Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah

Hamas, like any benevolent organization might, runs summer camps for children:

"The main reason for Hamas summer camp is just for fun, to take them from the killing environment. They've gone through things they weren't prepared for," Salah, the Hamas education chief, said. "The main thing is to teach them to love their nation, Palestine. We're all one nation." But while Hamas leaders point to their social programs as the reason for the camps' popularity, Israelis -- and some Palestinians -- are far more critical of what the young campers are learning besides horseback riding and the backstroke.

At one beach camp, attended by approximately 100 kids, an instructor wore a heavy flannel shirt under which a webbed belt could be seen strapped to his stomach. Asked by a reporter what it was, he answered, with a broad smile, "Boom!"

The instructor led a group of young teenagers through marching drills on the sand -- facing movements, close quarter drill. With a smile at the reporter, he put a megaphone to his lips.

"What are you?" he called.

"Monsters!" the kids replied.

"What are you?!"

"MONSTERS!"

As the instructor, Sa'eb Dormush, stepped aside for an interview, a youth in the group shouted out "moqawama!" -- resistance. "That is the first word they learn when they are born," Dormush said with a laugh. "This is the next generation."

Across camp, a group of younger children -- most between 10 and 12 -- sat in a circle in the sand singing one of the "intifada songs" they learn at camp. One boy sang verses in a rolling soprano as the others joined in on the one-word chorus.

"We don't want to sleep.

HA-A-MAS!

We want revenge.

HA-A-MAS!

Raise it up.

HA-A-MAS!

Rifle fire.

HA-A-MAS!

If it will take a thousand martyrs.

HA-A-MAS!

Kill Zionists.

HA-A-MAS!

Wherever they are.

HA-A-MAS!

In the name of God.

HA-A-MAS!"

Of course, the curmudgeonly Israelis fail to appreciate the benefits being bestowed on the little tykes:

Such activities prompt Israeli officials to look harshly at the camps, especially when combined with statements from Hamas officials such as Gaza leader Mahmoud al-Zahar, who said in a recent interview that despite the current shaky hudna (truce) with Israel, Hamas will continue to attack Jewish settlements in the West Bank until Israel disengages from that area. He also said that he remains devoted to the elimination of the state of Israel altogether.

"These summer camps are an industry of a culture of hatred," said Gissin, Sharon's spokesman. "They don't teach them how to fly kites; they teach them how to become walking bombs."

What a slander. To think that the Zionists would sink so low as to accuse peace-loving Palestinians of being so depraved that they would actually encourage their children to become suicidal killers. No wonder there's no peace in the Middle-East.

Is Islam the Problem?

"If the Boy Scouts of America had 1,000 Scout troops, and 10 of them practiced suicide bombings, then the BSA would be considered a terrorist organization. If the BSA refused to kick out those 10 troops, that would make the case even stronger. If people defending terror repeatedly turned to the Boy Scout handbook and found language that justified and defended murder -- and the scoutmasters responded by saying 'Could be' -- the Boy Scouts would have been driven out of America long ago."

"Today, Islam has whole sects and huge mosques that preach terror. Its theology is openly used to give the murderers their motives. Millions of its members give these killers comfort. The question isn't how dare I call Islam a terrorist organization, but rather why more people do not."

Talk show host Michael Graham who was suspended by WMAL for repeatedly accusing Islam of being a terrorist organization.

See more here.

As if to affirm Graham's allegation that the problem is not just fringe Islamists but Islam itself even some so-called moderate imams are refusing to face reality. The most senior Islamic cleric in Birmingham claimed recently that Muslims were being unjustly blamed in the war on terrorism and that the eight suspects in the two bombing attacks on London "could have been innocent passengers":

Mohammad Naseem, the chairman of the city's central mosque, called Tony Blair a "liar" and "unreliable witness" and questioned whether CCTV footage issued of the suspected bombers was of the perpetrators.

Mr Naseem, who was speaking after police seized Yasin Hassan Omar in Birmingham, delivered his unprompted outburst when he was invited to a press conference with West Midlands police and Birmingham city council to help calm fears of racial or religious tension after the arrest.

His comments shocked senior police officers. Sources said that attempts to encourage Muslims to pass them information on the bombers' activities would be hindered. One said: "We are trying to gain the trust of the Muslim community and these kinds of comments have the opposite effect. All they do is encourage communities to close ranks against us."

To the obvious embarrassment of council officials and police standing next to him, Mr Naseem said the Government and security services "were not to be relied upon". He said: "Tony Blair has told lies on going to Iraq and in a court of law if a witness has proved to be a liar he ceases to be a reliable witness. So we cannot give our blind trust to the Government.

"To have that trust it is important that the process of law should be independent, open and transparent. I am also sad that unfortunately the impression has been given that Muslims are to be targeted in this war against terror. There seems to be a directive to target Muslims. Why do we not have an open mind about this?

"Muslim bashing seems to be more earnest than the need for national unity and harmony. Terrorists can be anybody - we will have to see [whether the bombers are Muslims]. The process is not open; the process is not transparent; the process is not independent. I do not have faith in the system as it stands."

Mr Naseem is one of the most respected Muslims in the city and is considered a moderate. He has regular meetings with the chief constable to discuss religious harmony. Mr Naseem said that while it was vital that terrorism was stamped out and that there was never any justification for it, the Government had not helped by going to war in Iraq.

Dismissing the Prime Minister's insistence that the war had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks, he said: "Tony Blair ... is not going to be perceived as a reliable witness. His comments could motivate someone to take the law into his own hands."

"Some people have been caught but I have not seen any evidence. The process of law is not open," he added. Asked about the suspects' DNA being found at the scene of the first attacks, he said: "DNA can match you, but that does not mean you are going to commit a crime. Thousands of youths are passing by and caught on CCTV, so how do you know it is them?"

And, in an editorial in The Dawn, the central mosque's newsletter, Mr Naseem writes: "Where is the evidence that four youths whose pictures were caught on CCTV cameras...were the perpetrators? How did we reject the possibility they were just innocent victims of this terrible happening? They had bought return train tickets."

Meanwhile, the imam at one of the largest east coast mosques, a supporter of Hamas, Shaker Elsayed, rejected any suggestion that Islam needs to reform and should use any means necessary to defeat its enemies.

Islamists like Elsayad and Naseem see world-wide Islam as within their grasp as long as they don't lose heart and do not allow themselves to be deterred from the goal. Thus they must not give an inch to the infidels no matter how stupid their obstinence makes them sound.

The Privileged Professor

How does the University of Rhode Island justify paying this guy? Forget about the fact that, if Mr. Nelson is telling the story accurately, he's a disgrace to the teaching profession. Forget that he's an incredibly sleazy and contemptible human being. Ask yourself what the university would do if he were a heterosexual male making similar remarks to female students. Change everything in this column so that the references were to heterosexual behavior by a heterosexual male and the university would have had his bags packed and desk cleaned out within an hour of the opening of classes whether a student filed a formal complaint or not.

Why are promiscuously homosexual professors so privileged at this school that they are permitted to violate the canons of professional ethics governing teacher-student relationships and defraud their students of an education and still get paid for it? We know what kind of man professor Vocino is, but what kind of place is the University of Rhode Island? It sounds like an academic sewer.

Air America Update

Michelle Malkin has links to all the latest news on the Air America scandal.

Question: Have you heard anything, anything at all, about this scandal on the evening news or read anything about it in your local paper? We didn't think so. Do you remember reading about Rush Limbaugh's drug addiction and subsequent legal troubles? Of course. Why is the elite media only interested in scandal when conservatives are the principal players?

Iraqi Factionalism

Strategy Page has an analysis of the current political situation in Iraq. Here's an important excerpt:

The struggle to write a new constitution by the August 15 deadline is focused on issues like the power of conservative Islamic religious organizations (who want control of the courts, and lifestyle) and autonomy of the Kurds (and exactly how large "Kurdistan" will be). All the Islamic conservatives (Shia and Sunni) fear democracy, for they know that most Iraqis do not support the conservative Islamic lifestyle. The majority of Iraqis (the 80 percent who are Arabs) do not support a lot of autonomy for the Kurds either. And by next summer, the Iraqi armed forces will be some 250,000 troops and police, with armored vehicles and warplanes. The Peshmerga will still be about 100,000 men, armed with light weapons. The U.S. will not allow the Peshmerga to get heavier arms. A war with the Kurdish and Shia militias will eventually be hopeless for the militias.

Eventually, the Kurds and Shia religious conservatives will have to work out a compromise with the majority of Iraqis. But first the Sunni Arab terrorists have to be destroyed. That won't take much longer, because the Iraqi security forces get stronger month by month, and more and more Sunni Arab leaders abandon support (active or passive) for the Sunni Arab rebels. But never forget that Sunni Arab terrorists are only the first act in the struggle to create a democratic Iraq. The second act involves dealing with Shia religious conservatives, and independent minded Kurds.

Nobody said it would be easy, but if it happens in Iraq the whole world will change. If it fails, the Islamic world will descend into a chaos which will reverberate across the globe.

60th Anniversary of Hiroshima

As we approach the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Max Hastings offers us an excellent essay upon which to reflect. He argues that there are good arguments both to justify and to condemn the use of the atomic bomb on Japan and anyone interested in the continuing debate on this historical watershed should read his column. He closes it with an important observation:

Those who today find it easy to condemn the architects of Hiroshima sometimes seem to lack humility in recognizing the frailties of the decision-makers, mortal men grappling with dilemmas of a magnitude our own generation has been spared.

In August 1945, amid a world sick of death in the cause of defeating evil, allied lives seemed very precious, while the enemy appeared to value neither his own nor those of the innocent. Truman's Hiroshima judgment may seem wrong in the eyes of posterity, but it is easy to understand why it seemed right to most of his contemporaries.

It's hard to disagree with what Hastings writes. I think we have an obligation to try to understand the circumstances the men who made the decision to drop the bomb found themselves in. Even so, there is something Hastings omits from his column which I think is of overriding importance in judging what happened, not just at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also at Tokyo, Dresden, Hamburg and many less noted cities.

In all of these, there was a conscious decision to deliberately target civilians for death. It doesn't much matter, in my opinion, whether the death was administered by conventional or nuclear explosives, the salient point is that the intentional killing of non-combatants, women and children, is prima facie morally unjustifiable. I am not saying that it is absolutely wrong. There may be circumstances which would make such a measure necessary, and perhaps such circumstances obtained in August of 1945, but it's not obvious that they did.

We were outraged on 9/11 when 3000 civilians lost their lives to Islamic terrorists. We were incensed that the hijackers targeted innocent people. We called them cowards (which they certainly weren't). We called them evil (which they certainly were), but in what morally significant ways did their deed differ from the fire-bombing of children in Dresden or Tokyo?

I sympathize with the difficulty of the decision those men had to make during WWII. I don't know what I would have decided myself, especially if I had a son slated to take part in the impending invasion of Japan. But I do think we can spare those men harsh judgment without withholding moral assessment of their deed. If we seek to justify deliberately killing innocents now it will only make it easier for us to yield to the temptation to do it again. Even as I write Rep. Tom Tancredo is defending his call to nuke Mecca if a terrorist uses a nuclear weapon in an American city.

We are fortunate to be in possession of precision weapons today that our fathers did not have and which enable us to target combatants without deliberately harming non-combatants. We have, as best as can be discerned, used these with great care and effectiveness. They have relieved us somewhat of the moral burden previous generations of Americans carried. Even so, there are many times in war when the temptation to kill indiscriminately must seem overwhelming. To the extent we excuse what was done in WWII we make it more likely that it will happen again today in the war against Islamic terrorists.

Heaven Knows

Niall Ferguson, a professor of history at Harvard, sounds the tocsin and wonders what has happened to Christianity in the land of Wesley and Whitefield, Lewis, Tolkein, Chesterton and Stott. The concern he voices is remarkable in no small part because Ferguson identifies himself as a materialist. His lack of belief notwithstanding his article is titled, Heaven knows how we'll rekindle our religion, but I believe we must:

Contrary to popular belief, it was not G. K. Chesterton who said: "When men stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing. They believe in anything." But he should have said it. Chesterton - who is nowadays best remembered, if at all, for his Father Brown stories - viewed atheism with the utmost suspicion. Those who disbelieve in God on supposedly rational grounds, he argued, merely become prey to pseudo-religions and superstitions. His neatest formulation was probably in The Miracle of Moon Crescent when he wrote: "You hard-shelled materialists [are] all balanced on the very edge of belief - of belief in almost anything."

I am a hard-shelled materialist myself, I suppose. But I was reminded of Chesterton last week by a report of a conversation between one of the would-be Islamikaze bombers, Muktar Said-Ibrahim, and a former neighbour of his in Stanmore, the suburb of north London where he grew up. "He asked me," Sarah Scott recalled, "if I was Catholic because I have Irish family, and I said I didn't believe in anything, and he said I should. He told me he was going to have all these virgins when he got to Heaven if he praises Allah. He said if you pray to Allah and if you have been loyal to Allah you would get 80 virgins, or something like that."

Now it is the easiest thing in the world to make fun of the notion, apparently a commonplace among jihadists, that a suicide bomber who successfully blows up a decent number of infidels is rewarded in heaven with 80 virgins. (I personally can think of nothing more terrifying than 80 virgins; I can just picture the belles of St Trinian's running amok.) But is it, I wonder, significantly stranger to believe, like Sarah Scott, in nothing at all?

Miss Scott's recollected conversation with Said-Ibrahim is fascinating because it illuminates the gulf that now exists in this country between a minority of fanatics and a majority of atheists. "He said," she recalled last week, "people were afraid of religion and people should not be afraid." I am not sure that British people are necessarily afraid of religion, but they are certainly not much interested in it these days. Indeed, the decline of Christianity - not just in Britain but right across Europe - stands out as one of the most remarkable phenomena of our times.

There was a time when Europe would justly refer to itself as "Christendom". Europeans built the continent's loveliest edifices to accommodate their acts of worship. They quarrelled bitterly over the distinction between transubstantiation and consubstantiation. As pilgrims, missionaries and conquistadors, they sailed to the four corners of the earth, intent on converting the heathen to the true faith. Now it is we who are the heathens.

According to the Gallup Millennium Survey of Religious Attitudes, barely 20 per cent of West Europeans attend church services at least once a week, compared with 47 per cent of North Americans and 82 per cent of West Africans. Less than half of western Europeans say God is a "very important" part of their lives, as against 83 per cent of Americans and virtually all West Africans. And fully 15 per cent of western Europeans deny that there is any kind of "spirit, God or life force" - seven times the American figure and 15 times the West African.

The exceptionally low level of British religiosity was perhaps the most striking revelation of a recent ICM poll. One in five Britons claims to "attend an organised religious service regularly", less than half the American figure. Little more than a quarter of us say that we pray regularly, compared with two thirds of Americans and 95 per cent of Nigerians. And barely one in 10 of us would be willing to die for our God or our beliefs, compared with 71 per cent of Americans.

Of course, these surveys make no distinctions between creeds, so they almost certainly understate the decline of British Christianity. Last year, do not forget, it was revealed that, in an average week, more Muslims attend a mosque than Anglicans go to church. Small wonder our talented but frustrated local minister has just announced that he is leaving the Church to become a lawyer: a true sign of the times.

The de-christianisation of Britain is in fact a relatively recent phenomenon. For most of the first half of the 20th century, Anglican Easter Day communicants accounted for around 5 to 6 per cent of the population of England; it was only after 1960 that the proportion slumped to 2 per cent. Figures for the Church of Scotland show a similar trend: steady until 1960, than falling by roughly half. As those figures suggest, British Protestants were not especially observant (compared, for example, with Irish Catholics), but until the late 1950s established church membership, if not attendance, was relatively high and steady.

Prior to 1960, most marriages in England and Wales were solemnised in a church; then the slide began, down to around 40 per cent in the late 1990s. Especially striking is the decline in confirmations as a percentage of children baptised. Fewer than a fifth of those baptised are now confirmed, around half the figure for the period from 1900 to 1960. For the Church of Scotland the decline has been even more precipitous.

Some of the greatest British writers of the 20th century anticipated this decline. Evelyn Waugh knew, once he had finished his wartime Sword of Honour trilogy, that he had written the epitaph of a particular ancient kind of English Catholicism. C S Lewis wrote The Screwtape Letters in the hope that mocking the Devil might keep him at bay. Both sensed, understandably enough, that the war posed a grave threat to Christian faith. Yet it was not really until the 1960s that their premonitions of secularisation came true.

Why have the British lost their historic faith? Like so many difficult questions, this seems at first sight to have an easy answer. But before you blame it on "The Sixties" - the Beatles, the Pill and the mini-skirt - remember that the United States had all these earthly delights too, without ceasing to be a Christian country. To be frank, I have no idea what the answer is. But I do know that it matters.

Chesterton feared that, if Christianity declined, "superstition" would "drown all your old rationalism and scepticism". When educated friends tell me that they have invited a shaman to investigate their new house for bad ju-ju, I see what Chesterton meant. Yet it is not the spread of such mumbo-jumbo that concerns me half so much as the moral vacuum our dechristianisation has created. I do not deny that sermons are sometimes dull and that British congregations often sing out of tune. But, if nothing else, a weekly dose of Christian doctrine will help to provide an ethical framework for your life. And I certainly do not know where else you are going to get one.

Over the past few weeks we have all read a great deal about the threat posed to our "way of life" by Muslim extremists like Muktar Said-Ibrahim. But how far has our own loss of religious faith turned this country into a soft target - not so much for the superstition Chesterton feared, but for the fanaticism of others?

Perhaps one reason for the difference between Europe and America is that America has a strong tradition of independent and non-liturgical churches, which Europe does not. Indeed, were it not for non-denominational or weakly affiliated congregations in the United States church attendance would look no less bleak here than there. Most of the religious dynamism, enthusiasm, growth and teaching in this country is found in congregations that are organizationally autonomous, or nearly so, and which are in any case certainly not under the oversight of the state.

These assemblies tend toward a high view of scripture and a theological and moral conservatism which has largely been abandoned among their mainline brethren, especially in their seminaries and among the church hierarchy. People want something solid to believe in, they want to belong to a church where the people and the pastor act as if they really believe what they say they believe and they're attracted to the non-traditional congregations that are sprouting up all across the American landscape which offer a stout set of convictions.

The religious or spiritual energy generated by these institutions and their congregants also seeps into more formal mainline churches by neighbors talking to neighbors and through the expansive literature being produced by pastors and lay leaders outside the mainline denominations. This intercourse injects a measure of vitality into more traditional congregations, especially at the lay level, which would otherwise become moribund.

I doubt there's anything much like this phenomenon in Europe, and it's probably the reason why Christianity in America, though not what it should be, is nevertheless considerably healthier than it is there.

Thought For Today

The development of microelectronic manufacturing technology has enabled researchers to produce ultra high purity materials. When gold was purified to the limits of the technology, it had the appearance of clear glass and was completely transparent.

This fact is a particularly interesting and a curious revelation if one considers a passage in the King James Bible that was written ~1,900 years ago: "...and the street of the city was pure gold, as it were transparent glass" (Revelation 21:21).

Hmmm...

Freud's Absurdity

Sigmund Freud, writing about religion in The Future of an Illusion, asked, "Am I to believe in every absurdity? If not, why this one in particular?"

Even though he was talking about belief in God his question has resonance beyond its implicit criticism of theism. Consider, for instance, just a few of the absurdities that an atheist, like Freud, often chooses to believe:

He often chooses to believe that there are moral values that somehow transcend human subjectivity even though there's no basis for believing such things exist in a world without God. Unless there is a God the only morality that makes any sense is one based upon "might makes right."

He often chooses to believe that his daily existence has some meaning when in fact an eternal death nullifies all meaning and significance in life. Life can only have genuine meaning if physical death is not the end of one's existence.

He often chooses to believe that consciousness can arise out of brute material substance, as if a test tube full of the appropriate chemicals could produce a hope or a wish. There is no materialist explanation for human consciousness. It is a mystery. Why then is it less absurd to believe it somehow arises out of matter than to believe it somehow arises out of the mind of a Creator?

He often chooses to believe that even though everything in his philosophy tells him that we are just lumps of mud and blood, nevertheless we have dignity. On the contrary, human beings have no inherent dignity. Whatever dignity we possess is simply what we and others choose to confer upon ourselves.

He often chooses to believe that human rights somehow exist apart from the whims of the people in the state who wield power. He believes this even though any rights that the state chooses to grant its citizens are purely arbitrary and grounded in nothing more than human sentiment. We only have real rights to the extent they are granted to us by a transcendent moral authority.

He often chooses to believe that though this universe in which we live is so incredibly and exquisitely fine-tuned for life it is nevertheless just an accident of chance. He seeks to evade the powerful testimony of the universe's amazing physico-chemical properties by speculating that there are a near infinite number of worlds and that therefore at least one must have the astonishing collocation of properties, laws, and forces that this one has. He believes this despite the complete absence of any evidence for any world (universe) other than this one.

He often chooses to believe that the origin of life, the emergence of whole libraries of information contained within the walls of a microscopic cell, was a result of blind, unguided processes, as if feeding magnetic scrabble letters into a blender could eventually churn out the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Like consciousness, the origin of life is a complete mystery.

The Christian theist believes that the universe is not an incomprehensible coincidence, that consciousness is not an emergent property of matter, that life has meaning, human beings have worth, and morality and human rights are warranted because all these things are created by and/or grounded in an intelligent, personal God.

So we may ask Freud why it is more absurd to believe that there is an intelligent Creator than it is to believe that meaning, morality, the cosmos and life, human dignity and rights, all exist apart from any apparent or plausible ground or explanation for them. The fact is, it is the atheist who, in the light of what we know about the world today, must embrace absurdity.

Political Brilliance

Dick Morris thinks Bush is a political genius:

Who says President Bush isn't brilliant? His maneuver in appointing Judge John Roberts has completely throttled the Democrats in the highest-stakes game of his second term.

The key is that Bush has used the Democrats' opposition to his district and circuit-court judicial appointments against them and made it a ratification of the Roberts candidacy. Simply put, by choosing a judge whom the Democrats confirmed unanimously when he was nominated for the D.C. Circuit Court - and whom they did not filibuster - Bush has made the Democrats impotent.

The Democrats thought they were preparing for the Supreme Court battle when they hit on their strategy of filibustering Bush's judicial nominations. They saw these battles as spring training to get them in shape for the real fight that would come when Bush made his Supreme Court nomination.

Instead, their strategy has backfired massively. By lending such a high profile to their opposition to Bush's lower-court appointments, the Democrats have effectively denied themselves the ability to filibuster anyone of whom they have approved in the past.

When the Democrats singled out certain of Bush's appointees to the courts for filibusters and strident opposition, they, in effect, gave their seal of approval to those whom they did not filibuster. Their silence is like the classic case in Sherlock Holmes of the dog that didn't bark.

And when the Democratic Senators agreed to a voice vote on Roberts, in effect confirming him unanimously, their seal of approval was made even more explicit. Now, having voted for Roberts and having not filibustered his nomination, the Democrats cannot come back and suddenly discover reasons to oppose him.

Obviously, if Roberts says the wrong things at his confirmation hearings or abandons the wise strategy laid out by Ruth Bader Ginsburg in refusing to spell out her likely decisions on cases that will come before the court, then all bets are off. But if Roberts handles himself well and avoids explicitly committing himself on Roe v. Wade and other issues, Bush has succeeded in putting him over and dodging the bullet that seemed to be marked for him when Sandra Day O'Connor resigned.

Has Bush fooled the left or the right? Will Roberts be the reliable pro-life vote that the Christian right hopes, or will he be the judicial conservative, respectful of precedent - including Roe - that the left hopes? We won't know until after he takes his seat and casts his vote. But Bush has threaded his way through a minefield in selecting the most conservative judge who has already received recent Senate approval - and garnered a unanimous Democratic vote.

It is very interesting to see how Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) will vote on the Roberts nomination. Should she back him, she will be defying her core constituency - the abortion-rights group NARAL Pro-Choice America. For now, her vote for Roberts might win her points in moving to the center. But if Roberts votes against Roe, Hillary will have a very hard time explaining her support for him, especially if Sens. John Kerry (Mass.), Evan Bayh (Ind.) and Joe Biden (Del.) - her potential Democratic rivals in 2008 - vote against his confirmation.

On the other hand, if Hillary joins what is likely to be a small minority of Democrats in opposing Roberts, she is belying her supposed move to the center and showing that, when the chips are down, she will tack to the left. In posing such a dilemma for Mrs. Clinton, Bush has again shown his capacity for deft political maneuver.

Bush can just follow the Roberts playbook as future Supreme Court vacancies come up. Just appoint the most conservative available jurist whom the Democrats did not filibuster and he can escape political damage while appeasing his hard-right followers.

Bush is brilliant. There is no other way to read it.

Well, maybe. Now if we could only get him to say nu-clee-ar instead of nu-cu-lar.

Lost Liberty Project Update

Logan Clement of Freestar Media and the driving force behind the Lost Liberty Hotel project, has an e-mail update on the progress so far. Clement writes that the town of Weare's Selectmen oppose his plan to take the home of Justice David Souter by eminent domain but that the proposal can be placed on a ballot initiative if there are twenty five signatures endorsing the move:

The Weare New Hampshire Board of Selectmen has expressed complete opposition to The Lost Liberty Hotel Project. It seems they don't believe that Supreme Court Justice David Souter should be subject to the consequences of his own ruling. They claim to be defending property rights. However, while they are shielding Souter, thousands of other Americans who are fighting eminent domain proceedings enjoy no such shield. In fact ALL Americans are under threat of losing their home after the June 23 Supreme Court decision.

In New Hampshire citizens can bypass the Selectmen and make law directly. From what we've researched so far, it appears that it will take only 25 signatures to put on the ballot a measure to begin eminent domain proceedings to take Souter's land at 34 Cilley Hill Road and clear the way for the construction of The Lost Liberty Hotel. Several of our supporters in the town of Weare have mentioned that they plan to start this process. We want to help them by hiring the best attorney money can buy to draft the initiative in such a way that it can withstand attack from the Selectmen or other hostile parties.

All the pieces are coming together to make this project a success. Several real estate development companies have expressed an interest in leading this project forward. We also talked with engineers, attorneys, architects and other professionals who want to help. And of course financing it will be no problem as thousands of you want to own a piece of this living landmark. We are considering making some rooms in the Lost Liberty Hotel a timeshare so that hundreds of you can own a piece of it instead of just a few.

Clement's newsletter can be found here.

Can't Argue With Success

Debra Saunders gives credit to President Bush for the recent good news on the National Assessment of Educational Progress:

For years, nothing helped. America's children weren't reading as well as they should. An achievement gap showed black and Latino students trailing behind their white counterparts in reading and math. Educators and politicians agreed Something Must Be Done, but they made halting progress. Until now.

This month, the National Assessment of Educational Progress -- also known as the national report card -- released good news on long-term educational trends in America. Reading competency for 9-year-olds has reached its highest level since NAEP began measuring progress in 1971.

What is more, the achievement gap is narrowing. The gap between black and white 9-year-olds tested for reading was 44 points in 1971 to 26 points in 2004, while the gap between white and Latino students narrowed from 34 points in 1975 to 21 points in 2004. Half the gap-narrowing has occurred since 1999.

Of course, educrats are scrambling to make sure that no credit goes to President Bush or his No Child Left Behind program. The American Federation of Teachers issued a statement through an official, who noted that efforts that led to the higher scores predate the Bush presidency.

The AFT is right. The reforms that boosted scores predate the Bush presidency. That said, when he was governor of Texas, Bush had the good sense to jump on the right horse. He believed in pushing basic literacy, even if he wasn't as strong on phonics as I would have liked. He urged better testing to hold failing schools accountable. The approach paid off. When Bush was governor, black eighth-graders in Texas led the country in math and reading.

While Bush was on the right horse, some teacher groups and top educrats were leading a stampede of bad horses, carrying American children headlong toward ignorance. They eschewed phonics, dispensed with multiplication tables, denounced testing -- unless it gave credit for wrong math answers with clever essays -- and preferred failed bilingual education programs to English immersion programs for children learning English.

Look at any reform that has boosted student performance -- phonics, direct instruction, English immersion -- and the chances are, the educrats were against it. When parents revolted against whole language -- which teaches children to read language as a whole, without teaching them to decode words -- the educrats argued against a return to phonics, which they dismissed as "drill and kill."

When reformers pushed for tests that could show which curricula worked best, educrats denounced testing. If children steeped in phonics scored well on reading tests, they were not impressed -- it was because the children were brainwashed, not literate. And if whole-language learners scored poorly, well, it was because they were so creative.

When Bush and company demanded accountability, they complained that standards would hurt poor children -- as if under-educating poor and minority students didn't hurt poor and minority kids.

The educrat lobby in California opposed the switch from bilingual education to English immersion. Fortunately, California voters, not educrats, had an opportunity to switch to English immersion programs, and now more immigrant children have mastered English.

Over time, classroom teachers have seen their students make progress. Many have come to see the wisdom in emphasizing phonics -- it may be boring for teachers, but it helps kids learn to read better.

Bush packaged his approach under his promise to fight "the soft bigotry of low expectations." For years, educators blamed parents, demographics, money -- you name it -- for poor student performance.

Bush didn't want to hear the excuses -- and his Texas swagger paid off. As Hoover Institution fellow and sometime Bush adviser Bill Evers noted, "There's no doubt that high expectations and trying to hold the system accountable from top to the bottom is having an overall positive effect."

And so the educrats are left with weak criticisms. They complain that No Child Left Behind is underfunded -- even as Bush budgets money for the Department of Education. They argue that students have no motivation to apply themselves when they take tests -- and still the NAEP numbers are up. They note that NAEP high-school scores are flat without acknowledging that they opposed reforms that are helping more of today's 9-year-olds read.

There are good reasons to be leery of assessments based on standardized tests, but if the NAEP numbers do indeed reflect student improvement and are not just the consequence of teachers teaching to the test, well, one would be more than a little silly to argue with success.

Stopping the Contagion

Fareed Zakaria hits the bullseye with this piece of analysis in Newsweek. Zakaria notes that the ideological irrationality of the radical Islamists is similar to that of ideologues everywhere. He recounts a bit of history by way of illustration:

If you want to understand what motivates suicide bombers, watch the recent movie "Downfall." Based on eyewitness accounts, it chronicles the final days inside Hitler's bunker. In a particularly harrowing scene, Joseph Goebbels and his wife are given the opportunity to have their six young children flee to safety. But Magda Goebbels refuses and instead drugs the kids to sleep. Then she inserts a cyanide capsule into each child's mouth and presses the jaws until the capsule breaks. When explaining why she won't allow her kids to escape, Mrs. Goebbels explains, "I can't bear to think of them growing up in a world without national socialism."

This is the power of ideology. Magda Goebbels had embraced a horrific world view that made her believe that murdering her children was a noble act.

Zakaria rejects the conventional explanations that terrorism is a consequence of economic deprivation, lack of education, or American foreign policy:

What this is about, as Tony Blair has argued, is fanaticism. Radical ideologies of hate and violence have often seduced disaffected young men searching for some great cause. Forty years ago they would have embraced Leninist revolutionary dogma, with Che Guevara as the bin Laden of his day. Today, for Muslims, it is a violent interpretation of Islamic fundamentalism. Born in the Middle East, it has spread like a virus across the Muslim world and into the Islamic diaspora in the West.

He might have added that the hatred and violence are a consequence of the feelings of inadequacy, inferiority, and jealousy joined to a dogmatic, intolerant religion that countenances extreme violence as a means of spreading its ersatz "gospel" and which demands that the religion be imposed upon the entire world.

Other than that the only quibble I have with Zakaria's essay is when he says this:

But Western countries can do more as well. We're fighting a military battle against a phenomenon that is largely nonmilitary. In a battle of ideas, no one bullet will win. We must present a positive vision for Muslim societies, be seen as a friendly and progressive force by them and thus strengthen the moderates and liberals.

The problem with this is that it is contradicted by what he has said earlier in his piece. The 9/11 and London bombers were educated and the latter lived their whole lives in England. They were not ignorant of England's progressive, tolerant society. They had every reason to believe that England is a haven for, not a threat to, Muslims. Yet they wished to destroy it.

I disagree with Zakaria that Western countries can do more. We went to war in the nineties to rescue Muslims from Christians in Serbia and al Qaida thanked us by bombing the U.S.S. Cole and the World Trade Towers. We have given billions to help Muslims around the world, most recently the victims of a devastating tsunami. Osama bin Laden demanded we get our troops out of Saudi Arabia and we did. Western nations have provided refuge, opportunities, and freedoms to Muslim immigrants unheard of in Muslim nations, but all these things make no difference.

Despite all that the West has done to help save Muslims from themselves in the last fifty years Islamic nations in the U.N. refuse even to condemn the suicide bombers because to do so is to repudiate people they see as heroes of the faith.

There really is nothing more that the West can do to appease Muslims, who are intoxicated with an inexplicable sense of their own moral and religious superiority, except convert to Islam and abandon Israel. Only then would the jihad subside.

So Zakaria is incorrect in saying that there is more that the West can do. The West has done enough. The scalpel is in the Muslim's own hands, and it is they who must remove the suppurating corruption in their own flesh.

Otherwise, Zakaria's article is very good. Give it a read.

John Roberts' Paper Trail

An article in the New York Times on John Roberts' "paper trail" is reassuring, though not for the Times, I suppose:

John G. Roberts, a young lawyer in the Justice Department in 1981 and 1982 and on the White House counsel's staff from 1982 to 1986, held positions too junior for him to set policy in those days. But his internal memorandums, some of which have become public in recent days, reveal a philosophy every bit as conservative as that of the policy makers on the front lines of the Reagan revolution and give more definition to his image than was apparent in the first days after President Bush picked him to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court.

On almost every issue he dealt with where there were basically two sides, one more conservative than the other, the documents from the National Archives and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library show that Judge Roberts, now of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, advocated the more conservative course. Sometimes, he took positions even more conservative than those of his prominent superiors.

He favored less government enforcement of civil rights laws rather than more. He criticized court decisions that required a thick wall between church and state. He took the side of prosecutors over criminal defendants. He maintained that the role of the courts should be limited and the president's powers enhanced.

Consider Mr. Roberts's stands on some of the hottest political issues of the 1980's as revealed in the newly public documents:

Busing: In 1985, when he was an assistant White House counsel, Mr. Roberts took issue with Mr. Olson, an assistant attorney general at the time, on whether Congress could enact a law that outlawed busing to achieve school desegregation. Mr. Olson, who was one of the nation's most widely known conservative lawyers on constitutional matters, was arguing that Congress's hands were tied because the Supreme Court had ruled that busing was constitutionally required in some circumstances.

Mr. Roberts wrote in a memorandum to the White House counsel, Fred F. Fielding, that Mr. Olson had misinterpreted the law. He said evidence showed that by producing white flight, busing promoted segregation. "It strikes me as more than passing strange for us to tell Congress it cannot pass a law preventing courts from ordering busing when our own Justice Department invariably urges this policy on the courts," he wrote.

Sex discrimination: Mr. Roberts also challenged Mr. Reynolds, who was assistant attorney general for civil rights and another prominent conservative who outranked him. In 1981, he urged Attorney General William French Smith to reject Mr. Reynolds's position that the department should intervene on behalf of female prisoners who were discriminated against in a job-training program. If male and female prisoners had to be treated equally, Mr. Roberts argued, "the end result in this time of state prison budgets may be no programs for anyone."

Judicial restraint: Mr. Roberts consistently argued that courts should be stripped of authority over busing, school prayer and other matters. In a letter in November 1981 to Judge Henry J. Friendly of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, for whom he had clerked and whom he considered a mentor, Mr. Roberts wrote that he and his colleagues in the administration were determined to "halt unwarranted interference" by the courts in the activities of Congress and the executive branch.

Presidential war powers: In 1983, Arthur J. Goldberg, the former Supreme Court justice, wrote a letter to the White House questioning President Reagan's constitutional authority to send troops to Grenada without a declaration of war. Mr. Roberts replied with a ringing endorsement of the president's power. "This has been recognized at least since the time President Jefferson sent the Marines to the shores of Tripoli," he wrote. "While there is no clear line separating what the president may do on his own and what requires a formal declaration of war, the Grenada mission seems to be clearly acceptable as an exercise of executive authority, particularly when it is recalled that neither the Korean nor Vietnamese conflicts were declared wars."

Affirmative action: Mr. Roberts held that affirmative action programs were bound to fail because they required "the recruiting of inadequately prepared candidates." "Under our view of the law," he wrote in 1981, "it is not enough to say that blacks and women have been historically discriminated against as groups and are therefore entitled to special preferences."

Immigration: Mr. Roberts took strong issue with a Supreme Court decision striking down a Texas law that had allowed school districts to deny enrollment to children who were in the country illegally. The court had overreached its authority, he wrote, and the Justice Department had made a mistake by not entering the case on the state's side.

Church-state: Mr. Roberts was sharply critical of the Supreme Court decision outlawing prayer in public schools, and he said the court had exceeded its authority when it allowed any citizens to challenge the transfer of public property to a parochial school.

It's going to be devilishly hard for the Democrats to convince the American people that these positions put Judge Roberts out of the American mainstream, although of course that won't stop them from trying. All in all, Roberts sounds like a man of eminent good sense and an excellent choice for the Supreme Court. Even Ann Coulter should be pleased.

The Liberal Church

Christianity has many attractions, but one of them surely is that it offers people sustenance that they can find nowhere else in the culture. It offers, among other unique goods, transcendence, a solid ground for morality, and a solid set of morals to go with it. It is because so many liberal churches have abandoned these benefits and embraced the moral thinking fashionable in the larger culture that their pews are being emptied. People, particularly the young, see no reason to commit to a church that offers them on Sunday morning nothing that the world doesn't offer during the rest of the week.

This is the theme of a new book titled Exodus: Why Americans are Fleeing Liberal Churches for Conservative Christianity, by journalist and author Dave Shiflett. Shiflett interviewed Southern Seminary President R. Albert Mohler Jr. and Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission President Richard Land for the book and devotes a lot of Exodus to their thoughts. An article by Jeff Robinson for BP News discusses Shiflett's work. Robinson writes:

Liberal Christianity's rejection of the inspiration, inerrancy and authority of the Bible is to blame for its demise, Land said, adding that is the reason the mainline denominations are losing members and conservative churches are drawing them in.

"... Once you embrace liberal Christianity, you cut loose from your anchor," Land said. "And you keep drifting. Liberal Christianity had totally abandoned biblical authority by the late 1950s. They said they had 'moved beyond' Scripture."

Mohler says the mainline downgrade is perhaps seen most clearly in its views of sexuality.

"[Liberal churches] make no demands, including demands on sexual behavior," Mohler said. "Why should, for example, a sixteen-year-old boy and girl bother to go to a liberal church? What does this church have to offer that's any different from what they get from the culture? The church tells them that if they want, they can have sex. They already know that. That's what society tells them. The church needs to tell them that they can't have sex, and has to explain why.

"The mainline denominations have decided that the most basic human drive, sex, can be permanently separated from the most basic human institution, marriage. There is no room for Christianity in that equation."

There's more about the book at the link, but the main theme presses upon me as I prepare to travel to Orlando in August to participate in the Church-wide assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). Among the resolutions which will be taken up and voted upon are whether the Church should bless same sex unions and whether it should ordain homosexual men and lesbian women to the ministry.

Affirmative votes on either of these resolutions would be, in my view, a calamity for the ELCA. It may be true for all I know that Lutheran theologians are divided on how to properly interpret the Scriptural passages bearing upon the issue of homosexuality. Even so, it would be extremely reckless, in the absence of a strong theological consensus, to overturn 500 years of Lutheran scholarship and 2000 years of Christian tradition simply to conform church praxis to a contemporary social fashion.

Moreover, should the voting members assembled in Orlando see fit to approve these resolutions, what basis would future assemblies have for refusing to bless or ordain those who live in loving and committed relationships with more than one other person? Why should those people be excluded from the church's grace? On what grounds could the church withhold its blessing from heterosexuals living together in deeply committed but unmarried relationships or sharing in loving but adulterous relationships? Once the church decides that the sex of the two people in a relationship no longer matters then it has no justification left for saying that anything else about the relationship matters either. It will have cast itself adrift with no compass, no rudder, but plenty of sail to be pushed about by whatever wind of prevailing taste happens to be blowing through the culture.

What does such a church offer to people that the wider culture doesn't? Why should anyone bother to commit themselves to it? Certainly not to find spiritual anchorage and moral refuge from the gales of relativism sweeping through modern society. The Church which abandons its theological and moral moorings loses its distinctiveness, and it's only a matter of time before it finds itself wondering where its parishioners have all gone.

Howard Unhinged

Whatever you may think about Howard Dean you have to admit that he's good for laughs. Consider this CNS News article on Mr. Dean's recent speech to the College Democrats of America:

[Dean] said the president was partly responsible for a recent Supreme Court decision involving eminent domain [The Kelo decision].

"The president and his right-wing Supreme Court think it is 'okay' to have the government take your house if they feel like putting a hotel where your house is," Dean said, not mentioning that until he nominated John Roberts to the Supreme Court this week, Bush had not appointed anyone to the high court.

Dean's reference to the "right-wing" court was...erroneous. The four justices who dissented in the Kelo vs. New London case included the three most conservative members of the court - Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Associate Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor was the fourth dissenter.

The court's liberal coalition of Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer combined with Justice Anthony Kennedy to form the majority opinion, allowing the city of New London, Conn., to use eminent domain to seize private properties for commercial development.

"We think that eminent domain does not belong in the private sector. It is for public use only," Dean said.

Evidently, Mr. Dean has an unhappy relationship with the facts, but we shouldn't quibble. It's just like conservatives, after all, to throw cold water on a good speech by insisting that its claims be factually correct. Why let facts stand in the way of a rousing stem-winder? So what if Mr. Dean has no idea what he's talking about? So what if he's the guy who claimed to be the head of the "reality-based" party? Do you think anyone in his audience cared? Truth is so twentieth century.

After lambasting the Republicans for their lack of moral values and praising Democrats for their moral virtue in pushing for a strong public education system, balancing the budget, and, he implies, winking at illegal immigration, he shouted that he is "sick of being divided."

It's not clear what he meant by this, but he was apparently referring to the gap between what he says and what is objectively the case. Or maybe he suffers from multiple personality disorder. At any rate, it's telling that he didn't list honesty in his peculiar catalogue of Democrats' moral values.

The Iraqi Constitution

Omar at Iraq the Model has a partial translation of a draft of the Iraqi constitution. Omar finds a couple of provisions so objectionable that he would vote to reject the whole thing rather than accept them. The proposed draft (words in parentheses are still being debated) states that:

The (Islamic, federal) republic of Iraq is a sovereign, independent country and the governing system is a democratic, republican, federal one.

Omar protests: "The Islamic republic of Iraq!? NO WAY."

The most repugnant clause for Omar, however, is this:

Islam is the official religion of the state and it is the main source of legislation and it is not allowed to make laws that contradict the fundamental teachings of Islam and its rules (the ones agreed upon by all Muslims) and this constitution shall preserve the Islamic identity of the majority of the Iraqi people (with its Shea't majority and its Sunni component) and respect the rights of all other religions.

Omar comments that: "This is the deadliest point if approved; Islam or any religion cannot and must not be the main source of legislation."

On the one hand, Omar is right that Islam should not be the basis for Iraqi law because Islam has a very attenuated view of human rights. On the other hand, it would be very difficult to construct a system of laws which is not ultimately grounded in something more objective than a popular consensus.

Both Iraq and its Western supporters (like me) are in a bind here. Most Westerners would argue that the best model for Iraqi law is one which, like our own, places a premium on human rights. But our obligation to respect human rights derives from our Christian heritage, specifically the belief of the Founders that we are created in the image of a God who loves and values us. Because of this, and only because of this, we have worth, dignity, and the right not to be harmed. No man, as John Locke said, has the right to harm what belongs to, and is loved by, God. Take away creation by a transcendent creator, and all we are is an ephemeral glob of carbon and water whose only "rights" are whatever the whim of the authorities induces them to grant us.

Christianity enjoins us to extend to even those who spurn God, the "infidels", tolerance and love in accordance with Jesus' teaching on this very subject (see Mat.13:24-30; Lk.6:27-37). Muslims might be able to reconcile human dignity with the principles of the Koran, but it's hard to see how they could find a basis for tolerance, forgiveness and love of one's enemies in Koranic tradition. Unfortunately, it's even harder to imagine Muslims embracing a Christian rationale for their constitutional provisions.

And yet, the fear is that unless they do, they will ultimately slip back into the same human rights morass that Muslims have been mired in for 1300 years. I once asked a moderate Imam at a local mosque this question: If you could wave a magic wand and convert a majority of Americans to Islam so that you had the political power to write laws, amend the constitution, etc. what would become of the Bill of Rights, specifically the first amendment? He talked around the question, by way of a response, but he never answered it. I had the feeling that he didn't want to because he knew that the freedoms contained in the first amendment were antithetical to Islam.

One wonders how long human and minority rights would be protected by a constitution that is officially based upon Sharia (Islamic) law.

FOOTNOTE: We've been hearing the last few days that the Iraqi constitution allows anyone to become an Iraqi citizen except Israelis. I saw no mention of this in the portion of the constitution translated by Omar, but maybe I missed it. If it is in there, it would be a reprehensible act of bigotry which all Iraqis should repudiate.

Films Every Child Should See

Gideon Strauss (scroll down to July 23rd) has a list of ten movies that the British Film Institute says every child should see before they are fourteen years old. The list:

1. Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1948, Italy)

2. ET The Extra-Terrestrial (Steven Spielberg, 1982, USA)

3. Kes (Ken Loach, 1969, UK)

4. The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955, USA)

5. Les Quatre Cents Coups (Fran�ois Truffaut, 1959, France)

6. Show Me Love (Lukas Moodysson, 1998, Sw/Dk)

7. Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001, Japan)

8. Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995, USA)

9. Where is the Friend's House? (Abbas Kiarostami, 1987, Iran)

10. The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939, USA)

How many did you see by the age of fourteen? How many have you seen altogether? Personally, I never even heard of six of them, I'm ashamed to say.

Taking From the Poor

Air America, the liberal talk radio network, has enough woes, due both to poor programming and dismal finances, without being implicated in a scandal involving "borrowing" money that was supposed to go to inner city kids and alzheimer's sufferers.

We thought liberals believed in taking from the rich to give to the poor, not the other way around.

Read the details at Michelle Malkin's blog.

The Inquisition of John Roberts

WuzzaDem has a humorous pictorial satire on the upcoming senate judiciary committee hearings on John Roberts' Supreme Court nomination. It's pretty funny, especially Senator Feinstein.

Thanks to Cheat-Seeking Missiles for the tip.