Strange Women Lying in Ponds

Planned Saudi Mosque in Czech Spa Town Causes Uproar

The spa town of Teplice (pronounced TEP-leetz-uh) is having a mosque problem:

Milos Kejzlar angrily recalls the reaction of visiting Arabs in Teplice following the events of 9/11.

"The people of the town were very surprised to see a great number of Arabs here celebrating in the parks and the restaurants after they learned what happened in the U.S.," he said, downing shots of slivovice at his well-kept house in a leafy suburb.

Shocked by some Arabs' response to the destruction of the World Trade Center and flooded by constant media coverage of terrorist plots, Kejzlar concluded that a mosque a few blocks from his home was a bad idea.

"It seems that terrorism often springs from those who gather at the mosques and from those who preach from them," said the 41-year-old high school math teacher.

Last spring, after learning of a private company's plans to erect a temple to cater to the thousands of Arabs, mostly Saudis, who seek extended medical treatments in this historic spa town, Kejzlar launched a petition against the mosque, which would be the country's second.

Thousands have signed the petition. The article portrays supporters of the petition as a bunch of xenophobic rubes who don't appreciate the fact that Arab money (read, "Saudi") has been largely responsible for the revitalization of the town's historic spa structures.

But the citizens of Teplice don't strike SWLiP as being so naive:

Zdenek Briza, a 56-year-old technician who signed the petition, said he knows that not all Arabs are terrorists, "but you never know. There are 100 to 200 mosques under state surveillance in Germany because of suspected terrorist ties. We don't want that here. Look what happened in Madrid."

Oh, THAT Iraq-Al Qaeda Connection: III

The universe of the NY Times must be a very strange one, indeed. Just a week after the Times editorial page found vindication in the report of the 9/11 Commission with its straw man argument that the Bush administration's claims of a Saddam-9/11 connection had been fatally undermined (the Bush administration never made any such claim), the Times is now forced to acknowledge that Saddam and Bin Laden did indeed, at a minimum, explore ways to get into bed with one another.

But of course that doesn't stop the Times from putting its own spin on the story. The headline itself says it all:

Iraqis, Seeking Foes of Saudis, Contacted bin Laden, File Says

You can already see the spin emerging, and the article most bears this out: Saddam didn't seek out Bin Laden to attack the U.S., but merely because he wanted to cooperate with groups opposed to the Saudi regime:

The document states that Iraq agreed to rebroadcast anti-Saudi propaganda, and that a request from Mr. bin Laden to begin joint operations against foreign forces in Saudi Arabia went unanswered. There is no further indication of collaboration.

No interest here in attacking a common enemy. Nothing to see. Move on. Well, except for this:

Mr. bin Laden "also requested joint operations against foreign forces" based in Saudi Arabia, where the American presence has been a rallying cry for Islamic militants who oppose American troops in the land of the Muslim pilgrimage sites of Mecca and Medina.

But [you knew there had to be a "but" -- ed.] the document contains no statement of response by the Iraqi leadership under Mr. Hussein to the request for joint operations, and there is no indication of discussions about attacks on the United States or the use of unconventional weapons.

The whole article is in this same vein of wanting desperately to bury one's head in the sand. The writer makes no effort to account for a number of contradictions. For example, there's this oddity early in the piece:

American officials described the document as an internal report by the Iraqi intelligence service detailing efforts to seek cooperation with several Saudi opposition groups, including Mr. bin Laden's organization, before Al Qaeda had become a full-fledged terrorist organization. (emphasis mine).

But the article also asserts that the first key meeting occurred in 1994, which was after the first WTC bombing. Wasn't Al Qaeda involved in the first WTC bombing, and wasn't one of the bombers given safe haven in Iraq?

And the article notes, without a trace of irony:

The document details a time before any of the spectacular anti-American terrorist strikes attributed to Al Qaeda: the two American Embassy bombings in East Africa in 1998, the strike on the destroyer Cole in Yemeni waters in 2000, and the Sept. 11 attacks.

I suppose that the writer meant for us to draw the conclusion that, since these contacts occurred in an age of relative innocence (during Clinton's first term, actually -- why hasn't the Left come up with a theory that Bin Laden only went "bad" after the Republican takeover of Congress?), the purposes of the contacts must have been benign. But a more sensible conclusion is that these contacts marked the early stages of a collaboration.

And can we finally dispense with the meme that Saddam and Bin Laden could not have cooperated because one was godless and the other was a fundamentalist?

The document, which asserts that Mr. bin Laden "was approached by our side," states that Mr. bin Laden previously "had some reservations about being labeled an Iraqi operative," but was now willing to meet in Sudan, and that "presidential approval" was granted to the Iraqi security service to proceed.

At the meeting, Mr. bin Laden requested that sermons of an anti-Saudi cleric be rebroadcast in Iraq. That request, the document states, was approved by Baghdad.

If the Times were only willing to give itself a dose of its own medicine, those paragraphs would have been followed by the sentence: If true, this would flatly discredit the widely held view among liberals that Saddam and Bin Laden were too ideologically opposed to one another to ever cooperate.

UPDATE: Ace beat me to the punch. He has similar thoughts, expressed in his usual, trenchant idiom.

More of what the media doesn't report in Iraq

Iraq the Model reports on more heartening news. Traffic is improving, the Iraqi Dinar exchange rate is being reported on Arab TV, baseball is being played (by women, too), mobile phone service is up, and Omar gets a raise.

But of course, it's a quagmire!

Just one question:

Were they plain or peanut?

Sullivan's Unsurprising Flip

I would comment extensively on the recent "outing" of Andrew Sullivan as a declared Kerry supporter, but Ace of Spades is all over the topic like white on rice. Just keep scrolling. Ace called this well over a month ago, and deserves all the credit.

What I have seen in Sullivan over the last two years has been nothing short of appallingly shallow. He started out as one of the most impassioned advocates of intervention in Iraq. But over the last year, Sullivan has been executing a careful withdrawal (I would add, with no pun intended, that it has been an admirably performed rear-guard action on his part).

I also note the harsh reality that, while Sullivan wrote in the Advocate that his flip was entirely attributable to Bush's support of the FMA, Sullivan's blog has been increasingly hyping problems in Iraq. In other words, it looks like he's building up a pretext.

But we now all know that, for Sullivan, it's not about the war. It's about his wish to get married to his boyfriend.

Well, that's all fine and good, and I wish him well. SWLiP is actually moderately in favor of gay marriage. We'll see how long it lasts after the first "gay divorces" start coming in, racking up the attorneys' fees and court costs, and when Sullivan or some other high-powered gay man has to pay his first alimony check. But all in all, I'm very much in the camp of live and let live.

However, the Islamists are not in the camp of live and let live. They very much intend to kill us all. And whatever they would do to us "infidels," they would do worse to openly gay men like Sullivan.

So I'm in favor of preserving Western Civilization first, and putting some of these culture war issues on the back burner for the time being. Sullivan apparently feels otherwise; that he's willing to put Western Civilization at risk over his feelings on gay marriage. That is an incredibly selfish position to take.

How do I know that he's willing to put Western Civilization at risk? Because a Bush loss would be perceived by the Islamists as a victory, just like they have interpreted the loss of Aznar in Spain as a victory. It would only embolden them to take more steps against us. And America would be in danger of falling into a malaise that would make the seventies look like a picnic.

But the bigger problem I have with Sullivan's waffling and his obfuscations has to do with something which I take very seriously:

Like many of us, he advocated a war. Unlike many of us, he's trying to disown the war he advocated.

When you advocate a war, you cannot shrink from it, nor shirk the responsibility to see it through. War is a tough business, and things go wrong more often than they go right. When you go to war, you cannot wilt at the sight of bad news anymore than a soldier can afford to wilt at the sound of gunfire. Anything else and you cannot be counted on as a serious person.

I'm reminded of the anecdote about President Lincoln's meeting with a group of governors, all of whom had forcefully advocated war with the South. The governors protested to Lincoln that they couldn't afford to call up more regiments for the Union. Lincoln chastised them for lacking the moral courage to pay the price for the war they had so heartily advocated.

If Lincoln's presidency had been judged by the first three years of the Civil War, it would have necessarily been declared a failure. But Lincoln had something that Sullivan lacks: Courage.

NY Times: Campaigning for Kerry

If anyone could have doubted that the NY Times is campaigning for John Kerry, they need look no farther than today's puff piece. My favorite passage has to be this:

His formal statements are filled with multisyllabic upper-crust phrasing — his campaign had an intern whose main responsibility was to look up all the unfamiliar words Mr. Kerry uttered — but one on one, he calls strangers "man" or "brother." He is careful to use people's names — he has interrupted himself more than once to introduce sign-language interpretations — yet he rarely remembers them.

And where former President Bill Clinton plays cards and President Bush turns to the treadmill, Senator Kerry strums his Spanish classical guitar in a kind of musical meditation. Lately, in the private front cabin of his campaign plane, he has been learning a new (old) song, "This Land Is Your Land."

"He's a weird mix of both the very refined taste of elite schools and all that but also eating Hostess cupcakes and watching dumb comedies on TV," observed Andrei Cherny, who spent more than a year as Mr. Kerry's chief speechwriter and now works for the Democratic National Committee. "It's sort of a mix of those two things: Up on pop culture more than most people running for president; at the same time, he's read all these books by people whose names I can't pronounce."

Well, of course. He's smarter than Bush, and has even more of the "common touch" than Clinton. What more could we want in a President?

Besides principles, I mean.

I'm reminded of a scene from "A Fish Called Wanda":

Otto: Apes don't read Plato.

Wanda: Yes they do, Otto. They just don't understand it.

Peering from my Cave

Some of you may be wondering where I am. Well, I am still alive. It's a long story, but I'll try to make it brief.

You see, I have been going through something of a crisis. Over the last several weeks, I came to the realization that I am in danger of passing age forty without ever having been interviewed by a Western news reporter.

I have spent a great deal of time pondering my strategy of how to get interviewed. I reached the conclusion that the easiest way is to grow a beard, wrap a turban around my head, carry an AK-47, and every now and then blurt out, "Death to America!"

While a brilliant scheme, I have found that this has its disadvantages. For one thing, I had to move out of my neighborhood. I am now in an undisclosed warehouse location somewhere between I-95 and Biscayne Boulevard, and a little bit north of I-395 (if you're from 60 Minutes, look for the Gap billboard and you're almost there).

Needless to say, blogging has been and will be intermittent, for the time being.