The urge to denigrate is an attempt to establish your own superiority by imposing humiliation on someone else—as well as a naked admission that you have no other way to demonstrate your personal merit

On The Tracinski Newsletter, the always accomplished Robert Tracinski has a post about Moral Equivalents. It is his look at the "Antifa" riots in Berkeley, following up on his coverage of the upheaval in his own town of Charlottesville (thanks for the link, Maggie). Also take a look at his take on what happened, President Trump's reaction, and how the event unhinged the left and made the Confederate statue controversy even more nonsensical.

The media spent the last two weeks, after the deadly riot in Charlottesville, denouncing the notion that there were two sides responsible for the violence and specifically praising the far left’s black-clad “Antifa” brawlers as freedom fighters who are saving us from Nazism. Then, on Sunday, Antifa was filmed attacking random people on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley, looking and acting exactly like a fascist militia bent on imposing rule by force.

This is a timely warning that the media is using the shock and horror of one evil, a newly brazen white nationalism, to panic us into submission to the horror of another evil.

This media trope was established by criticism of President Trump for condemning violence on “both sides” in Charlottesville. Since anything said by Trump must necessarily be wrong, it therefore became unacceptable for anyone to say that there was violence on both sides in Charlottesville.

But there was violence on both sides. That was clear from videos and photo essays and was described by reporters at the time. That even includes reporters who, in the process of factually describing the violence on both sides, still imposed the narrative that both sides weren’t to blame.

For example, New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg acknowledged the “hatred” with which the black-clad Antifa attacked their opponents, but then the Twitter mob pressured her to recant. In the old days, we used to speculate that reporters and commentators tailored their views based on what they thought would get them invited to DC and New York cocktail parties. Now they tailor their views to avoid the amplified gossip of random people on a social media platform. Decide for yourself which is worse.

But the new edict had been delivered by the vox populi of political Twitter, and everyone fell in line. The left has given up violence, having “cleansed itself through a painful process of introspection,” according to an opinion piece in the Washington Post. And even if they are violent, it’s just not the same thing, because they’re not motivated by “hate” when they club people over the head. They’re violent in a good way, and only against the bad guys. In fact, come to think of it, they’re just like the GIs who stormed Omaha Beach!

No, really, this actually became a meme, the most famous version of which came from The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg.

Funny, I must have missed the part in Saving Private Ryan where Tom Hanks’s character is a radical socialist. Maybe it’s in the director’s cut.

After the media worked so hard to establish this new dogma, Antifa thugs repaid their courtesies by staging what can only be described as a violent takeover of the campus at the University of California at Berkeley. Ostensibly this was in response to a “No to Marxism in America” rally that never even happened. But it didn’t matter whether it happened or not. Antifa used it as an excuse to attack any passersby suspected of being white nationalists or merely conservatives or Trump supporters.

 … Some of us have long warned that college campuses are becoming like one-party dictatorships, intolerant of any opinions or culture opposed by the left. But up to now, this cloying monoculture has largely been accepted and enforced through voluntary means. They chose conformity. Now the universities are becoming literal pockets of totalitarian rule—zones in which those with dissenting political opinions face the prospect of being beaten by an angry mob.

Actually, it’s more anarchic than that. The Antifa mobs weren’t stopping people to interrogate them about their political opinions. In one video a middle-aged man and his college-aged son are being attacked, and he starts by asking, in a bewildered tone, “What are you guys beating us up for?” The only answer he gets is a fist in the face, and that’s the only answer any of us are liable to get when Antifa comes for us.

That’s what gives Antifa the genuine stamp of a totalitarian movement. They have gone from attacking “fascists” to attacking anyone who is not them, anyone who is not a member of the party.
 
Some in the media are starting to wake up. The same Washington Post that had recently explained to us how nonviolent the left is, suddenly is blaring unambiguous headlines like “Black-Clad Antifa Members Attack Peaceful Right-Wing Demonstrators in Berkeley.”

Vox took a peculiar middle path, declaring that beating up political opponents is bad, but not because it’s repellent in and of itself. It’s bad because it could lead to bad publicity: “such violence can reinforce right-wing views about the left.” Imagine that.

 … [What the antifas' wider program is] is lust for power in its most elemental form: beating self-designated “enemies” as an end in itself, for the thrill of exercising physical power and coercion directly on the body of another person. It is how Orwell described the steady state of the perfect totalitarian system: a boot stamping on a human face, forever.

The conventional liberals have toyed with a similar motive in a much more diluted and genteel form. They have indulged in the ritual of casting everyone who disagrees with them as a racist and fascist in order to establish their own sense of moral authority by comparison. What they haven’t figured out yet is that this seemingly benign thrill of self-congratulation is just a weaker form of the same impulse, a diluted form of the lust for power. It starts with enjoying being part of a social-media mob that gets some guy fired from his job or forces some other guy into a groveling public apology in order to enjoy your own sense of power and authority as the imposer of these humiliations. But if you keep indulging this impulse, it ends with seeking the sense of control over others that comes from smashing your fist into someone’s face.

 … The urge to denigrate people from other racial and ethnic backgrounds is a similar attempt to establish your own superiority by imposing humiliation on someone else—as well as a naked admission that you have no other way to demonstrate your personal merit.

Read the whole thing. And while you're at it, consider subscribing to The Tracinski Newsletter.

"Criminalizing millions of Americans overnight": those pushing a neo-Victorian code of sexual conduct are on the Left

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve increasingly had the experience of saying things that would have been considered pieties in the liberal catechism when I was young—and which now will get you labeled as a howling reactionary 

muses Robert Tracinski.

 … The left had the reputation of being defenders of free speech, for example, but it was always something of a case of “free speech for me but not for thee.” They were all in favor of “questioning authority”—until they became the authorities.

More important, the left has moved farther to the left, leaving moderate “liberalism” behind and embracing a more consistent, authoritarian collectivism.

Robert Tracinski goes on to list Seven Liberal Pieties That Only the Right Still Believes (thanks to Instapundit). Number 3 goes thusly:

3) Government should stay out of the bedroom.

This was one of the big selling points for the liberals. Conservatives were scary religious zealots who wanted to tell you what music you should listen to, censor your movies and television shows, and worst of all, invade your bedroom and tell you who could sleep with and what you could do with them.

It was all a bit overblown and it wasn’t as simplistic a partisan narrative as you might remember. (The campaign against rock music lyrics, for example, was spearheaded by Tipper Gore, wife of then-Senator Al Gore.) But there’s little doubt that things have changed, and now it’s the left that is pushing a neo-Victorian code of sexual conduct.

I remember during Bill Clinton’s impeachment, when Ken Starr released a report poring over the details of Clinton’s sordid encounters with Monica Lewinsky, how creepy all the liberals thought it was for a prosecutor to examine every detail of other people’s sexual encounters, like some kind of peeping Tom. Yet this is now the exact system set up on every college campus, which is prepared to produce a Starr Report for every drunken hook-up.

And the crazy ideas that start on campus have a tendency to escape from the asylum. Thus, the Washington Examiner‘s Ashe Schow reports that the campus system of “yes means yes,” in which lovers must receive express permission for every minor stage of a sexual act or risk being prosecuted by a regretful partner after the fact, is now being proposed as the legal model for criminal prosecution nationwide. As Schow puts it, this is a standard “so stringent that it would criminalize millions of Americans overnight,” and is “part of a push to bring authoritarianism into the bedroom.”

And it’s not just what goes on behind closed doors. Every statement about sex, every public depiction of anything that remotely connotes sex—from movies to music to video games—has to be loaded up with social and political significance and policed for evidence of forbidden sexual attitudes.

These days, if you want to hear someone tell everyone to lighten up when it comes to sex and to stop making everything a crime, you’re far more likely to hear that from the right. Frankly, there are a lot of us who are just wishing we could hear less about what is going on in everybody else’s bedrooms.

Indeed, take a look at Elizabeth Nolan Brown's Reason article:

The biggest threat to sex as we know it is the coming revision of U.S. sex-crime laws. For a glimpse into this frightening future, look no further than Judith Shulevitz's latest in The New York Times. Shulevitz chronicles how "affirmative consent" (the principle, often referred to as "yes means yes," that the mere absence of a "no" is not sufficient permission to proceed sexually) has been quietly spreading from California universities to colleges across the country, and could soon mutate out of academia entirely.

 … "The traditional premise in the law has been that individuals are presumed to be sexually available and willing to have intercourse—with anyone, at any time, at any place—in the absence of clear indications to the contrary," states ALI. The new model "posits, to the contrary, that in the absence of affirmative indications of a person’s willingness to engage in sexual activity, such activity presumably is not desired."

Mind you, these are not conservative prudes; these are not Americans in general; who these people are are the leftists who are allegedly open, and tolerant, and against the prudes.

The draft guidelines drew strong criticism from some members, including law professors and lecturers from the University of Pittsburgh, Duke University, Rutgers, Harvard, and Georgetown University. "If there is political consensus on anything in the United States today, it is the consensus that our government has overcriminalized and overincarcerated the American public," they write. Yet "against this political consensus and judicial backdrop, the current ALI draft is an extreme deviation, focused on expanding criminal sanctions for sexual behavior."

 … "None of this is inadvertent or the result of loose drafting," the lawyers and professors suggest.

To the contrary, the intentionality of the draft is fully disclosed in the announcement that its purpose is to create very expansive statutes and standards with a "default position" of overcriminalization

Thomas Jefferson’s Tea Party Speech

From Robert Tracinski (be sure to check his Tracinski Letter out regularly), we get the following:

At the Jefferson Area Tea Party’s Independence Day celebration in Charlottesville, Virginia, we were favored by a surprise visit from our most famous local celebrity, the Sage of Monticello, Thomas Jefferson. Mr. Jefferson came to read the Declaration of Independence to our audience, but after he was done, our emcee, radio talk show host Joe Thomas, asked the third president if he could favor us with his views on today’s Tea Party movement. Here is what Mr. Jefferson said. — RWT

A little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.¹ What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?²

Our grievances we have [set forth] with that freedom of language and sentiment which becomes a free people, claiming their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate. Let those flatter, who fear: it is not an American art.³

Lay down true principles and adhere to them inflexibly. Do not be frightened into their surrender by the alarms of the timid.⁴

Our legislators are not sufficiently apprised of the rightful limits of their power; that their true office is to declare and enforce only our natural rights and duties, and to take none of them from us. No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another; and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him. The idea is quite unfounded, that on entering into society we give up any natural right.⁵

If we are made in some degree for others, yet in a greater [degree] are we made for ourselves. It were contrary to feeling and indeed ridiculous to suppose a man has less right in himself than one of his neighbors or all of them put together. This would be slavery and not that liberty which the Bill of Rights has made inviolable and for the preservation of which our government has been changed.⁶

I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground: That “all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States or to the people.” To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition. Certainly no such universal power was meant to be given them. It was intended to lace them up straitly within the enumerated powers.⁷

It would be a dangerous delusion were a confidence in the men of our choice, [our representatives], to silence our fears for the safety of our rights: that confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism—free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence. In questions of powers, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.⁸

I think, myself, that we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.⁹

When we consider that this government is charged with the external and mutual relations only of these states, we may well doubt whether our organization is not too complicated, too expensive; whether offices or officers have not been multiplied unnecessarily. Considering the general tendency to multiply offices and dependencies, and to increase expense to the ultimate term of burden which the citizen can bear, it behooves us to avail ourselves of every occasion which presents itself for taking off the surcharge; that it may never be seen here that, after leaving to labor the smallest portion of its earnings on which it can subsist, government shall itself consume the residue of what it was instituted to guard.¹⁰

[In short,] we [must] prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretense of taking care of them.¹¹

The earth belongs to each generation during its course, fully and in its own right. The second generation receives it clear of the debts and encumbrances of the first, the third of the second, and so on. For if the first could charge it with a debt, then the earth would belong to the dead and not to the living generation. [Thus], no generation can contract debts greater than may be paid during the course of its own existence.¹²

We are overdone with banking institutions which have banished the precious metals and substituted a more fluctuating and unsafe medium.¹³ Paper is poverty. It is only the ghost of money, and not money itself.¹⁴

I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government to the genuine principles of its Constitution; I mean an additional article, taking from the federal government the power of borrowing.¹⁵

A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned—this is the sum of good government.¹⁶

A little patience, and we shall see the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles.¹⁷ Here will be preserved a model of government, securing to man his rights and the fruits of his labor, by an organization constantly subject to his own will.¹⁸

The kind invitation to be present at [your] celebration of the anniversary of American Independence is most flattering. In the bold and doubtful election we [made] between submission or the sword, [it is] a consolatory fact, that our fellow citizens continue to approve the choice we made. May it be to the world, what I believe it will be—to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all—the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that that mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.¹⁹

The flames kindled on the fourth of July, 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; on the contrary, they will consume these engines and all who work them.²⁰

For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.²¹

1. Letter to James Madison, 1787,  
2. Letter to William Stephens Smith, 1787,  
3. A Summary View of the Rights of British America, 1774,  
4. Letter to Samuel Kercheval, 1816,  
5. Letter to Francis W. Gilmer, 1816, 
6. Letter to James Monroe, 1782,  
7. Opinion on Creating a National Bank, 1791,  
8. Kentucky Resolution, 1798,  
9. Letter to William Ludlow, 1824,  
10. First Annual Message to Congress, 1801,  
11. Letter to Thomas Cooper, 1802,  
12. Letter to James Madison, 1789,  
13. Letter to Abbe Salimankis, 1810,  
14. Letter to Edward Carrington, 1788, 
15. Letter to John Taylor, 1798,  
16. First Inaugural Address, 1801, 
17. Letter to John Taylor, 1798, 
18. Letter to William Plumer, 1815,  
19. Letter to Roger C. Weightman, 1826, 
20. Letter to John Adams, 1821,  
21. Letter to Roger C. Weightman, 1826.

Iraq: The Better Question

Terrorism has been described as "the weapon of the weak," a weapon employed by those who cannot win in direct combat on the battlefield

writes Robert Tracinski.

That is the meaning of today's wave of bombings in Baghdad. The terrorist insurgency just suffered a defeat in Tal Afar--so they retaliate, not by attacking the US military or even the Iraqi military, but by blowing up Iraqi civilian day-laborers.

As a military strategy, this makes no sense. If the insurgents keep suffering losses on the battlefield, and they can only answer by attacking unarmed civilians, how do they expect to win the war? The better question is: who do they expect to win the war for them? The answer: the American left, who they hope will use new terrorist attacks as an excuse to claim that Iraq is a "quagmire" and call for a US withdrawal.

This is the sickening irony of the so-called "peace movement": that it is a crucial part of the terrorists' war strategy--and that the terrorists commit the worst war atrocities known to man precisely to appeal to the "peace movement's" alleged humanitarians.

Read more about the hostility of America's alleged intellectual "elite" to the ideals and even the existence of their own country… Robert Tracinski adds:

The problem with America's strategy in Iraq is that our leaders have refused to treat this as a regional war, acting as if they can defeat the insurgency in Iraq without confronting its sponsors in Syria and Iran. That's why it's encouraging when we occasionally hear some new tough talk against Syria…

But we need more than just talk. It's time to show that we are serious by backing the talk with action. After all, wasn't the Bush Doctrine supposed to make no distinction between the terrorists and the states who support them? Why isn't that doctrine being applied to Syria and Iran?

Marriage has always been a forward-looking institution aimed at nurturing the next generation of children, not a love license for the adults of the present

Before the judiciary settles [the same-sex marriage] question — or perhaps leaves it unsettled — it would behoove us to pause in this rush, and ask what purpose the institution of marriage serves in our society

says Ed Morrissey (thanks to Robert Tracinski) in a The Week post which mirrors my own post from almost two years back (To Understand Liberal Issues Like Gay Marriage Correctly, It Is Vital to Get the Basic Premises Right).

Let's start by refining the argument. Supporters of same-sex marriage talk of "legalizing" gay marriages, but that's not an accurate depiction of current law. No U.S. state, regardless of its definition of marriage, will prosecute same-sex couples who call themselves "married," nor should they, outside of an intent to defraud — which is a crime regardless of the sexual circumstances. In fact, the government has a very limited legitimate interest in sexual or living arrangements. Especially after the Lawrence v. Texas case, the government has no role in regulating sexual activity with the exceptions of consanguinity (close blood relations), use of force and victimization, commercial trafficking of sexual favors, and exploitation of minors.

No one wants the government to dictate who may or may not share a bed, outside of those exceptional circumstances. Those who choose to cohabit in non-traditional relationships have ample options for formalizing their arrangements through the private contract process, which government enforces but does not sanction. That leaves adults free to choose whatever sexual arrangements they desire outside of the actual prohibitions that are objectively applied to everyone. That is actual freedom and equality.

Marriage, however, is a unique status even apart from religious concerns, which I'll address later. Marriage licenses exist as government recognition of the unique procreative potential of heterosexual relationships. The government takes a special interest in that potential for good reason — because a failure of the procreators to act as proper guardians forces the government to build safety-net systems for children whose parents either cannot or will not provide for them. Marriage provides a structure for assigning responsibility for children potentially produced by heterosexual relations. Put simply, it fixes responsibility for paternity on the husband, regardless of who may have fathered the children during a marriage — a fact that more than a few cuckolded husbands have discovered during divorce settlements. That structure ensures that the state can enforce responsibility for the care of its most vulnerable citizens, even to the extent of criminal prosecution for neglect.

In Western societies, including the U.S., marriage has always been a forward-looking institution aimed at protecting and nurturing the next generation of children, not a love license for the adults of the present.

Most states, until relatively recently, provided incentives for marriage and disincentives for divorce. Social experimentation undermined both, and safety-net programs accelerated the process. Thanks to no-fault divorce laws that put the whims of adults over the needs of children, the results of devaluing marriage for heterosexual unions have produced heavy social costs for the past few generations that have fallen outside of the traditional family structure.

 … In pushing to overturn a referendum passed by a large majority in California that enshrined the traditional definition of marriage into the state constitution, the opponents of Proposition 8 argue in essence that both the process and the policy chosen by the voters are entirely illegitimate. Voters used a direct-democracy mechanism that has existed in California for decades to amend the constitution no differently than other such propositions, and affirmed the definition of marriage that has existed during the entire history of this country. The challengers don't like the outcome, and argue that nine justices should only accept as a legitimate result of that referendum a definition of marriage that until the last few years few would have accepted, and negate a legitimate outcome in an election. That's an argument for an oligarchy or an autocracy, not a democracy. 

Tolerance, it seems, works only in one direction — and that brings us to the religious argument, but not in the manner one might think. 

While as a practicing Catholic my definition of marriage involves its sacramental character, I understand that others may not share my faith and perspective on its meaning or value. That, however, will not work both ways, as recent examples have made plain. For example, a baker in Oregon faces potential criminal charges for refusing to provide a wedding cake for a same-sex couple because of his religious beliefs. What happens when churches refuse to perform such ceremonies for the same reason?

Most people scoff at this question, but religions have partnered with the state on marriages in a way that bakers have not. Priests, ministers, rabbis, and imams act in place of the state when officiating at wedding ceremonies, and states that legalize same-sex marriage are eventually going to be forced by lawsuits to address that partnership, probably sooner rather than later. In similar partnerships, that has resulted in pushing churches out of business. 

… It's not difficult to see the writing on the wall when it comes to the ability of churches to perform a core sacrament in any meaningful sense once the government changes the definition of marriage.

The best outcome would be for Americans to recall the limited state interest in marriage and preserve it as a forward-looking institution, and return to incentivizing families rather than lowering barriers to failure.

Indeed. To return to the no-fault divorce laws "endemic to a governmental regime whose very existence is predicated and dependent on the power to remove children from their parents", Stephen Baskerville writes that the

practices and powers [of the nation's family courts] are undermining constitutional government in its most fundamental principles. The power to take children from their parents for no reason is arbitrary government at its most intrusive, since it invades and obliterates all of private life. Yet we have created a governmental machinery that exists for no other purpose.

Lenin: "Destroy the family, and you destroy society"

A handy guide to help you know your tropes for the political exploitation of terrorism

After hearing Barack Obama lecturing us about our intolerance, Robert Tracinski offers us a handy guide to help you know your tropes for the political exploitation of terrorism.

‘Or The Terrorists Win’

This is the claim that people should engage in some utterly ordinary activity — shopping, watching television, eating bacon, etc. — as an act of defiance against terrorism. Because if they don’t do it, “then the terrorists win.”

This trope originated with exhortations from President Bush just after 9/11 for people to keep going about their normal lives in spite of the fear al-Qaeda wanted to instill in them. Which is reasonable enough, I suppose, but then it got out of hand
 … Note that in its pure form, Or the Terrorists Win is not about the need to pursue some actual foreign policy that might disrupt or defeat terrorists. It’s about asking us to “go on living our lives as usual” — which means that there is no activity too trivial or mundane that it cannot be recast as an act of defiance against terrorism.

Or the Terrorists Win is no longer a trope, strictly speaking, because it has become a running joke. No one uses it non-ironically any more.

But they are still oh-so-serious about knowing Exactly What ISIS Wants.

‘Exactly What ISIS Wants’

The bodies were barely cool in the Paris shootings when we were treated to lectures that “The West Is Giving ISIS Exactly What It Wants,” usually accompanied by very dubious projections of what ISIS wants, which just so happen to correspond to any policy proposed by someone on the American right.

Exactly What ISIS Wants may seem as if it is the opposite of Or the Terrorists Win. Or the Terrorists Win urges action to defy terrorism — albeit trivial and ineffectual — while Exactly What ISIS Wants demands inaction. But both effectively say the same thing: act as if the situation is normal, go on with our lives as if nothing happened. Or the Terrorists Win tells us to go shopping or hold awards ceremonies or whatever else we were already doing — even though many young men, thankfully, did disrupt their lives by volunteering to join the armed forces. Exactly What ISIS Wants tells us to change nothing about our policies toward terrorism, toward ISIS, toward Syria, toward refugees, or anything else — even if such changes might be warranted.

The purest, most absurd use of Exactly What ISIS Wants is to declare, “If we go to war, we’re doing exactly what the terrorists want.”

Get that? Don’t destroy ISIS. Don’t bomb them, shoot them, or hunt them down like dogs. That’s exactly what they want!

As absurd as it may sound, this is the specific form Obama used in his appeal to Exactly What ISIS Wants: “We should not be drawn once more into a long and costly ground war in Iraq or Syria. That’s what groups like ISIL want.” To which he then adds: “They know they can’t defeat us on the battlefield.” Strange, then, that they would want to draw us into a war they know they can’t win, isn’t it?
 … maybe we should decide our response to terrorism based on our own judgment of our interests, without worrying too much about what ISIS has to say on the matter.

But Exactly What ISIS Wants is the black hole of arguments. It pulls any proposed action against terrorism into its gravitation field and sucks all motion and energy out of it. Which is interesting, because I’m pretty sure that dithering and inaction on our part is exactly what ISIS wants. It has certainly served their interests so far.

But we have not exhausted the tropes for the political exploitation of terrorism, not by a long shot. Exactly What ISIS Wants, for example, is merely an inverted version of Vicarious Terrorism.

‘Vicarious Terrorism’

Vicarious Terrorism is when you advocate responding to terrorism by taking away the grievances that motivate it — which means, in effect, granting the terrorists’ demands.

The person who makes this argument is not a supporter or sympathizer of the terrorist group in question and would never dream of committing an act of terrorism himself. It’s just that the terrorists’ supposed grievances happen to correspond in some way to his pre-existing agenda, and he just can’t help using the attack to promote that agenda.

 … One of the common threads among these tropes — the thing that makes them tropes — is the fact that they are always used to justify a pre-existing agenda. They are less a response to terrorism than an attempt to exploit terrorism to promote or defend an existing political program. …

‘Bin Laden Syndrome By Proxy’

In Bin Laden Syndrome by Proxy, you take someone else’s terrorist attack, fantasize what you think its causes and motives ought to be according to your world view, then advocate a response intended to address this pretended cause.

In Vicarious Terrorism, the terrorists’ real motives and agenda have some overlap with your own, and you succumb to the temptation to exaggerate the connection and use the attacks to promote your agenda. But in Bin Laden Syndrome by Proxy, the overlap is entirely a product of your own imagination, spurred by naked opportunism.

Probably the best example I have ever seen of Bin Laden Syndrome by Proxy is giving a speech after an ISIS-inspired terrorist attack in which you tell the American people that gun control is now “a matter of national security” — which is exactly what Obama just did. Obviously, he did not start wanting to ban “assault weapons” because a couple of terrorists used them last week. He’s been advocating it all along as his standard response to domestic shootings by crazy people with no ideological motive at all. But these shootings haven’t mobilized the public to support gun control, so he repackaged his argument to connect it to an issue on which people do seem to want strong action.

Then again, maybe that’s not the very best example, because it’s hard to top “climate change caused the Paris attacks.”

What unites Exactly What ISIS Wants and Bin Laden Syndrome by Proxy is that they both help the user avoid addressing the essential cause behind the current terrorism threat: the religion of Islam. This avoidance has spawned a whole constellation of tropes, starting with the assertion that the Islamic State and Islamic terrorism have Nothing to Do with Islam.

‘Nothing To Do With Islam’

“This has nothing to do with Islam” is a standard description for anything bad done by a Muslim in the name of Islam, based on arguments offered by Islamic imams citing quotations from Islamic scripture.

Hence Hillary’s Clinton’s assurance that “Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people, and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism” — in response to attacks in Paris by Muslims who were not peaceful or tolerant and had something to do with terrorism.

This is a variant of The Religion of Peace.

‘The Religion Of Peace’

The Religion of Peace is the religion that did not motivate the San Bernardino shootings, the Paris attacks, the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the Fort Hood shootings, the beheading of hostages in Syria, the mass execution of policemen and soldiers in Iraq, the shooting schoolgirls in the head, and so on and on. It definitely didn’t motivate the 9/11 attacks, and that is why it is not even supposed to be mentioned at the Ground Zero museum.

Must be some other faith. Try the Presbyterians.

The purest examples of either trope are when non-Muslims — who endow themselves with the authority to speak on behalf of somebody else’s religion — offer assurances about the essential peaceful and tolerant nature of Islam. This culminates in No True Muslim.

‘No True Muslim’

This is a variant on the No True Scotsman trope. In its original inspiration, this is a type of circular reasoning used by a Scotsman to endow his countryman with some particular, virtuous quality. When confronted with the counter-example of a Scot who fails to possess this virtue, he merely declares that the miscreant must be “no true Scotsman.”

In this case, the trope is used by a non-Muslim to disavow the association of Muslims with any negative qualities — particularly religiously motivated violence — by asserting that anyone who commits such violence must be No True Muslim.

Thus, when a British Muslim began stabbing people the London subway and declared, “This is for Syria,” an onlooker was recorded telling the attacker, in impeccable London slang, “You ain’t no Muslim, bruv!”

 … But as Hillary Clinton explained above, describing Islamic terrorists as Muslims would “play into their hands.” It is Exactly What ISIS Wants.

You see how it all fits together. If we can’t admit to the real motive of Islamic terrorists or address their actual strategic goals, we need to invent new motives and goals and use these polite fictions to dictate what actions are acceptable and unacceptable as a response. And if we’re going to do that, we might as well invent motives and responses that allow us to remain comfortably in the rut of our established domestic political routine.

In declaring that No True Muslim is inspired by the Religion of Peace to engage in terrorism, which has Nothing to Do with Islam, we invite ourselves to engage in Bin Laden Syndrome by Proxy, because otherwise we might be tempted to do Exactly What ISIS Wants. We had better continue along undisturbed in our pre-existing routine, Or the Terrorists Win.

The Sign That Says It All

(Thanks to Robert Tracinski)

Turning science into a narrative: For decades, the Left has been attempting to equate its political goals with Science Itself

Although Robert Tracinski is, and has been, a Carl Sagan fan "from way back", he cannot avert his eyes from How Carl Sagan Ruined Science.

 … we’ve had nearly forty years to assess the long-term impact and see how Sagan unwittingly contributed to a trend that has served to muddle public understanding of science.

 … that’s the problem. The “March for Science” is an attempt to equate the political goals of the left with Science Itself, claiming the intellectual and moral authority of science for the left’s agenda.

 … Science has its own unique language and methods: the language of mathematics and a method of systematic observation and experimentation. The reason science tends to be opaque to the public is because it ultimately requires that they understand its language and learn to use its methods. But how do you communicate the history and meaning of science to those who don’t yet speak its language? You turn science into something they can understand. You make into a narrative, a story.

In Sagan’s case, he mostly turned it into a story about brave and honest scientific pioneers fighting against the forces of superstition and obscurantism. He made it into a narrative of good guys versus bad guys, of the forces of light and progress against closed-minded reactionaries. This was sometimes oversimplified, but it wasn’t entirely wrong; the religious authorities who persecuted Galileo definitely weren’t the good guys. But Sagan fell into the temptation to make this narrative about science fit just a little too closely with the agenda of conventional late-20th-century liberalism, so he used “Cosmos” as a platform for the Cold-War-era moral equivalence of the “anti-nuclear” movement and for homilies about environmentalism.

“Cosmos” is an interesting intellectual time capsule, because it was broadcast just at the point when predictions of global environmental catastrophe were tipping between global cooling and global warming. So he presented the two as equally likely scenarios that required further study (and, of course, massive government funding). But this is the point at which he dropped his guard, forgot his own admonitions about following the evidence wherever it leads, and indulged the conceit that science would just happen to line up neatly with his own political preferences. Because what he didn’t do was to entertain the possibility that human being aren’t destroying the planet and we aren’t cruising toward planetary catastrophe. He literally does not even consider this null hypothesis as a possibility.

It was a glaring hole in scientific objectivity, but it set the path for the popularizers of science who would follow in his footsteps. He had fixed the narrative in place, and they followed it.

… If you don’t really need science and all you need is the narrative, then what you get is our own era’s official replacement for Carl Sagan: Neil deGrasse Tyson. As the decades pass by, Sagan’s imitators become less thoughtful and more propagandistic, less interested in conveying the actual scientific method and more concerned with just telling the public what to think. It’s also about making those who accept the approved “pro-science” political agenda feel that they are superior to all of those ignorant, knuckle-dragging bigots who disagree with them. It equates science, not just with the politics of the left, but with the left’s attitude of smug condescension. That’s how you get Tyson’s fake-but-accurate narratives or the meme-swapping superficiality of the IFL Science crowd.

That’s also how we get things like the March for Science, in which it is naturally assumed that defending science dovetails perfectly with the left’s “resistance” against the current administration and every part of its agenda. It reduces science to a narrow political pose and blinds people to its big questions and radically different method of inquiry.

It's not about rich versus poor: It's about parasites versus producers; It's about takers versus makers

This will give you an idea of some of the outrage that’s fueling the tea party movement. When I asked a local tea party organizer what got her started, one of the first things she mentioned was the contrast between what ordinary people were doing with their own budgets—cutting back, giving up on luxuries, trying to dig themselves out of debt—and what the federal government was doing: a spending binge financed by vast new quantities of debt that we will have to pay. People are outraged, and they are terrified of a future in which America’s only growth industry is government.

Thus writes Robert Tracinski.

The New York Times just put out an analysis of a survey on the tea party movement. I love it when the mainstream media does surveys like this, because the results are usually a mix of the totally obvious and the totally wrong.

For example, they found out that "while most Republicans say they are 'dissatisfied' with Washington, Tea Party supporters are more likely to classify themselves as 'angry.'" I hope they didn't pay too much money to find that out.

Now for the totally wrong part. When I got an e-mail alert about this article, the headline read, "Poll Finds Tea Party Anger Rooted in Issues of Class." Issues of class? What does that mean? The article says that we're motivated by "the conviction that the policies of the Obama administration are disproportionately directed at helping the poor rather than the middle class or the rich." Yeah, we're concerned that the government hasn't done enough to help out the rich, that's why we're marching. Not enough bailouts for Goldman Sachs.

These guys are incorrigible old Marxists, so they want to see everything as class warfare between the workers and the capitalists. So they miss the real class division that is driving the tea party movement: a division between the producer class versus the parasite class. It's a division between people who take on the responsibility of supporting themselves and who end up having to pay all of the bills for runaway government, too, versus the people who want to live off of our work. That includes the poor people who are, for example, getting checks from the government for "tax credits" on income taxes that they never paid. This is the new form of welfare, by the way, because it's a way that politicians can give handouts while calling it a "tax cut." So you give people a tax credit that they can claim as going toward an income tax "refund," even though they don't make enough money to pay income taxes in the first place. It's a handout disguised as a tax refund. But we're also angry about the guys making $150,000 a year as bureaucratic paper-shufflers in Washington, and the guys with politically connected businesses who are getting money from bailouts and the stimulus and the "green jobs" racket.

It's not about rich versus poor. It's about parasites versus producers. It's about takers versus makers.

What the Democrats are telling us is that they would rather have no legislature than allow legislation that breaks the power of the unions

Why are Democrats ready to give everything in a last stand for public employees' unions? Because government employment is the socialist ideal in miniature.

Robert Tracinski provides answers to the question, What does the Democratic Party stand for?

What does the Democratic Party stand for? You can find out by asking what they will take a stand for. In the recent protests against limitations on the power of government employees' unions, the Democrats have taken the strongest stand possible, short of outright insurrection. In Wisconsin, in Indiana, and potentially in Ohio, Democratic legislators have actually fled the state in order to deprive their state legislatures of the quorum necessary to vote.

This has led some commentators to describe this as a conflict between the Tea Party and the "Flee Party," but the issue is a little more serious than that. What the Democrats are telling us is that they would rather have no legislature than allow legislation that breaks the power of the unions.

Jack Wakeland has described the current attitude of the left as the rage of the liberal plantation owners, comparing it to the closed-minded irrationality of Southern politicians in the years leading up to the Civil War. Jim Geraghty captures something of the same idea when he describes these legislative walk-outs as "small-scale, temporary secessions."

They are not likely to win. Democratic legislators in Texas fled the state a few years back to prevent an unfavorable congressional redistricting—but they eventually returned and the legislation passed a few months later. Some have also pointed out that the Wisconsin Senate requires a smaller quorum for non-spending measures, so they could still pass the core of their union-busting legislation in the Democrats' absence.

That implies that this is not so much a rational calculation of political advantage on the part of the Democrats as it is an outpouring if existential rage. Curtailing the power of government employees' unions strikes to the very core of their existence, prompting them to give everything in a last stand. Why?

The threat to the Democratic Party is partly practical and partly ideological.

On the practical level, as Michael Barone explains below, the government employees' unions are a mechanism for siphoning taxpayer dollars into the campaigns of Democratic politicians. That's why Democratic legislators are going to bat for the unions. They are protecting their biggest campaign contributors. But that corrupt motive is not the only thing driving them.

On an ideological level, public sector employment represents the left's ideal: public employment is not oriented toward making a profit, there is no competition, generous health-care and retirement benefits are provided by the government, comfortable pay is mandated by legislative fiat, and the work rules are militantly egalitarian: pay, promotion, and job security are almost totally independent of actual job performance.

This is, of course, how the left thinks everyone should live and work. It is a socialist economy in miniature.

But of course, this prosperous set-up is possible only because the majority does not work like this. It survives only on the tax money looted from a much larger, productive private economy. Even then, the money is starting to run out. The socialist utopia of public employment is crossing the Thatcher Line—the point at which, as the Iron Lady used to say, you run out of other people's money.

This is why the left is pouring into the streets and temporarily seceding from state legislatures. For them, this is like a second fall of the Berlin Wall: the very viability of their ideal society is being threatened.

"Public Unions Force Taxpayers to Fund Democrats," Michael Barone, Washington Examiner, February 22

Everyone has priorities. During the past week Barack Obama has found no time to condemn the attacks that Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi has launched on the Libyan people.

But he did find time to be interviewed by a Wisconsin television station and weigh in on the dispute between Republican Gov. Scott Walker and the state's public employee unions. Walker was staging "an assault on unions," he said, and added that "public employee unions make enormous contributions to our states and our citizens."

Enormous contributions, yes—to the Democratic Party and the Obama campaign. Unions, most of whose members are public employees, gave Democrats some $400 million in the 2008 election cycle. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the biggest public employee union, gave Democrats $90 million in the 2010 cycle.

Follow the money, Washington reporters like to say. The money in this case comes from taxpayers, present and future, who are the source of every penny of dues paid to public employee unions, who in turn spend much of that money on politics, almost all of it for Democrats. In effect, public employee unions are a mechanism by which every taxpayer is forced to fund the Democratic Party.

.

Heroes

A Nation honors valor in the war on terror (thanks to Robert Tracinski)

"We recovered hundreds-of-thousands of bodies in mass graves across the country, many of which were dedicated to children three to six-years-old"

"My own region, Kurdistan, was decimated by Saddam,"

Qubad Talabani, son of Iraqi president Jalal Talabani, said as he reminded an American audience including W. Thomas Smith, Jr whom and what exactly the peace camp defended.

"He destroyed about 4,000 villages, killed about 200,000 people, and used chemical and biological weapons in over 250 incidences – primarily against civilians."

Prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, most Kurds believed themselves to be the only victims of Saddam’s brutality. "But when the regime fell, we realized that Iraqi Arabs were also victims," Talabani says. "We recovered hundreds-of-thousands of bodies in mass graves across the country, many of which were dedicated to children three to six-years-old. Most had been experimented on by the regime. I cannot describe the carnage and brutality in a way that you would be able to comprehend just how bad it really was." …

Despite problems stemming from fear and mistrust, Talabani is quick to point out the ongoing, and too-often underreported, positive developments in Iraq.

"Of the 18 different governorates [provinces] – similar to the states you have here in the U.S. – 13 or 14 of them are relatively calm and stable," he says. "People are going about their daily lives and trying to rebuild the country."

Robert Tracinski adds:

What no one seems prepared to acknowledge is that April 9, 2003, was the day we won the war in Iraq (though not, by any means, the broader War on Terrorism). It was the day we broke all militarily significant, large-scale resistance and established our ability to control Iraq militarily and establish a new government on our terms. No action by any enemy since then has reversed that victory.

And more: it was the day we crushed fascist Arab nationalism—an ideology that had already been weakened by the 1991 Gulf War, but which was terminally humiliated by the fall of Saddam. That was a big achievement, and it has now freed us to face the larger threat of totalitarian Islam—but the press has so magnified the pathetic terrorist insurgency in Iraq that they have almost made that victory disappear.

81, 76, 50, 49, 43, 25

What are these numbers? This week’s Powerball winners? A safe deposit combo? New numbers to torment those poor b*stards stranded on the island in Lost?

Election Analysis provides the answer.

If we want to fight terrorism, the last thing we should do is to fight terrorism

Robert Tracinski takes on the

warning we keep hearing from the press: Ahmadinejad and the mullahs are unpopular with the Iranian people—but precisely for that reason, we dare not oppose them, because confronting Iran will only cause the people to rally to the dictators' side. In other words, if we want to fight terrorism, the last thing we should do is to fight terrorism.

This is an obvious contradiction, and functions merely as another excuse for those who seek the superficial safety of doing nothing—or for those who secretly sympathize with the enemy and want to blame "American aggression" for every problem in the world. … Michael Ledeen provides a good analysis of that second approach.

He does so while discussing yet another crackdown on internal dissent being launched by the Iranian regime. As Ledeen points out, the only American newspaper that is prominently and tirelessly covering the fate of Iran's dissidents is the New York Sun… The rest of America's newspapers are apparently indifferent to the world's real freedom-fighters.

Shouldn't We Be Worrying About Civil War and Looking for the Root Causes of the Violence?

Maybe all that talk about searching for root causes, and all those warnings about civil war, weren't that far-fetched after all — except members of the Left were looking in the wrong direction.

Quoth Robert Tracinski:

Here is another report on the internal collapse of Palestinian society into anarchy and gang rule. Things are very bad in Gaza--and they are about to get worse. As it always does, reality is exacting its revenge: a society that elevated mass murder into an ideal is achieving its own suicide, instead.

The brains behind the The Intellectual Activist was referring to Craig S Smith's NYT article:

In Gaza City on Saturday night, one man was killed during a gun battle between armed militants and the police, while elsewhere in town another armed group threatened to destroy the local offices of the satellite television station Al Arabiya, which is based in Dubai. The men were angry at the station for broadcasting a documentary that suggested that female Palestinian suicide bombers had been put under pressure by male relatives. Farther south that same day, gunmen cordoned off a neighborhood in Khan Yunis, Gaza's second largest city, while members of a well-known drug-smuggling family battled with the Palestinian police…. And in Rafah, along the Egyptian border, armed men from the Abu Taha family stopped cars on Sunday, checking identification papers in hopes of catching members of Al Masri, the rival family with which they have been waging a deadly feud….

"One day, these guys woke up and had nothing to fire rockets at, but they had no food in the kitchen, so they turned on the Palestinian Authority," said Khalid Abu Hilal, known as Abu Adham, a spokesman for 10 branches of Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, an armed wing of the Fatah political faction. "We are heading toward civil war." … Many people here believe that violence will eventually break out between Hamas's armed wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigade, and Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, either because Fatah will force the elections to be postponed or because they will not accept the results if the elections are held and they lose.

The Latest Conspiracy Theory: the Oil-for-Food Investigation Is a Yankee Plot

…nearly two months after the $35 million U.N.-backed probe that collected all those documents exposed just how troubled the program was, there has been no rush by the authorities in question to study it

writes the AP's Nick Wadhams (merci à Robert Tracinski). Nor do any of the European media outlets seem to have made much about it. (And why should they? It is not a scandal that involves the continent's favorite bogeyman. It's true that it's a subject far less interesting than tales of American torture.)

Some experts suspect there are governments that don't want to investigate their own complicity, or that treat bribery as the price of doing business abroad, or simply have judicial machinery that grinds slowly.

Of course, we are told that besides the United States, some "of the most active prosecutors are in … France".

But guess what? The scandal has not, and will not, be used to bash France through and through (that's reserved for les Américains), but to show, au contraire, how it proves how efficient and open and honest and forward-looking the country is.

Double standards.

Now.

Always.

Forever.

…the most prominent Jordanian mentioned in the report, Fawaz Zureikat, … who has denied any wrongdoing, offers a widely held claim that the oil-for-food investigation is a largely U.S.-led campaign to discredit the United Nations.

What did we say?

The skin ripped from their bodies: "I cannot express all that suffering and pain that we suffered in the 70 days inside"

Mr Haidari recalled the 1982 massacre at Dujail, where Saddam is accused of orchestrating the mass reprisals in retaliation for an alleged attempt on his life

writes the Daily Telegraph's Adrian Blomfield (shookhran to Robert Tracinski) in news which, unless I am mistaken, French media has not made a whole hell of a lot about. (It's true that it's a subject far less interesting than tales of American torture.)

Mr Haidari, who was only 14 at the time, told how he and all 43 members of his family were rounded up and taken to the Ba'ath party headquarters in Dujail.

"I saw my brother being tortured in front of my eyes," he said, looking straight at Saddam. "I was terrified. They would take one of us away and he would return in a sheet, dripping in blood."

Seven of his brothers were executed, he testified. Like so many Iraqis, he has no idea, he said, where they were buried.

The killings at Dujail were by no means the worst of the atrocities that Saddam and his henchmen are alleged to have orchestrated.

In comparison to the massacre of thousands at a time in the Kurdish north or the Shia south, only 147 people were killed. But prosecutors say the evidence in Dujail was easier to compile and have promised that there will be more charges brought against the former president.

Mr Haidari told the court that he was taken to a prison in Baghdad where children even younger than he, some only nine years old, were held in terrible conditions.

Beatings and electric shocks were regularly administered. Some of his fellow prisoners had the skin ripped from their bodies. "I cannot express all that suffering and pain that we suffered in the 70 days inside.''

…The more Saddam seemed to shrink, the bolder the witness became. "I hold Saddam responsible for detaining me and my family and ruining my future," he said.

The Iraq of Corporal Mayer's memory is not solely a place of death and loss; it is also a place of hope

The Iraq of Corporal Mayer's memory is not solely a place of death and loss

writes Mark Sappenfield in the Christian Science Monitor (shookhran to Robert Tracinski and Gregory Schreiber).

It is also a place of hope. It is the hope of the town of Hit, which he saw transform from an insurgent stronghold to a place where kids played on Marine trucks. It is the hope of villagers who whispered where roadside bombs were hidden. But most of all, it is the hope he saw in a young Iraqi girl who loved pens and Oreo cookies…. It is a perception gap that has put the military and media at odds, as troops complain that the media care only about death tolls, while the media counter that their job is to look at the broader picture…. Kidnappings and unclear battle lines have made war correspondents' jobs almost impossible. Travel around the country is dangerous, and some reporters never venture far from their hotels. 'It has to have some effect on what we see: You end up with reporting that waits for the biggest explosion of the day,' says Mr. Hart.

Robert also has this:

Lincoln famously said that you cannot fool all of the people all of the time--and my experience is that, on the big issues, we can count on most of the people to do their best, most of the time. Here iss an example: a poll showing that most of the people see through the Democrats attempt to paint their demands for American surrender and defeat as an act of "patriotism."

Nevertheless, Robert adds that

The left's wave of defeatism over the war against Sunni insurgents in Western Iraq may not cause an American withdrawal and defeat in Iraq. But it has already achieved the strategic goals set by the leftists--and by their allies in Tehran: it has paralyzed the US and Europe in dealing with Iran's nuclear threat.

The latest symptom of paralysis is the failure of the US and Europeans to push for UN sanctions against Iran, despite overwhelming evidence of Iran's nuclear program. Instead, our leaders are considering a stalling action--one meant to stall us, not the Iranians--put forward by Russia.

Having outsourced our Iran policy to wobbly, appeasing allies--Britain, France, and Germany--will the Bush administration and the Europeans outsource the whole problem to the corrupt and hostile government of Russia?

French sympathy for Muslim terrorists and Arab dictatorships is a vulture that is coming home to roost

…says Robert Tracinski as he points to Craig S Smith's NYT report and to Amir Taheri's NYP commentary, "Why Paris Is Burning"…

How the welfare state literally feeds criminality

One trade union representing policemen described the unrest as a "civil war" and called on Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy to impose a curfew in areas that have been affected by the violence to ensure that the violence did not spiral out of control

writes Sophie Louet.

"We have found our thrills: playing with riot police in the evening," one 22-year-old told an Agence France-Presse reporter yesterday. "As long as the police come and provoke us in the evening, we'll bring out the Molotov cocktails, stones, petanque balls, planks."

"In the day, we sleep, go see our girlfriends, play video games," the young man continued as a half-dozen youths nodded. "And in the evening, we have a good time: At 9 p.m., we go and fight the police."

This led Robert Tracinski to write the following comment:

Speaking of individualism versus collectivism, the story [above] reveals one of the contributing causes behind the past week of violence in the suburbs of Paris. Rioting Muslim youth talk about how they throw Molotov cocktails at the police all night. But what do they do during the day? The sleep in their subsidized apartments and lay about on the public dole. This is how the welfare state literally feeds criminality.

For decades, the Europeans have looked down on America as some kind of backward, regressive country, rife with poverty, violence, racism, and religious bigotry. This was always hypocritical, given that it was Europe, not America, that collapsed into the bloodiest wars in history during the 20th century. But it is especially ironic now that France is collapsing into mass unemployment and a racial/religious civil war.

The Face of Tribalism — in the Middle East and in Europe

A Sunni grandmother watched the first day of Saddam Hussein's trial on television and scoffed that he should be charged at all. "I felt sorry," she told The Washington Post, "I almost cried. Every country in the world has terrorism. All the presidents in this region torture their people. Why, of all the countries, do they come after us?"

That is the face of tribalism -- pride in one's own trumps every other consideration -- most definitely including morality, compassion and a love of justice. Saddam is a Sunni Arab who committed the most brutal crimes against the Shiite majority and the Kurdish minority in Iraq. Estimates of the number he murdered range from 300,000 to over 1 million if those who died in his aggressive wars against Iran and Kuwait are included.

But in the tribal world of the Middle East, being a mass murderer, torturer, liar and supporter of terrorists does not guarantee a bad reputation. It depends whom you ask.

As his trial opened (and then abruptly adjourned for 40 days), Sunni Arabs expressed disquiet. "Saddam doesn't deserve all this," Ahmad Muhammad, a Mosul taxi driver complained to The New York Times. …

Read the rest of Mona Charen's article. Meanwhile, Robert Tracinski (who has noticed the same NYT article) points out that

The trial of Saddam Hussein is going to have a big impact across the Arab world, an impact assessed in two items … from Washington Post blogger (or quasi-blogger, since he's part of the dreaded MSM) Jefferson Morley. The story in the Lebanon Daily Star …which links Saddam's trial with the Hariri investigation in Syria, is definitely worth reading.

What is amusing is the "unease" Saddam's trial creates among all of the supporters of Arab tyranny--as it should, if the example of holding leaders accountable for their actions catches on. Meanwhile, the New York Times covers the trial with its usual impartiality by trolling Baghdad for Saddam's few remaining fans

There are two lessons here — one in each article — and, unfortunately, they both apply to France.

First of all, "the unease Saddam's trial creates among all of the supporters of Arab tyranny" — this also applies outside of the Arab world, of course. For the past month, France's MSM has been covering the Saddam trial with also its usual impartiality. The country has been replete with scorn for the kangaroo court, admiration for the "high and mighty" dictator (and his "rendez-vous with destiny"), indulgence for terrorist sympathizers, complete and terminal dismissal of the constitution, and, yes, the hunt for Saddam fans (notice how the first testimony against Saddam is actually a back-handed slap at Americans).

Oh, and here is the lesson regarding the Iraq war that Le Nouvel Observateur's Claude Perdriel would have the students of Paris's Journalism Training Centre learn: "the American press was intoxicated by a disinformation operation without precedent". (Still don't understand what the Oil-for-Food scandal tells you about the "peace camp's" choices during the crisis, do you, Monsieur Perdriel, or the failure of the French press in covering that beyond the usual token articles?)

All of this is linked to the second lesson : tribalism.

Information is never neutral. Positive news about the "other" tribe must always be placed into doubt. Negative news about one's own tribe must always be given a positive spin.

And those who don't ascribe to that positive spin — whether fellow tribe members or foreigners (certain webmasters come to mind) — must undergo pressure, be castigated, be submitted to ridicule, and threatened with banishment unless they relent.

It is taken for granted that opinions are a communal trait, not an individual one: e.g., if an American even wants to put some facts about Bush into perspective, laconic smiles appear, along with words such as: C'est normal qu'il pense comme ça, il est américain. That, even if the American voted against Bush! This is not the type of atmosphere that invites debate or encourages open discussion. Unless the surrounding pressure, or the individual's personal inclination, forces him to agree with the pervading viewpoint, he is assaulted with ridicule, with anger, with spite and finally invited (in less subtle language) to leave the country.

Nationality doesn't matter. Remember only what happened to French war-supporter Pascal Bruckner:

I learned what it is to get insulted in the street, threats on the telephone. My North African friends told me, "You have brain damage", those of the Esprit review dropped me. … I felt very alone.

In a Canal + TV show, the democratization in Eastern Europe is given a bad name simply because it allegedly happened under the helm of Washington.

"Imposing demoracy"; "the American brand"; "A real marketing of the revolution with its codes, its colors, its slogans"; "a green revolution, the dollar revolution"; and finally a word from the filmmaker (described as seeing with "a citizen-like, a humane, a sensitive look"): "all those we met were so persuaded of being on the right side of history [suggesting that they obviously were not so] that they let us film them with no problems" (suggesting, in turn, that the filmmakers were far from forthcoming about their partisan intentions). The humane and sensitive citizen Manon Loizeau (who spent seven years in Russia) goes on:

At first, I thought I was making a movie about an American plot … But today, I wonder. Why is Europe absent? To what degree will the Americans succeed in imposing their ideology of democracy?

Guillaume Fraissard's article ends with the sentence, "Manon Loizeau hopes to be able to soon return to those countries in order to verify, with hindsight, if the promised democracy was really achieved." In other words, unless a lucid paternalistic French(wo)man verifies it, la démocratie ain't worth m•rde.

Now do you see why the French are impressed by thuggish dictators? Now do you see why they think of all of America's allies, democrats or otherwise, as poodles and lapdogs? Now do you see why they thought Iraq was better off under Saddam Hussein? Now do you understand their country's policies?

While Canal + is preparing a second airing of its show on the Saddam "trial you will not see" (already in October 2004 the powers-that-be were preparing the citizenry for the perfidy of the trial), Guillaume Fraissard and Daniel Psenny inform us that a decision to clamp down on its investigation programs

occurred a couple of weeks after the broadcast of a report with exclusive video on French soldiers shooting on the crowd in front of the Hôtel Ivoire in Abijan on November 6, 2004. A shooting that resulted in several deaths. The scenes broadcast on Canal + irritated France's defence ministry who, after the shooting, affirmed that the soldiers had fired in "self-defense".

To quote Mona Charen again:

That is the face of tribalism -- pride in one's own trumps every other consideration -- most definitely including morality, compassion and a love of justice.

And I would add, it trumps even the desire to be informed and to have one's fellow countrymen be informed.