6/29/2006

Soulless Tyranny

At Samizdata the other day, they posted a video of a speech given in the European Parliament, directed towards British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in his capacity as rotating President of the E.U., in which Mr. Blair is savaged for backing down on his purported efforts to reform the E.U. The speaker notes midway through that the EU's auditors have refused to sign off on the budget for eleven years running.

A similar video has another member of the same political party running down a list of the more egregious members of the European Commission, the unelected body that exerts far more control over the EU's law than does the elected Parliament, a point which he makes. Indeed, so much power does the Commission have that it intends to implement the European Constitution, despite said document being resoundingly defeated in public referrenda in France and the Netherlands.

The EU seems to be following a similar trajectory as the United States did in its early years: from a political alliance of sovereign states, bound together for mutual defense and open trade, to a government in its own right that supercedes the sovereignty of its constituent members. What is worrisome is that the body elected directly by the people, Parliament, has little actual power. Power is instead concentrated in the hands of an entrenched bureaucracy, led by a Commission that is accountable to nobody. Even in the earliest days of the U.S. Federal Government, the body directly elected by the people, the House of Representatives, could propose or block any bills it chose to. The European Parliament, on the other hand, does not have the power to initiate legislation, nor does it have an unrestricted right to amend or veto laws.

Furthermore, while the United States was built on a profound mistrust of human nature and government power, the EU is generally organized around the precise opposite attitudes. Government action should be as pervasive as possible, goes this theory. Should you doubt this, consider that the EU regulates materials and processes according to the Precautionary Principle:
In its most basic form, the principle suggests that because we don't know everything about a technology, product or process, it is better for regulators and legislators to "err on the side of caution" — to regulate, restrict or even prohibit technologies, substances and processes unless they are proven "safe."
To give an idea of how far that can be taken, the linked article notes that exposure to electromagnetic fields (such as those produced by MRI machines, for example) is now tightly regulated.

Additionally, as the second linked video makes clear, there is a much higher tolerance for corruption and abuse of power in Europe in general than in most of the United States. This corruption can be especially pernicious because the idea of fundamental citizens' rights is much weaker in Europe. The EU is quick to silence its critics with state coercion, which Parliament is powerless to prevent.

Europe is on the road to becoming a totalitarian superstate, unchecked by the people and ruled by the bureaucratic class. We in America should take notice.

6/26/2006

Sacred Separations

Yesterday, one of my close friends got married. The new bride and groom are some of the nicest, most fun people I know. I wish them much happiness and joy together; may their house be among the splendours of the House of Israel.

Two weeks ago, at a gathering to celebrate the approaching wedding, my friend gave a drash (loosely translates as "sermon") regarding the blessing we recite during the betrothal ceremony. Originally, the betrothal, called kiddushin, was held months in advance of the actual wedding, or n'suin. (In modern times, the two ceremonies are held on the same day.) However, in many respects a couple who have gone through kiddushin are considered already married; the man and woman require a divorce document to separate, and the future husband has significant financial obligations towards the future wife. The largest difference between kiddushin and n'suin is that the couple are still not allowed to have marital relations until after n'suin.

During the ceremony, the following blessing is recited:
Blessed are You, Eternal One, our God, King of the universe, Who has sanctified us with His commandments, and has commanded us regarding forbidden unions; Who forbade betrothed women to us, and permitted women who are married to us through canopy and consecration. Blessed are You, Eternal One, Who sanctifies His people Israel through canopy and consecration.
("Canopy" refers to the bridal canopy of the n'suin ceremony, and "consecration" is the literal translation of the term kiddushin.)

In many ways this is a strange blessing. Blessings are generally divided into three categories: those sanctifying a commandment, those marking the enjoyment of some pleasure, and those expressing thanksgiving. Our bracha here does not seem to be sanctifying a commandment, since its main subject is a negative, the prohibition against sexual relations without n'suin; we do not, for example, make a blessing when we refrain from stealing or murdering, so why would we here? Similarly, we are hardly deriving enjoyment from abstaining from sexual relations. And if we are expressing thanksgiving, why are we doing so?

Many commentators have tried to explain this difficulty. My friend offered his own explanation. He suggested that the blessing is indeed one of thanksgiving; we are thanking God for forbidding sexual relations between the engagement and the wedding. Why? Because it allows the couple to build a relationship on an intellectual and spiritual level, before the physical element is introduced.

Physical interaction is incredibly powerful, so much so that the emotions it evokes often interfere with the attempt at building a spiritual relationship. Marriages in which the physical element is the foundation run into trouble when the physical element is threatened. But when the cornerstone of a marriage is a spiritual and intellectual bond between husband and wife, the physical level becomes a crown of splendour for the marriage, without being paramount. It is for this opportunity for couples to build a deep, abiding relationship between betrothal and marriage for which we thank God, with the blessing of kiddushin.

6/23/2006

New York Times Compromises National Security, Again

The Grey Lady of Gotham has decided to publish a report about the government analyzing records of international money transfers. Readers have surely seen articles about it in any major newspaper by now. The program was legal, Congress was notified, other countries were notified and actively participated in the program, safeguards were in place to prevent abuse, and the program had been instrumental in stopping quite a few terror attacks. Yet the Times blew the lid off of it anyway, for no particular reason except a vague appeal to the "public interest."

Glenn Reynolds has a roundup of reactions across the blogosphere, none of which are particularly kind to Bill Keller, editor-in-chief of the Times. Glenn comments:
What's interesting to me is that when you talk about military force, we're supposed to use law-enforcement and intelligence methods instead. But if you use law-enforcement and intelligence methods, people shout "Big Brother" and the Times runs stories exposing them.
Another point that I get out of all this, if I can return to an older topic, is that currency is fundamentally the property of the government that issues it. The dollars that we spend are effectively lent to us by the Federal Reserve for the convenience of the people and the government both, and while governments generally permit us to do what we like with their currencies, there comes a point at which governments reassert their power.

"What!" you say. "What do you mean that we don't own our dollars?" Consider that it is a Federal crime to deface a dollar bill. In no other case are we forbidden to destroy our own property, unless doing so harms others. Consider also that governments have the power to devalue the currency, without needing to pass laws to do it.

Government allow us to use its property as a medium of exchange so that we can acquire property of our own efficiently. That being the case, government retains the privilege of knowing what is being done with its property. Similarly, there is nothing wrong with collecting information about foreign currency transactions, since it is a simple question of intelligence-gathering on another country's assets.

The situation will persist until private currencies become more widely used. In the meanwhile, for the Times to betray one of the cornerstones of our national security policy should be grounds for prosecution. As Emperor Darth Misha I is wont to say:
Rope. Tree. Journalist.
Some assembly required.

6/22/2006

Da, Comrade!

Imagine my surprise, as I browsed through my inbound links at the Ecosystem site (see sidebar) to find that I have apparently been drafted into the Alliance of Communist Blogs!

This is certainly an unexpected honor, but I suppose I have to play the part now. Henceforth, no quarter will be given to capitalist running-dogs such as the Alliance of Free Blogs and their lackey the Right Hand of God who seek to undermine and subvert the glorious People's Republic of China. We join with our comrades in China to strike back against the capitalists' devious efforts to corrupt the youth with the evils of religion and free speech.

Victory to the proletariat!

(Ps: Now's as good a time as any to add Basil's Blog to my sidebar. He's been linking to me for forever, and he's funny as all heck.)

6/21/2006

Quis Docet Ipsos Doctores?

As my father and I were waiting for the start of my brother's graduation ceremony last week, the conversation somehow turned to the program of study for the Master's in Education. My father commented that as he understood it, Education students are primarily trained in the theory of education, especially from a developmental and psychological standpoint. There is certainly some value in learning such. But what is not emphasized is the practice of actually teaching: how to convey information to students, how to keep their attention, how to enforce discipline. Teachers are more or less expected to learn that on their own. Moreover, teachers do not necessarily gain expertise in the subjects they teach. (Many of us know of the archetypical PE coach who is drafted as a math teacher; what the two fields have to do with each other, Heaven only knows.) My father concluded that teachers really needed to be taught two things which are neglected today: "stuff," i.e. deep, substantive knowledge of the subjects they teach, and "vocational training" in the nuts-and-bolts of standing in front of a young audience and instructing them.

Looking at the Ed.M. program at Harvard (which could be expected to represent what passes for state-of-the-art these days), one notices that there is little emphasis on practical training. Of the thirteen courses of study offered, at least five seem geared towards educational policy and administration, two seem primarily psychological/biological, several are research-oriented, and one focuses on building a proper "community atmosphere" for learning, whatever that means.

One program looks eminently practical, the Teacher Education Program, which is billed as "Preparing individuals to become middle or secondary school classroom teachers in urban settings." Surely such teachers are rigorously prepared in the practical arts of teaching! And indeed, when one looks at the curriculum, one sees more emphasis on the practical than in the other programs. Yet even here, there are required courses such as "Race, Class, and Power in Urban Schools," in which "students will explore theoretical frameworks for understanding cultural difference as it impacts teaching and learning in the urban classroom."

Theory is important. But this is true up to a point, for two reasons. First, often scholars of education can become so wedded to their theories that they disregard evidence that the theories are counterproductive in practice. The "whole language" debacle is a good example. Second, people's perception of the world is often determined by the mental framework they apply to their perceptions. One too steeped in theory might disregard data that he cannot categorize in the theory. To be truly effective, an observer must be able to see things as they are first, and then try to organize his observations.

Aside from that, many theories are simply overelaborate ways for teachers to justify not holding their kids to a high standard. This is why a practical approach is so necessary. A friend of mine teaches at a local public school, which is disproportionally low-income and had been known for poor grades. Then the principal decided to have all the students taught with the GATE curriculum for gifted students, a decision which would send the average theoretician into apoplexy. Wonder of wonders, test scores for the whole school shot through the roof!

So why not do this across the public school system? Because it doesn't fit the theory…

The teaching profession in general has frequently been willing to discard practices that work in real life, in favor of innovations that sound good on paper. (New Math, anyone?) This does a tremendous disservice to students. Better for teachers to be trained to focus on results first, last, and foremost, and not whether the methods involved are trendy in the theoretical world.

6/18/2006

Quote of the Day (Bonus Edition!)

Zelos, emulation, is a good thing and characteristic of good people, while phthonos, envy, is bad and characteristic of the bad; for the former, through emulation, are making an effort to attain good things for themselves, while the latter, through envy, try to prevent their neighbors from having them.
—Aristotle, Rhetoric 2.10.1
A self-pitying inclination to contemplate another's superiority or advantages, combined with a vague belief in his being the cause of one's own deprivation, is also to be found among educated members of our modern societies who really ought to know better. The primitive people's belief in black magic differs little from modern ideas. Whereas the socialist believes himself robbed by the employer, just as the politician in a developing country believes himself robbed by the industrial countries, so primitive man believes himself robbed by his neighbor, the latter having succeeded by black magic in spiriting away to his own fields part of the former's harvest.
—Helmut Schoeck, Envy: A Theory of Human Behavior

6/16/2006

Two Sides of a Crooked Coin

[I apologize for my nonexistent posting lately. At a certain point, it felt like I didn't have anything interesting to say that wasn't being said already, and there are only so many "In Praise of Wretchard" posts I can write before it gets repetitive. Fortunately, I just got a job in legislative analysis, which should be enough to get my creative juices flowing again. Plus, there's grad school in the Fall…

In the meantime, here's something that I've been mulling over for some time, but hesitated to write about because it seemed to smack of the navel-gazing victimology for which I typically have no patience. As to whether I fall into that trap, you may judge for yourself.]


Jew-hatred is a fascinating topic for study, most of all because there are innumerable variations of it. One can tell a lot about a society by looking at the precise nature of its Jew-hatreds. (That some form will exist seems an immutable law of history, aside from being explicitly foretold in the book of Deuteronomy.) It seems, to my eye, that Jew-hatred generally starts with the common concerns of a society, takes them to grotesque lengths, and then puts the Jew in the center of it all.

Many forms of Jew-hatred exist today, of course. Some are simply variants of basic tribalism; some are sparked by envy for an economic competitor, much as ethnic Chinese are despised across Asia for their business savvy. Some are derived from religious ideas, a phenomenon that goes back thousands of years. But two broad strains today seem relatively new, both in that they have only existed for a century or two, and in that they are both based on non-religious or even anti-religious philosophies. For the sake of convenience, I shall call them Right-Wing Jew-Hatred (RWJH) and Left-Wing Jew-Hatred (LWJH). Both terms are gross misnomers, just as the terms Right and Left are misnomers; but since neo-Nazis and their ilk tend to be called right-wing, and Noam Chomsky and his ilk tend to be called leftist, the terms are readily understood.

These two ideologies hate Jews for precisely inverted reasons, as will be discussed below; yet ironically enough, both of them will find common cause with Jihadi Islam, despite Jihadism being their enemy as well when all is said and done.

Right-Wing Jew-Hatred

RWJH takes inspiration from a love of the soil, of skilled craftsmanship, of tight-knit communities. The ideal that followers of this philosophy pine for, in some obscure sense, is a nation in which people are united around bonds of kinship, deeply in harmony with the land around them through the work of their hands. The concreteness of life, the labor among tangible surroundings such as the land or artisanship, is expected to produce a sturdy type of citizen, ruggedly pure, courageous, and the undisputed master of his domain. D. H. Lawrence's ideas of "blood knowledge" would agree well with this philosophy (as would much else that he wrote, to be frank).

The nation is seen as a large extended family, tied together by history and a shared connection with the land. Other nations are outsiders; while the home nation might not bear outsiders ill will (a rare state of affairs, to be sure), it certainly has no obligation to see to outsiders' welfare. Least of all can the nations mix into an undifferentiated mass; if so, the unique heritage of each one is lost.

Thus far the ideas may be discordant to the ear of the modern sophisticate, but there is much here that is praiseworthy. Indeed, many of these ideas can be found in one form or another in many stouthearted communities in America: the importance of family and history; the sense of harmony with the land (less that of the hippy than of the veteran hunter, feeling closer to the animals around him than can any who have not killed); satisfaction with the work of your hands; deep patriotism and love of country.

But RWJH takes these virtues and turns them into a Manichaean struggle between the true citizen and the corrupt. For as these Jew-haters admit, this idyllic vision is not reality; in the real world, the deepest nature of the people is constantly frustrated by the work of the Jew. The Jew, an eternal wanderer between nations, is cut off from the deep connection to the land that true citizens enjoy. Similarly, the Jew cannot enjoy the blood ties to his neighbors that all true citizens possess, and is in a constant state of alienation. His soul is therefore twisted and warped, unable to derive satisfaction from the manly labor of the craftsman or the farmer.

Yet the Jew does not suffer his fate in silence. Sick with envy of the hearty folk around him, he plots to reshape society in his own image. Thus, the Jew promotes ever-more-abstract forms of capitalism, in which people are reduced to commodities and ripped from their wholesome communities. Rather than developing blood knowledge of the earth around them, capitalist drones exchange their labor for money, the ultimate abstraction. The Jew thrives on abstraction; he also knows that true citizens are starved by it. Eventually, the connection between true citizens and the physical world is severed entirely by the artificial system in which they labor.

The Jew also seeks to undermine the traditional institutions of the community. "Tolerance," "internationalism," and the like are simply avenues for the Jew to subvert the integrity of the nation, and thus reduce all peoples to one undifferentiated mass. The Jew also spreads perverted practices in order to destroy the traditional family, thus making all people as alientated from each other as he is. The end state for which the cunning Jew works is for all peoples to be adrift in a sea of symbols, with no deep connection to their neighbors, their homes, or their own native skills. Then, the Jew will be content, for he is innately suited for such an environment.

What must the RWJH do? Stand vigilant against contamination, of ideas or of blood. When it seems necessary, resort to violence to vanquish the Jewish menace. Yet in large part the battle is lost before it is begun; today's world is increasingly a world of ideas, of the intellect, not of virtuous labor. In particular, the "Jewish" banking and economic system is self-sustaining and omnipresent; even if ties of kinship and nationality etc. took on a new prominence for true citizens, the enervating effects of their financial environment would continue. I have not seen the RWJH community suggest a single serious alternative. Even Fascism would be insufficient; the Nazis used international banks just as much as the next government. In short, RWJHs are fighting what amounts to a desperate, doomed rearguard action. The modern world has left them behind.

Left-Wing Jew-Hatred

LWJH is ultimately motivated by the desire to build a peaceful world, a better world. The view of many on the Left is that humanity's ills are almost entirely the result of our brutish tribalism (expressed in the modern nation-state), the influence of irrational ideas such as religion, and most of all the failure of people to feel empathy for one another. For people to stop going to war, they must simultaneously feel no loyalty to discrete groups of people and feel a deep love and loyalty to all people, as fellow-citizens of the world.

A few seminal philosophers are worth citing here. First, Immanuel Kant proposed that war would inevitably be abolished once all nations were subsumed into a world government, an idea enthusiastically taken up by many. (That Kant also predicted that such a world government would be a "soulless tyranny" is immaterial.) The irrational loyalty that many have for the United Nations, whose peacekeepers are best known for sexually abusing young children and for leaving "protected" civilians to die in Bosnia, Rwanda and elsewhere, is due to the UN's promise to be a true global government.

(In case you doubt the ecstasy with which the Left views a world government, check out this post and remember that the sign in question was paid for with tax dollars.)

Second, Immanuel Levinas wrote extensively about how the act of cognition forces the rational mind, or logos as he referred to it, to construct "themes" or imperfect representations of the object being studied, since the logos cannot deal with an object's entirety. Therefore, nobody can truly know the totality of another person on an intellectual level; instead, you are dealing with a caricature.

That people are able to do evil to each other, Levinas wrote, is only possible because of this tendency of the logos. If a man would experience the totality of another, he could not bring himself to cause his fellow injury. Hence, violence is routinely accompanied by instinctive or deliberate depersonalization.

The only way to break out of this stranglehold of the logos is to experience people before the act of cognition, on a pre-cognitive or emotional level. Cognition, and especially language (which inherently captures meaning incompletely), cannot be allowed to rule our minds. They are useful tools, to be sure, but to rely on them is to allow people to caricature each other and do evil. Only the purest experience of empathy with others, in which the distinction between Self and Other breaks down and all that is left is the We, can ensure peace.

This idea was taken further by Levinas's student, Jacques Derrida, who wrote that since all formal systems are inherently incomplete, they cannot be depended on to dictate truth or standards of behavior.

In the real world, these ideas and others like them have inspired many on the Left to work against the idea of the nation-state and other such "artificial" dividing-lines between people, such as religion or race. Once all people see each other as brothers in a world fellowship, once there is no reason for conflict and only the "oceanic feeling" of total empathy, then the world will see peace.

Again, while the specifics of such ideas are sometimes unnerving, they are often built around laudible foundations. Peace should be beloved by all righteous people. Reflexive nationalism, and tribalism more generally, has been the cause of horrifying bloodshed throughout history, as have religions and entrenched power structures. Willingness to break free of convention, when that convention merely perpetuates harm, is indisputably good.

But again, these ideas are taken to a grotesque extreme. And as with the RWJHs, the LWJHs must admit that their ideal world does not yet exist. Men still make war on men, traditions are fiercely defended from attempts to nullify them, and tribalism is if anything increasing. Most galling to many LWJHs is the world economic system, i.e. capitalism, a system of endless competition between people in which there are winners and losers. That such a system is unmatched at improving the physical and technological well-being of humanity is beside the point; by setting people in conflict, capitalism makes a world of total empathy and We-ness impossible. And cooperative economic systems that would foster this empathy are inexplicably unpopular.

Jews are an especially severe problem for the LWJH. Jews (and note that LWJH will rarely speak of "the Jew" as RWJHs sometimes do) cannot be safely dismissed as an unenlightened people like African aborigines, unable to grasp the true way of globalism. To the contrary, Jews are at the forefront of every field of intellectual endeavor. Indeed, Levinas and Derrida were both Jewish, as are many in the vanguard of the globalist project. Yet the Jews had the effrontery to found a country based explicitly on an ethnic/religious identity, Israel. Moreover, Jews tried the socialist system in its least unsuccessful instances, the kibbutzim, before concluding that they were unsustainable as purely socialist redoubts.

We must understand all the ways in which this is a challenge to the globalist idea. Jews, certainly familiar with the ideas of globalism, rejected it in favor of (seemingly) the most primitive tribalism. The state they found is not simply tribalist; it is inspired (in some indeterminate fashion) by a religion, a religion that says that Jews are set apart from the world around them, that they must hold themselves within a code of law manifested by a God. The Jews as a nation declare that national identity has meaning, and that they are (in some sense) better than all other men. How abhorrent to the LWJH. Worst of all, the existence of a Jewish nation throws into question the bona fides of the Jewish globalists, who can be accused (in a supreme irony) of dual loyalty: to the idea of a global society, but also to their unique nation.

The Jews as a coherent body, and especially the State of Israel, are therefore a deadly threat to the LWJH dream of utopia. The LWJH must in turn work to stamp out this dangerous idea of Jewish peoplehood and religion, both through intellectual means and through physical means. (Thus we have such marvels as Noam Chomsky visiting Lebonan just long enough to extoll the Islamist Hizbullah. Why on Earth should Chomsky give such people the time of day? They are violent, they are religious, they are tribal — yet they are trying to destroy Israel, and that makes all the difference.) For the Jews, through their infuriating nationalism and religious delusion, are the most stubborn of a shrinking group of obstacles to world peace. (Another obstacle, of course, is the militant Jingo Christianist arrogant imperial unilateralist United States; this explains why on the Left, Jew-hatred and anti-Americanism often go hand-in-hand.)

Most of all, the LWJH must continue to chip away at the established hierarchies and moralities, subverting the very foundations and justifications of Judaism and religion/nationalism generally. The goal is to slowly convince the Jews to give up their selfish ideas on their own; LWJHs do not want an actual genocide like RWJHs, merely an intellectual genocide in that the Jewish people as such would cease to exist.

Parallels

As I noted above, RWJHs and LWJHs hate Jews for precisely inverted reasons. Yet they are both reacting to real phenomena. Jews are simultaneously alienated and clannish, abstract and rooted in the physical, iconoclastic and fiercely protective of tradition. True, a given subset of Jews will often manifest some of these traits and not others, yet there is no inherent reason for this. The traits listed are all implicit in Judaism. This permits two groups that agree on nothing else (RWJHs and LWJHs) to find common ground in their despite of Jews, if for different reasons.

It is worth pointing out that both ideologies have a pathological hatred for modern capitalism. RWJHs believe capitalism to stand in the way of "blood knowledge" and true vital connections to the world and our neighbors; LWJHs believe capitalism to stand in the way of progress away from the State of Nature and towards global harmony. Both, again, are reacting to legitimate concerns with capitalism, concerns which were noted by Schumpeter no less than by Marx. But neither ideology has a true alternative that works in the real world; scapegoating the Jews for their failures is a convenient way of obscuring this inconveniency.

And, of course, both RWJHs and LWJHs frequently work in concert with Jihadi Islamists. For RWJHs, this is a simple matter of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend"; they view Islamists with contempt for the most part, but see them as the best hope of breaking the Jewish deathgrip on the world.

The attitude of LWJHs is more complex. Even though the Islamists are guilty of the same sins as the Jews, they are excused because they have not yet been enlightened. LWJHs unconsciously believe that the Muslim world must inevitably accede to the superior wisdom of the Left, as must the whole world; therefore, any actions they do in the meanwhile are less significant. Best to use them to chastise the Jews, who are not ignorant savages but spiteful heretics.

On the other hand, LWJHs recognize, even as they seek to deny it, that the Islamists have something they lack. Fundamentally, the ideology of the Left is hollow because it seeks universal brotherhood for its own sake, and nothing higher. In the absence of a metaphysical standard (e.g. a Supreme Being), what inherent meaning can be found in the life of a self-replicating collection of complex carbons? Islam, meanwhile, is built around submission to the will of God. The lives of believers are infused with meaning, leading to a certitude and self-sacrifice that LWJHs find awe-inspiring. Their identification with Islamism is in part a pathetic attempt to experience such certitude for themselves.

Ultimately, Islamism is the greater beneficiary of this strange parnership. For if the Left should succeed in sweeping away the old system in favor of their utopia, it will immediately crumble before the onslaught of the Jihadis. Indeed, it is crumbling already all across Europe. RWJHs are about as dangerous in the long run as a caveman stubbornly insisting he doesn't need to learn how to use tools; but LWJHs, advancing a seductive yet flawed philosophy, are setting the stage for their own enslavement.

6/05/2006

Wherein I Yet Again Praise the Incomparable Wretchard

Wretchard, publisher of the Belmont Club, is on fire. Every post on his front page right now is amazing, and terribly important. Most important, I think, is this one about the apparent decision by the major American media to embargo reporting on the widespread unrest in Iran.

Why is the media suppressing this story, which could well be the most significant geopolitical event of the last two years? I would imagine that they should be encouraged by anything that holds out the possibility of removing the mullahs from power without a nuclear exchange. Are people in the media beginning to identify with Ahmadinejad, in some perverse form of preemptive Stockholm Syndrome?

Please, read the Belmont Club's front page after you read the linked article. I can think of no other writer not published by a major media outfit who is so profound as Wretchard. Indeed, few published writers are.

6/04/2006

The War Continues

Two quick hits:

First, a roundup of the large Islamist terror cell busts in over six countries yesterday and over the last few months, provided by the frighteningly erudite Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom. The biggest cell was in Canada, and had at least 17 members who had assembled 3 tons of ammonium nitrate (the material used in the Oklahoma City bombing). One worrying thing for me is that several of the terrorists from different countries had met in person in Bangladesh, a country wracked by Islamist terror yet largely ignored by the Western counterterrorism effort.

Second, a fascinating discussion of trends in counterterrorism over at the Belmont Club. (A few acronyms need to be defined. COIN: counterinsurgency operations. GWOT: global war on terror.) Read the whole thing, plus as much of the comments as you can.