SUNDAY, AUGUST 10,  2008

UNSPEAKABLE

Posted at 8:41 p.m. ET

One of the saddest aspects of the Holocaust, or of unspeakable crimes anywhere, is that they are so often answered with silence.  Everyone of a certain age in New York has seared into his or her memory the murder of Kitty Genovese in Queens in 1964, while 38 witnesses, who saw, or heard, didn't even bother to call the police.  It was one of the crimes that showed New Yorkers, in starkest terms, what was happening to their city.  It took 25 years, to the election of Rudolph Giuliani, for New York to do something about it.

Now a new horror is in our midst.  Jeff Jacoby of The Boston Globe, where he is the token conservative, writes about honor killings in America.  And you will notice - the response, even by "women's" organizations, is often silence:

NO ONE knows just how many Muslim girls and women are murdered each year in the name of family "honor," since their deaths frequently go unreported and unpunished. The cases that do come to light are ghastly. "Women and young girls are set ablaze, strangled, shot at, clubbed, stabbed, tortured, axed, or stoned to death," a United Nations report noted in 2004. "Their bodies are found mutilated with their throat slit, or they are chopped into pieces and thrown in a ditch."

And...

In the last few months, there have been news reports of a Jordanian man murdering his daughter "to cleanse the family's honor" after she kept leaving home without permission; another Jordanian, 22 years old, who gave the same reason - "family honor" - for killing his pregnant sister; a Saudi woman beaten and shot by her father after he discovered her having an online correspondence with a man on Facebook; and two Arab brothers in Israel, who strangled their sister after learning that she was involved in a romantic relationship.

Notice the response of "human rights" activists.  But it goes on:

But while honor killings may be more prevalent in the Middle East, no longer are they unknown in the West.

In the Atlanta suburb of Jonesboro last month, a Pakistani immigrant allegedly strangled his 25-year-old daughter with a bungee cord because she was determined to end her arranged marriage and had gotten involved with a new man. According to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Sandeela Kanwal's father, Chaudhry Rashid, "told police he is Muslim and that extramarital affairs and divorce are against his religion [and] that's why he killed her." In court last week, a detective quoted Rashid: "God will protect me. God is watching me. I strangled my daughter."

"Feminist" groups, as you've noticed, are up in arms.  Not.

On New Year's Day in Irving, Texas, the bullet-riddled bodies of the Said sisters - Sarah, 17, and Amina, 18 - were found in an abandoned taxi. Police issued an arrest warrant for their father, an Egyptian immigrant named Yaser Abdel Said, who had reportedly threatened to kill them upon learning that they had boyfriends. According to the Dallas Morning News, Yaser Said was given to "gun-waving rants about how Western culture was corrupting the chastity of his daughters."

How many headlines have you seen about that?

In 2003, Jordan's parliament overwhelmingly defeated a proposal to impose harsher penalties for honor killings; Islamists objected on the grounds that more severe punishment would violate religious traditions and damage Jordanian society. It is appalling that such lethally barbaric attitudes persist anywhere - all the more so now that the shame of honor killing has made its way here.

Can you name a single public figure who has taken up this cause?  Can you name a single feminist group that has petitioned Congress for legislation?  Can you name a single conference held on a single American college campus on this issue?  Can you find one professor of Middle East studies who has protested? 

I wonder why.  Well, I guess so many feminist groups today are front operators for the far left that they've lost their interest in women's rights.  I guess multiculturalists have convinced the "intellectual" world that we have no business questioning someone else's "culture."  I guess universities get too much funding from Saudi Arabia and other garden spots to notice these little annoyances.

The silence is sickening.  It tells us much about the real agendas of some "human rights" groups.  Coming a few days after Random House cancelled publication of a book with an Islamic theme out of fear of violence, and the silence that greeted the cancellation, Jacoby's column reminds us of the moral hollowness of those who claim to be protecting our "precious liberties."  The only liberties some of them see as precious are those belonging to people out to murder us.

August 10, 2008.      Permalink          

MEMO TO JOE

Posted at 6:33 p.m. ET

Joe Klein, a better novelist ("Primary Colors') than journalist, continues a long meltdown with a bizarre post about the Edwards affair.  Consider:

I never much liked John Edwards as a politician...and I guess we now know that he's a heel as a human being, too. But that doesn't mean his tawdry personal life is any of my concern. Consensual sex among adults isn't something that we in the media should bother about, except in extraordinary circumstances (say, the President is sharing a girlfriend with a Mafia Don).

How "sophisticated."  How above us.  Get out those Manhattan party invitations.  Let's flash that to Europe to show how advanced we are.

So I think the mainstream media handled Edwards affair appropriately, for a change. There are two larger points at stake here:

--Just about anyone under the age of 60 who has lived in this permissive society during the past 40 years, has done something that might be unfit for a Hallmark Greeting Card. In fact, I have profound qualms about any would-be politician who hasn't allowed him- or herself a moment of untrammeled human or chemical exploration.

I love journalists who begin a point with "Just about anyone under the age of 60..."  Joe, how do you know that?  Tell us, Joe.

Also, Joe, most people aren't running for president.  Joe's second brilliant point:

--These sort of crapulous stories are next-door neighbors to the sleazy negative advertising that, well, John McCain has been accosting us with. They feed the notion that politicians are just a bunch of soulless, egomaniacal dolts without a high-minded--whoa, almost said bone in their bodies--pick your allusion. One of the worst results of the past 30 years of the Reagan pendulum swing is that the politicians-as-perverts meme fits quite neatly into the government-as-problem-not-solution meme.

That is so over the top I need not comment. 

Oh, by the way, crapulous refers to the drinking of alcohol.  Isn't it wonderful to use a word like that?

I'm not in favor of censorship. I am in favor of discretion and proportion. If the National Enquirer wants to go there, that's their business. I don't think Time Magazine should be in that business, and I'm proud we weren't. When the Lewinsky story broke, I wrote in the New Yorker: "This is an era that will be remembered more for the ferocity of its prosecutions than for the severity of its crimes." That still holds.

Yeah, lying to a grand jury isn't so important.  We all do it. 

And John Edwards?  So he ran a campaign based on his family values?  Hey, it's talk for the yokels, that's all it is.

Mr. Klein, you would do better working for a French newspaper.  It's where your head is.  It's not where America is, thank God.  (May I say that, Joe?)

August 10, 2008.        Permalink          

TRACKERS

Posted at 4:09 p.m. ET

Both trackers for today are now out.  As reported before at SNIPPETS, Rasmussen has Obama up by two, a slightly jolting reversal from yesterday, when he had McCain up by one.  But we're still talking small changes with a certain amount of normal variation and statistical noise.

Gallup has Obama up by three.  Yesterday he had him up by five.  Again, a small change with normal variations and statistical noise.

However, the reality is that no very recent poll shows McCain leading, and it does appear that Obama has made a small gain in the last three or four days. 

Some expert observers tend to discount polls taken before the conventions, as noted in Dan Balz's thoroughly reported piece in today's Washington Post.  I tend to disagree.  Most candidates expect a convention bounce in poll numbers.  But if one candidate has slipped well behind by convention time, that bounce will have a much smaller effect,  and that can impact the psychology of early September.  And that has an impact on the kind of news stories being written and broadcast.  The proof:  Note the number of stories you've seen in the last two weeks about McCain's gain in the polls and Obama's failure to improve after his European trip.  Those stories have changed the perception of the race from "Obama the probable winner" to "Close and competitive."  Point made.

August 10, 2008.       Permalink          

DANGEROUS SOULS

Posted at 11:25 a.m. ET

Reader Joseph J. Gallick alerts us to a great piece at Bookworm Room about the secret lives of conservatives in Marin County, California.  Bookworm Room is a terrific site that's one of our favorites, and listed on our blogroll.

In the 2004 election, only San Francisco County and Alameda County (home to Berkeley), cast more Democratic votes than Marin did. This didn’t come as any surprise to those who know that a mere 21.3% of Marin’s registered voters are Republicans. Indeed, of the many little towns that make up Marin, just one (Belvedere) has more Republicans than Democrats, and that by only an 8 person margin. Republicans aren’t just a mere minority, they’re a minority vastly outweighed by the majority.

Given that liberals are in the catbird seat, and given their much-vaunted tolerance, one might think that they’d be kind to, indeed solicitous of, the few Republicans in the midst. Sadly, however, that’s not the case. As regular readers know, I’ve chosen to keep my political life separate from the day-to-day aspects of my life. I simply can’t (and don’t want to) run the risk of tainting my carpools, my neighborhood barbecues, my kids’ comfort level at school, the camaraderie of the sports teams with which we’re involved, etc., by exposing myself to the obloquy that is routinely heaped on conservatives here — and this is a hostility that increases as elections draw near, of course.

That's just a sample quote.  When you get a chance, read the whole thing.  you won't regret it.

August 10, 2008.      Permalink          

THOSE WHO WATCH US

 Posted at 9:23 a.m. ET

We are fair here.  If someone we oppose writes something compelling, we're happy to quote it.  He may be an adviser to Obama, but Bruce Riedel has written a thoughtful, informed piece for the Washington Post on the role al-Qaeda may wish to play in our presidential campaign, and it's worth a reader's time:

On March 11, 2004, Spain was rocked by perhaps the bloodiest terrorist attack in Europe since World War II, as bombs ripped apart commuter trains in Madrid, leaving nearly 2,000 Spaniards dead or injured -- three days before the country went to the polls.

The incumbent party was promptly hurled out of office...

And...

As someone who worked on terrorism issues for decades at the CIA and elsewhere, I found the most striking thing about the Madrid bombings to be the sophistication of the jihadists' grasp of electoral timing...

...If it happened in Spain, it can happen here. The Madrid bombings reveal the close attention al-Qaeda pays to the electoral cycles in Western democracies. Osama bin Laden, the perpetrator of one of the greatest mass murders in U.S. history, is certain to want to have his say in our elections this fall.

But don't mention that to the "sophisticates" who are above mentioning terrorism at all.

Al-Qaeda has developed a predictable pattern of behavior over the decade since it declared war on the United States that provides important insights into what we can expect in the next six months. Brace yourselves.

We're braced.  Is Senator Obama?

Al-Qaeda has put out increasingly detailed diatribes each September since 2001 to mark the anniversary of what bin Laden's goons call "the Manhattan Raid." These now include lengthy analyses of the progress of al-Qaeda's war against the United States and often a "martyrdom video" from one of the 19 hijackers.

And...

Another al-Qaeda audio or video message is likely to arrive in late October, just before the election, to remind Americans that the group is still out there and to try to convince al-Qaeda's supporters around the world that the network is keeping up its holy war against the "Crusaders and Zionists."

And...

Of course, we should also be on guard for a more violent message from al-Qaeda. Bin Laden and his partners in crime would be glad to stage spectacular attacks at any time against a U.S. target, at home or abroad, as long as the assets are ready. An election could further goad them on.

Please note this carefully:

Had it not been for the counterterrorist skills of Britain's MI5, al-Qaeda might have pulled off a plot to simultaneously blow up 10 jumbo jets over the North Atlantic in August 2006 -- which could have killed thousands of people just weeks before the U.S. congressional elections that November. This was a very narrow miss: The flights had been selected, the terrorists had been picked, the martyrdom videos had been filmed, and the bombs had been built.

Finally...

Charlie Black, a senior adviser to John McCain, recently had his knuckles rapped for saying that an al-Qaeda attack before November would help his candidate. In fact, we don't really know whether al-Qaeda's core leadership has a preference in the presidential election...

...But we should expect to hear more from al-Qaeda, violently or otherwise, before November.

And, at the same time, Iran continues to be defiant, and will probably remain so, hoping for a better deal from a new president. 

Unexpected events from abroad could heavily influence our upcoming election.

August 10, 2008.      Permalink          

OBAMA'S VACATION READING

Posted at 8:47 a.m. ET

Obama is vacationing is one of his many native states - Hawaii.  Put down that beach novel, Senator.  There's better stuff available.

According to The Politico, Atlantic magazine is publishing a report on the internal memos of Hillary Clinton's campaign.  Just when I thought Obama might be forced to pick Clinton as his v.p. choice - and he still might - along comes a perfect advertisement for why he shouldn't.  What can we do?  It's fate:

Mark Penn, the top campaign strategist for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), advised her to portray Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) as having a “limited” connection “to basic American values and culture,” according to a forthcoming article in The Atlantic magazine.

The magazine reports Penn suggested getting much rougher with Obama in a memo on March 30, after her crucial wins in Texas and Ohio: “Does anyone believe that it is possible to win the nomination without, over these next two months, raising all these issues on him? … Won’t a single tape of [the Reverend Jeremiah] Wright going off on America with Obama sitting there be a game ender?”

Yes, if the mainstream media would report it.  But many of the reliably liberal journalists would just scream "guilt by association" or "McCarthyism."  The conservative media did expose Obama during the primaries, and the exposure took its toll.  But he won anyway.  And he's still ahead in polling for the general election.  The sad fact is that there's a growing bloc of Americans who just don't care, as long as the check is in the mail.

Penn, the presidential campaign’s chief strategist, wrote in a memo to Clinton excerpted in the article: “I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.”

A key take-away from the article is that Clinton received a lot of accurate advice, including from Penn. He wrote a remarkably prescient memo in March 2007 about the importance of appealing to what he called “the Invisible Americans,” and specifically “WOMEN, LOWER AND MIDDLE CLASS VOTERS”—exactly the groups that helped Clinton beat Obama in key states nearly a year later.

If Penn can't imagine America electing an Obama in wartime, he hasn't visited some of America's college campuses, where they know there's a war on, but where a disturbing number are rooting for the other side.

The Penn memo suggesting that the campaign target Obama’s “lack of American roots” said in part: “All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared towards showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light.

“Save it for 2050 … Every speech should contain the line you were born in the middle of America American to the middle class in the middle of the last century. And talk about the basic bargain as about the deeply American values you grew up with, learned as a child and that drive you today. Values of fairness, compassion, responsibility, giving back.

“Let’s explicitly own ‘American’ in our programs, the speeches and the values. He doesn’t. Make this a new American Century, the American Strategic Energy Fund. Let’s use our logo to make some flags we can give out. Let’s add flag symbols to the backgrounds.”

Actually, not a bad strategy, if a bit overcooked.  Hillary, after all, has more than a few suitcases full of her own left-wing background.  But today's she's center-left, compared to Obama.

The famous 3 a.m. ad, written by Penn and approved by Hillary Clinton almost didn’t run: “In the days leading up to Ohio and Texas, the campaign kept arguing over whether to air the [3 a.m.] ad. With the deadline looming, Bill Clinton, speaking from a cell phone as his plane sat on a runway, led a conference call on Thursday, February 28, in which he had both sides present their case. As his plane was about to lift off, it was Bill Clinton – not Hillary – who issued the decisive order: ‘Let’s go with it.’ ”

Yeah, so Obama now has to be thinking, "If I make her v.p., which one am I really getting?"

Interesting stuff.  There's a lot more here about the backbiting inside Clinton's camp.  The fact is, Clinton lost the race early in the primaries, and didn't recover her footing until much later, when it was too late to overcome Obama's small but persistent lead.  That is my fear in the general election - that McCain will campaign well, but that Obama's base will not be moved, and that he'll crawl over the finish line, as he did in the race for the nomination.  On January 20th, no one will remember the race or the numbers, just the name of the man whose hand is raised.

August 10, 2008.      Permalink