Athenians and Visigoths

Neil Postman has been gone for some time now but he once wrote a commencement speech which Joe Carter has posted at Evangelical Outpost. Joe says this:

While it could be argued that youth is wasted on the young, it is indisputable that commencement addresses are wasted on young graduates. Sitting in a stuffy auditorium waiting to receive a parchment that marks the beginning of one's student loan repayments is not the most conducive atmosphere for soaking up wisdom. Insight, which can otherwise seep through the thickest of skulls, cannot pierce mortarboard.

Most colleges and universities recognize this fact and schedule the graduation speeches accordingly. Schools regularly choose speakers who are unlikely to motivate, inspire, or provide advice that will be remembered after the post-graduation hangover. That is why graduates are subjected to such deep thinkers as film director Spike Lee (University of Miami), actor Warren Beatty (U.C. -Berkeley), and novelist Erica Jong (The College of Staten Island). Calvin College made the mistake of inviting philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff to the latest ceremony before recognizing their error and bumping him for a less intellectually rigorous orator.

Although he had been forced to sit through dozens of such speeches, the late communications theorist Neil Postman was never invited to provide a commencement address. He did prepare some remarks, though, that he planned to use if ever given the opportunity. In typical Postman fashion he even provides it as a true "open source" document: "If you think my graduation speech is good, I hereby grant you permission to use it, without further approval from or credit to me, should you be in an appropriate situation."

Postman's graduation speech is good. Too good, in fact, to be wasted on the young.

Carter is right about the speech. Here it is:

Members of the faculty, parents, guests, and graduates, have no fear. I am well aware that on a day of such high excitement, what you require, first and foremost, of any speaker is brevity. I shall not fail you in this respect. There are exactly eighty-five sentences in my speech, four of which you have just heard. It will take me about twelve minutes to speak all of them and I must tell you that such economy was not easy for me to arrange, because I have chosen as my topic the complex subject of your ancestors.

Not, of course, your biological ancestors, about whom I know nothing, but your spiritual ancestors, about whom I know a little. To be specific, I want to tell you about two groups of people who lived many years ago but whose influence is still with us. They were very different from each other, representing opposite values and traditions. I think it is appropriate for you to be reminded of them on this day because, sooner than you know, you must align yourself with the spirit of one or the spirit of the other.

The first group lived about 2,500 years ago in the place which we now call Greece, in a city they called Athens. We do not know as much about their origins as we would like. But we do know a great deal about their accomplishments.

They were, for example, the first people to develop a complete alphabet, and therefore they became the first truly literate population on earth. They invented the idea of political democracy, which they practiced with a vigor that puts us to shame. They invented what we call philosophy. And they also invented what we call logic and rhetoric. They came very close to inventing what we call science, and one of them, Democritus by name, conceived of the atomic theory of matter 2,300 years before it occurred to any modern scientist. They composed and sang epic poems of unsurpassed beauty and insight. And they wrote and performed plays that, almost three millennia later, still have the power to make audiences laugh and weep. They even invented what, today, we call the Olympics, and among their values none stood higher than that in all things one should strive for excellence. They believed in reason. They believed in beauty. They believed in moderation. And they invented the word and the idea which we know today as ecology.

About 2,000 years ago, the vitality of their culture declined and these people began to disappear. But not what they had created. Their imagination, art, politics, literature, and language spread all over the world so that, today, it is hardly possible to speak on any subject without repeating what some Athenian said on the matter 2,500 years ago.

The second group of people lived in the place we now call Germany, and flourished about 1,700 years ago. We call them the Visigoths, and you may remember that your sixth or seventh-grade teacher mentioned them. They were spectacularly good horsemen, which is about the only pleasant thing history can say of them. They were marauders-ruthless and brutal. Their language lacked subtlety and depth. Their art was crude and even grotesque. They swept down through Europe destroying everything in their path, and they overran the Roman Empire. There was nothing a Visigoth liked better than to burn a book, desecrate a building, or smash a work of art. From the Visigoths, we have no poetry, no theater, no logic, no science, no humane politics.

Like the Athenians, the Visigoths also disappeared, but not before they had ushered in the period known as the Dark Ages. It took Europe almost a thousand years to recover from the Visigoths.

Now, the point I want to make is that the Athenians and the Visigoths still survive, and they do so through us and the ways in which we conduct our lives. All around us-in this hall, in this community, in our city-there are people whose way of looking at the world reflects the way of the Athenians, and there are people whose way is the way of the Visigoths. I do not mean, of course, that our modern-day Athenians roam abstractedly through the streets reciting poetry and philosophy, or that the modern-day Visigoths are killers. I mean that to be an Athenian or a Visigoth is to organize your life around a set of values. An Athenian is an idea. And a Visigoth is an idea. Let me tell you briefly what these ideas consist of.

To be an Athenian is to hold knowledge and, especially the quest for knowledge in high esteem. To contemplate, to reason, to experiment, to question-these are, to an Athenian, the most exalted activities a person can perform. To a Visigoth, the quest for knowledge is useless unless it can help you to earn money or to gain power over other people.

To be an Athenian is to cherish language because you believe it to be humankind's most precious gift. In their use of language, Athenians strive for grace, precision, and variety. And they admire those who can achieve such skill. To a Visigoth, one word is as good as another, one sentence in distinguishable from another. A Visigoth's language aspires to nothing higher than the clich�.

To be an Athenian is to understand that the thread which holds civilized society together is thin and vulnerable; therefore, Athenians place great value on tradition, social restraint, and continuity. To an Athenian, bad manners are acts of violence against the social order. The modern Visigoth cares very little about any of this. The Visigoths think of themselves as the center of the universe. Tradition exists for their own convenience, good manners are an affectation and a burden, and history is merely what is in yesterday's newspaper.

To be an Athenian is to take an interest in public affairs and the improvement of public behavior. Indeed, the ancient Athenians had a word for people who did not. The word was idiotes, from which we get our word "idiot." A modern Visigoth is interested only in his own affairs and has no sense of the meaning of community.

And, finally, to be an Athenian is to esteem the discipline, skill, and taste that are required to produce enduring art. Therefore, in approaching a work of art, Athenians prepare their imagination through learning and experience. To a Visigoth, there is no measure of artistic excellence except popularity. What catches the fancy of the multitude is good. No other standard is respected or even acknowledged by the Visigoth.

Now, it must be obvious what all of this has to do with you. Eventually, like the rest of us, you must be on one side or the other. You must be an Athenian or a Visigoth. Of course, it is much harder to be an Athenian, for you must learn how to be one, you must work at being one, whereas we are all, in a way, natural-born Visigoths. That is why there are so many more Visigoths than Athenians. And I must tell you that you do not become an Athenian merely by attending school or accumulating academic degrees.

My father-in-law was one of the most committed Athenians I have ever known, and he spent his entire adult life working as a dress cutter on Seventh Avenue in New York City. On the other hand, I know physicians, lawyers, and engineers who are Visigoths of unmistakable persuasion. And I must also tell you, as much in sorrow as in shame, that at some of our great universities, perhaps even this one, there are professors of whom we may fairly say they are closet Visigoths.

And yet, you must not doubt for a moment that a school, after all, is essentially an Athenian idea. There is a direct link between the cultural achievements of Athens and what the faculty at this university is all about. I have no difficulty imagining that Plato, Aristotle, or Democritus would be quite at home in our class rooms. A Visigoth would merely scrawl obscenities on the wall.

And so, whether you were aware of it or not, the purpose of your having been at this university was to give you a glimpse of the Athenian way, to interest you in the Athenian way. We cannot know on this day how many of you will choose that way and how many will not. You are young and it is not given to us to see your future. But I will tell you this, with which I will close: I can wish for you no higher compliment than that in the future it will be reported that among your graduating class the Athenians mightily outnumbered the Visigoths.

Thank you, and congratulations.

Very good stuff.

The Search For Moderate Muslims Continues

World Net Daily has this story on a group of American Muslims who produced a video that shows its members on a New York City street corner declaring Islam's dominance over America as they tread on a U.S. flag and then rip it apart. Some excerpts:

In the video, released by the New York-based Islamic Thinkers Society, one of the Muslims is shown placing a sign on the flag that says, "Oh Muslims! Do you know your enemy? Isn't it obvious?"

The five-minute piece begins with a man speaking in clear English: "Just to show where our loyalty belongs to -- you see this flag here? It's going to go on the floor [sic]. And to us, our loyalty does not belong to this flag, our loyalty belongs to Allah ... ."

Later, after noting he has a legal permit for the demonstration, the speaker shouts, "You Muslims who are hiding in your houses, don't be afraid. Come and join us. Join us in the revival of all Islam. ... Join us to revive the Muslims from darkness into light."

Another speaker refers to the mandate for "Islam to dominate over all other religions, to dominate the world, even though the non-Muslims may hate it."

At one Al-Muhajiroun event at Queensborough Community College sponsored by the MSA and attended by WND, a Muhajiroun speaker working with Yousuf said, "We reject the U.N., reject America, reject all law and order. Don't lobby Congress or protest because we don't recognize Congress! The only relationship you should have with America is to topple it!"

The speaker continued, "The so-called terrorists are the only people who truly fear Allah. ... They are the only worthy causes, and the mighty superpower only fears them."

In a private interview with WND, a Queens based Al-Muhajiroun leader said he would be "absolutely honored" to give up his life in a "martyr operation" against American civilians. The leader warned that "a jihad is coming to America because of the moves of the Bush administration."

Last year, Al-Muhajiroun planned a convention in London titled, "The Choice is in Your Hands: Either You're with the Muslims or with the Infidels," to mark the third anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

In 2003, the group had planned a similar anniversary event called "The Magnificent 19 [Suicide Attackers]," but canceled it at the last minute.

We assume that the lack of publicity about this demonstration in the MSM is due to the fact that the Muslims didn't urinate on the flag while they were stomping on it so there's really no call, to their way of thinking, for outrage.

To those who don't work in the newsrooms of the liberal media, however, this demonstration is a sickening affront to the families who lost loved ones on 9/11 and in the war on terror being waged by American forces. It tells us much about the mind-set of many American Muslims that the community would allow this sort of thing to be done in the name of Islam without distancing themselves from it.

The video itself has apparently been taken off the Islamic Thinkers web-site since we couldn't access it when we went to see for ourselves what the religion of peace is up to these days.

The EMP Threat

Some months ago we wrote about increasing fears in the defense community about this nation's vulnerability to EMP. EMP stands for Electromagnetic Pulse and refers to the powerful surge of radio waves produced by a nuclear detonation. These waves have the potential to overwhelm any electrical/electronic system within a line of sight of the blast so that a detonation about 300 miles over the center of the U.S. could conceivably shut down everything in the country that runs on electrical power. This would take months or years to repair and in the meantime the nation would probably be thrown into chaos.

Winds of Change has a piece by Frank Gaffney which describes the nature of the threat and discusses what must be done to prevent what would certainly be a national catastrophe should even a single nuclear weapon be detonated in space above the United States.

Grounds For Hope

The Strategy Page has the results of an Al-Arabiya News poll taken throughout the Arab world that give grounds for hope that the struggle against Islamist tyranny is succeeding.

What do Arabs really think about the problems that afflict them, and how is this related to the issues Islamic terrorists are fighting and dying (and killing) for? A recent "Opinion Survey of the Arab Street 2005" by Al Arabiya news network provides some interesting answers. The survey sought to see what Arabs thought about the relative lack of economic progress in the Arab world. In answer to the question, "What is stalling development in the Arab world?," 81 percent chose "Governments are unwilling to implement change and reform", 8 percent citing "The ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict," 7 percent "Civil society is failing to convince governments", and 4 percent chose "Terrorism".

Another question, "What is the fastest way to achieve development in the Arab world?", had 67 percent choosing "Ensuring the rule of law through justice and law enforcement", 23 percent chose "Enhancing freedom of speech", and 10 percent chose "Resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict".

Islamic terrorists represent a small minority of Arab thinking, and interests. But most Arab media and governments, for obvious reasons, avoid the "bad government" issues and instead concentrate on the Arab-Israeli conflict as the cause of all that is bad in the Arab world. While few Arab governments support all Islamic terrorists, many support some (like the Palestinian terrorists, or Hizbollah in Lebanon).

An Arab government will support terrorists as long as there is no terrorist attacks against themselves, and the terrorists are working against the government's enemies. Syria has played this game enthusiastically, perhaps too much so, for decades. By getting behind terrorism and hostility towards Israel, Arab dictatorships believe this will distract their people from problems closer to home. But this ploy is working less well of late. The invasion of Iraq in 2003, the forcible removal of an Arab dictator and enthusiastic participation in democratic elections has terrified Arab despots throughout the Middle East. The Islamic terrorists are generally hostile to Arab dictators, but have made deals with the devil in order to survive. Increasingly, Arab people are fed up with the tyrants and terrorists, and are willing to do something about it.

Let's hope.

The Need For Vigilance

Michelle Malkin has lots of information and some good links on the story coming out of Lodi, California about the arrest of a possible father/son terror threat.

One does not wish to see a repeat of WWII internment camps filled this time with Muslims instead of Japanese, but we also have to face the grim reality that many Muslims in this country do not see themselves as Americans. Nor do they want to be Americans. Many of them feel a solidarity with Islamist jihadis around the globe and see their situation here in the States as an opportunity to strike a blow for Allah against the infidels.

That being the case, it's hard to fault those who look upon Arabs and other Muslims in our midst with suspicion, PC abhorrence of "profiling" notwithstanding. We can only hope that law enforcement and the larger Arab/Muslim community are vigilant and able to preempt any act of terrorism which may be planned to take place on our soil.

If they're not, it will surely be difficult to dissuade enraged Americans from tragic and pointless reprisals against innocent Arabs.

Mugabe's Socialist Paradise

Belmont Club has a vivid look at what is happening in Robert Mugabe's socialist paradise of Zimbabwe. It's a little too long to repost here, but it's a very important read.

Back when Zimbabwe was Rhodesia the Left was all aflutter over the prospect of the white government being replaced by black leadership. This would be good for the country the Left declaimed, and good for all of Africa. In the event, however, it has been, like so many of the Left's nostrums, a nightmare for the people, both white and black, who live there. Indeed, today's Zimbabwe sounds very much like the Cambodia and South Africa of the 1970s.

Don't miss the e-mail from Sister Patricia Walsh.

Telling it Like He Wishes it Was

The first rule of warfare, political or otherwise, is Know your enemy. Howard Dean, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, simply doesn't. About Republicans he recently said this:

The Republicans are not very friendly to different kinds of people...They're a pretty monolithic party...They all behave the same and they all look the same...It's pretty much a white Christian party.

Set aside that this is from the man who was taken to the woodshed by Al Sharpton in the Democratic primaries for the fact that he had no minorities in his administration as governor of Vermont. Set aside that this is from the head of a party which has no record of having elevated minorities to positions of prominence, nevertheless criticizing a party which has made African Americans and Hispanic Americans the last two secretaries of State and an Attorney General and appointed numerous other minorities to less exalted positions.

Set aside that it is Republicans who are fighting to get Janice Rodgers Brown to the federal appeals court and Democrats who are fighting her nomination.

Set all that aside and ask, what on earth does he mean by suggesting that Republicans are "the white Christian party?" Since he is a man who has said that he hates Republicans and who has never had a kind word to say about the Republican party we may reasonably infer that he meant this as more than a simple statement of fact. He obviously intended it as a slur. So let's ask, is there something wrong with being a party that attracts many people who are both white and Christian, perhaps the majority of voting citizens in the country? What exactly is it that makes this something to be derogated? And are we to infer from Governor Dean's remark that the Democrats are the party of non-white non-Christians?

This is extremely divisive rhetoric that the Chairman is engaging in, but Democrats have been setting one group against another for decades in the politics of this country. The irony is that every chance they get they accuse GWB of being divisive and yet there is nothing they can point to in support of this allegation.

George Bush's "divisiveness" apparently lies in the fact that he takes a stand on policy matters, does what he says he's going to do, and doesn't ask the Democrats for permission. Since Democrats find that sort of behavior in a Republican president immensely impertinent and irritating, and since they consider any president who doesn't agree with them to be polarizing, they naturally see GWB as divisive.

Howard Dean, however, is just telling it like it is.

Case For the Creator

Christianity Today has an interview with Lee Strobel author of The Case For the Creator. Here's an excerpt:

CT: It didn't seem hard to find top quality scientists and researchers who came to that conclusion.

LS: Absolutely. My problem was trying to pare it down to who I thought would be someone who would be able to articulate the evidence powerfully and persuasively and in a way that everybody could get. There's more than 300 scientists with doctorates from major universities who've now signed this statement saying that they are skeptical of the claims of neo-Darwinism.

I quote somebody in the book as saying that one of the fastest growing phenomena is scientists who are doubtful of the claims of Darwinism.

Darwinism is as strongly held as it is in large part because it is an essential prop to atheism. If Darwinism should ever collapse biology and a few other related sciences will be changed, to be sure, but the most significant consequence will be the philosophical reverberations such a collapse would generate throughout the culture.

Anyway, you'll want to read the whole interview. It's a pretty good discussion.

Brain Power

Now will the Left stop insulting Bush's intelligence? Nah:

(June 7) - Sen. John F. Kerry's grade average at Yale University was virtually identical to President Bush's record there, despite repeated portrayals of Kerry as the more intellectual candidate during the 2004 presidential campaign.

Kerry had a cumulative average of 76 and got four Ds his freshman year - in geology, two history courses and political science, The Boston Globe reported Tuesday.

His grades improved with time, and he averaged an 81 his senior year and earned an 89 - his highest grade - in political science as a senior.

In 1999, The New Yorker magazine published a transcript showing Bush had a cumulative grade average of 77 his first three years at Yale, and a similar average under a non-numerical rating system his senior year.

Bush's highest grade at Yale was an 88 in anthropology, history and philosophy. He received one D in his four years, a 69 in astronomy, and improved his grades after his freshman year, the transcript showed.

Liberals oohed and ahhed at John Kerry's superior intellectual gifts during the 2004 campaign, but aside from being more articulate there's not much evidence that Kerry was any brighter nor more motivated as a student than George Bush. What the infatuation with Kerry's vaunted cerebral skills illustrates is nothing more than a fondness for style over substance.

The Truth About Ward Churchill

The Rocky Mountain News has been hard at work ferreting out the truth about Ward Churchill, the radical University of Colorado professor who became the object of national scrutiny when a piece came to light which he'd written on 9/11. In the essay he claimed that those who died that day were "little Eichmanns" and, by implication, deserved their fate.

The RMN investigation has uncovered much unsavory information about Mr. Churchill which, among other shortcomings, reveals him to be an academic fraud and ethnic poseur:

University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill fabricated historical facts, published the work of others as his own and repeatedly made false claims about two federal Indian laws, a Rocky Mountain News investigation has found.

The two-month News investigation, carried out at the same time Churchill and his work are being carefully examined by the university, also unearthed fresh genealogical information that casts new doubts on the professor's long-held assertion that he is of American Indian ancestry.

The findings come as Churchill is, essentially, on trial - in the court of public opinion and in the halls of academia. Prickly debates swirl around him on the standards of academic integrity, the limits of free speech and the responsibilities of scholarly writers.

A faculty committee is working behind closed doors, conducting a detailed and time-consuming examination of four allegations - fabrication, plagiarism, mischaracterization of federal Indian laws and misrepresentation of his ancestry.

The stakes are high. For Churchill, it's a process that ultimately could cost him his job. For Colorado's flagship university, it's a process that could bear heavily on its integrity and reputation.

Read the details of the evidence against him at the link.

Liberal Heroes

Steve Hayward at No Left Turns makes a salient point about the Mark Felt revelations:

I shouldn't be amazed that with all the media chest-thumping about their heroism in the Watergate story, made possible by the brave Mark Felt, that no one has mentioned the irony that Charles Colson went to prison on the charge of leaking a single FBI file. Felt was leaking confidential information, and raw files, not once, but repeatedly over a period of months. No wonder Felt wanted to keep his secret all these years; indeed, one wonders whether he would have done so now if he still had his full mental faculties available to him (or if there were no statute of limitations.)

Whether someone's act is heroic or not depends as much upon why one acts as upon what one does. Doing the right thing for the wrong reason, even if the act requires much courage, is not morally commendable and is certainly not heroic. A man who saves another man's life only because the man who is saved owes his rescuer a large sum of money is not a hero. Saving the man's life is the right thing to do, but the man who does it can claim no virtue in his act. If Mark Felt did indeed help to bring down the Nixon administration only because he was angry at having been passed over for the directorship of the FBI then whatever he is, he's not a hero.

For the Libs, though, whether you're a hero or not seems often to depend only upon whom you're trying to hurt.

Transgressing Orthodoxy

Here's an article guaranteed to drive the politically correct into a frenzy. It raises the question of whether intelligence might be genetically based not just in individuals but in entire ethnic groups. If it is, the article suggests, might the history of the Jews allowed intelligence to be selected for to a greater extent than in the rest of us?

If social security is the third rail of politics this question is the third rail of academic careers. It takes enormous audacity to ask this question in the current socio-academic climate. Recall how Harvard's president Larry Summers was practically burned at the stake a few months ago for suggesting that the sexes differ in their intellectual aptitudes. Recall, too, how Charles Murray back in the late eighties was excoriated for pointing out that some racial groups fare more poorly on IQ tests than others and are probably cognitively less well-endowed.

Any hint that there may be a genetic component to intelligence that is a function of race or ethnicity is almost certain to bring down the wrath of a thousand furies upon the head of a hapless scholar. This is unfortunate because in a free society no intellectual question should be considered taboo, even if it may have unpleasant or unwanted consequences. Free people should not fear truth, nor should there be questions that one dare not ask, nor ideas one dare not discuss. Free men and women should not allow themselves to be shackled by the sociological orthodoxies of a dogmatic, closed-minded elite.

We'll watch with interest the trajectory of this story.

Flushing Them Out and Wearing Them Down

Here's an update on ongoing operations in Iraq. The bad guys continue to suffer grievous losses of men and resources. They also continue to see their leadership attrited:

The joint U.S.-Iraqi force operating in Latifiyah to the south of Baghdad was backed by American air power and said it had rounded up at least 108 Iraqis, mainly Sunnis, suspected of involvement in the brutal insurgent campaign to topple the Shiite-led government.

To the west of the capital, the 2nd Marine division said its forces had discovered 50 weapons and ammunitions caches over the past four days in restive Anbar province. The military said the find included a recently used "insurgent lair" in a massive underground bunker complex that included air-conditioned living quarters and high tech military equipment, including night vision goggles.

That bunker was found cut from a rock quarry in Karmah, 50 miles west of Baghdad. The Marines said the facility was 170 yards wide and 275 yards long.

In its rooms were "four fully furnished living spaces, a kitchen with fresh food, two shower facilities and a working air conditioner. Other rooms within the complex were filled with weapons and ammunition," the announcement said.

The weapons included "numerous types of machine guns, ordnance, including mortars, rockets and artillery rounds, black uniforms, ski masks, compasses, log books, night vision goggles, and fully charged cell phones."

In Latifiyah, 20 miles south of Baghdad, Iraqi and American forces launched a raid as part of Operation Lightning, a week-old assault aimed at rooting out insurgents conducting raids on the capital and sapping militant strength nationwide.

Interior Minister Bayan Jabr has said at least 700 suspected insurgents have been rounded up in the sweep, which has also killed at least 28 militants. U.S. Lt. Col. Michael Infanti said at least 221 people had been detained since last Wednesday by forces carrying out a sweep of Baghdad's southern districts. It was unclear if that number was in addition to the 700 given by Jabr.

An Iraqi believed to be a terror leader in the north was captured by U.S. and Iraqi forces in Mosul, 225 miles north of Baghdad. He was identified as Mullah Mahdi and was caught along with his brother, three other Iraqis and a non-Iraqi Arab, Iraqi army Maj. Gen. Khalil Ahmed al-Obeidi said.

Mahdi was affiliated with the Ansar al-Sunnah Army, one of Iraq's most feared terror groups, and had links to the Syrian intelligence service, al-Obeidi said without elaborating. Iraqi and U.S. officials have accused Syria of facilitating the insurgency by allowing foreign fighters to cross its borders, but Damascus denies the allegation.

Mahdi was wanted in connection with car bombs, assassinations "beheadings of Iraqi policemen and soldiers and for launching attacks against multinational forces," in Mosul, al-Obeidi said.

In addition, 19 suspected insurgents - including a Jordanian and a Syrian - were arrested in raids in Baghdad's western Abu Ghraib district, Iraqi Lt. Col. Abu Fahad Alkhasali said.

Time is running out for the insurgency which has in fact taken on the flavor of a foreign invasion as more and more of the terrorists apprehended and killed turn out to be non-Iraqis.

Political Philosophy For Autodidacts

For anyone interested in pursuing an education at home in political philosophy Dr. Greg Forster offers a wonderful annotated reading list of the most important works in the field. Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost hosts Dr. Forster's piece. Don't overlook the comments from readers at the end.

Great News From Afghanistan

Afghanistan has come an astonishing distance since the spring of 2002. We don't hear about this part of George Bush's historic humanitarian mission on the evening news, of course, unless there's a setback to report, but the story that we're not told is truly a testament to the goodness of the American people, this administration, and the resilience of the Afghan people.

There are other nations chipping in to do good works, of course, but none of their efforts would have materialized, or even been possible, were it not for the work of the Bush administration and the efforts and sacrifice of the American military. The only historical analogy we can think of to what we've undertaken in Afghanistan and Iraq is the Marshall Plan in Europe after WWII. No other nation in history has a record like that compiled by the United States since 1945.

You can read about it here.

The Left's Selective Reverence

Viewpoint has stated that although we believe the media outrage over shabby treatment of the Koran in our detention camps amounts to unwarranted hysterics, nevertheless, our troops should show the Koran respect, not so much for the book itself, which many scholars have determined is probably a plagiarized Old Testament, but out of respect for people around the world who revere it.

Even so, we have to wonder why liberals are so beside themselves over this issue. As a caller to the Glenn Beck program pointed out this morning, when Andres Serrano placed a crucifix in a jar of urine and incensed many Christians, the Left yawned and called it art. When another "artist" defiled a picture of the Virgin Mary with elephant dung Christians who complained were called narrow-minded xenophobes.

Now we read of several dubious cases where there may have been irreverent treatment of a Koran and the Left is thrown into high dudgeon. Why is this? The Left, being predominately skeptics and atheists, don't give a fig about the Bible much less the Koran. Nor do they care about the sensibilities of religious believers whom they largely regard as rubes and dolts. At least they don't care about the sensibilities of Christians, why should they care about those of Muslims?

The only reason for their loud ululations over the fact that a Koran may have been "defiled" is that these allegations present themselves as a club with which to beat the administration over the head. They are so bereft of weapons with which to fight their ideological campaign against Bush and Co. that they'll grasp at anything that offers itself, no matter how flimsy the tool and no matter how cynical, hypocritical, and dishonest using it makes them look. And they think we should vote for them to run the country.

T-Shirts

A friend passes along the "Best T-shirts of the summer":

So Many Men, So Few Who Can Afford Me

I Fought the Lawn and the Lawn Won

I Suffer Occasional Delusions of Adequacy

God Made Us Sisters, Prozac Made Us Friends

If They Don't Have Chocolate In Heaven, I Ain't Going

At My Age, I've Seen It All, Done It All, Heard It All. I Just Can't Remember It All

My Mother Is A Travel Agent For Guilt Trips

I Just Do What The Voices Inside My Head Tell Me To Do

If It's Called Tourist Season, Why Can't We Hunt 'em?

Princess, Having Had Sufficient Experience With Princes, Seeks Frog

No, It Doesn't Hurt (on a "well-tattooed gentleman")

(on the back of a passing motorcyclist) If You Can Read This, My Wife Fell Off

I Used To Be Schizophrenic, But We're OK Now

Veni, Vedi, Visa: I came. I Saw. I Did a Little Shopping

What If The Hokey Pokey Really Is What It's All About?

I Didn't Climb to the Top of the Food Chain to Be a Vegetarian

Top Ten Most Harmful Books

Human Events has surveyed a number of Conservative intellectuals and asked for their nominations for the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. This is the result.

I can't say that I agree with all of the selections, and indeed I haven't read all of them myself, but I have to object to the inclusion among the honorable mentions of two of my very favorite works. The first is John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. I'm surprised that Conservatives, who often have a libertarian streak in them, would find it offensive. The second is Rachel Carson's Silent Spring which probably did more to galvanize action to save from extinction species like the Peregrine Falcon, Osprey, Brown Pelican, and Bald Eagle than any other single piece of writing in the last fifty years.

Most of the rest of the selections with which I'm familiar, however, do indeed belong in this rogue's gallery, with the possible exception of Origin of Species which is for the most part unexceptional in its evolutionary claims. In Origin, Darwin pretty much limited himself to evidence for micro-evolutionary change which even most anti-Darwinians do not dispute. The harm done by Darwinism is, in my opinion, more a consequence of the subsequent development of the theory, especially its metaphysical aspects, than of what is put forth in Origin.

The only other change I might make is to put Nietzsche's works at the very top of the list.

North American Bureau of Al-Jazeera

The headline reads: Gitmo Koran Was Splashed With Urine.

That'll get the Muslims worked up into a frenzy, which is apparently what the media hope for. Why else run the headline or the story which follows?

The facts of the story reveal how absolutely ridiculous and trite both of them are.

It turns out that a guard went outside to relieve himself and urinated too close to an air vent. The air drew the urine into a shaft and sprayed a few drops of mist onto a prisoner and his Koran. There was no evidence of any intent on the part of the guard.

The MSM is so desperate to get something, anything, to vindicate Newsweek's egregious "flushing down the toilet" fiction, that they'll sink to any level to fabricate the sense that real abuse is widespread in our prisons. Maybe we should just start referring to the MSM as the North American Bureau of Al-Jazeera.

God's Politics

Democracy Project has a thorough and fairly ascerbic critique of Jim Wallis' book God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It. The review is too lengthy to reproduce in its entirety here, but it should be read by anyone who thinks that Jim Wallis is really seeking a "third way" in American politics. According to DP Wallis' position is that the Left is almost completely right except on abortion, and the Right is almost completely immoral and unChristian. In other words, Wallis' third way is for everyone to become Left-wing Democrats save with respect to abortion, but his prescriptions for actually ending abortion are apparently obscure:

So what does he want Democrats to do to make abortion rare? Moderate and moderate some more. Does that mean a ban on partial birth abortion? Wallis is silent. Parental notification? Silence again. A 24-hour waiting period. Silence. A ban on federal funding of abortions? Silence. Overturning Roe v Wade. Deafening silence. Returning the issue to political debate and the state legislatures? Total silence. Detailed information on the potential physical, emotional, and spiritual harm caused by abortion. Mum's the word. Stringent limitations on health of the mother exceptions. Not a word.

DP hammers away at Wallis' fondness for driving in the far left lane of the ideological highway, a proclivity apparent in the tendentious wording of much of what he writes. For example:

Jim Wallis is forever setting up straw men and offering false choices. "Oh really," I kept muttering to myself as I came across this or that line. "We are all diminished when our social life is reduced to the survival of the fittest" (as if that is the world according to those on the right). Or the Democrats need to, there he goes again, "moderate" their position on abortion "without criminalizing an agonizing and desperate choice" (as if jailing women is at the top of the pro-life wish list). Or the GOP is "wrong" to see religious issues "solely" in terms of "individual moral choices and sexual ethics" (solely?). Or the Christian Right is led by "theocrats," such as those ever-ready (and increasingly irrelevant) bogeymen, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, and theocrats have a "fatal attraction" for violent solutions. (In truth, Falwell is as close to being a theocrat as, well, as Jim Wallis.)

Or, it is wrong to resort to "purely military solutions" (purely?). Or it is "mean-spirited to blame gay people for the breakdown of the family" (as if those who oppose gay marriage are unaware or otherwise unwilling to call attention to the myriad reasons for the collapse of the family).

Or, with Iraq occupied the Bush administration "now intends to control the rest of the world too" (must be that those neocons have been listening to the theocrats on the subject of violence -- or is it the other way around). In any case, such immoderate statements made in the name of moderation are more than moderately astounding.

Or, those who believe that "there is nothing we can do about poverty" are those who take comfort from Christ's reminder to his disciples that the "poor you will always have with you." Nothing?? Really?

There is much, much more to this review at the link and those likely to read Wallis' book or who are themselves interested in the mesh of politics and Christian faith would do well to give it a look.

If you would like a review which offers a more sympathetic treatment of God's Politics than Democracy Project does you can find a good one here.

Certain of Their Own Infallibility

Charles Krauthammer writes a fine essay in defense of certainty. The heart, but by no means all, of his piece is here:

The Op-Ed pages are filled with jeremiads about believers--principally evangelical Christians and traditional Catholics--bent on turning the U.S. into a theocracy. Now I am not much of a believer, but there is something deeply wrong--indeed, deeply un-American--about fearing people simply because they believe. It seems perfectly O.K. for secularists to impose their secular views on America, such as, say, legalized abortion or gay marriage. But when someone takes the contrary view, all of a sudden he is trying to impose his view on you. And if that contrary view happens to be rooted in Scripture or some kind of religious belief system, the very public advocacy of that view becomes a violation of the U.S. constitutional order.

What nonsense. The campaign against certainty is merely the philosophical veneer for an attempt to politically marginalize and intellectually disenfranchise believers. Instead of arguing the merits of any issue, secularists are trying to win the argument by default on the grounds that the other side displays unhealthy certainty or, even worse, unseemly religiosity.

Why this panic about certainty and people who display it? It is not just, as conventional wisdom has it, that liberals think the last election was lost because of a bloc of benighted Evangelicals. It is because we are almost four years from 9/11 and four years of moral certainty, and firm belief is about all that secular liberalism can tolerate.

Do you remember 9/11? How you felt? The moral clarity of that day and the days thereafter? Just days after 9/11, on this very page, Lance Morrow wrote a brilliant, searing affirmation of right against wrong, good against evil.

A few years of that near papal certainty is more than any self-respecting intelligentsia can take. The overwhelmingly secular intellectuals are embarrassed that they once nodded in assent to Morrow-like certainty, an affront to their self-flattering pose as skeptics.

Enough. A new day, a new wave. Time again for nuance, doubt and the comforts of relativism. It is not just the restless search for novelty, the artist's Holy Grail. It is weariness with the responsibilities and the nightmares that come with clarity--and the demands that moral certainty make on us as individuals and as a nation.

Nothing has more aroused and infuriated the sophisticates than the foreign policy of a religiously inclined President, based on the notion of a universal aspiration to freedom and of America's need and duty to advance it around the world. Such liberationism, confident and unapologetic, is portrayed as arrogant crusading, a deep violation of the tradition of American pluralism, ecumenism, modesty and skeptical restraint.

Well put. Krauthammer might also have mentioned that it's not really certainty that contemporary skeptics disdain, for they themselves are filled to overflowing with it. They are so certain that they are in the right politically, for example, that they are willing to go to any lengths to defame, discredit, mock and ridicule those with whom they disagree in order to crush all opposition and to insure that their views prevail. This is not the behavior of people cognizant of their own fallibility and at pains to maintain a modicum of intellectual humility.

No, it isn't certainty to which our Leftist elites object. What they find deplorable is the substance of those matters about which religious conservatives are certain. The maddening offense of religious conservatives is that their certitudes are in conflict with the certitudes of the secular Left. This the elite finds quite insufferable. They cannot abide that anyone would have the temerity to entertain a sense of certainty about matters so out of harmony with what they themselves are certain about.

Review of <i>Unspeakable</i>

Yesterday we posted a meditation on forgiveness which was triggered by a few lines in a new book by Os Guinness on the problem of evil. The post wasn't intended to be a review, but if the reader would like one an excellent overview of the book can be found here.

Did They Or Didn't They?

Now we're really confused. First we were told that Saddam was working on WMD in Iraq, then we were told that, ha, ha, Bush lied, there's no evidence that Saddam was working on WMD. Now we're told that tons of stuff that could be used to make biological and chemical weapons and banned missiles have been moved out of the sites where they'd been located prior to OIF:

UNITED NATIONS - U.N. satellite imagery experts have determined that material that could be used to make biological or chemical weapons and banned long-range missiles has been removed from 109 sites in Iraq, U.N. weapons inspectors said in a report obtained Thursday.

Now which is it? Did Iraq have material that could have been used for WMD, or didn't they? Will somebody please get the story straight.

The Modern Sisyphus

Viewpoint has argued several times over the past year that any ultimate meaning to life is contingent upon there being a God. Now columnist Dennis Prager addresses himself to the same theme in his series on Judeo-Christian values:

As I have noted on occasion, there are three values systems competing for world dominance: Islam, European style secularism/socialism and Judeo-Christian values. As the competition in America is between the second two (in Europe, Judeo-Christian values are dying while Islam is increasing its influence), my columns on Judeo-Christian values have concentrated on differences between Judeo-Christian and secular values.

Perhaps the most significant difference between them, though one rarely acknowledged by secularists, is the presence or absence of ultimate meaning in life. Most irreligious individuals, quite understandably, do not like to acknowledge the inevitable and logical consequence of their irreligiosity -- that life is ultimately purposeless.

Secular and irreligious individuals raise two immediate objections:

1. Irreligious people, including atheists, are just as likely to have meaningful lives as any religious person. They need neither God nor Judaism nor Christianity nor any other religion to have meaning.

2. Secular and irreligious are not the same as atheistic; many secular individuals believe in God and therefore whatever meaning accrues from having a belief in God, they, too, have. They do not need religion or Judeo-Christian values to give their lives meaning.

The first objection denies a fact, not a subjective judgment: If there is no God who designed the universe and who cares about His creations, life is ultimately purposeless. This does not mean that people who do not believe in such a God cannot feel, or make up, a purpose and a meaning for their own lives. They do and they have to -- because the need for meaning is the greatest of all human needs. It is even stronger than the need for sex. There are people who lead chaste lives who achieve happiness, while no one who lacks a sense of purpose or meaning can achieve happiness.

Nevertheless, the fact that people feel that their lives are meaningful -- as a parent, a caregiver, an artist, or any of the myriad ways in which we feel we are doing something meaningful -- has no bearing on the question of whether life itself is ultimately meaningful. The two issues are entirely separate. A physician understandably views his healing of people as meaningful, but if he does not believe in God, he will have to honestly confront the fact that as meaningful as healing the day's patients has been, ultimately everything is meaningless because life itself is. In this sense, it is far better for an individual's peace of mind to be a poor peasant who believes in God than a successful neurosurgeon who does not.

If there is no God as Judeo-Christian religions understand Him, life is a meaningless random event. You and I are no more significant, our existence has no more meaning, than that of a rock on Mars. The only difference between us and Martian rocks is that we need to believe our existence has significance.

Now to the second objection, that you don't need religion or Judeo-Christian values, just a belief in God or, as is more popular today, in "spirituality" to imbue existence with meaning. Theoretically, one can posit the existence of the God of Judeo-Christian religions without actually believing in any of those religions or in any of their holy works. There is, however, some absurdity in believing in the God made known through texts whose authenticity one rejects. "I believe in the God made known to the world solely through the Old Testament but not in the Old Testament" is not logically compelling.

Whatever the logical inconsistencies or theoretical arguments in either direction, the fact remains that while secular individuals can believe that their own lives have meaning, secularism by definition denies that life has meaning. The consequences have been devastating to mental health and to social order.

Among these have been increased unhappiness and depression, increased reliance on drugs and numbing entertainment to get people through life, moral confusion, belief in nonsense (such as Marxism, fascism, communism, male-female sameness, pacifism, moral equivalence of good and bad societies, and much more), and perhaps most ubiquitous, political meaning as a substitute for religious meaning.

Given that the need for meaning transcends all other human needs, its absence must create havoc individually and societally. In government, secularism is a blessing; but most everywhere else it is not.

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus compares human existence to the everlasting punishment imposed by the gods on the mythological Sisyphus whose sentence for rebellion against the deities was to push a stone up a hill only to have it roll back down. He had to do this over and over, forever. Camus says that human existence is every bit as futile, meaningless, and mind-crushingly absurd. And yet, he writes, "The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a human heart. One must imagine that Sisyphus is happy."

Actually, it is extremely difficult to imagine Sisyphus happy in such circumstances. Indeed, it is easier to imagine him on the verge of total insanity. A man suffering life without significance, without meaning, without hope for eventual release is a man teetering on the brink of madness.

Camus is right in his comparison of life without God to the existence Sisyphus was made to endure. If there is no God then life surely is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing", as Shakespeare put it.

Camus is wrong, however, when he urges us to imagine Sisyphus as happy. To the extent that the modern Sisyphus is content it is because he has not allowed himself to consider the full implications of his naturalistic worldview. He refuses to permit the consequences of his atheism to obtrude into his thoughts lest he be forced to confront the sheer senselessness of his being and that of all humanity. To face honestly the fact that in the final analysis nothing has meaning, nothing has value, nothing matters is to weave dizzyingly on the precipice of a spiritual and psychological abyss that only the most intrepid, or nihilistic, atheists dare approach.

Semper Fi

Our country has lost a fine leader. Ilario Pantano has chosen to resign from the Marine Corps. After the hell he and his family were put through over the last year for defending himself in a stressful situation in Iraq, who can blame him?

There's lots of background on Pantano and his story here.

Kit Jarrell indicts both the military and the media for having grossly mishandled the Pantano case. She writes:

The Corps took one of their own - an officer who had served proudly and with distinction - and crucified him on the cross of political correctness, in a society where too many are more concerned with how we look to the world than how safe we are. His accusers were sloppy and unbelievable at best, and at worst they were simply malicious; determined to ruin a career and a man who was so much more than they would ever be. The case itself was flimsy on all counts - no real eyewitnesses, conflicting statements. Even prosecution witnesses ended up sounding like advertisements for the defense.

She concludes with this:

It could be argued that Pantano's resignation "lets the bad guys win", but I think that happened a long time ago. It happens every time the media slants their reports on the war. It happens every time a military recruiter is barred from a campus. It happens every time we bend over backwards to please the collective globe while leaving ourselves defenseless. It happened the minute someone listened to Sgt. Daniel Coburn.

And yet, the Pantanos that remain in the Marines; the Air Force; the Navy; the Army all fight on; hoping that when and if it is their turn to fire their weapon in the defense of our nation that they do not find themselves at the mercy of a disgruntled sergeant who couldn't even be trusted to lead his squad.

The idea that it could happen again is horrifying. The idea that it happened at all is the tragedy.

The rest of her essay is a blistering indictment of Pantano's accusers and the way the whole thing was dealt with by the Marines. Its worth reading.

Is Zarqawi Dead?

Adnkronos International has this report on Abu Al-Zarqawi:

Baghdad, 2 June (AKI) - The Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi - al-Qaeda's leader in Iraq - died on Friday and his body is in Fallujah's cemetary, an Iraqi Sunni sheikh, Ammar Abdel Rahim Nasir, has told the Saudi on-line newspaper Al-Medina. He claims that gunfights which broke out in Fallujah in the last few days involved militants trying to protect the insurgency leader's tomb from a group of American soldiers patrolling the area.

During a telephone conversation from the city of Fallujah with the Saudi newspaper, Nasir said al-Zarqawi was taken there after being injured in the city of Ramadi around three weeks ago, and may have been treated by two doctors who had worked with his aides in Baghdad. He said the two doctors had stopped a serious hemorrhage in al-Zarqawi's intestines, but that after his condition worsened last week, the militant died on Friday.

Nasir adds that in his will the insurgent leader left the order that no funeral should be held for him and the right to announce his death should be left to the al-Qaeda leadership in Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden.

The Al-Medina newspaper reports that it also called the headmaster of a school in Fallujah, who preferred to remain anonymous, but confirmed that many people in the city were aware of the fact that al-Zarqawi had recently been taken to the city.

Sheikh Nasir's claims appear to correspond with reports several weeks ago that al-Zarqawi had been injured and taken to Ramadi hospital for emergency treatment, and with messages on the Internet talking of two Arab doctors accompanying him. Al-Zarqawi was reported to have been seen at the hospital on April 27. The hospital's director told an Iraq-based newspaper that US troops later surrounded and raided the entire building, searching for the Jordanian militant.

Only two days ago, an audio message attributed to al-Zarqawi was posted on the Internet, in which he assured his followers that he had only been lightly injured. Following the message, the US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned countries neighboring Iraq not to give any medical assistance to al-Zarqawi. "Our current theory is that he is in Iraq," he said. "Were a neighboring country to take him in and provide medical assistance or haven for him, they obviously would be associating themselves with a major linkage in the al-Qaeda network, and a person who has a great deal of blood on his hands," Rumsfeld continued. "And that's something that people would want to take note of."

How reliable this report is is hard to say, but as Bill Roggio at Winds of Change points out there is no doubt that right now forensics experts are examining the alleged remains to determine whether Zarqawi has indeed passed on to be with his 72 virgins, whom, we expect, will all be fat, ugly, and covered with pustules.

Unspeakable

Os Guinness has written a fine book on the problem that evil poses to both believers and unbelievers and the responses to evil offered by each of the three families of faith: eastern, naturalistic, and Judeo-Christian. The book is titled Unspeakable: Facing Up to Evil in an Age of Genocide and Terror.

Guinness touches a lot of bases and says many worthwhile things about the topic that anyone can read with profit, but one thing in particular puzzled me. Guinness holds to the view that one person may forgive another of a serious offense even though the other neither seeks nor desires that forgiveness. It is possible, in other words, to have forgiveness without reconciliation. Guinness suggests that as long as the "forgiver" doesn't seek redress for the offense, as long as he doesn't hold a "grudge", then he has forgiven the offender.

I guess my problem is that I'm not sure what "forgiveness" means given Guinness' view of the matter. Let me illustrate the difficulty: John does Dave a grave injustice. John is unrepentant and is not interested in Dave's forgiveness. Dave nevertheless says that he forgives John. He treats him with a modicum of courtesy, even behind his back, and seeks no revenge or redress for the hurt. Even so, he no longer respects nor likes John. Their friendship has been irreparably sundered, and Dave doesn't wish to have anything to do with John in the future. Whenever he thinks about the situation he cannot help but think that John is guilty of an offense even though he doesn't insist that John make any compensation. They go their separate ways.

In what sense, then, has Dave actually forgiven John? In other words, can there be any meaning to forgiveness if the forgiveness is not accepted and if there is no reconciliation?

If one man forgives another man's debt then all record of the debt is wiped away, but if Dave forgives John, in Guinness' understanding of the word, then there is no wiping away of guilt, only a decision not to press for retribution. So, is forgiveness just a refusal to seek recompense, which is what Guinness seems to say, or is it something more than that? If it's more, then exactly what is it?

It seems to me that forgiveness entails the restoration of a relationship to at least some semblance of the status quo ante, just as in the case of debt forgiveness, but I don't see how this is possible apart from some measure of reconciliation.

I've always thought of forgiveness as a transaction. One party offers it, and the other accepts it. Until it has been accepted there is no transaction even if the offer still holds. God, for example, holds out forgiveness to everyone, but only those who accept it can receive it. If this is not the way God's forgiveness works then classical Christianity has an interesting problem: People God has forgiven will nevertheless find themselves suffering eternal punishment because, though they've been forgiven, they've never accepted that forgiveness and are thus not reconciled to God. Yet if hell is a consequence of sin and all sin has been expunged from the ledger (because it has been forgiven), why will there be anyone in hell? Indeed, what is the substantive difference between forgiveness and no forgiveness?

This quibble notwithstanding, Unspeakable is an excellent read and can be ordered here. Viewpoint recommends it to anyone interested in the phenomenon of modern evil.

George Mikan, 1924 - 2005

George Mikan has died at the age of 80 from complications from diabetes. Perhaps no player in the history of basketball had as much of an impact on the game as he. There is a fine column on his life and his many contributions to basketball here. He was by all accounts an outstanding man.

Bleak Prospects

Ron Brownstein of the LA Times does the math and concludes that there's not much chance that the Democrats will retake the Senate in 2006.

Brownstein points out that there are more red states than there are blue states. Republicans hold 44 of the 58 red state senate seats and Democrats hold 28 of 36 blue state seats (six seats are in "swing" states). Moreover, the Dems are defending more seats in 2006 than is the GOP. The Republicans thus have more potential for gains than do the Democrats.

Of course, it might be asked why the Democrats should even worry about recapturing the majority as long as there are Republican senators like John McCain and his merry band who do everything possible to allow the Democrats to control things even when they're in the minority.

At any rate, there's a lot more interesting analysis in Brownstein's article. Incidentally, if he's correct and the Republicans hold on to, or even increase, their lead in the Senate, we expect a flood of editorials in liberal newspapers calling for amending the Constitution to allow for proportional representation in that body just as is done in the House. It rankles many Leftists that even though New York's senators represent more people than do the senators of many western states put together, each state gets two senators in Washington regardless of the population of the state. Thus a minority of small-state citizens can effectively neutralize the will of a large-state majority.

Call it "minority rights", of which senate Democrats should actually approve since they keep invoking the concept in order to justify the filibuster. Of course, the difference is that the right of small states to have the same number of senators as large states is fixed by the Constitution. That document is silent about any alleged rights of a minority political party.

Beslan Terror Trial

The only surviving terrorist who participated in the Beslan massacre was put on trial yesterday and pleaded not guilty. Unfortunately for him there are witnesses. Pictures and details can be found here.

Amnesty's Buffoonery

Amnesty International, which distinguished itself last week with singularly ridiculous allegations against the United States and a positively moronic suggestion that other countries arrest president Bush and his top officials, describes itself as nonpartisan. The following information is taken from an article in the Washington Times:

Irene Khan, Amnesty's secretary-general, compared the U.S. detention center at U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where more than 500 suspected al Qaeda and Taliban members are held, to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's "gulag" prison system.

Ms Khan has evidently never read Solzhenitsyn's One day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch nor his monumental Gulag Archipeligo. If she had she would have been far more reluctant to make such a completely asinine comparison of the conditions which existed in the Gulag to those which prevail in the relative country club that is Guantanamo.

At the same time, William F. Schulz, Amnesty's executive director, issued a statement calling Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other top administration officials "architects of torture." Mr. Schulz suggested that other countries could file war-crime charges against the top officials and arrest them.

It now transpires that the top leadership of Amnesty International USA contributed the maximum $2,000 to Sen. John Kerry's presidential campaign. Federal Election Commission records show that Mr. Schulz contributed $2,000 to Mr. Kerry's campaign last year. He also has contributed $1,000 to the 2006 campaign of Massachusetts Democrat Sen. Edward M. Kennedy.

Moreover, Joe W. "Chip" Pitts III, board chairman of Amnesty International USA, gave the maximum $2,000 allowed by federal law to John Kerry for President. Mr. Pitts is a lawyer and entrepreneur who advises the American Civil Liberties Union.

Amnesty International's Web site states it is "independent of any government, political ideology, economic interest or religion. It does not support or oppose any government."

Indeed. It only opposes the officials of those governments which have freed more people from tyranny in the last five years than have ever been freed by any nation in the entire history of the world.

Perhaps Amnesty should add to its governing principles not only freeing people from the oppression of political tyrants but also freeing the rest of us from the insufferable oppression of it's own buffoonery.

A Jewish Anti- Christian Defamation League

Christianity Today has an interview with Don Feder who is president of an organization of Jews formed last month which is committed to defending Evangelical Christianity from it's cultural despisers. This is an historically unprecedented undertaking on the part of religious Jews, and their aims and rationale for it are encouraging. At one point in the interview Feder says this:

Christians by and large aren't being attacked because Catholics believe in the doctrine of transubstantiation or because some evangelicals believe in the Rapture. They're not being attacked on theological grounds. They're being attacked on moral grounds. They're being attacked because they object to same-sex marriage; they object to abortion on demand; they support public displays of the Ten Commandments; they support voluntary school prayer or a moment of silent meditation at the beginning of the school day; because they want judges to interpret the Constitution rather than using the Constitution to legislate from the bench; because they object to, you might even say they were outraged by, what happened to Terri Schiavo. Christians are the last remaining obstacle to the triumph of secular humanist values. And that's why we say that if Christians fail, America will fail.

There's much in this piece that we found fascinating, especially Feder's response to questions about why he and others started the organization as well as his thoughts on Christian proselytism of Jews. Give it a look.

Moral Retards

He writes about the "logical impossibility" of "religion without fanaticism." In his essay, Religion & Morality: A Contradiction Explained, he opines that "humanity would be better off without religion," which he characterizes as "social poison," because believers are "susceptible to extreme forms of hatred and violence." He also calls religious believers "moral retards" and says they are "incapable of moral action."

He writes: "American Christians like to think that religious violence is a problem only for other faiths. In the heart of every Christian, though, is a tiny voice preaching self-righteousness, paranoia and hatred. Christians claim that theirs is a faith based on love, but they'll just as soon kill you. For your own good, of course." He then belittles religious believers "whose devotion is moderate," saying they "are only cowardly fanatics," not brave enough to "foment their own kind of holy war."

Who is he? His name is Timothy Shortell and he's just been named to chair the Sociology Department at CUNY's Brooklyn College. There's much more about Shortell and his radical Left politics here.

His claim that religious believers are incapable of moral action is a statement that only someone totally oblivious to cultural and social history could make. It is also philosophically inane. It is, after all, only religious believers who can even speak in moral categories. For the atheist there can be no morality. Shortell refers to himself as an "ubermensch", Nietzsche's term for the man who is beyond good and evil. Having adopted a Nietzschean attitude toward morality, it is disingenuous, if not fatuous, of him to pretend that he's morally superior to Christians or to pass moral judgment upon anyone. If, as we've argued many times, there is no God then there is no morality. There are just things that people do, some of which are preferred by some people over others.

If "moral retards" there be, among them are those who assert that one can have Christian moral principles without the Christian God.

Rocker Consultant

Those readers who are fans of Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers may be familiar with a guitarist named Jeff "Skunk" Baxter. If so, you may be surprised at what Mr. Baxter is up to these days.

Embryo Adoptions

This is a very interesting article in the Washington Post on embryo adoptions in the United States. Here are a couple of salient paragraphs from the piece:

Fertility clinics across the country, according to the most recent data available, held about 400,000 frozen embryos as of May 2003. Patients had reserved 88 percent of them for their own future use, and they had earmarked about 3 percent for medical research. Two percent -- or about 9,000 embryos -- were available for donation to other couples, according to Sean Tipton, director of public affairs at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, which collected the data.

When the Brinkmans ran into fertility problems, they first tried in vitro fertilization themselves, unsuccessfully. They also thought about a conventional adoption. But because they wanted to experience a pregnancy, Donielle Brinkman said, they turned to Nightlight Christian Adoptions of Fullerton, Calif., and its "Snowflakes" program, a name intended to emphasize that every embryo is unique.

More than half of U.S. fertility clinics allow clients to donate embryos to other couples anonymously. Nightlight, which has received more than $800,000 in grants from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to promote embryo adoptions, is one of only a few agencies that treat embryos exactly like infants.

For a fee ranging from $4,000 to $5,600, it arranges "open" adoptions in which the genetic and adoptive parents are matched according to detailed preferences and given an opportunity to get to know each other. Donielle Brinkman said that she did not want to make the genetic family's identity public, but that they have exchanged photographs, phone calls and information over the Internet.

It's worth reading the whole column.

The Survivor

Matt Drudge highlights some of the scandalous stuff in a forthcoming book on the Clinton presidency by Washington Post White House correspondent John Harris titled The Survivor. Viewpoint shamelessly repeats here the gossip Drudge has reported:

-- Bill Clinton was so upset that his weight-loss regimen in 2000 was not working that he made his aides release a bogus number after his annual Navy physical to make him five pounds lighter. (pg. 394)

-- Hillary taunted her husband's aides as being wimps by not fighting hard enough on Whitewater - "JFK had real men in his White House!" (pg. 108)

-- Tipper Gore was so disgusted in 2000 with Bill and Hillary that she stayed cloistered in a holding room instead of going to a New York reception with major Democratic fund-raisers where the Clintons would be. "No, I'm not doing it," she snapped to an aide. "I'm not going out there with that man."

-- The first conversation between Clinton and Gore after the Lewinsky story broke. Clinton is shouting at Gore, "This is a f-----g coup d'etat!" Gore just stared back blankly. pg 313.

-- Former White House counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke on the record hitting Clinton for not having the guts to fire FBI director Louis Freeh, who Clarke called a major obstacle on anti-terrorism policy. "He should have just fired Freeh and taken the shit it would have caused." (pg. 408)

The context of the following is Sally Quinn's article from 11/98 explaining why the Washington Establishment was appalled by Clinton's behavior during the Lewinksy contretemps.

Some time afterward the president was going over papers with his staff on the upcoming Presidential Medal of Freedom awards. Spontaneously, he launched into a little riff for his assembled aides. His nominee for the prestigious award this year would be none other than the famous [Watergate editor] Ben Bradlee, husband of Sally Quinn.

The aides looked on in puzzled amusement.

"Anyone who sleeps with that bitch deserves a medal!" he explained.

Not very flattering or pretty. I doubt that this book will be added to the collection at the Clinton library.

In Search of Moderate Muslims

Joel Mowbray does the leg work to show that there are moderate Muslims. They're just not in the leadership of Muslim organizations in the United States:

In the first of its kind for an event organized by a major national Muslim organization, Kamal Nawash and the Free Muslims Coalition (FMC) recently held the Free Muslims March Against Terrorism. Not surprisingly, the leaders of every other major Muslim organization shunned the march and declined to take a public stand against terrorism and extremism.

Noticeably missing from the list of over 80 sponsors Nawash rounded up was any of the Muslim groups that claim to be moderates, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC). Though these groups pay lip service to opposing terrorism, they couldn't put their money where their mouth is and bring themselves to stand side-by-side with the Free Muslim Coalition.

The reasons for the absence of the major national Muslim groups are obvious. The empirical evidence has clearly demonstrated where the true loyalties of organizations such as CAIR and MPAC lie. In this particular case, it is anathema for many Muslim groups to identify themselves with the unambiguous message of the rally. Nawash is among the few Muslim leaders-and certainly one of the very few leaders of the overtly political Muslim groups-to explicitly confront the real threat, the real root cause of terrorism: radical Islam.

There's much more at the link.

Hypocritical Phony

NewsMax.Com states that Senator George Voinovich's opposition to John Bolton is completely a matter of personal pique that has nothing to do with Bolton himself:

Voinovich's stated reason for opposing Bolton: "I know, some of my friends say, 'Let it go, George. It's going to work out,'" said Voinovich, the only Republican opposing the appointment. "I don't want to take the risk. I came back here and ran for a second term because I'm worried about my kids and my grandchildren. And I just hope my colleagues will take the time and...do some serious thinking about whether or not we should send John Bolton to the United Nations."

His kids and grandkids? Had the Senator been so worried about his children and Bolton's nomination, he might have shown up for most of the Foreign Relations Committee hearings about Bolton. But the Senator missed almost all the meetings.

The real reason Voinovich is angry was a series of TV ads played by a conservative group in Ohio criticizing the Senator for not backing Bolton early. Bolton and the White House had nothing to do with the ads. But insiders say Voinovich was so ticked off by the local pressure he vowed to get Bolton.

What a phony.

The Washington Times ran a little piece a week or so ago which gave the lie to Voinivich's concerns that Bolton's temperament ill-suits him for the role of ambassador to the U.N. It turns out that Voinovich is criticizing Bolton for behavior in which he himself has indulged in the past.

"In 1995 when he was governor of Ohio, he had a temper tantrum at an airport because his plane was kept on the ground while Air Force One was in the sky." John Podhoretz wrote in the New York Post on May 13 (Subscription required). "He ordered his pilot to take off, screaming at air traffic controllers all the while and daring them to 'shoot us down.'"

An AP report at the time quoted Voinivich as using profanity and defying the authorities to put him in jail. Voinivich was fined by the FAA for his behavior.

"Interpersonal skills are important. The way you treat other people - do you treat them with dignity and respect? Very important." This was Voinivich during the senate Foreign Relations Committee vote a couple of weeks ago.

What a hypocrite.

In God We Trust

The battle to scrub the public arena free of any hint that God might be lurking in some obscure crevice of our public life opens a new front in North Carolina:

The words appear on every dollar bill and US coin. They are displayed at the entrance to the US Senate and above the Speaker's chair in the House. But when local officials in North Carolina placed "In God We Trust" on the front of the Davidson County Government Center, they soon found themselves in federal court facing a complaint that they were violating the separation of church and state.

The display was mounted in 18-inch letters that passing motorists could see on nearby Interstate 85. "If you are going to get sued, you may as well get sued for big letters," says Larry Potts, vice chairman of the Davidson County Commission. The case is one of an array of church-state battles across the country seeking to establish a bedrock answer to a difficult constitutional question: To what extent may the government bring God into the public square?

It is more than crosses, creches, and menorahs. Last year the US Supreme Court considered whether repeating the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance violates the First Amendment's prohibition of government establishment of religion. And the justices are currently weighing the constitutionality of displaying the Ten Commandments on public property in Texas and Kentucky. Decisions in the Ten Commandments cases could come as early as Monday, or, at the latest, by the end of next month.

Legal scholars are hopeful the Ten Commandments opinions will provide a legal landmark, offering lower courts more precise guidelines to help judges resolve the growing number of church-state disputes. At the center of the debate is whether the Constitution demands strict separation between church and state or whether it provides leeway to permit government acknowledgment of America's religious heritage. Others go further, saying the First Amendment bars establishment of a government-backed church but says nothing about government efforts to promote religiosity and faith-based morality.

The Davidson County debate over "In God We Trust" started in 2002. That's when Rick Lanier suggested posting the phrase on the side of the government center. At the time, Mr. Lanier was a county commissioner and a member of a local ad hoc group called the US Motto Action Committee, which was offering to pay for the display.

Not everyone on the county commission thought it was a good idea. Critics said it would be viewed as an endorsement of religion. Some said the commission might get sued. Lanier noted that in 1956 Congress designated "In God We Trust" as the national motto. After nearly 50 years, he said, what judge would dare declare a local display of the national motto unconstitutional? The measure passed 4 to 2.

To Lanier and other supporters, the display was seen as a local response to the 9/11 terror attacks and an answer to a growing number of lawsuits seeking to remove any mention of God and religion from public life. "For the past three to four years we went from a gradual process with legal challenges from groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and American Atheists to a fast-track effort to try to completely secularize our society," Lanier says. He adds, "If you secularize and take God and our religious heritage out of [our society], then we open the door even wider to moral corruption and tearing down the very fiber that built this country."

Two local lawyers who conduct business in the county building objected to what they saw as the use of public property to present a religious message. "It is the semantic equivalent of putting up a sign that says Davidson County believes in the Christian God," says Michael Lea, a Thomasville, N.C., lawyer who filed suit with Charles Lambeth to have the display removed.

"I am a Christian and have been on the governing board of the local church. It is not that I am anti-Christian," he says. "I just don't think it should be up on a government building."

Faced with the prospect of open-ended litigation costs, the county commission began to reassess its decision. But the US Motto Action Committee responded by gathering 18,000 signatures on a petition supporting the motto. The group also raised $10,000 from local churches and individuals to cover the legal defense. In May 2004, US District Judge William Osteen upheld the display. "The phrase 'In God We Trust' is not inherently religious, particularly when considered in light of its history as this nation's official motto," he wrote.

Messrs. Lambeth and Lea appealed. On May 13, the Fourth US Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., upheld the display. A reasonable observer would know "In God We Trust" is the national motto, not an endorsement of religion by Davidson County, the appeals panel ruled.

George Daly, a Charlotte civil rights lawyer, argued the case challenging the display. He says the Fourth Circuit got it wrong and he plans to file an appeal to the US Supreme Court. "You look up over the door and it says, 'We trust in God' - we, the government of Davidson County," Mr. Daly says. "That is direct government speech," he says, "and that is endorsement."

Daly adds, "The government, of course, endorses what the government says. I thought I passed the endorsement test hands down, but what the Fourth Circuit says is, 'No, no, no - everyone knows what the national motto is and that it is patriotic.'"

If the Supreme Court strikes down one or both of the Ten Commandments displays in question, that could make Daly's appeal much easier. Still, he faces another obstacle. "I just detect a great reluctance in the courts to want to allow religion to become the subject of a trial," he says. "But being a lawyer, I want a trial."

In addition to the Fourth Circuit, three other federal appeals circuits - the Fifth, Ninth, and 10th - have upheld the national motto against Establishment Clause challenges. Furthermore, the Sixth Circuit has upheld the constitutionality of Ohio's state motto: "With God, All Things Are Possible."

Davidson County isn't the only place posting the national motto on public property. The American Family Association (AFA) in Tupelo, Miss., has sponsored a campaign to display 11-by-14-inch "In God We Trust" posters in school classrooms and other public buildings. At least 18 states have passed laws supporting the posters.

"We have hundreds of thousands of posters in 18 states and not a single lawsuit filed. I think that speaks for itself," says Randy Sharp, an AFA spokesman. "Under a strict separation of church and state, even this type of endorsement of religion would not stand," says Rob Boston of the Washington-based group Americans United for Separation of Church and State. "But the courts have never adopted a standard that strict. They have always carved out an exemption for certain types of civil religion, and this is another example of that."

He adds, "We haven't been involved in a case like this or taken any of them on simply because it is usually an exercise in futility. The courts aren't going to declare something like this unconstitutional."

George Daly is, in my opinion, correct in that the government, by inscribing the offending words on the walls of public buildings and on our currency, is claiming, accurately or not, that the American people do, in fact, trust God to protect our nation, and that the government endorses that trust. To defend the inscription by trying to reduce it to a mere expression of patriotism is silly and disingenuous.

Where Mr. Daly is not correct, however, is in thinking that this violates the intent of the freedom of religion clause of the First Amendment. By expressing a sentiment such as the one carried by the statement in God we trust, the state is not establishing a religion nor is it interfering in the free exercise thereof. The state may be endorsing a theistic point of view but theism is not a religion. It has no clergy nor churches, it has no dogma nor sacred books. Nor is the government, by stamping its currency with these words, actively striving to establish a state religion of theism. Indeed, it is doing much less than the founders of this country regularly did in their writings, speeches, and other public pronouncements.

First Amendment jurisprudence has drifted so far from what the framers originally intended that it has become a parody of itself and the courts and lawyers which seek to totally secularize public life look like small-minded anti-religious bigots. Any mention of God by a public official is seen as a constitutional breach by the censors at the ACLU. Any acknowledgement of God which is in any way associated with tax dollars is cause for litigation. This is a ridiculous state of affairs which the founders could scarcely have foreseen nor desired, and it is time that our courts and legislators started acting like adults and reformulate the law so that it more accurately reflects what the fathers intended when they wrote the Bill of Rights.

The Most Beautiful Spot in the East

We're back from a Memorial day weekend at what is, in my judgment, the most beautiful place in the United States east of the Mississippi River - Acadia National Park in Maine. Like all of our National Parks, it is a public treasure and needs constant vigilance to protect and preserve it from those who see in such places little more than an opportunity for development and exploitation.

If political conservatism means anything it means having a strong predilection toward preserving and conserving our heritage - our values, our traditions, and our natural gifts. It is as sad as it is puzzling that more conservatives don't see conservation and preservation of land and natural beauty as logical consequences of the conservative ethos.

This is not to suggest that conservatives should not favor, say, drilling for oil in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, but it is to say that such exploitation, which would be enormously profitable to the oil companies, should only be permitted if those who benefit from it compensate future generations of Americans by purchasing other significant lands elsewhere for incorporation into the National Wildlife Refuge or National Park systems.

Indeed, there is much land around all of our National Parks, Refuges, and Seashores which still needs to be protected from development. Why not make preserving some of it part of the deal for drilling rights in ANWR?

Keeping the Pressure On

For those interested in things military Belmont Club is almost always worth a visit. Wretchard's most recent post analyzes the significance of the increase in operational tempo of Coalition forces in Iraq. In his concluding paragraphs he writes:

The US ability to increase tempo effectively means that it has more troops, even though the actual number of personnel may remain the same. When 'toothpaste' is corralled faster than it can ooze, using the metaphor of the Iraq expert Toby Dodge, the insurgency will be forced into lower and lower energy states. The surprising thing about this up-tick in tempo is that there are actually fewer American troops in Iraq today than three months ago: it stands at 138,000, down from February's high of 155,000. The downside of increasing tempo means US troops are working at a faster clip and are exposed to more combat situations.

But high tempos may also cause a gradual breakdown in the enemy response times which may save lives in the long run. Historically, the winning force has sought to speed up operations once it felt the measure of the enemy. One of the best examples was the US Navy practice of using the same ships under different admirals during the Pacific War. Ships would sail as the 3rd Fleet and after their mission pick up a new command group to re-sortie as the 5th Fleet: "the same team of horses with a different driver". The practice was hard on the USN sailors but catastrophic for the Imperial Japanese Navy because the blows arrived faster than they believed possible. Historically, an acceleration in operations has often marked a discontinuity in what seemed to be static situations. While not always the case, it often signals that a crisis is approaching. Things will become clear soon enough.

Faster operational rates also suggest that our intelligence has markedly improved. We know who and where the targets are to a greater extent than we did six months ago and we're not giving them time to catch their breath. It's also a sign that Iraqi troops are much more competent and numerous than they were six months ago and are able to shoulder much more of the load. All of this is very good news, indeed.

The Wrong Man's Values

The New York Times is in a bit of a snit that the President is, in their view, imposing his moral convictions concerning the humanity and worth of human embryos on the rest of us:

[The President's] actions are based on strong religious beliefs on the part of some conservative Christians, and presumably the president himself. Such convictions deserve respect, but it is wrong to impose them on this pluralistic nation.

These blastocysts, as they are called, bear none of the attributes we associate with humanity and, sitting outside the womb, have no chance of developing into babies. Some people consider them clumps of cells no different than other biological research materials. Others would grant them special respect but still make them available for worthy research. But Mr. Bush is imposing his different moral code on both, thereby slowing research that most consider potentially beneficial.

There is so much nonsense contained in these two paragraphs that it almost takes one's breath away.

First, the claim that GWB is imposing his moral beliefs upon others is absurd. Bush isn't forcing people to accept his view of the status of the embryo. He's simply saying that if you wish to destroy incipient human beings that's your business, but you can't expect taxpayers to compensate you for it.

Second, the Times complains that different people view the status of human embryos differently and that Mr. Bush is [unfairly] imposing his views on all of them. But someone's views must prevail in the debate over how these embryos are to be regarded by the federal government. Is the Times' problem that someone is imposing his views, or that the wrong person's views are being imposed?

Third, even if the President were "imposing" his beliefs about morality on others why would that be wrong? If one has the political power and constitutional authority to impose one's beliefs why, precisely, is it wrong to do so? Would the Times hesitate for one moment to impose its beliefs upon the nation were it to have the power to effect such a catastrophe?

In a secular society such as the Times yearns for the U.S. to be, right and wrong are merely functions of whatever the law allows. There is no appeal to some objective moral standard because secularists do not permit any such standard to be brought into play. Thus, whatever a man can legally do he has a "right" to do. In the secular state if Bush has the constitutional authority to impose his values on the rest of us then he has the right to do so, and the Times' complaints are just so much sour grapes.

The Decline of Amnesty International

Amnesty International's recent condemnation of the United States shows how ideologically blinkered that organization is. Amnesty calls for the arrest of several high administration officials should they stray into another country as did former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet who was arrested in London in 1998.

"If the U.S. government continues to shirk its responsibility, Amnesty International calls on foreign governments to uphold their obligations under international law by investigating all senior U.S. officials involved in the torture scandal," William Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA, said.

"If those investigations support prosecution, the governments should arrest any official who enters their territory and begin legal proceedings against them," he added. "The apparent high-level architects of torture should think twice before planning their next vacation to places like Acapulco or the French Riviera..."

Torture and other grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions amount to crimes against humanity and therefore all states have a responsibility to investigate and prosecute people responsible for them, Amnesty said in its 308-page report.

George Bush is among a dozen former or current U.S. officials who should be probed by foreign governments....Others on the Amnesty list of potential targets for investigation and prosecution include Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief George Tenet.

Perhaps we just don't remember but has Amnesty ever called for the arrest of Fidel Castro, or, prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom, of Saddam Hussein? Have they ever called for the arrest of any of the murderous tyrants in black Africa or of Kim Jong Il in North Korea? We don't recall.

Nor have they ever urged the arrest of any of the potentates in the Islamic world which is odd since part of the indictment against the United States is that it practices rendition of prisoners, i.e. we send them to their country of origin in the Mideast to be interrogated. This is severely criticized by organizations like Amnesty because everyone knows what happens to people in the prisons of Islamic countries. Well, if that's all true, why isn't Amnesty putting out an APB on the leaders of Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, etc. for the appalling abuses of human rights that occur regularly in those countries? Their focus on the United States seems to suggest an ideological antipathy that ill-becomes an organization which is supposed to be non-ideological.

Nor does Mr. Schulz seem to understand the implications of what it is he's urging some hapless country to do. He's calling for, say, Belgium, to arrest President Bush should GWB ever wander into Brussels. Has Mr. Schulz tried to imagine what would ensue if a foreign nation took into custody the President of the United States? Either the executive director of AI is a complete fool or he's deliberately trying to instigate a military conflict between the U.S. and whatever nation is naive enough to heed his advice.

Amnesty International is an organization which could do much good around the world, and it's therefore especially unfortunate that its manifest bias and ridiculous recommendations are turning it into a discredited and irrelevant voice in world affairs today.