I have a confession to make. Right after 9/11, I was given a CD by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, which included their rendition of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." I put it in my car's CD player and played that song over and over, often singing along as I drove. It wasn't only the patriotism it evoked that stirred me, but the sense of national unity. That song was what the choir sang at the close of the memorial service at the National Cathedral right after 9/11. And although that was such a wrenching moment for our nation, I look back on it now with a certain longing and nostalgia. For it was such a moment of American solidarity, with people rallying to people and everyone rallying to the president.And that is what makes me so sad about this moment. It appears we are on the verge of going to war in a way that will burst all the national solidarity and good will that followed 9/11, within our own country and the world.
This war is so unprecedented that it has always been a gut call--and my gut has told me four things.
The point is that in the immediate wake of 9-11 even people of the Left, like him, were filled with a martial and patriotic fervor, prepared, though only momentarily, to wage a war on terrorism. Here, after all, are the words he was singing along to, penned during another, rather more divisive, American religious war:
Battle Hymn of the Republic (Julia Ward Howe, February 1862,
Atlantic Monthly)Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:His truth is marching on.
I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:His day is marching on.
I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
"As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,Since God is marching on."
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!Our God is marching on.
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me:
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,While God is marching on.
In the next few days, George W. Bush will make critical decisions likely to determine the fate of his presidency. Whether or not he goes to war with Iraq, and whether he is successful in breaking the tyrannical grip of Saddam Hussein, will decide whether the American people praise him or reject him, and what his place in history will be.It became painfully clear to me watching the State of the Union address this year that I've drunk the Koolaid: I'm W's man. He is my leader and I am his follower (unless there's been no regime change in Iraq by the next election, in which case I'm moving to France). So I like a good "hasn't W grown in office?" column as much as the next guy.
But by assuming that Bush's focus is on his popularity and the history books, Hughes, like so many observers both pro and anti-Bush, betrays his Clinton-era thinking. These observers are thinking too small. What George Bush intends is nothing less than ending the post-war security system and setting up a new system for the new century. This is a huge gamble with a commensurate potential payoff, but is as risky as anything the United States has attempted since World War II. Despite my own trust in the President, I find it odd that this is going on without much discussion, mostly because so many observers refuse to take W seriously when he says, in the State of the Union, to the UN or at press conferences dismissed as soporific, that he intends to remake the world.
The bouts of faux nostalgia for the cold war that pop up every now and then are impossible to take seriously. When this nostalgia takes the form, as it has recently, of wishing that the US could be defeated in war it is, at best, puerile. But it is another thing entirely to abandon the structure that, at least in Europe, kept the peace for 50 years and reconciled nations whose wars, over the past three centuries, had threatened more and more of the world. Anything that lasts so long becomes part of the landscape. It is almost impossible to imagine life without it.
And so people forget that the UN was formed to perpetuate the alliance that won World War II. NATO was formed to deter and contain the Soviet Union. With Germany and Japan tamed, with eastern Europe freed, with the Soviet Union gone to the dust-bin of history, the UN and NATO and the rest of the post-war order kept going more out of habit than purpose. Having lost their purpose, they needed a second. What were these powerful institutions to do now?
The first President Bush had an answer: he would use these post-war instruments to shape a new world order. Russia and the US, east and west, rich and poor, white and non-white, north and south, he would gather them all together to provide the stability previously imposed by the cold war. Even better, because we would no longer have to fear that some random hotspot could unleash global thermonuclear Armageddon, we would no longer have to suffer tyrants to live. This worked well once in Iraq. It half worked, without the UN and with a stiff-arm to Russia, in the Balkans. It will never work again and President Bush, contrary to the pop-psych theories that he lives to finish his father's work, has decided to undo that work.
To return to Hughes,
The defining moment in this coming of age was Sept. 11, 2001. Bush's life changed when Osama bin Laden sent his misguided minions on a surprise suicide attack with hijacked airliners against New York and Washington. As Bush said in his press conference last week, he will not take the chance of that happening again.Will the UN or NATO or any collective security arrangement help us prevent another 9/11? Or, given that we can't guarantee our safety, is the old system the best we can do, or can we establish a better system? George Bush believes that the best interests of the United States require a new system, and it is that system that he is now working to establish.
The administration has decided to make the world safer in order to reduce our presence in the world substantially. Remake the middle east, so that it is not a powder keg. Leave Europe to the Europeans. Tame North Korea and reduce our presence in Asia. Through a free trade agreement for the Americas, plus military assistance when needed, build up the economies and the governments of Latin America.
This is, in some ways, a return to an older idea of America's place in the world -- Teddy Roosevelt's vision rather than Franklin's. But it will also depend on 21st century weaponry, technological superiority and the ability to put fires out while they are still smoldering. We will work with others. We will help when needed. We will accept help when offered. But at the end of the day, it will be America relying on itself. As the President said shortly after 9/11, we can do it alone if we have to, we're the United States.
The mavens of collective security deride the President as a cowboy but they have not watched enough westerns. The best follow a simple story: the stranger rides into town, sees a wrong that needs righting, he does what must be done, but he must do so alone. He discovers that the townsfolk, as afraid of him as of those he has fought, will never accept him. At the end, he rides out of town the same way he rode in, alone but tall in the saddle. George Bush hears the theme music playing; its time for the final shoot-out and then we'll saddle up and ride out of town.
A university professor said she was asked to resign for introducing elite students to flaws in Darwinian thought, and she now says academic freedom at her school is just a charade.During a recent honors forum at Mississippi University for Women (MUW), Dr. Nancy Bryson gave a presentation titled "Critical Thinking on Evolution" -- which covered alternate views to evolution such as intelligent design. Bryson said that following the presentation, a senior professor of biology told her she was unqualified and not a professional biologist, and said her presentation was "religion masquerading as science."
The next day, Vice President of Academic Affairs, Dr. Vagn Hansen asked Bryson to resign from her position as head of the school's Division of Science and Mathematics.
MORE:
Arrogance and ignorance: Darwinian Texas Tech professor is going against basic professorial ethics (Marvin Olasky , World)
JACQUES CHIRAC was basking in ecstatic praise from virtually all of France yesterday after his Monday night pledge to defy America and veto a war against Iraq. [...]“In the eyes of the world he has attained the kind of stature that Mandela won in Africa,” La Croix, the Roman Catholic daily, declared.
Le Figaro called M Chirac a “white knight of peace, champion of all the oppressed of the Earth” and suggested that he might win the Nobel Peace Prize.
The talk from Paris dinner tables to works canteens was about pride in France leading the field in a moral cause. The mood, spurred in part by old Gallic reflexes against the “Anglo-Saxons”, reflected the belief that M Chirac had put France back on the map.
“Maybe Chirac stumbled into this, but the old dodger has finally done something great,” was a common refrain among intellectuals who had long regarded him as an unprincipled opportunist.
Le Monde, which until elections last year had led the campaign to expose M Chirac as corrupt, hailed the “nobility” of his cause in defending the international order against “the neo-imperialist Americans”. Liberation, another perennial opponent, the left-wing daily, marvelled at the way in which he was leading the world towards his vision of a multipolar, international order in the face of superpower hegemony. Serge July, Editor of Liberation, said that M Chirac’s intransigence was aimed at saving America from its own “fatal unilateralism”.
With the wind in his sails as never before in 35 years of high politics, M Chirac is in no mood to compromise over a new UN resolution, his aides said. Nor is he likely to rush to help Tony Blair, whom he views as an irritating rival and an adversary of the old EU core, which France dominates with Germany.
A few doubters did air qualms about a US backlash and the damage to Europe. La Tribune, a business daily, said that France’s veto was not justified by any national interests and it would look impotent when Washington launched its war. “France’s influence in the Security Council would be annihilated . . . It would inflict a terrible blow to the (UN) organisation whose role it wants to consecrate,” it said.
While the Socialist and Communist Opposition showered praise on M Chirac, Olivier Dassault, an MP in his UMP party and a boss in the family aerospace and media firm, said that thousands of businesses could be ruined by an anti-French reaction from the US.
MORE:
Chirac basks in warm glow of adulation: President takes plaudits for veto promise (Jon Henley, March 12, 2003, The Guardian)
Tacky Jacques (Daily Sun, 3/11/03)
Democrat Gov. Ed Rendell made it clear Monday he has little choice but to veto his own budget to regain political leverage over a Republican Legislature and complete his ambitious agenda for Pennsylvania.''I'd be fighting this budget battle with one hand tied behind my back ,'' Rendell said. ''I don't see any point in doing that.'' [...]
Rendell took a political black eye last week when the Republican-controlled House voted 113-84 along party lines to send the governor's spending plan to the GOP-dominated Senate. It did so despite Rendell's pleas that lawmakers wait until March 25, when he will detail the second half of his budget proposal. The Senate is scheduled to vote Wednesday.
''We expect to consider the budget in the full Senate on Wednesday,'' said Erik Arneson, an aide to Senate Majority Leader David J. Brightbill,
R-Lebanon. ''At this point, we have no plans to change the budget — pass it as is.''Legislative Republicans have claimed they were simply following Rendell's wishes by moving on the budget — even if the vote came just 48 hours after it was unveiled without public hearings.
But a Rendell veto would reflect badly on the administration's credibility, especially because Rendell had said he'd sign the document if it wasn't changed, said Steve Miskin, spokesman for House Majority Leader John M. Perzel, R-Philadelphia.
''In the future, when he sends us legislation, how do we take it serious that it's serious?'' Miskin asked. ''This is his budget. These are his ideas. These are his numbers. This isn't our budget. We just can't imagine he would veto the first bill that comes to his desk — a bill he sent to us.''
His story in the April edition of the magazine is "A Tale of Two Colonies." Kaplan traveled to Yemen and Eritrea to investigate how the war on terrorism is forcing the United States to be involved with each. Yemen is believed to have the largest al Qaeda presence outside of the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. Kaplan is best known for his book Balkan Ghosts, which former President Clinton turned to before the U.S. involvement in the Bosnian crisis. Kaplan's 1990 book Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan, has just been republished, updating the story.
MORE:
A Post-Saddam Scenario: Iraq could become America's primary staging ground in the Middle East. And the greatest beneficial effect could come next door, in Iran (Robert D. Kaplan, November 2002, Atlantic Monthly)
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday that the United States was in secret contact with elements of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's military who it hopes will step aside or surrender in the event of an American-led attack.Rumsfeld's comments, at a Pentagon news conference broadcast into Iraq, marked the first official indication from the U.S. military that some Iraqi soldiers are cooperating in undermining Saddam.
"They are being communicated with privately at the present time," Rumsfeld said.
"They are being - will be - communicated with, in a more public way. And they will receive instructions so that they can behave in a way that will be seen and understood as being nonthreatening. And they will not be considered combatants, and they will be handled in a way that they are no longer part of the problem."
The disclosure, together with the testing of a terrifying new American bomb Tuesday at an Air Force installation in Florida, seemed aimed at fomenting fear - front and rear - in the Iraqi military.
Three of North America's Great Lakes -- Lake Huron, Lake Superior and Lake Erie -- have frozen over for the first time in nearly a decade after icy weather lasting more than a month, experts at Environment Canada said on Tuesday.This will, of course, get every bit as much attention as the supposed thawing of the north pole. I look forward to reading the New York Times editorial arguing that, given the risks posed by a new ice age, we can't wait for proof but must start mandated air pollution schemes at once.A month of temperatures below minus 4 Fahrenheit has caused an ice blanket averaging as much as 24 inches on the lakes . . . .
Sources tell CBS News that Great Britain – America's closest ally – may find it politically impossible to commit its military to a U.S.-led attack on Saddam Hussein. And that could force the United States to go it alone in Iraq.Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld hinted as much Tuesday.
"To the extent that they are able to participate that would obviously be welcomed. To the extent they are not, well, there are workarounds," Rumsfeld said.
War in Iraq is now supported by fewer than 20 percent of Britons, and Prime Minister Tony Blair has told Washington he needs U.N. authorization, reports CBS News Correspondent Bill Plante.
So Britain is now talking about a new amendment to the draft resolution in the Security Council that would extend the March 17 deadline by as much as another ten days and would include strictly defined disarmament benchmarks – something the U.S. has opposed in the past.
"The United Kingdom is in a negotiation and it's prepared to look at timelines and tests together," Britain's U.N. Ambassador Jeremy Greenstock said. "But I'm pretty sure we're talking about action in March, don't look beyond March."
On the other side was our delegation, sent by Fidel Castro in an attempt to convince his Baghdad ally that a war in the Persian Gulf would be disastrous for Iraq....The idea of a direct appeal to the Iraqi dictator had come from Castro.... Rodrigo Alvarez Cambras, an orthopedic surgeon who years before had removed a tumor from Saddam Hussein's spinal cord, was included. His presence would underscore the friendly, almost intimate, nature of the mission....
The Soviet military, which was kept fully informed on the mission's activities, provided us with detailed descriptions of the allied forces and equipment en route to the region, including information on new weaponry. At the Soviet base in Torrens, on the outskirts of Havana (known as Lourdes to Americans), electronic intelligence had been culled from command centers throughout the United States ...
The electronic surveillance network Echelon played a key role in the capture of the alleged September 11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, it was reported yesterday - as did a $27m payment to an "al-Qaida foot soldier", who may be planning to relocate to Britain. [...]In Washington, the national security agency used Echelon, an intelligence system coordinated by the United States but involving several of its allies, including the UK, to monitor more than 10 mobile phones used by Mohammed.
"They were tracking him for some time," an unnamed intelligence official told the American news magazine US News and World Report. "He would shift; they would follow."
Echelon reportedly monitors phone numbers and voices, then uses satellite triangulation to locate the user. The Swiss justice ministry has confirmed reports that the September 11 hijackers used pre-paid Swiss cellular phones, not registered in any name and thus hard to trace, in preparing the attack.
"Let's say that thing that drug traffickers and terrorists thought they could do to avoid detection are really not effective strategies anymore," said Larry Johnson, a former deputy director for counter-terrorism at the US state department. "The technology being used now [by the authorities] is really pretty effective."
The rival magazine Newsweek quoted a Middle Eastern intelligence source as saying that an unidentified al-Qaida member "turned over and made a deal with the United States", taking the $25m reward offered and extracting a supplementary $2m in order to relocate with his family to the United Kingdom. A US law enforcement source confirmed that the payment had been made, the magazine said.
Other Pakistani intelligence sources said the real breakthrough had come when the FBI had managed to "persuade" an al-Qaida operative arrested earlier to reveal the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden or his close associates. The man was arrested in Quetta, capital of Baluchistan province, but his identity was never made public.
These sources say the Pakistani officials were kept in the dark about the real identity of this man, or the deal that the American had cut with him. The sources said it was only a few hours before the raid on Mohammed's hideout in Rawalpindi that the FBI had informed Pakistani intelligence, and had asked it to carry out the raid without the help of the local police or the civilian intelligence services.
The poet who sees things differently these days is Wolf Biermann, lyricist, baladeer, an incontravertible figure of respect in Germany. Hard to classify, this lank-haired man with washed-out blue eyes who writes poems, sings songs, and offers up an occasional, enormously readable political essay. "Great poet": So says, very judiciously, a man from the chancellery, having just heard, a couple of days later, what Biermann thinks of his boss.Biermann, 66, is sitting at a little table, near the window of his house in Altona, a nice suburb, close to downtown, a good place for his small children.Schroeder is not his main preoccupation. It is his country, its "harte deutsche Vaterlands-Mus," or, roughly and inadequately, "the hard must of the German Fatherland." But with his name slipping into the conversation, Biermann contrasts the current chancellor's soft position on Saddam Hussein with a Churchill battling appeasement, or Tony Blair's treading against the flow.
"Schroeder's opportunism is the worst," Biermann says. "He's a victim of a democratic pratfall. All this guy wanted to do was get elected, and he turns out morally to be under Chamberlain and Daladier. Their appeasement policy was wrong, but at least they were serious. There was no historical experience to go on then." [...]
The son of a Communist murdered by the Nazis, he left West Germany at age 17 for East Berlin, where he became a writer whose renown and eventual role as a dissident grew together. In 1976, he was expelled from East Germany to instant elevation as a cultural hero in the West. His poetry remained a source of vast admiration, but his politics gradually changed. From someone, after coming West, who joined demonstrators blocking U.S. Army bases (and remembers, he says, "how good it feels to be part of the Oh So Very Good"), he returned to the dissident's role as a German who sees "vulgar hatred" and paranoia in the "the propaganda bogeyman" that has been projected here onto the White House.
In fact, with a German press, like Britain's, that has much more a pro and con division on Iraq than the single, missionary position of French newspapers, Biermann hardly speaks from persecuted isolation.
But what he says is tougher, more direct, and comes with the whip-stroke of his rage. He calls the meld of Germans now challenging the use of force against Saddam "National Pacifists" - no small damnation in a language where the word national, as in National Socialists, shakes with the sound of abjectness, a curse. [...]
But the bombs, the deaths to come? Biermann tells a story of he and his mother surviving the storms of fire that devastated Hamburg after British air raids in 1943. Down the street from the flames, his mother told him then that these "terrible, terrible bombers are going to free us from evil, evil people who took Papa away."
Madonna added: “My real responsibility is to bring light to the world and make the world a better place.”...She claims following the Jewish mystic cult Kabbalah has taught her not to gossip or criticise others.
Madonna said: “If we truly believed that every act of denigrating somebody is a small form of murder — the negative energy you create by talking badly — we’d never do it again."
In a remark that could be directed against precipitous U.S. military action in Iraq, Annan said the creators of the tribunal had considered "the implications such a court might have for the delicate process of dismantling tyrannies and replacing them with more democratic regimes committed to uphold human rights."..."International law can be extremely effective in destabilizing tyrannical leaders who have a history of atrocities," [said the man who signed the treaty on behalf of the United States, former war crimes ambassador David Scheffer]...
The new court is modeled on the temporary tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Its rules and procedures will be set out in coming months by the judges and, once elected, the prosecutor.
The member states have been unable to find a consensus candidate for prosecutor.
The fascinating thing about this "international law" is that there appears nothing lawful about it. There is no agreement on rules and procedures, so some chosen prosecutor will dictate rules and procedures, and then judges will create their own variations. The law will apply to persons and jurisdictions that never consented to be governed by it. It creates a multiplicity of law-making authorities in any jurisdiction, so that if the ICC is respected, no one will be able to know what the "law" is. And these people believe that this retreat from negotiation and the rule of law will somehow reduce conflict, instead of just giving us new things to fight over - like who the prosecutor should be.
The White House has asked Mel Mart’nez, a Cuban-American member of President Bush's Cabinet and the former elected chairman of Orange County, to run for U.S. Senate in Florida next year, sources told The Herald Monday.Mart’nez, secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development since 2001, has been approached in recent days by a leading Republican senator and other White House emissaries, and is said to be weighing his options, said the sources familiar with the discussions. [...]
[M]art’nez, 56, would drive up voter turnout among Cuban Americans and in his politically critical home region of Central Florida in a year that the president needs Florida's 27 electoral votes to secure reelection.
''How many more Cubans, who are almost always Republican, does it draw out in an election if the Senate candidate's name is Mart’nez?'' said one leading Republican operative.
''It's not a slap in the face at McCollum or Foley,'' the operative said, ``it's just a fact that [Mart’nez] would influence turnout in a way that would be favorable for Republicans.''
The United Nations fight for freedom
Antiwar protesters burned and ripped up flags, flowers and patriotic signs at a Sept. 11 memorial that residents erected on a fence along Whittier Boulevard days after the terrorist attacks in 2001 and have maintained ever since.However, although officers witnessed the vandalism Saturday afternoon, police did not arrest three people seen damaging the display because they were "exercising the same freedom of speech that the people who put up the flags were,' La Habra Police Capt. John Rees said Monday. [...]
Tracey Chandler, a Whittier mother of four who has maintained the spontaneous memorial since it was created by other area residents soon after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, said she was shocked by the destruction.
"They trashed 87 flags, ripped 11 memorial tiles made by myself and my children out of the ground and glued the Bob Dylan song to a sign that said, 'America, land of the brave, home of the free,' ' she said.
The Bob Dylan song she referred to is "With God on Our Side,' an antiwar anthem of the 1960s.
I hate, I despise your feasts, and I will take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Yea, though ye offer me burnt-offerings and your meal-offerings, I will not accept them; neither will I regard the peace-offerings of your fat beasts.
Take thou away from Me the noise of thy songs; and let Me not hear the melody of thy psalteries.
But let justice well up as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.
President Bush called Afghan President Hamid Karzai last week to apologize for the way he was treated in a meeting with members of a Senate committee on Capitol Hill late last month ...Karzai was placed at a witness table looking up at the senators, the usual layout for people summoned to testify at a hearing. There were several skeptical and hostile questions that Karzai did not expect and had not prepared for ...
"We thought these people were our friends, but now we really don't know," a senior Afghan government official said. "This was a protocol blunder, and there was real insensitivity on the part of some senators. They were talking about nitty-gritty problems in Afghanistan and missing the big picture that there is a war on terrorism going on while we try to make a country again from scratch."...
In addition to being seated at a table below the committee members, Karzai was scolded by some of them.
Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) warned that if Karzai told the committee everything was going well, "the next time you come back, then your credibility will be in question." Hagel said later that he felt the administration had "coached" Karzai.
Holding a recent report released by the advocacy group Human Rights Watch, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) told Karzai that "police in Herat are detaining women and girls caught alone with unrelated men, are being forced to submit to medical exams to see if they have recently had sexual relations."
The Karzai government is trying to expand its authority across the country, but it still has only limited control in many areas, including the western city of Herat.
Civil liberties and privacy may be priceless, but they may soon have a price tag.In an unusual twist on cost-benefit analysis, an economic tool that conservatives have often used to attack environmental regulation, top advisers to President Bush want to weigh the benefits of tighter domestic security against the "costs" of lost privacy and freedom.
"People are willing to accept some burdens, some intrusion on their privacy and some inconvenience," said John Graham, director of regulatory affairs at the White House Office of Management and Budget. "But I want to make sure that people can see these intangible burdens."
In a notice published last month, the budget office asked experts from around the country for ideas on how to measure "indirect costs" like lost time, lost privacy and even lost liberty that might stem from tougher security regulations.
The budget office has not challenged any domestic security rules, and officials say they are only beginning to look at how they might measure costs of things like reduced privacy. But officials said they hoped to give federal agencies guidance by the end of the year. And even if many costs cannot be quantified in dollar terms, they say, the mere effort to identify them systematically could prompt agencies to look for less burdensome alternatives. [...]
Jarring as it may seem to assign a price on privacy or liberty, the idea has attracted an unusual array of supporters, including Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate and former presidential candidate, who said the approach might expose wrong-headed security regulations.
"My position is that whatever the circumstances, France will vote no."
- JACQUES CHIRAC, announcing that France would veto a United Nations resolution threatening war against Iraq.
On my way to synagogue, I see my brother outside with a friend. Here, serious faces always mean bad news.I'm informed that "there was a pigua (terrorist attack) last night, in Kiryat Arba ... An older couple was murdered in their home --- apartment 35" just as they finished their Friday night Sabbath meal.
That's all that is known.
Kiryat Arba, near Hebron, is where I went to high school. A quick search through my memory: Older couples, older couples. No one immediately comes to mind. I tell myself that there is no point in getting all worried now, anyway --- there's no way of finding out until after the Sabbath.
It's now after synagogue. I'm back at home, playing a game -- relaxing, laughing, having fun -- before Sabbath lunch. My mom enters the room.
"Do you know a Horowitz, from Kiryat Arba?"
The name sparks in my brain. The game is put on the floor. I already understand, but I want to ignore, ignore.
"Yes, Dina Horowitz --- my teacher."
"Dina? Is her husband a rabbi?"
"Yes."
We look at each other, already knowing, but denying. [...]
I don't know how many of you have been taught by an amazing person before. How many of you had the privilege of knowing a real, passionate, gentle, loving teacher? In Hebrew, the word "Morah" means teacher and guide --- someone who shows you the way, who gives you love and encouragement, helps you make your own way in this complicated world.
A Morah is someone who gives you the tools to deal with whatever should happen along your path. Such a person was Dina. She was my "Morah."
Some of Dennis Kucinich's politics are a long way from polka, bowling and kielbasa.Kucinich, now in his fourth term in the U.S. House, has added a constituency--one likely to appreciate crystals and incense more than the ethnic icons he frequently cites to highlight the character of his hometown.
Known for crusades to keep open local steel mills and hospitals and to improve safety near railroad crossings, Kucinich remains rooted in a pro-labor populist social agenda.
But he also can claim the support of a network of peace activists and New Age gurus, from those who practice meditation to those who embrace alternative religions.
They are attracted to his message of spirituality and peace.
He is relying on this cultivated network - even at risk of being tagged the "Moonbeam Congressman" - to help him win the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination.
Kucinich, a strict vegetarian whose friends include a New Mexico spiritual adviser, has won converts specifically with his legislation to ban the use of weapons in space and to create a U.S. Department of Peace.
Two weeks ago, when Tahir Anwar, the imam of San Jose's downtown mosque on Third Street, just about a two-minute stroll north from St. James Park, returned home after almost three weeks on the Arabian peninsula, it was a bit difficult for him to swing right back into his daily routine, and jet lag wasn't the only factor. The imam had just performed the hajj, for most Muslims not only a cleansing but also the ultimate confirmation of religion before death itself.The word hajj, in fact, is linguistically related to the word hujah, which is translated as "proof," teaches a Bay area scholar. And so, visiting the Kaaba--the empty black cube (once full of idols, now cleansed) in the center of Mecca that Muslims believe Abraham built--confirms, by its very emptiness, the impossibility of conceptualizing the divine, the incapability of the finite to capture the infinite.
Meanwhile, many of Imam Tahir's own confirmations came, like so many pilgrims before him, through the swarming masses of humanity surrounding him. "The greatest sight is the people." The imam shakes his head in disbelief of the memory. "What's more amazing is the different countries that people come from--Indonesia, Thailand, Bosnia. ... When you're walking between groups of people, it's like you're walking from one country to another in a matter of minutes."
It's this social egalitarianism, this unity, that Muslims pride themselves on. It was, of course, an awed Malcolm X who wrote home about sitting sincerely with "fellow Muslims, whose eyes were the bluest of blue, whose hair was the blondest of blond and whose skin was the whitest of white."
But while unity overwhelms in the sanctuary of Mecca, back in the United States, the second and final holiday season of the Islamic calendar has, again, brought with it a jurisprudential tiff that Muslims still can't seem to resolve. The celebration of Eid al-Adha, the holiday that honors Abraham being asked to sacrifice his son and then being restrained by God, falls during the hajj season, but Muslims are (still) having a nasty time figuring out exactly when it should be. [...]
Ask ordinary Muslims what this disagreement is all about, and they'll likely shrug it off not as a disagreement but as a "difference of opinion." Ask conspiracy theorists, and they might spout off something about Sheik George W. and the United States exerting political pressure to evacuate the pilgrims from the Middle East early to gain time in their plans for invading Iraq.
From the Christian perspective, it's rather like not being able to come to a consensus on when Christmas should be (although, because of the accepted ambiguity of the Islamic lunar calendar, not exactly). But, perhaps more interesting than the problem itself are the spiritual implications inherent to the disagreement.
The crux of the difficulty lies in the sighting of the new moon, which marks the beginning of the 12th Islamic lunar month, Dhul-Hijjah.
[S]ceptics have a myopic view of power that focuses too heavily on the military dimension, where the US excels. But power in the 21st century is distributed differently on different issues and resembles a three-dimensional chess game. On the top board of military issues, where US military expenditure is equal to the next two dozen countries combined, the world is unipolar. There is only one superpower. It is likely to remain that way unless Europeans want to double the proportion of gross national product spent on defence to equal US levels. But even more modest European capabilities should not be discounted. European participation in a coalition against Iraq helps the legitimacy of the US cause and European nations could play a crucial role in the aftermath. There are more European than US troops helping to keep the peace today in the Balkans and in Afghanistan.The middle board of economic issues is a sharp contrast from the military board. Here the world has a multipolar balance of power. The US cannot achieve a global trade agreement without the agreement of Europe and others. In the area of antitrust, General Electric was unable to merge with Honeywell because the European Commission opposed the move. And recently, Microsoft had to make significant changes to its new passport system in order to meet European privacy regulations. This is hardly the "American hegemony" that some proclaim. Moreover, despite the political popularity of the US in Donald Rumsfeld's "new Europe", the US is becoming less prominent in business and investment there. EU countries account for three-quarters of the "new Europe's" trade.
The bottom board of the three- dimensional chess game consists of transnational issues that cross borders outside the control of governments. Examples include illegal migration, drugs, crime, the spread of infectious diseases, global climate change and, of course, transnational terrorist networks. On this board, power is chaotically organised and it makes no sense to speak of unipolarity, hegemony or American empire. While these
issues are having an increasing effect on the lives of ordinary Americans, they cannot be solved by military power or by the US acting alone. Co-operation with other countries, particularly the capable Europeans, is essential to Americans' ability to get the outcomes they want.Europe is not likely soon to become the military equal of the US but it has enough sticks and carrots to produce significant hard power, the ability to get others to do what they would not otherwise do. In addition, despite internal divisions, Europe's culture, values and the success of the EU have produced a good deal of soft power, the ability to attract rather than merely coerce others.
Despite policy differences over Iraq, no two parts of the world share more of the basic values of democracy, liberty, tolerance and human rights than do Europe and the US. Mr Bush and President Jacques Chirac should cool the exaggerated rhetoric that obscures these similarities and the importance of working together. France should think again before producing a train-wreck by using its veto in the United Nations. And US unilateralists should remember that those who focus on only one board in a three-dimensional game are likely to lose in the long run.
Meanwhile, he underestimates the degree to which unilateralism and even geopolitical isolation can remain an effective option in a globalized world. On the middle rung of his chess board we need only lower our own trade barriers to reap most of the benefits we're likely to gain from Free Trade. Why should we care if European taxpayers subsidize our purchases of their goods? While, on the other hand, it is going to become more and more difficult for Amnerican exports to compete abroad, regardless of what trade rules exist, because our currency is going to be so much stronger than anyone elses. Certain goods that only we make--like cultural/intellectual goods: computer programs, movies, music, biotechnologies, pharmaceuticals, stock in US companies, etc.--will continue to thrive, but no one will have enough euros to buy an American made machine of any kind. As Europe declines our goods will be priced out of its markets regardless of any structural barriers.
The bottom rung argument is the most bizarre, though you hear it often from Atlanticists trying to scare folks. What Mr. Nye and others are proposing is that a France which is terrified of its burgeoning Muslim population will allow radical Islamic terrorists to operate with impunity inside her borders in order to teach us a lesson. This fantasy, of an al Qaeda that would not choose to attack its anti-Muslim hosts and of a French people who would tolerate a globalist Islamic movement in their midsts, would be amusing if so many transnationalists weren't using it to try and keep us bound to Old Europe.
Just as the generals always prepare for the last war and the Fed always fights the problems of the youth, so does the foreign policy establishment try to prop up the system that they were taught in grad school "worked" fifty years ago, no matter how much the world has changed.
MORE:
A Theory: What if there's method to the Franco-German madness? (Michael Ledeen, March 11, 2003, Jewish World Review)
They dreaded the establishment of an American empire, and they sought for a way to bring it down.If you were the French president or the German chancellor, you might well have done the same.
How could it be done? No military operation could possibly defeat the United States, and no direct economic challenge could hope to succeed. That left politics and culture. And here there was a chance to turn America's vaunted openness at home and toleration abroad against the United States. So the French and the Germans struck a deal with radical Islam and with radical Arabs: You go after the United States, and we'll do everything we can to protect you, and we will do everything we can to weaken the Americans.
The Franco-German strategy was based on using Arab and Islamic extremism and terrorism as the weapon of choice, and the United Nations as the straitjacket for blocking a decisive response from the United States.
This required considerable skill, and total cynicism, both of which were in abundant supply in Paris and Berlin. Chancellor Shroeder gained reelection by warning of American warmongering, even though, as usual, America had been attacked first. And both Shroeder and Chirac went to great lengths to support Islamic institutions in their countries, even when - as in the French case - it was in open violation of the national constitution. French law stipulates a total separation of church and state, yet the French Government openly funds Islamic "study" centers, mosques, and welfare organizations. A couple of months ago, Chirac approved the creation of an Islamic political body, a mini-parliament, that would provide Muslims living in France with official stature and enhanced political clout. And both countries have permitted the Saudis to build thousands of radical Wahhabi mosques and
schools, where the hatred of the infidels is instilled in generation after generation of young Sunnis. It is perhaps no accident that Chirac went to Algeria last week and promised a cheering crowd that he would not rest until America's grand design had been defeated.
France is playing the peace card because it is the only one it holds. But for fragile entities like Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, France, which recently failed to impose its military will on a small West African state (the Ivory Coast), has nothing to offer. In the end, as Hobbes pointed out, covenants are useless without swords to enforce them....The EU, far from being an embodiment of the rule of law, as Mr. Kagan argues, is fundamentally corrupt and in a sense lawless. French governments invariably break or ignore its rules when they conflict with national interests. Jacques Chirac is an opportunist with a long record of malfeasance. If he did not enjoy ex officio immunity, he would be under indictment. His current anti-Americanism is in part an effort to win over his accusers on the left....
I trust that American policy makers will not accept the view that basic differences exist between America and Europe. What they should try to avoid are entangling alliances in which a single rogue power, like France, has the right to inhibit America's pursuit of her vital national interests.
And lo, which nation has emerged as the world's leading "rogue power"? If Jacques Chirac had intentionally sought to undermine the world's respect for France, he could not have been more effective.
The U.S. foreign-born population has reached a record high, though the rate at which people came to America has slowed considerably, the government reports. . . .A tenth of the population is foreign born and many have arrived since 1990. The AP article goes on to note that the census numbers don't include illegal aliens (another 7 million) or people in jail or nursing homes or other group living situations. Two thoughts jump out at me. First, the economy is absolutely dependent upon immigration. Second, wars come and go, but the great American project remains making one nation from the people of all nations.Census Bureau estimates being released Monday show there were about 32.5 million foreign-born residents in the United States in March 2002, 2 percent more than the 31.8 million in the previous March.
In a population of 282.1 million, the foreign born amounted to 11.5 percent. . . .
-Nearly 17 million people, or just over half of the foreign-born population in 2002, came from Latin America. Over half of the 17 million arrived after 1990.
-Slightly more than one-quarter of the foreign-born population had a bachelor's degree or more, about the same as the native-born population. More than 20 percent of the foreign-born population had less than a ninth-grade education, compared with about 5 percent of the native population.
The census report did not count immigrants in jails, nursing homes or other group quarters, and did not cover illegal immigration.
Portugal is siding with the United States on Iraq because Washington was "Portugal's best way to ensure national security," a Portuguese Cabinet minister said Monday.Foreign Minister Antonio Martins da Cruz told state radio that if Portugal were attacked, "it would be unlikely France and Germany would come to our rescue."
He said: "Let us suppose Portugal, proper or its archipelagos, faced a threat, who would come to our rescue? The European Commission, France, Germany?
"I think it would be NATO who would come to our rescue, in other words, it would be the U.S., no one else would defend us....
"How curious is this: in Bosnia, when we were called to send soldiers urgently to that region, the U.S. had C-17 and C-130 planes, and France leased ferry boats, which during the summer are employed in tourist services to Corsica.
"Is this how we are supposed to project our forces in Europe? Are they planning to defend us with ferry boats?"
Interesting that the word of the day on My Yahoo yesterday was propitiate and today is abstain. We know the former applies to France, perhaps the latter will also.
