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Mon. May 06, 2002

QuoteLog, 5/6

QuoteLog, 5/6 – "Nowadays I am admonished to look at things from the Arab perspective. Well, I do. I read their papers as much as I can, as well nuggets gleaned from the MEMRI site. I see a legitimate cause long lost to a collective spasm of romantic insanity. I see a pathological hatred of the Jews that seems both delusional and self-destructive. The problems of the Arab states are the fault of the Arab states, but this cannot be discussed, so all anger must be directed at the Jews. It’s interesting to note after the 50s, the American culture never objectified and demonized Russians – on the contrary, we indulged ourselves with notions of the curmudgeonly Bear who, in the end, could be brought around with some good clear likker. If there is one remarkable and unnoticed aspect of the Cold War, it is the way in which the Americans eventually wanted to love the Russian people. Screw the Kremlin, fine, but we had no beef with Rooskie workin stiffs. You got your system, we got ours, but hell, it ain’t worth blowing up the planet over. If Saudi Arabia had a Star Trek, do you think they’d put a Jewish Chekov at the helm?"

James Lileks

"Though Rana Kabbani, writing from Paris for the Guardian, piously offered the hope that ’the painful lesson that Americans have had to learn is not drowned out by cowboy ravings about ’getting the bastards’ ’, it was more or less assumed that the Yanks’ crude, xenophobic, redneck instincts would quickly reveal themselves [...] Well, sure enough, the crude, xenophobic rednecks did assert themselves. But not in America in Europe. Muslims kill thousands of Americans in America, and theres a big anti-Muslim backlash …in France! Oh, and also Denmark, the Netherlands, Portugal and those other provinces of the land of sophistication where explicitly Islamophobic parties are now a significant part of the political calculus [...] The police in the German capital recently advised Jews not to go out in public wearing skullcaps or other identifying marks of their faith. Given that their predecessors were keener to mandate identifying marks yellow stars, arm tattoos, etc. perhaps we should look on the Berlin constabulary’s recommendations as progress. But are there any Germans minded to mimic those American women who took up the hijab in solidarity with their Muslim sisters? Perhaps you’d like to protest this rising tide of anti-Semitism by, say, wearing skullcaps in solidarity with your Jewish brothers? Don’t all raise your hands at once."

Mark Steyn, The Spectator

"The despair comes from the bewilderment of living in a world of monstrous moral inversion. Take Jenin. What was the real story? That hand-to-hand, door-to-door combat, in an intensely built-up shantytown, among dozens of houses booby-trapped by Palestinian fighters, should have yielded somewhere between seven and 21 scattered civilian casualties is nothing less than astonishing. It testifies to the extraordinary scrupulousness of the Israeli army, which lost 23 soldiers in the battle, precisely because it did not want to cause the civilian casualties that come with aerial bombardment, as has happened everywhere from Grozny to Kabul. And yet Israel was investigated precisely for defending itself against massacres that warrant no investigation [...] For the ”international community,” as embodied by the United Nations, such inverted moral logic is the norm. This is what it must have been like living in the false consciousness of Soviet communism, where everyone had to publicly and constantly pretend to believe the official lies, all the while knowing they were lies. This is what it must have been like living in the 1930s, as the necessities of appeasement created a gradual inversion of right and wrong—the Czechs, for example, pilloried by official opinion in Britain and France for selfishly standing in the way of peace at Munich. Churchill’s great gift to civilization was not just that he rallied good against evil but also that he pierced a suffocating fog of self-deception by speaking truth to lies. Where is the Churchill of today, the official of any government, prepared to tell the United Nations that its frantic hunt for a phantom massacre by Jews—while ignoring massacre after massacre of Jews—is grotesque and perverse?"

Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post

"On a more universal scale, the end of the recovery operation will expose its most painful truth: that no matter how extraordinary the effort has been, it will forever be incomplete. The remains of 1,008 of the 2,823 victims have been identified, with more to come through DNA matches, but hundreds of families will not fulfill their need to bury loved ones. Coffins are meant to carry more than air, they say, and the urns of ground zero dirt that the city distributed were just that: dirt [...] Mr. Vigiano knows that the moment is near. The remains of his younger son, Detective Joseph Vigiano, 34, were found in October. (’Imagine being happy when they find the remains of your dead son,’ he said.) But there has been no trace yet of his older boy, John, a 36-year-old firefighter, and this father without children can do nothing but watch the diminishing piles. In the first few months he was there every day, from 7 in the morning until 11 at night. But then he broke his arm at the site, and something else snapped as well [...] ’There is nothing here for me,’ he said, looking down into the pit. ’My sons are in heaven.’ "

Dan Barry, NY Times

"The night air was crisp, the horizon pitch black, as eight heavily armed and armored U.S. Special Forces soldiers and their local guides crept up to the small, one-story mud house, pausing about 750 feet away to find cover in ditches or behind rocks or trees. With black masks pulled over their faces, the Americans trained their night-vision goggles on the house, looking for the targets, the guides recalled. Inside, the Americans had been told, might be Osama bin Laden’s top lieutenant and one of the leaders of the fallen Taliban regime. As overhead satellites monitored the area for movement, the Americans sent a pair of Pakistani contacts, wired with special communications equipment, to peek inside. But the team left empty-handed. Each night for a week the U.S. team came back, sneaking over the border from Afghanistan into the treacherous and largely ungoverned tribal areas of Pakistan as soon as the sun went down to watch and wait until returning to the Afghan side of the border just before dawn, the guides recounted in interviews today."

Peter Baker, Washington Post