Dean's World

I have always loved the retro-'60s musical stylings of Smashmouth. In fact I was astounded when they hit the pop charts a few years ago: a band with nothing but 40 year old synthesizer technology (Moog perhaps?) in the top 40? In the early 2000s? Was that even possible? Indeed it was.

And just look at what this clever group of High School kids put together with the song!

If this were 1971 they'd all be considered geniuses. Well yes, but they still are. They did it all just by running a camera backwards. Bravo!!

(Thanks Martin.)

Beginning Friday, December 15, and continuing through Wednesday, December 20, I will be hosting a blogging colloquium on Iraq entitled “Directions on Iraq: a Blogging Colloquium” at The Glittering Eye.

I'm thrilled with those who will be participating. Participants include:

John Burgess is a former U. S. foreign service officer who has had two tours of duty in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the first in 1981-1983 and the second 2001-2003. He reads and speaks Arabic and has spent the bulk of his career in the Middle East with assignments in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, and Bahrain in addition to his assignment in the KSA. His blog, Crossroads Arabia, is one of the blogosphere's finest resources for information and commentary on the KSA.

Michael Cook is the Cleveland Dodge professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. In 2002 he was awarded the Andrew Mellon Foundation's Distinguished Achievement Award.

James Hamilton is a professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego. His special area of study is oil economics. His blog, Econbrowser, is a premier econblog.

Rasheed Abou Al-Samh is a Saudi-American journalist based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He is a senior editor at Arab News and a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, the Washington Times, Al-Ahram Weekly, and Forbes Arabia. His blog is Rasheed's World.

Shivaji Sondhi is a professor of physics at Princeton University.

I'm still accepting submissions. I'm especially seeking participants with knowledge of the Middle East and specialist expertise. If you're interested, please leave contact information in the comments below or in the comments to this post at The Glittering Eye.

I don't know if you're as discouraged by the present political climate and the likely turn of events with respect to Iraq as I am (not to mention Iran) but I've been wracking what I like to think of as my brains for some time now trying to consider U. S. interests in the region, how they're likely to be affected by a withdrawal of U. S. troops before the country can be stabilized, what other measures are available to secure those interests in the event of such a withdrawal, and so on.

I'm also discouraged by what I consider the poor level of analysis being done both in the blogosphere and in the larger world. The Iraq Study Group's report has been somewhat disappointing, not offering much in the way of new perspectives, and I doubt that the Democrats' forum on the subject announced a week or so ago will be a great deal better.

So rather than continue speculating myself I thought I might try to organize a blogospheric colloquium, basically a cross-blog discussion, on the subject. I've tried attract participants better informed than I (that leaves the field pretty open). Among the general topics I proposed were:

• military issues

• diplomatic alternatives

• regional stakes

• economics and development

• communications and information

The general format of the colloquium will be that each participant will elaborate on a topic in a post of his own (the contributions of participants without blogs of their own will be hosted here).

Participants and, indeed, all readers would be encouraged to address questions to the participants either in the pages of the participants' blogs or here:

iraqdirections at theglitteringeye dot com

(replace “at” with * and “dot” with a period).

I will coordinate, organize, and promote. I will also convene the colloquium, host posts and discussion as required, and call the colloquium to a close.

I'm very excited by this project and hope to learn a lot. Perhaps we can contribute some substance to the discussion on this crucial subject.

A journalist in Azerbaijan published the Danish Cartoons and a Grand Ayatollah in Iran (separate nation) has called for the journalist to be killed. I have started a letter/email writing campaign. Please, for God's sake, use only the letter I've provided, and not language like "go eff yourself" or "down with Islam." Either use the letter, or stay silent.

Just do not be stupid. The last think we need is the Ayatollah to get pissed from some blogosphere Troll. If you care about this guy's life, or the Danish Cartoons, just don't be stupid.

Dean writes about Turkey:

Modern Turkey is a good nation in many respects but the lack of religious freedom there is deplorable.

I am not sure which religious freedom Dean is talking about here. I think he means that women cannot wear scarves and certain institutions are militantly secular.

However, regardless of that (and of how they treat the Kurds, which does need to be addressed), Turkey is doing exceptionally well:

I'm up for work and I am listening to some random British sounding guy on the Radio (BBC World Update) talking about the Pope in Turkey and after talking about the Pontiff they actually discuss some meaty issues. You can listen to the program here, goodluck figuring out how, I get it on the Radio. But here are some interesting points made by some Turkish think-tank:

9% of Turks favor Shariah, 91% favor a non-Shariah state.

Yet, 2/3 of the country is "Islamist" and 1/3rd "more secular."

Yet the "Islamists" are "not fundamentalist."

Secularists and Islamists work together without conflict. They marry each other.

In fact, the "Islamist" parties don't consider themselves Islamic, so much as Conservative. They are known as Conservative Democrats.

Most people want to be part of the European Union.

Headscarf wearing is down from 71% to 65% over the past few years. Yet, the common perception is that headscarf use is up.

Turkey has defined its economic development an "Islamic Duty" and is shooting up the International Monetary Fund rankings.

As to the Pope, 3 Turks said:

a) I'd like to see him here.

b) I don't want him here because of his speech.

c) I'd like to see him here because it's good for tourism.

They talked to some kids at Bosphorous University. They say the word "family" like how Borat does. One engineering girl said that Turkey didn't need the EU, and Turkey was not European, it was Turkish Identity, and they could construct all of these things like democratic identities on their own. She said that Europe was trying to assimilate Turkey. The BBC guy then said "but you look European!" She said that her attitude was different because she is concerned that to become part of the EU, Turkishness would become something different. Another student jumped in and said that Turkey could use the Human Rights values of the EU. He also said that being part of the EU won't change Turkish traditions. Then the girl jumped in and she said that the EU wanted Turkey to accept the Armenian genocide by force. Damn, this girl talks too much. The other guy jumped in and said that the EU was a good opportunity for Turkey to make money. That's my man. "If you do not create technology, you can't construct an economy."

And here is an excellent Diary about more stuff on Turkey. See especially the link to the Prospect article. It essentially argues that the Turks are picking up where the Ottomans left off (as Heads of the Muslim World), except this time in fashion that merges secularism and Islam.

The reason I think that Turks can pull this off is because the Ottoman system always had two systems of law: the religious, and the Sultanic (which wasn't really religious but based on what he and his advisers wanted).

Now that the elections are over, and the trauma for many Dean's Worlder's is not so recent, I've put up a new post on how happy I am to get back to being a Moderate...

Here's an interesting report from the Times — which, when it is not pushing its party-line propaganda is still the gold standard for news reporting* — on oral argument at the Supreme Court over whether the EPA is under an obligation, under the Clean Air Act, to regulate the emission of carbon dioxide. (Which raises the interesting question: since Congress created the EPA, does the EPA have the authority to regulate the number-one source of noxious CO2, i.e., Congress?)

Questioning from the justices seemed almost, though not entirely, along anticipated party lines (assuming, that is, that you don't have any illusions about which party Justice Souter is a "member" of).

* UPDATE: Okay, maybe we've moved off the gold standard.

The third subject is, this week the strikes we made against the al-Qaeda terrorist organization in Baghdad were many and very strong in Baghdad. Before my arrival to this press conference, I was informed that one of the three who were just captured or detained is Mazer Al-Jubouri, aka the Baghdad Sniper, and his group. He admitted many things that are very important and very dangerous and our forces used this information about his network and conducted raids in the past 24 hours and detained 30 terrorists.

Speaking of bad Scandinavian videos, this one was all the rage earlier this year:

You know, aside from the slightly broken English, it's actually not all that bad a song. It's the whole package of the video that makes it hilarious.

But then, I found this:

Ozzie never looked better.

The rightosphere was all over the news about Jamal Miftah, the guy in Oklahoma who wrote an article condemning bin Laden and then subsequently got kicked out of his mosque. Good for the rightosphere.

But once the rightosphere had done their celebratory dance about how there are no "moderate" Muslims, it went along on its merry way. Meanwhile, I went and talked to Miftah. You think the rightosphere would want to follow up on it since they are so serious about empowering moderates.

Not quite. I gave it a day and a half to see if any of the big boys — hell, even little boys — would pick up my conversation with Miftah. Plenty of my readers went out and touted it. Nada. Oh look its me, having to do it all by my effing self, yet again.

So let me get this right: the NYT and MSM doesn't empower Muslim moderates because that doesn't suit their agenda; meanwhile the rightosphere claims that it does empower the moderates by highlighting them, and yet, it doesn't follow up on some of the biggest stories. This isn't big?

A case of "oversight"? I'm not so sure anymore.

Frankly, I think there's a snow job going on all over the news because, at the end of the day, its more fun to bitch about how there are no "moderates" (or how they are treated) than to actually spread their word far and wide.

Oh, and if any of you dare to give me a thankful back slap to say "keep up the good work Ali" I'm going to get even more pissed, so don't even try.

The Associated Press has faced considerable critique about its horrific story about six Shi'a men being burned alive by Sunnis in Baghdad. The critique hinges one the claim by the US military that the AP's source, a police captain Capt. Jamil Hussein, misrepresented himself. From a letter written by Lt. Michael Dean to the Associated Press:

We can tell you definitively that the primary source of this story, police Capt. Jamil Hussein, is not a Baghdad police officer or an MOI employee. We verified this fact with the MOI through the Coalition Police Assistance Training Team.

Also, we definitely know, as we told you several weeks ago through the MNC-I Media Relations cell, that another AP-popular IP spokesman, Lt. Maithem Abdul Razzaq, supposedly of the city's Yarmouk police station, does not work at that police station and is also not authorized to speak on behalf of the IP. The MOI has supposedly issued a warrant for his questioning. [...] Unless you have a credible source to corroborate the story of the people being burned alive, we respectfully request that AP issue a retraction, or a correction at a minimum, acknowledging that the source named in the story is not who he claimed he was.

The AP however made it clear that their source was legitimate. From a response letter written by AP International Editor John Daniszewski:

AP reporters who have been working in Iraq throughout the conflict learned of the mosque incident through witnesses and neighborhood residents and corroborated it with a named police spokesmen and also through hospital and morgue workers.

We have conducted a thorough review of the sourcing and reporting involved and plan to move a more detailed report about the entire incident soon, with greater detail provided by multiple eye witnesses. Several of those witnesses spoke to AP on the condition that their names would not be used because they fear reprisals.

The police captain cited in our story has long been known to the AP reporters and has been interviewed in his office and by telephone on several occasions during the past two years.

He is an officer at the police station in Yarmouk, with a record of reliability and truthfulness. His full name is Jamil Gholaiem Hussein.

The AP stands by its story.

In fact, the AP then produced the follow-up with more sources as promised.

Seeking further information about Friday's attack, an AP reporter contacted Hussein for a third time about the incident to confirm there was no error. The captain has been a regular source of police information for two years and had been visited by the AP reporter in his office at the police station on several occasions. The captain, who gave his full name as Jamil Gholaiem Hussein, said six people were indeed set on fire.

On Tuesday, two AP reporters also went back to the Hurriyah neighborhood around the Mustafa mosque and found three witnesses who independently gave accounts of the attack. Others in the neighborhood said they were afraid to talk about what happened.

Those who would talk said the assault began about 2:15 p.m., and they believed the attackers were from the Mahdi Army militia loyal to radical anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. He and the Shiite militia are deeply rooted in and control the Sadr City enclave in northeastern Baghdad where suspected Sunni insurgents attacked with a series of car bombs and mortar shells, killing at least 215 people a day before.

The witnesses refused to allow the use of their names because they feared retribution either from the original attackers or the police, whose ranks are infiltrated by Mahdi Army members or its associated death squads.

Two of the witnesses — a 45-year-old bookshop owner and a 48-year-old neighborhood grocery owner — gave nearly identical accounts of what happened. A third, a physician, said he saw the attack on the mosque from his home, saw it burning and heard people in the streets screaming that people had been set on fire. All three men are Sunni Muslims.

So let's recap here. The AP prinmts a story. The military objects, casting doubt on the source, and asks for either a retractio or to provide additional witnesses. The AP demonstrates that their source was in fact legitimate, and then also provides additional sources.

This whole affair speaks to a larger issue of "news out of Iraq". The belief seems to be that if the general public is shielded from bad news, or that bad news is minimized, or even outright denied, then that will maintain support for the war, or at least counteract the increasing lack of support.

This systematic campaign to delegitimize the media has backfired. By pretending that things are actually rosy and that good progress has been made (and it is no slight upon the honor and sacrifice of brave Iraqis or US soldiers to acknowledge otherwise), proponents of the campaign in Iraq have weakened their case. That is precisely why the public sentiment has hardened.

Had the media simply been muzzled for the past five years, as the most extreme of the media critics demand, then the public may have been ignorant of the details on the ground, but the reason we are losing the war in Iraq against the forces of anarchy is the fault of the insurgents, and a lack on our side not of will to sacrifice and fight but simply in resources, planning, and organization. I mean, isn't is truly shameful that we are only hearing about "going long" now, three years after the invasion? And make no mistake - it's liberals and Democrats who came up with that idea first.

To be honest, i still favor staying in Iraq. If we do withdraw fully, we will be ensuring that the brave voices of freedom upon whom the future liberty of all the oppressed masses in the middle east hinges, will die hideous deaths. It would be supreme cynicism to abandon Iraq.

The failure thus far is of execution, not principle, which is why the Administration is so desperate to whitewash the metrics by success or failure might by any reasonable standard be measured. And thus we see the Lancet study attacked, daily reports of deaths attacked, violence in iraq compared to urban street violence in the US, etc. To these critics I simply ask, what metric would YOU accept that would definitively show that we have failed in Iraq? But asking the question is pointless - especially since they have never been able to satisfactorily define victory. I mean, the Administration is so detached from the reality they'd prefer that they are actually considering choosing sides in the civil war whose raging they still refuse to acknowledge.

Elections were simply a (purple) fig leaf. But democracy is an end state, built upon a robust and rigorous foundation of stability, security, and personal freedom. The right of the individual as a sovereign must be secured by liberal constitutionlism first, before any talk of representative government can be entertained. Otherwise, you end up electing Hamas.

What is needed now is indeed to go long. Follow Phil Carter's prescription to abandon the superfortresses and increase the embedded advisers. Give Maliki an ultimatum: rein in the Shi'a militias, or lose control of your (still sovereign nation)'s armed forces. Engage Syria - there's plenty of carrots to peel them off of Iran and re-align with us, to the benefit of Israel and to Iraq.

And we need to celebrate the media for its role in keeping the pressure on. Because the Administration would rather "pick sides" and "declare victory and go home" rather than make the hard choices and the commitments that have been needed from the start.

UPDATE: A well-deserved apology to Tall Dave in the comments. I am an idiot. I'm still correct and he is still mistaken, but I am a correct idiot. That is all.

I see the Pope's been in Turkey--an almost entirely Muslim nation--for the last few days and so far no one's cut his head off.

I also see he's suggesting that religious freedom should be a requirement for Turkey's entrance into the European Union.

Yes, I should think that a basic requirement. Modern Turkey is a good nation in many respects but the lack of religious freedom there is deplorable.

I couldn't decide whether I thought this was funny or mean.

Things My Girlfriend And I Have Argued About.

I'm not sure I find it funny, although I'll bet different people have radically different reasons for finding it unfunny.

(Thanks Kimberly)

The arrogant New York Times loses again.

The Supreme Court agrees with the Second Circuit: If there were a reporters' privilege under the First Amendment, it still wouldn't give you a free ticket to do absolutely anything you want to undermine your country.

Fantasmagorical, Floyd! Hat tip to Instapundit on Beldar's reemergence from that dungeon in Vulgaria. Sweet to have you back!

Yesterday I posted about the lessons we should have learned from the assassination of Meir Kahane.

One thing we should have learned: to be aware of the extremist groups that exist within our own borders - like Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, Al Muhajiroun (the "Islamic Thinker's Society") and Jamaat Al-Fuqra. We should also be aware of the community centers that are associated with them.

In the post, I asked the web-based interactive news and discussion site, alt.muslim.com why:

"...they call the terror-cell hosting al Farooq [mosque] "Another very accessible masjid in good location on main strip amongst Muslim businesses" and why do they give it three stars?

While the comment recommending the mosque remains, here's the revised description:

The Al-Farooq masjid has a controversial and troubled history in the Brooklyn area, starting with fundraising for Afghan mujahedeen that may have been associated with Osama bin Laden. In the early 90's, FBI investigators linked several members with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, one of whom (El-Sayyid Nosair) later murdered Jewish radical Meir Kahane in New York in 1990. In 2003, federal investigators linked members of the mosque to $20 million in alleged fundraising for Al Qaeda, though little evidence of direct support was linked to the mosque itself. Other allegations include the use of Saudi-funded literaturea nd extreme sermons by some of its imams. Many members maintain that they are kept in the dark about any illicit activity that may be taking place and that the relatively poor community can barely keep the mosque functioning. Other members dismiss the allegations and say they are against terrorism and extremism, though deep cultural customs remain.

The automated and fairly anonymous nature of alt.muslim's Mosque/School finder (salat-o-matic) could be a great resource for people who want to express their feelings about extremist political activism within their places of worship. Vocal critics of extremism, like Tulsa's Jamal Miftah and Asra Nomani are often shunned by other members of their mosques. Web-based anonymity gives people who don't want to risk an unkind response a chance to speak out. It would be encouraging if people would take advantage of that.

Thanks to Shahed and to Ali Eteraz for notifying him about it. And, as a techie note, that was the best web-page customer response I've seen.

This morning I received an urgent Email from the proprietor of This Day in Alternate History. Google is screwing with his account...

This hosing is not malicious on Google’s part—quiet the contrary; they are attempting to upgrade their own service, and provide a better user experience. In the mean time, he—and others—are unable to update their sites. In the mean time, you can find tdiah by clicking this link. Since he’s now using Word Press, and Google makes money by selling ads on blogspot pages... that’s going to cost Blogger some money...

Google seems unreachable. Robbie Taylor has asked me to spread the word. Perhaps an avalanche of negative publicity will help get these blogs back up and running. If you’re interested in helping, just do a post on your own site about the situation. Be nice. Include a link to Blogger, so that they’ll start noticing a bunch of hits and wonder why...

From New Scientist (sub only):

Imagine being teleported. A special scanner records the state of every cell in your brain and body and digitally encodes the information for radio transmission. Your body is destroyed in the process but reconstructed as soon as the signals are received and decoded at your destination. You "arrive" in precisely the same condition that you "left", identical in body, brain and patterns of mental activity. Your memories, beliefs, plans, skills and emotions are perfectly intact and you go about your business feeling and believing that nothing about you has changed in the slightest. It's just like waking from a dreamless sleep and getting on with the day.

If you are comfortable with this scenario then you should be comfortable with bundle theory. You appreciate that the observing "I" is no more than patterns of energy and information, which can be disrupted and reconstituted without destroying the self - because there is no self to destroy. The patterns are all. If, on the other hand, you believe that some essential "you" would be lost in the process then you are an irredeemable ego theorist. You believe that the reconstituted body is not "you" but a mere replica. Although the replica will know in its bones that it is the very person who stepped into the scanner at the start of the journey, and friends and loved ones will agree, you insist it could not be you because your body and brain would have been destroyed.

Incidentally, we see here a neat inversion of conventional thinking. Those who believe in an essence, or soul, suddenly become materialists, dreading the loss of the "original" body. But those of us who don't hold such beliefs are prepared to countenance a life after bodily death.

Looks like I'm "an irredeemable ego theorist" because I don't believe that I would awaken in the replica. The destruction of my body would somehow sever the link between "me" and my body that could not be repaired through the reconstruction down to the finest detail of the latter. I would be dead, but what about my replica? Would it have its own consciousness - or would it be a zombie-like automaton?

The Wilhelm Scream.

Update: A complaint is raised in the comments: where's the actual scream? Well if you hunt through the article carefully and all its links you'll eventually find it. But in case you missed it, here is a direct link.

Why, yes, it is only about a second long. If, like me, you have a sharp ear for sound, you will probably be jolted and realize you've heard it countless times. On the other hand, if you don't find such trivia interesting, you'll probably just shrug and say "yeah that's kinda familiar."

At Instapundit.

A petty thief nails a child porn fan.

I find it somehow inspiring.

Fantastic study by Foreign Policy Magazine and analysis. Where? Where else?

I am plugging the new book by my friend, the frequently politically incorrect Dawn Eden, called The Thrill of the Chaste. It's about behaving yourself in ... that way ... until matrimony. Imagine that! But she's not just saying, "Just say no!" No. Here's what Publisher's Weekly says it's going to say about it in its December 5th issue (from Amazon):

New York Daily News columnist and blogger Eden offers a Christian apologetic for premarital chastity, aimed at "marriage-minded single women who'd had enough of the Sex and the City lifestyle." Eden herself is a convert to both Christianity and chastity, and now an unmarried 30-something, she's persuaded that chastity is more "hope-filled" and "vibrant" than sex outside of marriage. She draws on John Paul II's theology of the body to explain why Christians should reserve sex for marriage; "our bodies are living metaphors of God's loving nature," she argues, and to have sex casually is to make a false promise of total commitment. Eden doesn't just theologize — she gives practical advice about how women should relate to their parents (if yours are divorced, as Eden's are, you should resist the temptation to blame them for bad sexual choices you've made) and masturbation (avoid it — you'll just feel lonely afterward). But trading on familiar (and tired) gender stereotypes, she notes that men lose interest in women who pursue them. In a sea of evangelical books on chastity that read like they were written for college students, Eden's will stand out as a book for grownups and should be popular with more mature Christian women.

I guess that sentence, "But trading on familiar (and tired) gender stereotypes, she notes that men lose interest in women who pursue them" isn't a compliment, but it doesn't really indicate that the writer has an argument to advance that suggests that these stereotypes are false. Do you think they are? I don't know; I've never been chased.

UPDATE: Dawn on the Radar.

Things that suck.

You know?

In 1990, after concluding a speech in a Manhattan, New York hotel, Meir Kahane was assassinated by El Sayyid Nosair. Kahane's followers, including a 70 year old man, managed to keep the assassin from escaping.

According to Crime Library (written in a classic pulp style)

El Sayid Nosair was just another disgruntled loner with a gun and a grudge.

That's what the cops thought...

...As authorities would later discover, the bullets fired from Nosair's gun were the opening salvo in a war, a war waged by Islamic extremists against America and its interests...

..All of it, authorities would later say, was foreshadowed within three days of Nosair's arrest when investigators poring through his Cliffside Park, N.J., apartment would find a diary in his handwriting that would later seem almost prophetic. In it, Nosair called for jihad against the "enemies of Islam" and urged his comrades to bring America to its knees by "destroying the structure of their civilized pillars their high world buildings which they are proud oftheir statues and the buildings in which their leaders gather."

But all of that was missed in the days immediately after the Kahane killing. To Joseph Borelli, then chief of New York City detectives, the Kahane killing was the work of "a lone gunman" and the search of his apartment had turned up "nothing that would stir your imagination."

The cops had no way of knowing that in Nosair's writings they had found a threat that would some day be realized, that the insignificant-seeming man that they now had in custody was part of a network of terrorists who would, a decade later, kill more people in one day in New York City than all the gang-bangers and drug dealers and jilted husbands do in a year.

The assassination was the first operation carried out by a terrorist cell based in Brooklyn, led by the Imam of the al Farooq mosque on Atlantic Avenue, the 'blind sheikh' Omar Abdel Rahman.

Nosair later stood trial as a co-conspirator of Shaikh Omar Abdel Rahman for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, conspiracy to use explosives against New York landmarks, and plotting to assassinate U.S. politicians. Both men received life sentences.

Since it was ruled that Kahane's murder was part of the "seditious conspiracy," Nosair was later convicted of killing Kahane.

Here's a photo from the FBI investigation of the Brooklyn al Farooq terror cell shoooting AK-47's on Long Island

FBI agents photograph Islamic radicals shooting weapons at the Calverton Shooting Range, on Long Island, New York. The group is secretly monitored as they shoot AK-47 assault rifles, semiautomatic handguns, and revolvers for four successive weekends. The use of weapons such as AK-47’s are illegal in the US, but this shooting range is known to be unusually permissive. Ali Mohamed is apparently not at the range but has been training the five men there: El Sayyid Nosair, Mahmud Abouhalima, Mohammed Salameh, Nidal Ayyad, and Clement Rodney Hampton-El. Nosair will assassinate Rabbi Meir Kahane one year later (see November 5, 1990), and the others except for Hampton-El will be convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing (see February 26, 1993), while Hampton-El will be convicted for a role in the landmark bombing plot (see June 24, 1993). Some FBI agents have been assigned to watch some Middle Eastern men who are frequenting the al-Kifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn. Each weekend, Mohamed’s trainees drive from al-Kifah to the shooting range, and a small FBI surveillance team follows them. The FBI has been given a tip that some Palestinians at al-Kifah are planning violence targeting Atlantic City casinos. By August, the casino plot fails to materialize, and the surveillance, including that at the shooting range, comes to an end. Author Peter Lance will later say that why the FBI failed to follow up the shooting sessions is a “great unanswered question.”

If we're concerned about terrorism, perhaps we should ask the FBI why they failed to follow up their investigation of al Farooq mosque-going terror suspects who were were using illegal weaponry in populous Long Island - who later committed a string of terrorist attacks against New Yorkers.

Maybe we should ask the alt.muslim.com's "Guide to the best mosques and schools" why they recommend the oft-raided al Farooq mosque to Muslims who are new to Brooklyn? Why do they call the terror-cell hosting al Farooq "Another very accessible masjid in good location on main strip amongst Muslim businesses" and why do they give it three stars?

If we're concerned about terrorism, perhaps we should listen to the words of a New Yorker who lives near the al Farooq mosque, Rod Dreher, who says:

Of course, New Yorkers are used to living among people different from themselves. But Muslims are the only New Yorkers whose co-religionists murdered 3,000 of us in the name of a radical version of their faith — a version that is preached right here in Brooklyn. There is apparently no outcry from our neighborhood's Muslims against the extremists among them. There is little evidence indicating that they value American citizenship over their Old World hatreds. And the al-Farooq mosque remains in the headlines as an Islamofascist icon. You can hardly blame people for being suspicious.

And that suspicion breeds fear, alienation, and anger — on all sides. Brooklyn's Muslims wonder whether their Jewish and Christian neighbors would support putting them in detention camps in the event of another 9/11. Non-Muslims may wonder — no, do wonder — whether their Muslim neighbors are giving money and moral support to evil men who want to kill them. You walk down the street these days thinking: What's under that man's coat? What's behind that shopkeeper's smile? Is that hijab- wearing woman just another mom on the playground, or does she believe my kid and I are infidel scum who deserve to die? Am I being paranoid, or merely streetwise? It's a rotten way to have to live.

We didn't.

Quoted:

The sin of George W. Bush, to hear his critics tell it, is that he unleashed the forces of freedom in Arab-Islamic lands only to beget a terrible storm. In Iraq and in Lebanon, the furies of sectarianism are on the loose; and in that greater Middle East stretching from Pakistan to Morocco, the forces of freedom and reform appear chastened. Autocracy is fashionable once again, and that bet on freedom made in the aftermath of the American venture into Iraq now seems, to the skeptics, fatally compromised. For decades, we had lived with Arab autocracies, befriended them, taken their rule as the age-old dominion in lands unfit for freedom. Then came this Wilsonian moment proclaimed in the course of the war on Iraq. To the "realists," it had been naive and foolhardy to hold out to the Arabs the promise of freedom. We had bet on the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, thrilled to these young people in Beirut's plazas reclaiming their country from Syrian tyranny. But that promise, too, has been battered, and in the shadows, the old policy of ceding Lebanon to the rule of Syria's informers and policemen now claims a measure of vindication. On the surface of things, it is the moment of the "realists," then: They speak with greater confidence. The world had lived down, as it were, to their expectations. And now they wish to return history to its old rhythm.

But in truth there can be no return to the bosom of the old order.

Read the rest right here.

Via Glenn.

Voting has begun for the 3rd Annual Brass Crescent Awards. Please visit BrassCrescent.org and vote for your favorite blogs and blog posts now!

Note: a new category this year is "Best Ijtihad", wherein muslims take on the fanatics and the freaks head-on. Don't miss them!

Welcome to the Carnival of the Liberated, a sampler of some of the best posts of the week from Iraqi and Afghan bloggers. This week we have violence in Baghdad, curfew, the Gemayel assassination, and much, much more.

Afghan Lord is going on a somewhat mysterious journey.

Baghdad Bacon & Eggs has some interesting reflections on Sadr City, the largely Shi'a neighborhood in Baghdad where so much of the violence is taking place.

Baghdad Connect has an interesting perspective and some novel insights on what's going on in Baghdad: he portrays it as gang warfare.

I found Freedom of Mind's answers to some questions from an American reader very thought-provoking.

Zeyad of Healing Iraq translates posts from Iraqi message boards on the situation in Baghdad.

Mohammed of Iraq the Model reports on the difficulties and dangers he's faced in the last week over what's going on in Baghdad.

What's in a name? Quite a lot these days in Baghdad according to Ishtar of Iraqi Screen.

Marshmallow26 of Iraqi Roses has a long, eloquent lament on the violence.

Nabil is afraid.

neurotic iraqi wife posts on the shortcomings of democracy in Iraq.

Fatima of Thoughts from Baghdad recounts what life under curfew is like with remarkably good humour, I think.

Dave Schuler posts regularly to his own weblog, The Glittering Eye. The Carnival was originally conceived by Ryan Boots.

I hesitate because I don't like picking on people. But poor clueless (well-meaning but clueless) Alec Rawls has posted an unintentionally hilarious illustration of the Taqyya Libel in action.

I link it, by the way, not to embarrass poor Alec. He's obviously well-meaning. But he manages to illustrate just how deeply the Taqiyya Libel has managed to worm its way into the consciences of even decent people.

Alec: You've bought into the bigoted garbage known as the Taqiyya Libel. What is the Taqiyya Libel? The idea that Muslims are taught to routinely lie to non-Muslims if the purpose is to spread Islam.

The Taqiyya Libel is a lie. In fact, it is probably at least as prevalent at this point as the Blood Libel against the Jews.

All the "taqiyya" doctrine represents is this: a majority of Muslims believe, as a matter of faith, that it's never okay to lie under any circumstances. But a small minority believe that if you're trying to protect life or prevent war, it's okay to lie--and they call such pro-life actions "taqiyya," meaning to cover or protect. Most Muslims reject that as a matter of doctrine but even those who do embrace it believe it's a matter of protecting yourself or others--i.e. if you have to for protection, it's permissible.

Islamophobic nutjobs have blown this minor (and actually rather obscure) minority doctrine into a completely fantasy-based notion that Muslims are taught to routinely lie to unbelievers about just about anything so long as it helps them with their evil plot to forcibly convert or kill all non-Muslims.

And you, you poor sap, just unwittingly walked into becoming the poster child for the libel.

Here is the entire exchange between me and Ali that got poor Alec's wheels spinning:

Dean Esmay:
Uh, wait a minute. Can I get clarification on something, Ali?

Do you think that those Muslims who decide to abandon Islam, either by joining another faith or declaring themselves to be atheists, should be tortured and/or killed?

A simple yes/no answer would be good here.

(I know asking for a yes/no response is a little insulting, but one seems to be needed. And yes I'm certain that one of the Village Idiots will be along shortly to declare your answer "taqqiya" if you happen to say no. Humor me.)
11.21.2006 8:54pm

Ali Eteraz (mail) (www):
No.

Taq ya very much.

:waving to village idiots from my camel:
11.21.2006 8:59pm

Got it? I consider people who believe the Taqiyya Libel to be village idiots. Ali does too. We both share a laugh over it.

A similar exchange might go like this:

"Hey, my Jewish friend, I know you don't actually drink the blood of Christians, but could you humor me for a minute and say, yes or no, whether you think it's okay to persecute Christians?"

"No. :Munching on my Christian Baby Matzos:"

If you don't get it then I probably can't help you.

(Looking forward now to the ridiculous Robert Spencer linking this discussion and then explaining to his audience why he continues to peddle Islamophobic garbage like this.)

PS: Alec? Ali also doesn't actually ride camels. Except when he's a'courtin'. Cuz everyone knows the ladies love the camels.

Update: In case someone still needs it explained, "taq ya very much" was a pun on "thank ya very much" [wave!}

Jules explains the problem with the phrase.

Shorter response: yeah, if we call it a civil war then we can rationalize just bugging out, right?

Are some of us Americans so weak, so cynical, so very weird that the term "civil war" makes us batty when discussing Iraq?

So batty that MSM delivers a cornucopia of professors, pundits, ex-generals, fellows, and politicians for the Point/Counterpoint Olympics - Nouveau Civil War Edition! And a lot of us are watching and absorbing it.

As Charlie Brown, immortal leader of the Peanuts gang is fond of saying: I can`t stand it. I just can`t stand it.

I linked this already as part of a long, long list of links. But this really should be read on its own merits:

Most Israelis were shocked and surprised when they learned on July 24th, 1984 that Kach, the right-wing political party of Rabbi Meir Kahane, had won a seat in the Knesset. With nearly 26,000 votes, Kahane achieved his aim of entering Israel's parliament. This gave him a public forum and parliamentary immunity from police "harassment." Soon after his election, Kahane made it clear that he had no intention of becoming an ordinary parliamentarian. Devoted to his original plan of driving the Arabs out of the Land of Israel, Kahane said that a coalition government incapable of maintaining the integrity of the Jewish nation would not gain his parliamentary support, nor would he abandon his planned illicit confrontations with Arabs in their own villages.

A day after the election, Kahane and his supporters held a victory parade to the Western Wall in old Jerusalem. Passing intentionally through the Arab section of the old city, Kahane's excited followers smashed through the market, overturning vegetable stalls, hitting bystanders, punching the air with clenched fists and telling the frightened Arabs that the end of their stay in the Land of Israel was near.

Remind you of anything?

Anyway, read the whole thing.

More on the author, Ehud Sprinzak, right here.

By the way, Kahanists recently had a rally where they lionized one of their own for stabbing a homosexual and celebrated the "holy cannon" that accidentally fired a shell into an innocent family. Nice folks, those Kahanists. Good to know that some people "don't agree with everything" they represent. Kahane Chai!

Update: Martin Shoemaker calls me out in the comments for excessive snarkiness. He is absolutely right to do so.

Today is not a good day in the Esmay family calendar.

Via Slate

I've always marveled at how long the antique internal-combustion engine has survived. By 2006 standards, my car's power plant is a noisy, heat-blasting, poison-spewing monster with way too many moving parts. One spin in a Tesla made me realize that the gas engine might finally be on its last legs—and not because electric cars will help wean us from Saudi oil and save us from global warming. Rather, the Tesla Roadster is a rolling demo that proves electric cars now outperform their gas-guzzling counterparts in comfort, convenience, and, best of all, speed...

..It's one thing to know this stuff in theory. It's another to experience it on Highway 101. That's where I hitched a ride with Martin Eberhard, the Roadster's inventor. Eberhard got behind the wheel of a Tesla prototype and put the pedal to the metal. I was flabbergasted. In the passenger seat, I was wrapped in an all-powerful force that launched me forward with a perfectly even push. I've been driven this fast before in high-end European cars, always with a mix of excitement and omigod we're all going to die. But as Eberhard zoomed around slowpoke trucks and shot into traffic openings, I never once flinched with worry. I thought I'd miss the sexy rumble of a well-honed engine, but I didn't. In the silence I felt less distracted, more alert on the road...

Tim Worstall, a British libertarian, argues for legalization: "I've long been in favour of legalization (not for any particularly personal reason. My tastes in mood enhancing substances are banal and available in supermarkets up and down the land) for all of the reasons Sir Simon mentions. Prohibition is grossly expensive, diverts scarce resources from other more important matters and doesn't actually work in its declared aim, stopping people from taking drugs. But there is another point to make as well, as Milton Friedman did in his Open Letter to Bill Bennett. While prohibition will never be fully effective, efforts to make it so will have a far more damaging effect than anything drugs themselves could ever do....In the end it comes down to a fairly simple and basic choice. We can have prohibition and a heavily policed and restrictive society that has drug addicts in it or a free and liberal one without prohibition that also has drug addicts in it. Politics is just full of those tough choices, isn't it?"

My response: if adults want to jack up their own bodies, then that is on them. However, don't later ask taxpayers to bail you out of your bad life choice. And police could be focusing on serious crimes, like murder, rape, and the like.

What does it take for me to lift an entire Instapundit item, wholesale? Two out of three things: One is a desire to punish Glenn Reynolds for days of incessant blogging about digital cameras. But greater still: (2) Disregard for the law of copyright (or a belief in the merciful goodness of our Fearless Leader), and (3) the item has to be this good:

WELL, YES. Glenn Greenwald is extraordinarily lame, even when he's writing under his own name. The problem with the term "Christianist" isn't that it adds "ist" to the end of a religion. It's that, by parallelling "Islamist," it is a deliberate attempt at conflating people who oppose gay marriage — or, apparently, Madonna's schlocky posturing — with people who blow up discos and mosques, and throw gay people off of walls. That's the kind of execrable moral equivalence engaged in by the Soviets and their proxies, and it's the sort of thing that Andrew Sullivan used to oppose eloquently, before he started to engage in it himself.

For a more intelligent take, read this. And there's a bit more, here.

UPDATE: More on the difference between Islamists and "Christianists," in a video that can be found here. It's a sad thing — actually, it's a shameful thing — that I have to point this out.

"Moral equivalence" is the natural consequence of a mentality that is incapable of acknowledging absolutes in morality (for if it did, murder would always trump political action as a bad deed) and which as a corollary equates any disagreeable policy with Nazism. It understands neither morality nor equivalence, and it parades its lack of understanding as the highest sort of moral clarity. When I ask myself whether such confusion, both moral and intellectual, ever existed in an advanced society before, I can think of only one example: Prewar England, whose elite spoke almost as one in the shadow of Hitler's ascension to power to declare, "This House will under no circumstances fight for King and Country." Right and wrong, at critical points in the history of great nations — or perhaps at the apogees of their greatness — become effervescent, interchangeable, and scales of blameworthiness are measured in degrees of sentimentality, fashionableness and self-regard.

It's depressing, to say the least. I am left with only one immediate question, however: Who is this Glenn Greenwald?

UPDATE: Related thoughts from Victor David Hansen, via Glenn (Reynolds) again.

Some years ago Meryl Yourish and I had a fight over a couple of things that, in retrospect, were pretty stupid. Still, it was funny: a year or so after those incidents she wrote me to ask for a personal favor. She was entirely nice about it. I assumed this was an olive branch and complied. Since then we've exchanged short, polite emails a couple of times over mostly blogging-related matters. I didn't think we'd ever be friends again but I thought simple civility and courtesy were now a reasonable expectation.

Apparently not. Well, live and learn I guess.

Without responding to the slime spewed by Meryl and her commenters--the sexist, misandrist garbage about me, the slanderous claims about what I supposedly think about Judaism, or the shamefully Islamophobic nonsense--let me focus once again on my exact problem with the following video:

I agree with much of what's said in that video, as I've said from the start. I quibble with one or two things. If they weren't the words of a deplorable man, I would find nothing worth remarking negatively upon. I'd have probably posted the video on Dean's World, with a hat tip, and said little more about it.

However, the fact is that Meir Kahane was an evil man. Weak-tea statements like "I do not agree with everything he stood for" while glowingly quoting him at length strikes me as a big mistake. That opens up the Israeli people, and their supporters, to the charge that they stand by terrorism and theocratic extremism and are thus "no better than" their enemies--which is stupid garbage. But Kahane, by his life and actions, made such bullcrap harder to refute. If most Jews hadn't thoroughly rejected him he'd be the poster child for Jewish evil rather than the minor footnote he deserves to be.

I've spent too many years, too much personal time and money, and taken too much abuse for defending Israel. I will not stand by while a murdering terrorist thug and embarrassment to humanist values is approvingly quoted and treated as merely a bit controversial.

Under the assumption that we are actually talking like rational adults, let me point to a few examples that might help Meryl and her friends understand my point. I'll start with some comparatively mild objections about Kahane. I will then move up to issues that I consider felonies and not misdemeanors. So if someone tries the trick of only responding to my more mild objections, or pretending I put them all on the same level, we'll all know better.

Minor objection #1, which might be called a nitpick:

Meryl approvingly notes that Israel respects gay rights and is proud about this. She and I completely agree about this--we're both liberal humanists after all. As I noted almost three years ago, the following quiz is reason alone for tolerant people everywhere to respect Israel. You don't have to "approve" of homosexuality to note what it says about an enlightened, tolerant society not to imprison and persecute such people, to prefer to talk to them rather than stone them.

What would Rabbi Kahane have said about this? Well, he wanted to throw every non-Jew out of Israel, get rid of most of Israel's democratic institutions, and bring in traditionalist, Orthodox religious rule throughout the country. He advocated turning Israel into an officially theocratic, Orthodox regime. Furthermore, the Kahanist official line has always been that homosexuality is "detrimental to the perpetuation of Jewish life."

Update: This just in, Kahanists lionize a man for stabbing a homosexual. Nice folks, those Kahanists.

I think we are safe to assume that there would be no gay pride parades if Rabbi Kahane's Israel came into existence; indeed, the Kahanists continue to do their best best stop such things.

Minor objection #2, a bit more serious:

Ehud Sprinzak some years ago wrote an excellent expose of Rabbi Meir Kahane, detailing Kahane's theocratic views. There's lots there to read but I found this part particularly revealing:

The Arabs are, taken together, the collective entity that, for Kahane, threatens Jewish existence; and the Israeli Arabs (there is no Palestinian nation for Kahane) are a highly explosive time bomb. The Arabs claim the same land as the Jews, refuse to recognize God's biblical prescriptions and would never be ready to settle for less than the whole. This places them in the same position as the native population of Canaan at the time of the Israelite conquest, and all biblical rules and regulations adopted and applied by Joshua against the Canaanites are relevant today. Joshua, Kahane reminds us, sent the Canaanites three letters offering them three alternative courses of action: leave the land, fight for it and bear the consequences or peacefully surrender to the Jews and obtain the status of loyal "resident strangers." Any individual Arab is thus welcome to stay provided he fully accepts Jewish sovereignty, as well as the right upon which it is founded. Applying the rules of Halakha (written and oral tradition) according to his understanding, Kahane maintains that even in the case of complete submission, full rights of citizenship should not be given to "strangers." Only "strangers" who will obey the seven commandments of "Noah's sons," pay special taxes and submit to special labour regulations may remain. Following the "kingdom rules" of Maimonides, the "strangers" must also constantly be "humiliated and detested"

Does that sound like dhimmitude to you? It sure does to me.

I thought we were all proud of the fact that Arab citizens of Israel serve in its armed forces, in its government, and enjoy almost all the same rights that everyone else in Israel does. Israeli Arabs--not the Palestinians, but the actual Israeli Arabs who stood by Israel even when they were invaded--are treated with respect and friendship, and even gratitude. I've noted this myself many times as a reason to respect Israel. Would that every one of Israel's immediate neighbors was so tolerant of religious and ethnic minorities within their borders.

But Sprinzak notes that Kahane called for even Israeli Arabs to be expelled or at least treated with contempt and loathing. As Sprinzak noted, Kahane didn't just hate the non-Jews in Israel. He wanted them all gone, and the few who might stupidly remain should be treated with utter loathing and permanent second-class citizenship.

Minor Objection #3: To Kahanists, a Jewish woman who has sex with a non-Jew is a whore and a traitor to the Jewish people. If she doesn't deserve jail then certainly the man who had sex with her does. The Kahanists openly advocate this policy. They don't just frown upon miscegenation. They don't just condemn it. They don't even limit themselves to discouraging it. They want to make it punishable by law for a Jewish woman to have sex with a non-Jew.

I admit we are still in "controversial" territory here. I can understand why a reasonable Jew would say, "well maybe I support some of those ideas, or some parts of them," or even, "well I don't support much of that but I get where it's coming from." Either way, most would say, "we have higher issues we have to deal with right now--the protection of Israel."

I get that. So:

Not-So-Minor Objection #4: Kahanism is a terrorist movement.

If you read Sprinzak's expose, you'll find it's a pretty good introduction to Kahane's actual terrorist activities. The innocent people he beat up, the everyday people his followers hit with sticks and stones, the bombs they blew up or tried to blow up, the car bombs they set, the people he and his friends threatened to kill--and some of the people they actually did kill.

The Anti-Defamation League--an organization of which I am sometimes critical, but is certainly not anti-Jewish or anti-Israel--has a lengthy look at Kahane and his movement's violence. Click "show" below to see a few selections. By the way, the Jewish Defense League, mentioned repeatedly, is a Kahanist organization: