PERSPECTIVE Selling Muhammad the Ropeby Thomas Fleming Cutting off our nose . . . VIEWS War on the Home Frontby Wayne AllensworthReal homeland security. Is There a Khilafah in Your Future?by James George JatrasThe coming Islamic revolution. NEWS The Saudi Presence in the United Statesby Robert SpencerThe most lethal terror front of all? Islam: Africa’s...
Year: 2005
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On Beslan
Srdja Trifkovic’s conclusion to his piece on the Beslan tragedy (“After Beslan,” The American Interest, November) hits the mark precisely. Orthodox Christians have had it proved to them over and over again that the West will prefer the friendship of the Mohammedan to ours, unless we volunteer to forsake our convictions and identity to become...
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On Helping Taiwan
In his article “Out on a Limb: America’s Pledge to Defend Taiwan” (Vital Signs, December), Ted Galen Carpenter does not discuss whether it is in America’s national interest for Taiwan to fall under the control of the Beijing regime. Instead, he argues that our Asian allies may not support our defense of the island. To...
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President Bush Can End “Gay Marriage” If He Wants To
In June 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court ignited our most recent culture war when it discovered a constitutional right to sodomize (Lawrence and Garner v. Texas). The Massachusetts Supreme Court then threw kerosene on the fire by finding that its constitution mandated “gay marriage” (Goodridge v. Department of Public Health). Americans from San Francisco to...
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War on the Home Front
U.S. officialdom calls them “Special Interest Aliens,” as much because they might have a special interest in us as we in them. They are aliens from countries that are considered potential sources of terrorist attacks on the American homeland, and their numbers are reportedly growing. “People are coming here with bad intentions,” an anonymous Border...
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A Bush Nominee
Alberto Gonzales, President Bush’s nominee to replace John Ashcroft as attorney general, is, by all accounts, a skilled lawyer who has achieved a great deal since his humble beginnings as the son of Mexican migrant farmworkers. He also has compiled a track record that should trouble all those who wish to limit abortion, immigration, affirmative...
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The Remnant’s Library
Chilton Williamson has taken an important step toward giving postmodern conservatism a set of respectable literary credentials. If readers are expecting a conventional walk through the conservative “classics” or a set of reflections on the writers celebrated by Russell Kirk in The Conservative Mind, they will be disappointed. Rather than taking tea with Dr. Johnson...
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Selling Muhammad the Rope
The “War on Terror,” as the years roll by, looks more like a Maginot Line than like a Blitzkrieg. Instead of hunting down terrorists or expelling Islamic cells from the United States, President Bush has chosen to attack the rogue states of Afghanistan and Iraq. Instead of targeting Islam itself as the source of anti-American...
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If We Make It Through December
From oracles to astrology to double predestination, men throughout history have sought hope in a glimpse of their future. As the Greeks well understood, however, foreknowledge is usually at the root of tragedy, and even Saint Augustine warned against consulting astrologers not because astrology is mere superstition but because of the possibility that the astrologers’...
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Five Days in Hell, Part Two
As dusk approached, we were offered a final meal of flat bread, roast chicken, and tomatoes. The maniacal little leader came to watch us eat, all the while aiming his gun at us. “Eat, eat. Why do you have no appetite? Are you afraid, American pig?” he said and then laughed at his own joke. ...
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Diversity Bites Back
After September 11, the word blowback was frequently heard. It is a CIA term describing operations that come back to haunt the agency (e.g., Afghanistan). Unlimited immigration has its own form of blowback: people like Chai Vang, who, on the afternoon of November 21, 2004, shot eight deer hunters in the northwoods of the Indianhead...
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Rumsfeld Stays
Having provided advice to a number of influential Balkan figures in my time, I know the sense of frustration when sound counsel is overruled in favor of proposals based on error or mendacity. I have been proved right, but only when it was too late: Crown Prince Alexander Kara-djordjevic would have been better off had...
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Stem Cell Research
Stem cells have taken center stage in California. In November 2004, California’s voters approved, with 59 percent of the vote, a measure that would spend three billion dollars in borrowed state funds to pay for research that requires the destruction of human embryos. You might expect a heated debate over whether such research is morally...
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January Elections
The Bush administration and its supporters are investing tremendous hope in Iraq’s January national elections. According to the conventional wisdom in Washington, violence may increase as the balloting approaches, but, once the election is held, the overwhelming majority of Iraqis will be convinced that the resulting government is legitimate. Except for the foreign terrorists and...
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The Pontiff and the War
In early December, Tom Piatak sent me an e-mail to inform me of the “papal challenge” that Peter Robinson had issued over in the Corner on National Review Online. Robinson claimed, as almost all neoconservative Catholics have claimed, that Pope John Paul II never unequivocally opposed the war. Tom asked me to reply, and sadly,...
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Saint Aborta and the Molesters
Vera Drake Produced by Thin Man Films and Studio Canal Written and directed by Mike Leigh Distributed by New Line Cinema Birth Produced and distributed by Fine Line Features Directed by Jonathan Glazer Screenplay by Jean-Claude Carrière and Milo Addica Mike Leigh, one of Britain’s socialist directors, begins and ends his latest effort, Vera Drake,...
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Honor to Whom Honor
“Render to all what is due them,” writes Saint Paul, “Tax to whom tax is due, custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honor to whom honor” (Romans 13:7, NASB). When a zealous Christian offered to help Mark Twain understand the difficult things in the Bible, Twain said something like this: “It is not...
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Exeunt Metrosexuals
A Midsummer Night’s Dream Directed by Peter Dobbins Written by William Shakespeare Stage Manager: Joe Danbusky Produced by the Storm Theatre Trust Directed by Erica Schmidt Written by Gary Mitchell Stage Manager: Megan Smith Produced by The Play Company at the Kirk Theatre When a former professional football player turns actor, the inclination is to...
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First Prize, Second Hand, Third Rate
With difficulty, in a diminished capacity, or perhaps with an alienated attitude because I was watching good old Benny Hill reruns on the BBC America channel at the time, I have become somehow dimly aware that prizes have been awarded to someone for something—but not to the late Benny Hill. Yes, the Powers, always clueless,...
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Life, Immigration, and the Pursuit of Consistent Conservatism
Congressman Chris Cannon of Utah and his open-borders cronies at the Wall Street Journal, who have embarked on a smear campaign against mainstream immigration-control groups, should learn to differentiate between real xenophobes (as found in an August 2004 Tennessee primary election) and the vast majority of people with legitimate rationales for favoring lower, tighter immigration....
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Victims of Pleasure
I had long since given up on contemporary American fiction, although the Neoformalist movement has reinvigorated my interest in some of today’s American poets. The last American novelist I really admired was Walker Percy. And even he never gave us what I had vaguely been looking for: a dramatization of the lives destroyed—or nearly so—by the...
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Education and Authority
I had taught in private schools for years, but I hesitated before entering the classroom to teach my first lesson in the state sector. I stopped a colleague in the corridor and asked him for advice. Should I expect the children to fall silent and stand behind their desks when I walked in? Thinking I was...
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Ghosts on the Stairs
“F–k socialism!” —Evelyn Waugh Octogenarian knight Sir Peregrine Worsthorne is famous in Britain for several things. He was the editor of the Sunday Telegraph and a political columnist for that paper for 30 years. He is married to the jolly Lucinda Lambton, who presents enjoyable, occasional TV programs on heritage-related topics. He wears pink bowties. ...
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Stakhanovism in Reverse
Last April, Claude Imbert, editor in chief of the moderately conservative weekly Le Point, dared to make an astonishing mea culpa. In a minor masterpiece of melancholic irony, he confessed the awful truth that he was a “liberal”—which, in present-day French parlance, means someone who believes in free enterprise as a necessary antidote to socialistic...
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The War Lovers
To save precious space in America’s most important journal, I will refer to the subjects of this book as neocons. To make fine distinctions between academic and activist Straussians, as the author sometimes does, is akin to saying Marx is not to blame for his disciples. Having long admired Prof. Anne Norton for her brilliant...
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Measuring Our Culture of Death
One side is celebrating, the other rending their garments, but both sides are wondering if the outcome of the November presidential election might signal a springtime for traditional moral values in America. Rappers P. Diddy and Eminem doubtless turned more voters away from Kerry than they attracted, and, in all states where voters were asked...
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Proposition 200
Proposition 200, a measure requiring that applicants for state benefits and state suffrage show proof of eligibility for these privileges, was adopted in Arizona on November 2, 2004, by 56 percent of the total vote and 47 percent of the Hispanic portion of it. This happened in the face of opposition from the Democratic governor...
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The Curse of Activism
Activist, activism: These are two of the ugliest, falsest, and most sinister words in the English language. As citizens of the Age of Activism, subject to the unremitting harassment of activists who refuse to leave society in peace, we need to understand the phenomenon they represent, as well as to recognize it. According to my...
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The Death of David Reimer: A Case Study in Psychiatric Politics
David Reimer, the 38-year-old man who was raised as a girl (“Brenda”) following a botched circumcision in infancy, committed suicide on May 4, 2004. As the left rushes to validate sodomy by judicial fiat and “homosexual marriage,” perhaps now is an appropriate time to revisit his case. It reveals more about the public-policy effect of...
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Going Through Changes
The CIA underwent several changes at the close of 2004, and the resignations of a number of high-ranking CIA officers in November, as well as the content of a memo by new CIA Director Porter Goss to agency employees, appear to confirm a claim by Newsday that the White House was planning a purge at...
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Bleeding Red, Feeling Blue
When I started this column back in January 2001 (as a “Letter From Rockford”), the United States had just emerged from a presidential election that made this country look anything but united. Red and Blue, until then simply convenient colors used by the television networks to designate which party’s candidate had captured the electoral votes...
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From the Mountains Above Batumi
The Black Sea city of Batumi used to be beautiful, and, under a foot of freshly fallen snow, Batumi is beautiful again. Stuccoed terraces of tired 19th-century buildings sit doorstep-deep in white. Chuckling gutters trim the softness draped over corrugated iron roofs. Concrete tenements fade out of focus, their drabness merging with the gray of...
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Establishing the Worst
My young German friend Karl-Peter Schwarz, a political correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, sent me an essay last month that was earmarked for his newspaper, about an Italian Christian Democrat and nominee for the post of E.U. commissioner of justice, Rocco Buttiglione. In early October 2004, the Berlusconi government nominated Buttiglione as part of...
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On the Western Front
Paul Gottfried’s claim in “Where Have All the Nazis Gone?” (The Western Front, October) that “both sides had behaved recklessly in 1914” is incorrect. A close scrutiny of the July Crisis indicates recklessness mixed with mendacity in Vienna and Berlin, and merely reactive and predictable responses from Paris, St. Petersburg, and London. Dr. Gottfried then...
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Who Will Judge the Judges?
Abraham Lincoln, in his 1860 Cooper Union speech, asked, “What is the frame of government under which we live?” The answer must be, he said, the Constitution of the United States. The answer today, as Chronicles’ reviewer of Quirk’s and Bridewell’s Judicial Dictatorship stated in 1995, is a judicial dictatorship imposed by the Supreme Court. ...
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What’s Next for the Imperial Judiciary?
“How much power Congress has to block Supreme Court consideration of the constitutionality of its laws is an open question.” This, the Washington Post said in a September 23, 2004, editorial, is “somewhat surprising.” The Post shouldn’t be so astonished, for the real surprise is that judicial supremacy—the doctrine that the Court interprets the Constitution...
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Everything Dies
It was one of those winter days in Texas that seem as gray as the surface of the moon and about as hospitable. It’s cool outside, so you wear a jacket. Inside, it’s stuffy. I’m wearing a coat and running the fan at the same time. You can’t quite get comfortable when it’s like that. ...
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Government: Good or Bad? Big or Little?
Toward the beginning of De Caelo (On the Heavens), Aristotle makes the well-known remark that “the least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold”—or, as it is sometimes phrased, “a small error in the beginning leads to a large error later on.” We can easily see that this is true, whether in...
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In the Wake of November
George W. Bush’s electoral victory stunned pundits and pollsters. I was more surprised by the preelection polls than by the President’s margin of victory, which I had been correctly predicting for several months. When the Zogby numbers were brought to me at the end of the day, predicting a Kerry victory by 100 electoral votes,...
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Love the One You’re With
The reelection of George W. Bush has confirmed the leftist takeover of the Republican Party. While conservative Christians turned out in strength to defeat the party of “gay marriage,” Richard Perle & Assoc. remains in charge of foreign policy, and Karl Rove and Arlen Specter will prevent any action on the moral agenda. Most movement...
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Obstacle to Fresh Vision
Yasser Arafat, the president of the Palestinian Authority, is dead. While he was alive, he was an obstacle to any fresh vision for peace in the Middle East. Vainglorious and shifty (he changed his mind about his place of birth thrice), he was unattractive as the “icon” of Palestinian aspirations. His ineffectiveness as an administrator...
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European Bushophobia
The announcement of President George W. Bush’s victory last November 3 was immediately followed by an outpouring of vitriol by a legion of European editorialists and op-ed columnists. The Michael Moore wannabes ranted and raved while the “analysts” whined and wailed. The tone of the former was set by a Fleet Street tabloid, the Daily...
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Five Days in Hell, Part One
It was nearly dusk on September 7, when we arrived at the outskirts of Tal Afar, Iraq. On the main highway to Mosul, about a dozen Iraqi policemen at a checkpoint were supervising a frightened exodus of civilian refugees. For the past week, there had been media reports of escalating violence between resistance fighters and...
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Abortion on the Rise
Abortion is on the rise in the United States—and has been since George W. Bush was first inaugurated President in January 2001. Current estimates of the number of abortions performed annually in America hover just above 1.3 million. What may astonish many of the “moral values” voters who reelected President Bush last November is that,...
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Answering the Call
Brand New Strings by Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder Recorded and mixed at Skaggs Place Studios Produced by Ricky Skaggs When Lester Flatt’s health began to decline in 1979, he was sure of one thing: All those years, when he was playing Gospel songs with Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs, he had been an unbeliever. ...
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You Say You Want a Revolution
With a none-too-whopping lunch of 51 percent of the popular vote packed into their bellies, the nation’s “conservatives” quibbled and preached to one another about the true meaning of the 2004 presidential election even before the 51 percent had made it all the way down their political esophagus. “Now comes the revolution,” beamed Richard A....
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America’s Unthinking Military
It was in the autumn of 1960, after our Plebe Summer and the test of “Beast Barracks,” that I first heard about the revisions that the West Point academic curriculum had recently undergone, which would be experimentally applied to our incoming class of some 800 men. Colonel Lincoln’s Social Science Department, as it was presented...
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The Art of Scam
Roger Kimball, who edits the New Criterion and does art criticism for National Review, has set out to achieve two goals in this thin, concise book: pointing out “the depredations practiced by criticism on art” and aiming “to encourage the benevolent civilizing elements that have traditionally been accorded to our encounters with good art.” Despite...
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On the Accordion
In Scott P. Richert’s otherwise fine article “Polka Can’t Die” (The Rockford Files, November 2004), I was somewhat pained by his only slightly veiled disdain for the accordion. Polka without accordion? As soulless as Bach on a Moog synthesizer! His aversion does place him in some traditional company. A Daumier cartoon has a character whose...