When confronted with an American convert to Islam who has studied overseas, it’s hard not to think today of the celebrated case of John Walker Lindh, “the American Taliban” captured by U.S. troops in Afghanistan and brought back to the United States to stand trial. “Abdul” knows that, yet he’s chosen to be brutally honest...
Category: Columns
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Taking the Mickey
In an English court of law 21 years ago, I had the opportunity to discover firsthand how touchy judges can be when challenged from the dock. It was a case of libel that caught both the tabloid and broadsheet imagination, not to mention the BBC’s. I had referred to a very rich old woman as...
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A Remembered Kindness
Lebanese restaurants in London used to position their shawarma near the front window, so that a passerby could always tell the time of day by the volume of the orotund mass of diced lamb remaining on the spit. Now that many of them have become gentrified, that traditional enticement has been replaced with potted palms...
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Excellent Enemies
Lions for Lambs Produced and distributed by United Artists Directed by Robert Redford Written by Matthew Michael Carnahan Bulletin: The neocon pundits are going to war! Not to Iraq or Afghanistan, though. No, they’re landing in our local movie theaters and pounding away at all those treasonous antiwar movies being thrust on the unsuspecting public....
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Jesus’ Simple Message
When you get intimately familiar with any artist’s work, you become delightedly aware of the development of his style. I was reminded of this lately while working on a book about Shakespeare; more than ever, I was impressed by the vast difference between the “middle” Shakespearean style and the later style (or styles). The pithy...
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The Politics of Human Interests
After wearing out the patience of television viewers over an entire year of premature campaigning, the two political parties will soon be informing us of their choices. Will the presidential election of 2008 really come down to a contest between two leftist anti-Christian senators representing New York? Or will Al Gore, even more bloated with...
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The Empire: Not So Great in ’08
Iraq will continue to top the list of American foreign-policy concerns in 2008. While tactical successes in Baghdad and the Anbar Province were achieved in 2007 through the U.S. forces’ marriage of convenience with various Sunni Arab tribal leaders and former Saddam loyalists who detest Al Qaeda even more than they dislike the Americans, translating...
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You Read It Here First
A little less than a year ago, in the February 2007 issue, I introduced in these pages the story of Derrick Shareef, an African-American convert to mainstream Islam who was arrested on December 8, 2006, for plotting an attack on the largest shopping mall in the Rockford area during the height of the Christmas shopping...
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Saudi Bums
As I wrote five years ago in another place, beginning a new column is like the first date with a girl you’ve had your eye on for a long time but never had the courage to ask out. One’s nervous. But this is a new year, 2008, and let’s start it off right by telling...
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Cartoon Enlightenment
Two years ago, Europe was in the middle of its cartoon jihad, as thousands of Muslims protested images believed to insult Muhammad. At the time, despairing observers saw the affair as yet another milestone in Europe’s descent into Eurabia, a graveyard of Christianity and Western civilization. In hindsight, though, it rather looks as if the...
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A Pair of Charmers
There are two archetypes of the charming idler. One, rather like myself, is likely to be unemployed de métier. The other drifts in and out of employment, trading on social connections, borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, pandering, dealing cocaine, walking dogs, selling Impressionist pictures, joining the Foreign Legion, working on a perpetuum mobile, discovering...
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Slinging It
In the Valley of Elah Produced by Blackfriars Bridge Films and Summit Entertainment Written and directed by Paul Haggis Distributed by Warner Independent Pictures Michael Clayton Produced by Castle Rock Entertainment and Section 8 Written and directed by Tony Gilroy Distributed by Warner Brothers There are two kinds of symbolism: the gilded and the golden. ...
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A Close Encounter With the Enemy
Following his conversation with Jacinta Ruiz, Héctor took down from its shelf the statue of the Centaur that had been gathering a coat of the fine yellow dust blown in from the Chihuahuan Desert through chinks in the ranch-house walls and put it away in the closet, and he did not visit the Pink House...
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Freedom of Conscience
The Illinois legislature recently overrode Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s veto of what the newspapers are describing as mandatory-school-prayer legislation. Predictably, the state’s editorial pages are filled with denunciations of this arbitrary attempt to impose religion on the helpless children of Illinois, but in fact, the new law, requiring a minute of silence at the beginning of...
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A New Balance of Power
Seven years is a well-rounded time span, for better (“Behold, there come seven years of great plenty”) or for worse (“And there shall arise after them seven years of famine”). As we enter the final year of George W. Bush’s presidency, it is time to look at his septennial foreign-policy scorecard without malice, which his...
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Inside the Gates
Fr. Brian A.T. Bovee, the rector of Saint Mary’s Oratory in Rockford, sometimes calls his church Santa Maria Inter Carceres—Saint Mary’s Among the Jails. It’s a (half-)joking reference to the oratory’s location just to the west of the Public Safety Building, just to the east of the new Winnebago County Jail, and just to the...
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The Fighting Irish
Before a new documentary series on World War II by Ken Burns even aired on PBS, there was controversy. Mexican-American organizations complained that there was no episode that focused solely on their people. Burns responded by adding a segment devoted to Mexican-Americans. Nonetheless, the same groups complained that the additional material was not enough. I...
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A Sense of Perspective
It may seem to the least demanding of readers that this column, though generously meandering of thought, is short of action. The trouble, I must admit, is that I have no sense of perspective. There may well be more references to current events in a couple of pages of Plato’s Dialogues than in everything I...
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Defending the Normal
Conservatism is usually defined as “opposition to change,” “adherence to the old and traditional,” and so forth. But, of course, in the Bush-Cheney era, we all feel these familiar tags to be seriously inadequate, even wholly beside the point and downright misleading. If these men are conservatives, as the news media insist on calling them,...
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In Contention
3:10 to Yuma Produced by Tree Line Films Directed by James Mangold Screenplay by Michael Brandt and Halsted Welles Distributed by Lionsgate The Nanny Diaries Produced and distributed by The Weinstein Company Directed and written by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini 3:10 to Yuma began as a 15-page Elmore Leonard short story, as bare...
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Wiccan Warming
The summer of 2007 was nearly intolerable here in Northern Illinois. Except for a glorious week in July when the sun, shining bright in the clear sky, never warmed our city to above 80 degrees, the days were an unpleasant mix of heat and humidity, punctuated by a few cool stretches drowned in torrential rains...
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Staying the Course
Those of us who grew up under communism remember well the ritual of the Leader’s Speech. At a Party congress—invariably dubbed “historic” even before it began—or on the occasion of the opening of a new steel mill, the Dear Comrade would deliver a much-heralded oration. It usually contained three main ingredients: “We” are making great...
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In the Garden
“How’s your garden doing this year?” It’s a familiar question, as normal as the greeting that began the conversation and the goodbye that will end it. I cannot start a conversation with my grandmother, or an aunt or uncle or cousin, without being asked the question within a minute or two—or, depending on the time...
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The Fig Leaf
All one can ever imagine of Eve is the fig leaf, but the whole issue is more universal, and at the same time somehow more prickly, than any isolated contretemps in the Legoland of the senses. Say “glutton,” and in your mind’s eye you’ll see a mutton joint being brandished by some Rabelaisian hand; say...
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Henny Penny
No End in Sight Produced by Representational Pictures Directed and written by Charles Ferguson Distributed by Magnolia Pictures The Bourne Ultimatum Produced and distributed by Universal Pictures Directed by Paul Greengrass Screenplay by Tony Gilroy and Scott Z. Burns The Simpsons Movie Produced and distributed by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation Directed by David Silverman...
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Villa Blanco, Villa Negro
Revealed in the headlights of the van, Las Palomas had never looked so depressing to Héctor as it did that night. Indeed, it appeared to him as positively sinister, a ghost town in which the few flesh-and-blood inhabitants were the apparitions, and the thronging specters from the past, the true living beings. It occurred to...
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“Make Me Do Right or Make Me Do Wrong, I’m Your Puppet”
Nicholas Chiaroscuro is one of the most important men in American politics. Not that he is a politician. Mr. Chiaroscuro does not aspire to the lofty position of political puppets whose only qualifications are an insipid face, a case of hair spray, and an infinite capacity for self-gratification. Chiaroscuro looks upon such creatures much as...
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A Divided Subcontinent
A 31-gun salute boomed at daybreak on August 14 in Islamabad to mark Pakistan’s 60th anniversary of independence from British rule—or, to be precise, her birth as a Muslim state that resulted from the bloody partition of India in 1947. That event was accompanied by the largest mass migration in history, as over ten million...
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Submarine Ace of Aces
Now that the youngest of our World War II veterans, with but a few exceptions, are in their 80’s, I fear that, as they die, memory of them will die also. While teaching history in college for more than 30 years—15 of those at UCLA, where a single class could have more than 400 students—I...
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The New Math: 66 < 60
How much would you pay for a library card? In Rockford, if you are not a resident, you have to pay $140 per year for the privilege of using the Rockford Public Library system. With six branches scattered throughout the city and over 400,000 volumes, most avid readers who aren’t relying on the library for...
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Egypt’s Momentous Event
Every American knows that Egypt is an overwhelmingly Muslim country, by far the most populous Arab Muslim state. Many Americans, on consideration, might also be aware that, before the arrival of Islam, Egypt was just as solidly Christian, the cultural and spiritual heart of the early Church. How did one situation give way to the...
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Evangelical Theologian
Harold O.J. Brown fell asleep, as Our Lord puts it, on July 8, just two days after his 74th birthday. This magazine’s religion editor since 1989, he was a contributor before that. The title of this column was inspired by his most significant book, among several significant books, Heresies: The Image of Christ in the...
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The Atheist’s Redemption
In my last appearance in this space, I wrote erroneously that Christopher Hitchens had favored both Anglo-American wars on Iraq. In fact, he strongly opposed the first one, back in 1991. I remember this so vividly (I was delighted with him at the time) that I can’t understand how I could be so embarrassingly forgetful...
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Promises, Promises
The world of pulp and prevarication, whose deluged plateau the young woman I was in love with had fled, called to mind a private letter of Pasternak’s written in the 1920’s. There the poet described the icy slush of totalitarianism, emulsifying every existing object out of recognition, as the epochal substratum in which his kind...
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I Love My Mother
Sicko Produced by The Weinstein Company Directed and written by Michael Moore Michael Moore calls his films documentaries, but they’re really sockumentaries. He is cinema’s heavyweight master of the sucker punch. Behind his slovenly, shambling flabbiness, he packs a vicious left hook. That’s politically left, of course. Now, some suckers deserve to be pounded by...
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Héctor Agonistes
For more than a week after his encounter with Jacinta Ruiz, Héctor avoided the Pink Store, finding an excuse to drive Jesús “Eddie” to Geronimo’s Bar & Grill in Deming—which Jesús much preferred anyway—instead. All this time, the Centaur’s statue stood on the top shelf of his computer hutch, where he had to make the...
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Counting People and People Who Count
My curriculum vitae still includes a paragraph describing my activities as an “educational consultant,” though it has been some years since I went to Washington to read grants or evaluate schools for the Department of Education. It was all time wasted, less profitable than time wasted on politics. Politicians, to their credit, know that it...
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The President’s Painted Corner
A prudent power will always seek to keep open as many options as possible in its foreign-policy making. An increasingly rigid system of alliances, coupled with mobilization blueprints and railway timetables, reduced the European powers’ scope for maneuver in the summer of 1914 and contributed to the ensuing catastrophe. The United States, by contrast, entered...
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Trusting Whitey
On June 30, 2002, the Rockford school-desegregation lawsuit came to an end. After 13 years of busing; the closing of numerous neighborhood schools, one of which is now a mosque and Islamic school; the construction of several massive (and massively overpriced) magnet schools, including a Spanish-language-immersion school and an environmental-science academy; white and middle-class flight...
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An Idle Character
The riddle of Svengali is only a riddle because men, in particular, tend to caricature their position as the breadwinning yang with respect to the theatrical female yin, supposing that what lies on the far side of the sexual divide is love, while what lies to this side of it is money. But the idea...
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Jekyll and Hyde in a Box
Mr. Brooks Produced and distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Directed by Bruce A. Evans Screenplay by Bruce A. Evans and Raynold Gideon Last month, the Wall Street Journal gleefully doted on billionaire wonderboy Stephen Schwarzman of the aptly named Blackstone Group, a firm dealing in private equities and leveraged buyouts. Schwarzman, George W. Bush’s roommate at...
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Mexico Way
Though Héctor had lived all his life in a desert climate, he was a town kid whose closest experience of the desert itself had been to drive across it at 50 or 60 miles per hour. Now that he was actually living there, he found the reality of the experience daunting, even frightening. For Héctor,...
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Connoisseur of Chaos
In a spurt of avuncular generosity, I handed the young man a cigar. It was a pretty good smoke, maybe a Romeo y Julieta or a Maria Mancini I had bought for half-price. (I buy all my cigars on sale or do not buy them at all.) The polite young man thanked me, clipped the...
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Conservative Russia, Imperial America
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s refusal to yield to Western pressure and accept Kosovo’s independence at the G-8 summit in Heiligendamm has prompted a new round of Russia-bashing at both ends of the political spectrum. Editorial columns were filled with references to Putin’s “posturing,” “bluff,” “intimidation,” and “empty rhetoric.” His “hard line” may “reignite ethnic violence,”...
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White Sprinters
For several years now, professional baseball has been pouring millions of dollars into developing black players. Evidently, the number of black players, at least American blacks, has been in decline. NASCAR is funding programs to develop black drivers after fielding complaints that the sport is too white. Similarly, the NHL now has a “Diversity Program”...
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A Light Out of the Dim
How did an eighth-generation German-American growing up in Rockford, Illinois, proud of his ethnic heritage, baptized Lutheran, educated in Catholic schools, come to convert to Islam? As Aaron, “Abdul,” and I sit down at the Richard John Neuhaus Memorial Conference Table, that question hangs in the air. “I came from a broken family, basically,” Abdul...
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A Highly Personal History
We’re about 50 miles east of Toledo, cruising along the Ohio Turnpike on our way to Cleveland for the wedding of longtime Chronicles contributor Tom Piatak. Satisfied from a lunch of cabbage rolls, paprikas dumplings, and Hungarian sausage at the original Tony Packo’s, I have Amy’s MacBook open on my lap and Bruce Springsteen’s Born...
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The Sea Gave Up the Dead
“Lord, he looks so peaceful,” Miss Alice said tearfully. I braced myself for a long two hours at my post—and that was before the funeral started. Interrupting my thoughts, she looked up at me and spoke in a whisper that was loud enough for Pastor Brown, who was standing on the other side of the...
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The Atheist Renaissance
Atheists are feeling their oats these days. Three militant unbelievers—Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens—have recently hit the best-seller lists and talk shows. Not since Bertrand Russell have we seen atheism so prosperously married to celebrity. Why now? Since the September 11 terror attacks, militant Islam has given ammunition to those in the secularized...
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Kierkegaard and the Camera
On a balmy spring day, a visitor to St. Mark’s in Venice, if he is adventurous enough to make his way to the top of the cathedral and look down, will see the subjacent piazza covered in a species of vermin. Excoriating the global tourist is almost as banal a pastime as trailing through an...