corruption; about the parlous state of education; about how intellectuals make everything worse; or even about the terrible and destructive proliferation of lawyers - cheer up, there's nothing new under the sun!

Or so I learned when Rachel persuaded me to listen to an audio recording of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Check it out if, like me, you somehow missed it. The discovery that we've been going to the dogs a long time made me positively cheerful.

Today's news

I have lots of things to post to this blog, but have been transfixed by the news from Japan. My heart goes out to all those suffering from the earthquakes and tsunami - what horrifying events!

I did want to note, though, that City Journal just published my review of a book by Russian novelist Elena Chudinova about the Islamization of Europe. I realize there are several orders of magnitude difference in importance between the first and second paragraphs of this entry...

American Nazi-hunters

Before he died in May 2009, my friend Mark Richard worked hard to get the Department of Justice to release a detailed history of its Office of Special Investigations (OSI), the office set up in 1979 to pursue Nazi war criminals. The Justice Department had repeatedly blocked publication of the report; a private group, the National Security Archive, in November 2009 submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for the report that was denied.

The Archive then filed a lawsuit in May 2010. In response to that request, according to the its website: "The Department of Justice censored dozens of pages of a candid history of Nazi-hunting (and Nazi-protecting) by the U.S. government to such a self-defeating extent that former officials leaked the entire document to the New York Times this week, instead of fulfilling the Freedom of Information request and lawsuit filed by the National Security Archive and its counsel David Sobel."

This is an incredible story, in and of itself quite shameful. The good news, however, is that Mark's report is now in the public domain. It's over 600 pages, so I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but I look forward to doing so. (You can access it through either of the above links.)

Mark, who pushed so hard to get the report compiled and served as its editor, was an individual of great integrity and, as a result, his 'warts and all' approach seems to have irritated Justice potentates. Many, many thanks to Sheila for telling me about this latest turn of events.

You gotta read this

I've been reading Stanley Kurtz' new book, Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism, thinking I'd post a review of it on this blog. But I decided I can't wait until I finish it. Here's why. I got to pp. 45-49, to a section describing the ideas of Peter Dreier, a long-time prominent socialist who served as an advisor to Obama's 2008 presidential campaign.

Way back in 1979, Dreier recommended a two-part strategy for turning the United States socialist. First, groups like ACORN must worm their ways into various sectors like the banking system, public utility commissions, etc.

Then, according to Kurtz: "The second part of the strategy involves 'injecting unmanageable strains into the capitalist system, strains that precipitate an economic and/or political crisis.' ... Dreier's plan is to gradually expand government spending until the country nears fiscal collapse. At that point, a public accustomed to its entitlements will presumably turn on its capitalist masters when they propose cutbacks to restore fiscal balance." (p. 47)

If any of this sounds familiar, think back to what Obama has done since elected. Radical-in-Chief has made me wonder if those huge surges in deficit spending were intentional. The only good news in this story is that Dreier and Obama never thought average Americans would demand fiscal discipline. Long live the Tea Party! And read Kurtz' book!

Some weekend reading

If anyone is looking for some good reading, here are two new books I highly recommend:

-- Daniel Hannan's The New Road to Serfdom is a plea by a British conservative for Americans not to forget what makes the United States unique. He warns: "The U.S. Constitution was both a product and a protector of American optimism. When one is disregarded, the other dwindles." His book also contains a devastating critique of the EU's complete lack of democracy.

-- Mark Durie, in The Third Choice, lays out clearly the discriminatory rules that Islam applies to non-Muslim peoples and how those rules have been enforced over the centuries. Durie warns that Westerners, often acting either out of a desire to be conciliatory or out of fear, adopt a submissive position that Muslims interpret as accepting Islamic superiority.

The weekend is only half over, so enjoy reading them tomorrow!

Self-promotion time

Here's my book review in City Journal of two books: A God Who Hates: The Courageous Woman Who Inflamed the Muslim World Speaks Out Against the Evils of Islam, by Wafa Sultan and Cruel and Usual Punishment: The Terrifying Global Implications of Islamic Law, by Nonie Darwish. They both argue that repression, cruelty, and fear are central to Islam.
I highly recommend both.

Self-promotion break

The quarterly journal of the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) has just published an article on radical Islam in Europe I wrote in its Winter 2010 issue. Editor Mackubin Owens refers to it as "a provocative and sure-to-be controversial article" - we shall see!

CAIRing for you

P. David Gaubatz and Paul Sperry have just written a book, Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That's Conspiring to Islamize America (WND Books) based on an undercover investigation of the Washington, DC headquarters of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). The information was collected by Gaubatz' son Chris, who worked at the headquarters as an intern.

Daniel Pipes highlights several key findings of the book:

-- rather than 50,000 members, CAIR actually has only 5,133.

-- 97% of its income comes from abroad, from various Islamic sources, and only 3% from membership dues.

CAIR has spent years advising the U.S. government on the views of American Muslims. Instead, as Pipes suggests, CAIR should be forced to register as an agent of a foreign power, with no tax-exempt status.

Pipes speculates that this book will lead to CAIR's demise; he expects, though, that the next Islamist front organization "will be a more savvy, honest, respectable institution that continues its work of bringing Islamic law to the United States and Canada while avoiding the mistakes and apparent illegalities that render CAIR vulnerable."

Liberal fascism

I finally read Jonah Goldberg's 2007 book, Liberal Fascism, and recommend it to anyone who is curious about where ideas come from and how history can be distorted for political and philosophical reasons.

As I recall, I learned in high school that the American Progressive movement flourished in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, then petered out. Goldberg shows that this was far from the case. The Progressives instead became an important current in the Democratic party.

Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama come from this tradition which, as Goldberg points out, has ideals, goals and techniques in common with fascist movements. No, he doesn't argue that these or other Americans were fascists - but he points out similarities and links which were in fact noted at the time.

This is a history book, not a polemic, and Goldberg has done his research.

Believe it or not

These two news items, unfortunately, come from the United States.

First, the Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir is holding a recruiting conference on July 19 at a hotel in Chicago. Hizb ut-Tahrir is dedicated to overthrowing Western democracy; if you want some insights on how it operates, read Ed Husain's The Islamist. In the 1990s, Husain spent time working inside Hizb ut-Tahrir in London. (Thanks to the American Islamic Forum for Democracy.)

Second, here's a video taken at this year's Arab festival in Dearborn, Michigan. Note the open thuggery, and the clear message that Christians aren't welcome. (Thanks to Smooth Stone.)

Islam and the West

In Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism & Its Discontents, Robert Irwin highlights some of the tensions between Islam and the West that have gotten lost in the historical mist. Two struck me as particularly interesting:

-- Christopher Columbus, by sailing West, was "seeking to outflank the Islamic empires of the Ottomans, Mamluks and Safavids [in Persia]. He believed that he lived very close to the Last Days and he was inspired by knowledge that astrologers had predicted the imminent collapse of Muhammad's sect and the coming of the Antichrist."

-- The Austro-Hungarian ambassador to the Ottomans half a century later "believed that the Christian powers were wasting their time and resources in America, while Christianity's very survival was threatened by Ottoman advances in Europe ..."

And indeed, it wasn't until the Turks were defeated a hundred years later at the gates of Vienna that the tide turned against the Ottomans.

Islam in Europe

Here's a report of a talk by a prominent scholar of Islam, Ralph Ghadban, given to a small audience at Ohio State University. He argues that many Muslim immigrants never intended to integrate into Western society, and that one of the biggest shocks they received in Europe was their encounter with secular legal systems.

Ghadban is also very critical of Tariq Ramadan, the controversial figure viewed by some as the face of 'moderate' Islam in Europe. Ghadban considers him a dangerous man because he wants to keep Muslims segregated from their host European societies. Ghadban, who was born in Lebanon and spent many years in Germany, is now at Princeton. He's written a very interesting book on Ramadan and the Islamization of Europe (unfortunately, I don't think it's been translated into English).

Then and now

I highly recommend The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes. I've had it on my night stand for some time now, intending to read it to increase my understanding of the Great Depression. She argues that many of the government's actions not only failed to cure the Great Depression, but made it worse.

When I finally picked it up yesterday, I was so startled by the parallels in what she describes to what's going on today that I wrote this short piece that has been published by The American Thinker. Down to the presidential urge to expoit the opportunities inherent in crisis situations and the governmental itch to micromanage businesses, it's uncanny.

LOL

That's the abbreviation for 'lots of laughs' (for those of you who don't send text messages or twitter all day long), and it applies in spades to the new novel by Libby Malin, Fire Me! OK, I have to add a disclaimer: she is a close and much-loved relative. But aside from that, if you want a funny yet thoughtful book, I strongly recommend it. As for me, I'm waiting for the movie.

Right-wing extremism

So much has been written about the Department of Homeland Security memo about right-wing extremism that I finally broke down and read it. Well, that isn't completely accurate: I skimmed it. I also read the companion piece on left-wing extremism. (Thanks to Jeff for providing links to both.)

The memo on left-wing extremism talks about the danger that environmentalists, animal activists or anarchists may hack into and destroy computer systems of companies whose actions they oppose. It lists a number of recent incidents and describes how the reliance of various companies on their IT systems continues to grow in order to make its point. All in all, it struck me as a reasonable piece of analysis. It left open the question of the relative threat posed by other activities of these groups, such as arson, but at least it made sense internally.

The memo on right-wing extremism consists of speculation; what facts it marshalls date from the 1990s. Analytical pieces based on 20-year-old, spotty data usually don't see the light of day. (Was Timothy McVeigh part of a trend? No evidence of that.) It came to light just as Obama top advisor Axelrod was characterizing the tea parties as 'unhealthy' - a context that certainly puts it in a highly unfavorable light.

The White House has distanced itself from the report. If President Obama is smart, he'll disown it.

Defining extremism

The Policy Exchange think tank in the UK has just published a report, Choosing our friends wisely, that reviews British policy for countering extremist Muslim ideology and finds it severely flawed.

One major drawback it identifies "is the premise that non-violent extremists can be made to act as bulwarks against violent extremists." As a result, "Some of the government's chosen collaborators in 'addressing grievances' of angry young Muslims are themselves at the forefront of stoking those grievances against British foreign policy; western social values; and alleged state-sanctioned 'Islamophobia.'"

The report is chock-full of information and pulls no punches; good job by Policy Exchange. (Thanks to Jeff).

Swedish banks and Bolsheviks

If you want a new look at a critical period in 20th century history, here's a review of what sounds like a fascinating book: Sean McKeekin's History's Greatest Heist: The Looting of Russia by the Bolsheviks. McKeekin charts the fate of all the artistic masterpieces and other articles of value sold by the Bolsheviks to the West from 1917-1922. Since the Bolsheviks had destroyed the Russian economy, these sales were a vital source of income for them.

My title to the contrary, it wasn't just Swedish banks that helped fence these treasures. Most Western governments took part. According to reviewer Adam Kirsch, "...the real value of this book is that it shows just how well the West lived up to Lenin's cynical prophecy: 'The capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang them.'"

Jewel of Medina panned

After all the hoop-la over Sherry Jones' novel, The Jewel of Medina, it was finally published...and turns out, it's not a very good novel. Robert Spencer notes that it presents a saccharine interpretation of Mohammed and is poorly written. Lorraine Adams was equally offended by its poor prose.

Adams appears to suggest - although I'm not clear on this - that it's a shame to risk offending others with such a low-brow production. She applauds the international writers association PEN for remaining silent on the issue. So if your prose or storytelling abilities fall short you should, to paraphrase French President Jacques Chirac, not lose an opportunity to remain silent? I would argue that such a position is cowardly. Such books should be published; let readers chose what they wish to read.

More self-promotion

This time, it's a review essay about two books dealing with radical Islam in Bosnia and the Balkans more generally: Chris Deliso's The Coming Balkan Caliphate: The Threat of Radical Islam to Europe and the West, and John Schindler's Unholy Terror: Bosnia, Al-Qa'ida and the Rise of Global Jihad. They both argue that the war in Bosnia was an important way-station in Al Qaeda's development of global jihad, and that radical Islam is becoming ever more influential throughout the Balkans.