Publius' Forum

-By Warner Todd Huston
Just deserts were dished out to one Saddam Hussein last night. Few deserved it more than he.

There is no reason for me to recount his many crimes against humanity here, but it is a good thing he has paid for his evil -- and paid with his life.

That is all need be said about that...

But, in reading the AP's story by Abdul-Zahra, something else comes to the fore that is vexing to anyone looking for truth in the media. Of course, truth is always in short supply from our friends at alAP, but with Abdul-Zahra's report we see a constant misuse of the English language.

There is no need to reproduce the entire report here, but I'd like to focus on the misuse of certain words that seems to offer exculpatory sentiment for the murderer Saddam and shows how the AP seems not to know what words mean.

The report starts out with this sentence:

Clutching a Quran and refusing a hood, Saddam Hussein went to the gallows before sunrise Saturday, executed by vengeful countrymen after a quarter-century of remorseless brutality that killed countless thousands and led Iraq into disastrous wars against the United States and Iran.

Vengeful? Is Abdul-Zahra trying to lead us to feel that this execution isn't justice, but is mere vengence?

It was a grim end for the 69-year-old leader who had vexed three U.S. presidents. Despite his ouster, Washington, its allies and the new Iraqi leaders remain mired in a fight to quell a stubborn insurgency by Saddam loyalists and a vicious sectarian conflict.

"Grim" end? Is that the sort of sorrowful terms we use to describe the execution of such a murderous dictator: grim? And, naturally, we cannot talk about the execution of Saddam for his crimes without making it seem all a wasted effort because his actions still "vex" U.S. presidents! Even in execution, this AP writer is trying to hand a triumph to Saddam.

Next our intrepid AP reporter got a sly dig against the death penalty by placing Saddam's use of political murder and torture next to a legitimate death penalty.

Iraq's death penalty was suspended by the U.S. military after it toppled Saddam in 2003, but the new Iraqi government reinstated it two years later, saying executions would deter criminals.

Saddam's own regime used executions and extrajudicial killings as a tool of political repression, both to eliminate real or suspected political opponents and to maintain a reign of terror.

Obviously, to writer Abdul-Zahra, there is not much difference between a measured and legitimate usage of the death penalty and Saddam's obscene murders.

Lastly, Abdul-Zahra showed complete ignorance of what the word "honor" means:

While he wielded a heavy hand to maintain control, Saddam also sought to win public support with a personality cult that pervaded Iraqi society. Thousands of portraits, posters, statues and murals were erected in his honor all over Iraq.

A grateful people honor a well-known person for his life's work by naming schools after him or displaying his portrait. But a dictator places them about the country by HIS OWN ORDER. Those "thousands of portraits, posters, statues and murals" were decidedly NOT erected in his honor all over Iraq. They were forced there by his thugs to aggrandize a tyrant by his own order.

"In his honor" is not the right verbiage to use in that case at all, Mr. Abdul-Zahra. Do you even know the difference?

Does the AP's editors?

Labels: Huston, Iraq, Publius Forum, Saddam

-By Warner Todd Huston

The Young America's Foundation has come out with their 2006 list of the most bizarre and Politically Correct college courses of the year and it shows, once again, the foolishness being called an "education" that is foisted upon our children in our colleges and universities.

The number one most ridiculous is Occidental College's "The Phallus", supposedly a study on the relation "between the phallus and the penis, the meaning of the phallus, phallologocentrism, the lesbian phallus, the Jewish phallus, the Latino phallus, and the relation of the phallus and fetishism."

What palpable nonsense!

The U. of Pennsylvania's "Adultery Novel", where students learn about infidelity -- I suppose to make Bill Clinton more acceptable -- also made the list.

Additionally, we see the U. of California-Los Angeles's "Queer Musicology", where our youngsters are taught about gay music -- as if it were somehow a "different" kind of music, apparently. Now, is separating them out from the rest of our music supposed to make them accepted just like "everyone else"? I thought gays wanted to be thought of as "normal people" instead of separated and segregated?

The list seems mostly to chastise overindulgences in "women's studies" in the average American University. Occidental College, for example, has quite an extensive "women's studies" department with all sorts of facile and unnecessary courses stuffed into this area of "study". Imagine the bloated budget this department must waste on a yearly basis!

There were a myriad of other "courses" that our highly priced and woefully inadequate universities have wasted time and effort upon, many of which attack America, the male of the species, white people and western culture. Of course, they all assault the sensibilities of any student who wants to actually learn something useful.

But, to my mind, the worst one on the list was Amherst College's "Taking Marx Seriously: Should Marx be Given Another Chance? Let me answer that query with a word even the pointy heads at University might understand: NO. A resounding no!

Here is Amherst's course description:

Should Marx be given yet another chance? Is there anything left to gain by returning to texts whose earnest exegesis has occupied countless interpreters, both friendly and hostile, for generations? Has Marx's credibility survived the global debacle of those regimes and movements that drew inspiration from his work, however poorly they understood it? Or, conversely, have we entered a new era in which post-Marxism has joined a host of other "post-" phenomena? This seminar will deal with these and related questions in the context of a close and critical reading of Marx's texts. The main themes we will discuss include Marx's conception of capitalist modernity, material and intellectual production, power, class conflicts and social consciousness, and his critique of alienation, bourgeois freedom and representative democracy. We will also examine Marx's theories of historical progress, capitalist exploitation, globalization and human emancipation.

In light of the 100 million human beings murdered over the last 100 years or so by people inspired by Marx, it is a continual amazement to me that certain types of people still wonder if the failed theorist's ideas could still work "if only it were tried right".

Marx's ideas have nearly all proven chimerical at best and murderous at worst, yet we get one person after another traipsing about our college campuses claiming the mantle of thoughtful, professor positing the absurdities of Marx and his many murderous acolytes and ruefully pontificating upon their unrealized potential.

These are the same sorts of people who point to things like the Spanish Inquisition and the many wars launched under the name of Christ in previous centuries as reasons to de-legitimize Christianity. They proclaim Christianity's hypocrisy because of the many that have died in Christ's name. Yet, far more people have died as a result of Marx's religion than any other ever created. And not a word about the millions upon millions of Marx's victims is ever acknowledged by the ivory tower set.

So, according to such people, religion should be cast out because of such depredations, religion should be banished from the mind of man and excised from the university because of such historical excess, yet the excess caused by Marx? Well, let's not bring that up shall we?

After all, they plaintively claim that Marx's ideas were never "really" implemented right as this fetid course description seems to allude, so his ideas must deserve a second look. Marx's followers just didn't get it because of how "poorly they understood it". Regardless of what Marxism has led to, let's give it another shot... no pun intended.

So, why can't we use the same argument for religion? Why can't we say religion has never been tried right, too? Not that I am equating Christ to Marx, far from it. But the pointy heads don't see their dichotomy. In fact, they don't even acknowledge it as a legitimate query.

Marx has proven an utter failure through every manner of implementation of his ideas on both large and small scale and does not behoove the time spent on him as a legitimate course of study unless it is as an adjunct to political science or history, and then only as a negative example therein.

Marx deserves nothing but the contempt of everyone. And our universities don't deserve much better for their slavish love for this murderous, beast at this rate.

Yes, he should be taught. But he deserves to be placed as the worst human being in human history. Worse than Hitler, worse then Stalin, even worse then Torquemada.

Labels: college, education, Huston, Publius Forum, universities school

-By Warner Todd Huston

OK, since 9/11 I have had a few negative things to say about Muslims and Islam... OK, more than a "few".

I have complained that the so-called moderates in the world of Islam don't stand up to the terrorists, for instance. As the old adage goes "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing", and Muslims the world over have seemed to be more than willing to let the evil happen.

Well, since I have reported the "evil" that Muslims do, I feel it only proper to report when I see them doing something right.

On Dec. 21st, the Washington Post featured a story titled Muslims Mark Solidarity With Jews,
Event Held Days After Iranian Meeting That Denied Genocide. And in it we meet a few American Muslims who stood publicly against the re-writing of history sponsored by the Iranians a few weeks ago.

Local Muslim leaders lit candles yesterday at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to commemorate Jewish suffering under the Nazis, in a ceremony held just days after Iran had a conference denying the genocide.

American Muslims "believe we have to learn the lessons of history and commit ourselves: Never again," said Imam Mohamed Magid of the All Dulles Area Muslim Society, standing before the eternal flame flickering from a black marble base that holds dirt from Nazi concentration camps.

Good show, Imam Magid.

Now if only more of his creed were as vocal.

Labels: Huston, Islam, Muslims, Publius Forum, terrorism

-By Warner Todd Huston

As the AP reports (Strip-Searched Muslim Woman Gets Apology), the Dept. of Homeland Security sent an apology letter to a Muslim woman who was strip searched on April 11th, 2006. Naturally, the AP uses the report as an excuse to bash the US government.

The Department of Homeland Security has sent a letter apologizing to a Muslim woman who was detained at the Tampa airport and strip-searched at a county jail.

Safana Jawad, 45, a Spanish citizen who was born in Iraq, was detained on April 11 because of a suspected tie to a suspicious person, authorities said. She was held for two days before being deported to England.

AP reports the letter was dated December 8th and sent in response to a complaint by Jawad.

"On behalf of the Department of Homeland Security, I offer you my sincere apology for having to undergo a strip search," wrote Timothy J. Keefer, acting chief counsel for the department's Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.

Then the AP takes this woman's complaint to the next level, as it were, by allowing her to wag a finger in the face of the USA.

Jawad was traveling to Clearwater to visit her 16-year-old son, who lived with her ex-husband, Ahmad Maki Kubba. Kubba, an Iraqi exile and American citizen for 27 years, was praised last year by Gov. Jeb. Bush for organizing a group to vote in Iraq's election.

Kubba said his ex-wife's detention prompted his son to move to Spain.

"I lost my son because of what happened," Kubba said. "My son wanted to be in the U.S. Navy, and he speaks both English and Arabic. He would have been just what they are looking for. What they did to Jawad was unfair and is hurting America."

Where is the AP wagging a finger in the face of Muslims everywhere for allowing the smallest percentage of them to make everyone else suspect Muslims as terrorists in the first place?

As it ends up, though, this appears to be a non-story. This apology letter isn't odd at all, apparently.

Department spokeswoman Joanna Gonzalez said it is standard practice to send a response letter to someone who complains. She said the agency does not track the number of apologies it issues.

Seems like the Dept. of Homeland Security does this all the time! (Though maybe a better story is why they bother wasting so much time with these letters?)

Nothing out of the ordinary at all, really.

But, it DID give the AP a chance to say how mean the USA is to those nice Muslims, though.

So, I guess the non-story DID serve SOME purpose: AP bashing the USA again.

Labels: AP, Huston, Islam, Muslims, Publius Forum, terrorism

-By Warner Todd Huston

Chicken Little yelled, "Help! Help! The sky is falling!" Our frightened Chicken could well be a "journalist" writing about Global warming, or a former Vice-President that can't find anything else to do with his time.

The hysteria that is global warming is perfectly evinced in a recent story by the Independent newspaper from England.

Disappearing world: Global warming claims tropical island is so fraught with fear mongering and hyperventilation that it is no wonder that skeptics look to the Globaloney movement and laugh at their claims of "scientific" seriousness.

For some sidesplitting, hilarity, this particular story is as ridiculous as they come, replete with overly emotional rhetoric, ill chosen verbiage, and scientific boobery.

(I will bold some of the funniest stuff for emphasis)

Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India's part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.

"Obliteration"? This obliteration took many years. But using the word obliteration seems a choice to invoke a sudden cataclysm and a way to cause alarm and fear in the reader. Certainly, obliteration does mean to "erase from existence", granted, but the word has a certain emotional carriage to it that is sure to cause alarm

And the Independent is somewhat misleading on the time line as well. Lochachara Island, for instance, has been gone for 20 or so years but here we have the Independent making it seem as if it just happened! As if Global Warming suddenly swamped the island.

Two-thirds of nearby populated island Ghoramara has also been permanently inundated. Dr Sugata Hazra, director of the university's School of Oceanographic Studies, says "it is only a matter of some years" before it is swallowed up too. Dr Hazra says there are now a dozen "vanishing islands" in India's part of the delta. The area's 400 tigers are also in danger.

Another word used to scare: "inundated". Inundation is generally a word to describe a sudden flood, not a slow, inexorable rising of water. We also use it to describe being overwhelmed, such as being "inundated" with email -- again an emotional reaction results. But, these islands have taken many years to go away. The fact that they are disappearing is certainly nothing to scoff about, and, while the hyperbolic rhetoric adds a novelist's flair, little scientific weight is brought to the story with such fear mongering.

Until now the Carteret Islands off Papua New Guinea were expected to be the first populated ones to disappear, in about eight years' time, but Lohachara has beaten them to the dubious distinction.

Another sentence calculated to cause mere fear. It is interesting that, in the rush to sound all dramatic, the Independent is ignoring the fact that 8 years or more should be plenty of time for inhabitants of these low lying islands to MOVE to a place where it ISN'T slowly flooding! It would also be plenty of time to save the tigers worried about above.

Human cost of global warming: Rising seas will soon make 70,000 people homeless.

Again, 8 years or more... they have at least 8 YEARS to move. Such advanced notice does NOT cause people to become "homeless"! This word is again used as if this is a sudden conflagration causing catastrophic loss. It is not. It is something that people have all sorts of time in which to solve their housing problems.

A forest fire, an earthquake, even a real flash flood, those are sudden catastrophes that could cause people to become "homeless". 8 years should be plenty of time to find somewhere else to live!

This grandiose flourish cries for some perspective to be called for here.

Refugees from the vanished Lohachara island and the disappearing Ghoramara island have fled to Sagar, but this island has already lost 7,500 acres of land to the sea. In all, a dozen islands, home to 70,000 people, are in danger of being submerged by the rising seas.

Nearly this entire sentence is filled with teary eyed, scaremongering! "Refuges", "fled", both are words usually used to denote suddenness. There is nothing sudden about the decades it is taking to submerge these islands, especially since Lohachara island has already been gone for 20 years.

Of course, these people are losing real estate and, yes, it will not be easy to move and start over. It never is easy to move and start over no matter what is causing the move. But, they will move and they will carry on. And they have many years to figure out how to do it.

And the last bit about being "in danger of being submerged". More emotionalism that. There is no "danger"; there is just plain fact. And it is a fact that must be dealt with by leaving the area affected. "In danger of" implies that something can be done to stop it and there is not one much humans can economically do to stop these islands from being submerged or even global warming, if it is happening, from happening.

Now, whether global warming is, indeed happening or not is immaterial to the fate of these islands. They are absolutely submerging beneath the waves and will soon be but a memory. This kind of erosion is happening all the time all across the world and always has. Many islands have come and gone in man's recorded history alone.

Worse, these scaremongers also fail to inform their acolytes that, if it is global warming, it is something that has happened many other times in Earth's past -- and in all those other times there WAS no man around to cause it. Man has not caused global warming. Man can do nothing to stop it.

Still, there is plenty of doubt that Global Warming is the cause. Dr. E. Calvin Beisner has written to me recently giving good reason to doubt that water levels have risen due to man's interference in the environment. "Averaged over century-long periods, sea level has been rising on Earth ever since the end of the last Ice Age, and according to the International Union for Quaternary Research's Sea Level Commission--the world's most authoritative body of scientific work on the subject--there is no significant change in the rate of rise through the period when, according to global warming theory, human activity is supposed to have contributed significantly to the warming."

But, in the end, I'd say that if people don't have the sense God gave a rock to move off an island that has been slowly submerging for 8 years or more, then global warming is the least of their worries.

Globaloney hysteria strikes again.

Labels: environment, global warming, Huston, Publius Forum

-By Warner Todd Huston

It amazes me that this Kwanzaa business has been washed of the real life criminal activity of its creator. The man was a race monger, a violent thug, a rapist, a torturer... just a horrible human being.

Yet never a word of this man's evil is ever uttered when his pseudo holiday is discussed in the MSM.

And the Cox News Service did it again on Christmas in theirs titled Kwanzaa glows even brighter after 40 years.

Kwanzaa turns 40 today. The colorful holiday, invented by California professor Maulana Ron Karenga in 1966, is like a jazz musician who fuses bits and pieces of music into a vibrant mosaic of sound. Kwanzaa, "first fruit" in Swahili, is a fluent, nonreligious holiday that borrows liberally from a patchwork of cultures and traditions.

Karenga originally created the seven-day observance to empower black communities and uplift black culture and identity.

Yes, kindly professor Ron Karenga. What a great guy.

Of course, his name wasn't really Ron Karenga originally. It was Ronald McKinley Everett.

In 1969 the organization called US (as is "us"--blacks--against "them" --whites), a black power militant group Everett founded, frequently clashed in violence with police and even other black power groups. Members of his group even killed two Black Panthers in 1969.

Nice and peaceful, eh?

In 1971 Everett served time in jail for assault. By then Everett had changed his name to Maulana Ron Karenga and began to affect a pseudo African costume and act a native African.

It wasn't mere assault he was convicted of, either. It was sexual assault and torture perpetrated against some of his female followers. The L.A. Times then reported that he placed a hot soldering iron in one woman's mouth and used a vise to crush another's toe.

As writer Lynn Woolley wrote of Professor "Karenga":

And so this is Kwanzaa. The militant past of the creator is now ignored in favor of the so-called seven principles of Nguza Saba – principles such as unity, family and self-determination that could have come from Bill Bennett's "Book of Virtues." The word "Kwanzaa" is Swahili, meaning something like "fresh fruits of harvest."

No one remembers the part about "re-Africanization" or the sevenfold path of blackness that Dr. Karenga once espoused. Hardly anyone remembers the shootings, the beatings,the tortures and the prison terms that were once the center of his life. It's just not PC to bring that sort of stuff up now that Kwanzaa is commercialized and making big bucks.

And the Cox News Service just helped a criminal and sexual pervert skate by again, hidden behind his false holiday, and has allowed him to continue to dupe millions of black Americans. A man who has never denounced his past criminal activity and extremist ideas.

Happy Kwanzaa, indeed!

Labels: Black Power, Huston, Karenga, Kwanzaa, Publius Forum

-By Warner Todd Huston

More proof that our schools are failing our students.

Santa Cruz schools rethink blood drives after gay student barred

A gay student prevented from donating blood because of his sexual history has stirred debate among Santa Cruz school officials over whether to continue hosting campus blood drives.

"I was turned away because of my sexual contacts," Childers said. "The reasoning behind me not being able to give blood is ridiculous. ... It made me feel like an outcast."

According to U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulations, a man who has had a sexual encounter with another man since 1977 is ineligible to donate.

Santa Cruz city schools officials said they were reconsidering whether to have blood drives on campus if students were required to divulge information about their sexual activities.

AIDS is plenty enough reason to prevent gays, the single most at risk segment of society, from donating blood to a blood bank. A policy to keep AIDS out from our blood supply is sensible and far from "bigotry".

Here is the stupidity from a school official to explain their decision:

"As the blood supply has become so politicized over time we need to check our policies," Santa Cruz City Schools Trustee Cynthia Hawthorne said.

If the issue is being "politicized" it would be by you and gay activists putting us all at risk over your social activism, Mz. Hawthorne.

It is logical and proper to stop gays from introducing AIDS into our blood supply and putting each of us at risk. But, in San Francisco, the activism for gay "rights" is far more important than the safety of our blood supplies.

But, it really shouldn't surprise anyone, should it?

Labels: blood, gay, health, Huston

-By Warner Todd Huston

From BBC Channel 4 comes a Christmas message that could do with a little more analysis and less taking the thing at face value.

Veiled British Muslim woman delivers alternative Xmas message

At the same time the 80-year-old monarch's Christmas message to Britain and the Commonwealth was broadcast, a woman known only as Khadijah spoke on Channel 4 television Monday about why she wore the niqab in public and called for tolerance.

"We are seen as oppressed. Since I've started covering I feel much more liberated, which I know a lot of people possibly won't be able to understand," she said.

"I don't wear the niqab to separate myself from society. I want to be part of this society -- this is where I choose to live. I hope that society is more accepting of my personal choice. It's not about separation."

OK, so we have a purported "Muslim" women claiming she loves to be covered in the black tent she walks around in. She claims it's "liberating".

At first blush (not that you could see her blush, mind you) one would see this as an affirmation of religious choice. Why, those Muslim women love their traditional dress, you'd think. We should ease off this hateful, western bias against the veil or the hajib. It must be that all our assumptions of the oppressiveness of Muslim female coverings is wrong.

But wait. One small section of the AFP story makes the entire thing a lie...

Khadijah -- who converted to Islam a decade ago and said she is the great-granddaughter of a suffragette who fought for women's right to vote -- said Straw's comments were not helpful.

This is no "Muslim" woman, but a white woman who willingly converted. And what we have here is a person who is striving to out Muslim the REAL Muslims. A nuevo Muslim attempting at zealotry trying to be accepted by people who will never accept her. A white person "gone native", as the saying used to go.

One can never take the word of an activist convert for much of anything because all too often they are extremists. They usually have certain mental problems and emotional voids that they fill with a new thing, something that becomes their entire life, something that is often even more than a passion. Usually more an obsession than a conviction or belief.

So, this claim of Muslims loving the veil is not from a woman who has spent her life covered from head to foot. This is not a woman who's mother was beaten by her Muslim Father. This is not a woman who was raped by her Muslim Uncle and warned to never tell anyone. This is not a woman who has lived with all the women around her beaten, mistreated and oppressed her whole life. This is a woman who only recently became a Muslim and is suddenly enamored with her interesting, new world.

This is not a woman who's voice comes from the experience of the Muslim world, but an outsider trying to convince herself that she is a "true" Muslim.

This woman's "message" is misleading and should be ignored. She does NOT represent the average Muslim woman and should not be treated as if she does.

Labels: Huston, Islam, terrorism, viel