A New York Times dispatch tells us that "a suicide bomber on a motorcycle attacked a crowded marketplace in a relatively peaceful part of western Afghanistan, killing at least 15 people." No one important among the dead (and the 35 wounded) except mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, children. Why in God's name would an Islamist want to do such a thing? And, anyhow, why do we call the cyclist a terrorist? Maybe he's just disturbed. Moreover, rest assured, The New York Times doesn't call any of these types terrorists.

In any case, I suspect "Opus Dei" to be behind the murders. So there!

 

I understand why the universe of cons and neo-cons has pounced on the Obamae for prosecuting K.S.M. in civilian proceedings in New York. And I find Charles Krauthammer's particular indictment of the venue and legal envelope of the proceedings strong, if not (entirely) persuasive.

But I actually think that a public trial several blocks from the scene of the atrocity will etch into (much of) the world's consciousness the intrinsic brutality of the whole ideological system that inspired and brought discipline to that day of terror. It will also remind the great public that the same system still brings near-daily bloodshed to innocent populations virtually everywhere. 

This is also likely to evoke from the millions and millions of enthusiasts of true jihad demonstrations of fidelity and enthusiasm. That is also a good thing. Otherwise, we will still be stunned every time Muslim terror strikes. A very bad thing, indeed.

Travesty in New York

By Charles Krauthammer

Friday, November 20, 2009 

For late-19th-century anarchists, terrorism was the "propaganda of the deed." And the most successful propaganda-by-deed in history was 9/11 -- not just the most destructive, but the most spectacular and telegenic.

And now its self-proclaimed architect, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, has been given by the Obama administration a civilian trial in New York. Just as the memory fades, 9/11 has been granted a second life -- and KSM, a second act: "9/11, The Director's Cut," narration by KSM.

September 11, 2001 had to speak for itself. A decade later, the deed will be given voice. KSM has gratuitously been presented with the greatest propaganda platform imaginable -- a civilian trial in the media capital of the world -- from which to proclaim the glory of jihad and the criminality of infidel America.

So why is Attorney General Eric Holder doing this? Ostensibly, to demonstrate to the world the superiority of our system, where the rule of law and the fair trial reign.

Click here to read the rest.

Please read this.

And if you care to know another reason why Major Doctor Hasan is not a terrorist at all please read John Judis arguing this irrelevant case in TNR, of all places.  

These are Christopher Hitchens' words (in Slate), and so you are not surprised to find them sharp, even cutting. Doubtless, some of you are provoked. But please don't repair to the self-righteous. Self-righteousness is an awkward response to the truth.

Given the "seven salient facts" about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan easily assembled by Hitchens I doubt that even President Obama would want us to withhold judgement on the killer. He, too, as clearly made his own. Even unto grasping the justice awaiting the culprit in the hereafter. Understandably, as Philip Elliott of the Associated Press wrote on Saturday, Obama would prefer that Senator Joe Lieberman and Representative Peter Hoekstra not press for hearings in their respective Senate and House committees. But I believe there is zero chance for that restraint to hold. And why should it? 

Hitchens' salient facts illumine the propensity of government agencies (and respectable journalistic institutions) to avert their gaze from realities that would get them into murky places they have learned to avert. For example: the point at which you have to admit "that an alarmingly high proportion of terrorists are Muslim." Or that "political correctness" now subverts domestic and military intelligence from doing their jobs.

The Obama administration has announced that immigration reform is next on its legislative agenda. I am personally disposed to a rather open Emma Lazarus-inflected policy: "I lift my lamp beside the golden door." We cannot simply dispose of immigrants we've decided, after years and years of winking at them, to call "illegals." But we also don't know how to keep unwanted--by whom, by the way?--aspirant immigrants out.  We do not know either how properly to judge asylum cases. 

And then there is the protection of liberal values with regard to civil freedoms, religion, family policy and violence in the home, sexuality, education. Does a society have the right to insure the safety of its virtues that are distinctly American or western? Some of you, I assume, are already furious. Well, go ahead and cancel your subscription.

Here's another way of posing this dilemma. Has Holland the right to remain Holland? England the right to remain England? France the right to remain France? And what about Rotterdam, Manchester, Paris?

"Alleged" is one of those awkward words with which hypocrisy pays tribute to the hypocritical formalities of the law.

But the case of Major Hasan seems to have brought our tolerance for what are really lies to a new low. At dinner the other night, someone at the table actually uttered the phrased "alleged killer" and everyone pounced on him. The lady to his left, a politically incorrect person already for several years, asked him, "don't you mean the Muslim shrink murderer?" I don't think anyone was shocked. And everyone laughed, even the guy who'd uttered the phrase in the first place.

Brian Palmer had an article in Slate on Friday discussing this very matter. Freeing us from several compunctions he binds us to others. Alas.

There is nothing intellectually sharp in Louis Farrakhan's apologia for Major Doctor Hasan.  In fact, he follows mostly in the footsteps of the psychobabblers.  I just thought you'd want to know what the ayatollah of black Muslims in America thinks about this group lynching.

Well, yes, of course, you've read about the lecture Major Nidal Malik Hasan, M.D., delivered at Walter Reed Hospital in 2007. Hasan's ostensible topic was "The Koranic World View As It Relates to Muslims in the U.S. Military." It might as well have been titled, as the scholar Barry Rubin suggested, "Why I Intend to Murder 13 American Soldiers at Foot Hood." But, since nobody in the higher-up military actually noticed that a very shaky psychiatrist, indeed, gave an official medical rounds talk--maybe even grand rounds--on Islam, Hasan did, in fact, go on to kill 13 men and women and wound another 28. Had two police not brought him down he would have gone on to shoot (how?) many others.

I assumed, presumably like you, that the text of the now notorious lecture had been deep sixed by the authorities after the event. Not at all. So who unearthed it? The Washington Post, on whose web-site it has been (virtually unnoticed) for a few days. Dana Priest, a Post correspondent covering the case, has written about Hasan's power point presentation and even did a question-and-answer colloquy on the site.   

The lecture is hard evidence on what everybody has been pondering about, pondering sympathetically like poor Joe Klein who, I am afraid, has lost his bearings. 

Yesterday, I also happened to listen to "On Point" with Tom Ashbrook on NPR. David Gergen held up the sensible side. But, well, you can imagine the mental pyrotechnics Jack Beatty and Ellen Goodman put themselves through to lift the pall that has now fallen over militant Islam. Apologists always sound pathetic.

You may already know that I think Christopher Caldwell to be among the most subtle columnists of the lot. So it was not surprising for me to read in his Saturday Financial Times column ("Enemies need not be insane") a dissent from almost everybody (including me) who tried to have it both ways in the case of Major Nidal Malik Hasan, M.D. Yes, said I and my sage colleagues, Hasan was nuts. But he was also a "true" Muslim believer.

Here's the problem, according to Caldwell, for us Americans right now. "The present generation of Americans is made uncomfortable by the idea that their country might have enemies whose enmity is the result of something other than fanaticism or mental illness."

Here I paraphrase Caldwell, and I hope correctly. According to fundamentalist Islam, to which many millions and millions--and many more millions?--of Muslims adhere, it is perfectly logical for them to terror wage war on us.

Recognizing that would overturn our entire worldview in which no thinking Muslim can be an Islamist and no Islamist can be "real" Muslim...

To carry the argument a bit further:

General George Casey Jr. spent much of last weekend on national television engaging in ... wishful thinking. “A diverse army,” he said, “gives us strength.” Does it? Or is that a platitude? Diversity can be a strength. But diversity as an ideology produced, in Major Hasan's case, bureaucrats who were too scared of giving offense to speak their minds--to act on the information they had... Protecting soldiers was simply made priority number two. That is what made the Hasan case so explosive.

Maybe you recall the rash of publicity given last spring to large numbers of young native Minneapolis Muslims (hailing from Somalia) who were "returning home" to wage holy war. It was reported widely. There was an earlier article marking the election of Keith Ellison, the first Muslim to enter Congress, and celebrating the "new Muslim-Liberal coalition." There is a disjunction between the two phenomena. Were these holy warriors crazy? Probably not. At least, not clinically. They are just believers. 

And while we are still on Dr. Hasan and his views about Muslims in the military, there was significant news in the Times of London today. Ayatollah Abdolhossein Moezi, the London representative of the Supreme Leader of Iran, also doubling as the director of the Islamic Centre of England, called on all Muslims in British military forces to quit. Otherwise, he said, they will be used by "the forces of Zionist imperialism." 

Well, it's not exactly a success. In fact, it's a flop.

The discussions were initiated by the president himself. That is, the president of the United States. And the person he talked to, apparently at least twice (first in April, again in July), was the president of Russia, Dmitri A. Medvedev. Would the Russians facilitate an open corridor for American troops and weapons into Afghanistan? Of course, we'll just have to work out the details.

Depending on how you're counting, these details may be taking as much as half a year to work out. But let's say it's only four months. In any case, they're not worked out yet. And maybe they never will be.

Just for the sake of quid pro quo for the American repudiation of our missile and rocket plans for Poland and the Czech Republic shouldn't Moscow have done this pronto?

All of this is discussed in a finely detailed article by Peter Baker in Saturday's New York Times.

But aren't there other alternatives? India, Oman, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and the other teensy weensy kingdoms in the Gulf some of which already have American bases defending them against Iran, for example.

No, Tehran is not yet about to fall to the dissidents. But the dissidents are also not about to crumble before the regime.

Talent has long ago deserted the mullahs, as the great writers and film-makers deserted the commissars.

And, now, the likes of Abbas Kiarostami, once the seed of the new wave in Iranian cinema and by now nearing 70, creator of The Wind Will Carry Us and many more gorgeous and subtly subversive films, have joined the protest.

So it's not just Kiarostami but playwrights, actors, directors, artists who have become dissidents. Public dissidents, no less. This is all treated in a dispatch by Najmeh Bozorgmehr in Saturday's Financial Times.

What we need to know is where the Obama administration stands.

Mike Crowley has a terrific piece in the next issue of TNR (to which you should have a real subscription) that will also be online in which he recapitulates poor Hillary Clinton's nasty arguments with herself over her (our) foreign policy. This is an extreme example of the first of Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points in 1918: "open covenants openly arrived at." It is, after all, strange to have our secretary of state change her mind every Wednesday and Thursday, to do so in public and then to be angry that many people think she is unsteady and undisciplined. 

(I am planning to write a longish article in coming weeks about why we should no longer play this game. And the most important reason is that it does not work. The fact is we are played for fools. Even by the endlessly foolish Palestinians who are having an election to force our hands, not having an election to force our hands, declaring independence to force our hands, dissolving the Palestinian Authority to force our hands, getting President Abbas to resign to force our hands, getting Abbas to stay to force our hands, getting Fatah and Hamas to make peace with each other to force our hands, keeping Fatah and Hamas separate to force our hands. And doing all of this also to force the hands of the Israelis.)

The most appalling instance of the administration fighting it out in public, however, is in the constant leaking of its personnel's conflicting opinions on what we should do in Afghanistan. So who is appalled? Much more important, as the Financial Times reports this morning is that defense secretary Gates is " 'appalled' at leaking of Afghan troop deliberations." "Everybody out there ought to just shut up." The proximate "everybody" was Karl Eikenberry, the American ambassador in Kabul. But there is also everybody else.

It even spills over into Harris polling data from five of the largest European states, really stupid polling data, also in a dispatch ("Poll shows European split on troop surge") in the FT.  The respondents were asked, for example, how long non-U.S. troops and U.S. troops should be kept in Afghanistan. Let's say for "at least one more year." A split there is. But the numbers in all permutations of the question hover around 60% who say yes to the one year proposition. At the same time, less than 50% of the five states' respondents thought President Obama should send more troops to Afghanistan. Go tell!

Another FT news analysis from Washington by Daniel Dombey informs us that, "At a war council this week Obama indicated he was still not happy with any of his choices."  But who ever said that the White House is a place where one finds happiness? Particularly in these times.

Major Hasan has been charged in court martial proceedings with 13 acts of murder. He may be charged with a 14th killing since one of his victims, Francheska Velez, was pregnant. Will any of my friends sympathetic to abortion object if this fetus turns out to have been killed? Well, you get the point. Another diversion will come when, as is likely, the prosecution asks for the death penalty. Myself, I'd rather forego capital punishment than get the country dragged into one of those hysterical side shows.

If it turns out that his terrorist romp was linked to others in the religious mass murder business his trial would probably go into the civilian criminal justice system. Either way, I believe, the truth is out: this was no ordinary homicide. 

It was one of thousands of bloodlettings inspired by Islamic motives over the last decades. You can now add 51 victims to the dealing death and maiming numbers inspired by the "great God" invoked by Hasan as he delivered his first gunfire volley. I am afraid that even the ever-so-fair, ever-eye-averting President Obama will have to reconsider his confidently euphonious message about belief and action in the Muslim orbit.

With all the damning evidence accumulating for this having been a distinct and rewarding religious experience for Hasan there are--I can see from the comments to my previous SPINES and from other sources--that readers still have to be persuaded away from the assuring soporific that he was merely a crank.

I know that some of you think ill of Charles Krauthammer because he often sided with George Bush. I think very highly of Charles: he's my friend and he is one of the great political analysts of the day. He's also a shrink. He knows how psychiatry helps us understand political actions and he also knows how it can divert us from essential truths.  Here's his column in this morning's Washington Post.