One of the problems that Britain has faced in trying to wage a liberal intellectual campaign against radical Islam is that the British catechism of multiculturalism makes doing so all but impossible. This conflict is starkest in the academy, which tacitly acknowledges the threat of campus radicalization and yet refuses to deal with, or even acknowledge, one of its main causes--Islamist ideology. The result is that peculiarly English phenomenon: a hotbed of cold feet.

Over the last decade, more than a dozen students from British universities have either carried out or been convicted of terrorist offenses. Some of the more prominent of these include Omar Saeed Sheikh, the London School of Economics graduate who beheaded Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, and more recently, Waheed Zaman, former president of the London Metropolitan University's Islamic Society who was convicted earlier this year for plotting to detonate liquid explosives on board transatlantic airliners bound from London to the United States and Canada in 2006. During this period, many British campuses have hosted, via their student-run Islamic Societies (ISOCs), countless "hate-preachers."

Two recent reports published in London illustrate, on the one hand, the systemic menace posed by campus radicalization and, on the other, just how far universities will go to suicidally downplay or disregard this obvious fact.

Last Monday, the government-sponsored Quilliam Foundation put out a case study of City University, London's Islamic Society, which it has found to be a cynosure of Islamic radicalization and one which has already graduated a known terrorist, Ahmed Abdullah Ali, also convicted in that 2006 liquid bomb plot. Apart from posting to its website articles written by Abdullah Azzam, "intellectual godfather" of al Qaeda, and Abu Muhammed al-Maqdisi, mentor to former al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, City's Islamic Society has also held regular Friday prayer sessions that disdain "man-made law," applaud the murder of apostates and homosexuals, and endorse marital rape and wife-beating.

Contrast Quilliam's alarming findings with what University College London has uncovered about itself. Once known as a redoubt of anti-clericalism, UCL has become internationally famous for graduating Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian who tried to murder 278 people on board a Northwest Airlines flight over Detroit last Christmas Day. Two weeks ago, the university published the findings of a months-long inquiry, which found "no evidence to suggest either that...Abdulmutallab was radicalised while a student at UCL, or that conditions at UCL during that time or subsequently were conducive to the radicalization of students."

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A mere two days after May's deadly flotilla raid off the coast of Gaza, the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), in a special "emergency session," passed a resolution by a 32 to 3 count that "condemn[ed] in the strongest terms the outrageous attack by the Israeli forces against the humanitarian flotilla of ships." Despite already forming its consensus view of the flotilla raid, it nonetheless ordered a "fact-finding Mission," which went ahead despite the support of Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon for a wider and more legally consequential UN inquiry, which Israel later agreed to cooperate with.

In addition to agreeing to work with the general UN inquiry, Israel has conducted an internal military review which acquitted the IDF commandos of any professional misconduct, faulting them only for not anticipating the violence they were met with onboard the Mavi Marmara. Furthermore, Israel is also now engaged in a domestic civil review headed by retired Israeli Supreme Court Justice Jacob Turkel and observed by Northern Irish First Minister Lord David Trimble and former Canadian military judge Ken Watkin.

The results of the UNHRC flotilla investigation were published last week in an "Advance Unedited Version" of its official report and the verdict is as predictable as it is one-sided. As with the Goldstone Report, Israel is once again accused of war crimes. And once again, the UNHRC's Mission sacrifices methodological rigor and dispassion for a politicized and prefabricated ruling.

It claims to have interviewed "more than 100 witnesses in Geneva, London, Istanbul and Amman" but in perhaps the most naked acknowledgement of its own distorted approach to fact-finding, the report states the following in its Methodology section:

In ascertaining the facts surrounding the Israeli interception of the Gaza-bound flotilla, the Mission gave particular weight to the direct evidence from interviews with eye witnesses and crew, as well as the forensic evidence and interviews with government officials. In light of seizure of cameras, CCTV footage and digital media storage devices and of the suppression of that material with the disclosure only of a selected and minute quantity of it, the Mission was obliged to treat with extreme caution the versions released by the Israeli authorities where those versions did not coincide with the evidence of eyewitnesses who appeared before us.

The report thus begins by proceeding from a ridiculously tendentious premise. Interviews with "government officials" in Turkey and Jordan are to be taken at face value, but nothing of consequence from the Israeli government passes the mission's smell test. That is, unless it expressly undercuts the Israeli version of events.

In attempting to justify its rejection of the validity of Israel's domestic inquiry the report states in its introduction that "public confidence in any investigative process in circumstances such as the present is not enhanced when the subject of an investigation either investigates himself or plays a pivotal role in the process." But this principle is hardly adhered to in a report whose conclusions were reached almost entirely on the basis of flotilla passenger testimony and passenger-produced documentary footage--did these individuals not play a "pivotal role" in the subject of the presently under investigation?

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The 26-year-old Iranian human rights campaigner Shiva Nazar Ahari was sentenced last Saturday by Iran's Revolutionary Court to six years in prison after being convicted on all charges made against her by the state, including that of moharebeh ("rebellion against God"), conspiracy to commit a crime against "national security," and anti-state propaganda. She was additionally sentenced to receive 74 lashes or pay a fine of $400, an option that makes this punishment especially gratuitous and sadistic.

I wrote about Ahari's plight in late August for THE WEEKLY STANDARD, citing her first arrest at age seventeen for the 'crime' of attending a vigil for the victims of 9/11. Since then she's been in and out of trouble with the theocratic law for fighting on behalf of political prisoners in Iran. She was incarcerated again in June 2009, exactly a day after Iran's fraudulent presidential election, and was released three months later following payment of $20,000 in bail. While traveling with two associates to Qom to attend the funeral of Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, a man now considered to have been the guiding religious light behind the Green Revolution, Ahari was rounded up yet again.

But perhaps sensing that attending a revered cleric's funeral was insufficient grounds on which to haul her before the draconian Branch 26 of Iran's Revolutionary Court, the prosecution cooked up an additional offense: Ahari, it alleged, was also affiliated with the Islamo-Marxist group Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MeK), which has carried out terrorist attacks against the Iranian regime.

On September 12, after many deferred court dates, Ahari was released on bail - $500,000 - after spending 266 days in Evin prison - the Lubyanka of Tehran - 100 of which were in a type of solitary confinement cell commonly referred to as a "human coffin." Her trial, when it occurred, was speedy; Ahari was handcuffed throughout and as part of the prosecution's case for the MeK affiliation, they cited email exchanges she had with other advocates for political prisoners who had once defended MeK members. "It was so tenuous it wouldn't even wash on a blog," one insider told me recently.

Ahari's defenders in the West, from Amnesty International to Freedom House, have only mild cause to welcome a 6-year prison sentence since it was broadly expected that she would receive the death penalty. It's the punishment Branch 26 specializes in Not that her having to serve out her actual sentence in Izeh prison in Khuzestan, in southwestern Iran, will be especially easy. It's unbearably hot in that part of the country. There's no air conditioning in the prison and most of its general population are common criminals - almost all men. Furthermore, Khuzestan is a ten-hour drive from Tehran, where Ahari's mother lives.

The family is appealing the court's ruling, which can take as much time as it likes to respond to her case if, indeed, it chooses to at all.

"One reason to hand her a suspended sentence," a Washington-based human rights activist who has been monitoring Ahari's case told me, "would be to force her to shut up for six years," whereas the regime's previous policy would have been to let her go - even to let her emigrate - confident that no one abroad would listen to her. But things have clearly changed now that democratic Iranian activists have become international symbols, greatly embarrassing a sclerotic regime that, by its own president's estimation, still very much wants to "talk" to the United States. Ahari is young, principled, and beautiful. And her Facebook solidarity page has over 15,000 followers worldwide.

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There is something either terribly wrong or terribly right with America when the political spectacle of the hour is Samantha Stephens in a chastity belt.

Christine O’Donnell, the much satirized Republican nominee for Delaware’s senate race, has abjured masturbation as a sin, lying as morally wrong under any circumstances (“So say the SS turned up at your flat in Amsterdam and Anne Frank were hiding upstairs...”), only then to have it disclosed that she once admitted to “dabbling into [sic] witchcraft” as a youth. Actually, what she literally said on Politically Incorrect in 1999 was that she “dabbled into witchcraft but... didn’t join a coven,” a distinction with a marked difference, I think you’ll agree, if High Holy Day paganism is to have anything to recommend of itself.

Jessica Grose at Slate’s womanly blog XX Factor makes a good point about how scandalizing O’Donnell, a television-savvy born-again, has become much easier now that all human behavior and misbehavior is thoroughly mediated:

I can foresee a media universe in which old, dumb Facebook posts and unearthed tweets become a consistent source of fodder for journalists. O'Donnell is 41, so her earlier transgressions were on an older media, television. However, the incredibly quick dissemination of O'Donnell's ridiculous comments is all thanks to blogs and online video. Budding candidates a decade or two younger have lived their entire adult lives with these media.

There will be presidential sex tapes, in other words.

And a concomitant of this frightening prospect is that as our every thought and brain-fart and slip of the tongue or other piece of anatomy is recorded for posterity, so too will our standards for acceptable conduct decline. Whole generations reared on the discourse of text messaging and Facebook status updates will come to submit to an ever-lowering threshold for public officials who can’t speak in coherent sentences, follow a train of thought or engage in honest debate about anything. If Lindsay Lohan misses her re-sentencing for drug abuse it’ll be because she’s forming an exploratory committee.

In fact, the O’Donnell case is more revealing for what hasn’t been disclosed on YouTube but for what has been blithely tolerated without seeming to threaten her political fortunes in the slightest. Her former campaign manager, Kristin Murray, resigned from this Tea Party-concocted protest candidacy because, “I found out [O’Donnell] was living on campaign donations - using them for rent and personal expenses, while leaving her workers unpaid and piling up thousands in debt. She wasn't concerned about conservative causes. O'Donnell just wanted to make a buck." Four years ago, in a previous senate run, O’Donnell also invented a diploma for herself from Fairleigh Dickinson University, a document that even her campaign now admits she was only just awarded in late August 2010 under cryptic circumstances.

A woman who uses the company card to buy her clothes and pay her rent, stiffs the help and invents academic credentials is thus to be welcomed as a vibrant young upstart wishing to return the country to the principles of the Founding Fathers. I see. This doesn’t so much beg the original question of how the gluttony of information and the famine of knowledge has vitiated our culture as answer it with a resounding, “Whatevs.”

One of the slow-burn methods by which terrorism lives up to its name is to cause a state of absolute, literal-minded stultification in laws and writs of the society being terrorized. We complain daily about long, bare-footed queques at airport security gates, witless government “watch lists” that seem to include everyone not participating in global jihad but exclude everyone doing just that, and the absence of trash bins in the London Underground (or at least, I complain about those daily). A public transport system under omnipresent video surveillance and heavily populated throughout the day is unlikely to be idle once a man is seen stuffing a bomb into a receptacle marked “Trash.” So why the categorical ban on bins and the implicit encouragement of an older public infraction again decency: littering?

The misdemeanors against common sense and rational precaution in the age of terrorism are manifold. However, none compares to the more aggravated crime of arresting a harmless person for a casual tweet. Nick Cohen has a column up at the Observer about the plight of Paul Chambers, a 27 year-old automotive manufacturer who was so frustrated about not being able to fly from Doncaster into Northern Ireland to visit his girlfriend that he tweeted: “Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You've got a week… otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!" The airport monitor for such things saw this, considered it innocuous, but duly passed it along to his superiors. The rest is security-state history:

A plain-clothes detective from South Yorkshire Police arrived at Chambers's work. Instead of quietly pointing out that it was best not to joke about blowing up airports, he arrested him under antiterrorist legislation. A posse of four more antiterrorist officers was waiting in reception.

"Do you have any weapons in your car?" they asked.

"I said I had some golf clubs in the boot," Chambers told me. "But they didn't think it was funny. I kept wondering, 'When are they going to slap my wrists and let me go?' Instead, they hauled me into a police car while my colleagues watched.”

Chambers lost that job and only last week lost another in Northern Ireland, where he repaired to be with his girlfriend after being handed a criminal record and a £1,000 fine for saying on the Internet the kind of meaningless hyperbole we all say every day to air our grievances. Why was he fired from that second job? Because his employer heard him mention his forthcoming court appeal and its probable media coverage along with the words “bomb” and “airport” -- admittedly not wise water-cooler palaver in Northern Ireland. Yet Chambers’ attempt to preempt further misunderstanding was enough to do the opposite for the new boss.

In solidarity with this victim of a real-life Czech parable, people are planning a mass Twitter inundation Friday, the day of his appeal, of gobbets of good or great literature that would likewise indict the original authors under current counterterrorism statutes. These include John Betjeman’s verse, “Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!” (which was the basis for Morrissey’s equally tweetable lyric, “Come Armageddon.... Come, come, nuclear bomb” in “Everyday is Like Sunday”). Also on the roster is Shakespeare’s famous prescription, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,” against which it might truly be said that the skin of an innocent lamb has not made a scribbled-over parchment that undoes a man but that the parchment needs re-scribbling to see that innocent men are not undone.

Russ Smith at Splice Today has a short but pungent squib against the ridiculous charge of “McCarthyism” being leveled at all types of Ground Zero Mosque opponents. He reserves particular scorn for Peter Beinart, a pundit who has lately undergone the transformation from ADA-style liberal hawk to reigning hall monitor of American Jewry:

“If Beinart’s going to raise the Joseph McCarthy specter, shouldn’t he at least provide some evidence of Congressional inquisitions of Muslim-Americans (which haven’t occurred under the presidencies of either Bush or Obama), blacklisted men and women in academia, entertainment or even those applying for a mortgage or credit card, or mass deportations borne of rampant Islamophobia?”

It would have been nice if Smith also took his scalpel to the nonsensical term “Islamophobia,” but perhaps he lives to splice another day. But there are other substantial historical ironies and discrepancies that intrude upon this facile comparison between McCarthyism and the mosque affair.

-- The shrewdest critiques of McCarthyism came from serious Cold Warriors such as Whittaker Chambers and Robert Conquest, who argued that by sensationalizing a world-historical struggle, McCarthy was in effect giving a free hand to Soviet propaganda. Which indeed he was: Even into the perestroika and glasnost decades, Stalinoid apologists could compare the Great Terror to Congressional Red-baiting without a trace of irony.  Just to put this in perspective, between years 1937 and 1938, the Soviet Union arrested seven million people, executed one million more, and was complicit in the deaths of two million gulag inmates who perished either from starvation, medical neglect and/or extreme overwork. It would be gratifying to hear, as against so much multiculturalist patter, that the problem with the Ground Zero Mosque opponents it that they similarly confuse rather than make crucial distinctions in a long-term and necessary war. Is a slippery and self-promoting imam trying to be all things to all people a real “extremist” or just a nuisance? So far, Lawrence Wright has been one of the few students of global jihadism to offer sensible commentary on the mosque controversy and yet even he cannot elevate himself above equating loud but non-violent demagogues such as Pamela Geller with professional head loppers and suicide bombers.

-- McCarthyism claimed no human lives and his “victims” have largely been sacralized in the popular imagination as martyrs even when defending them on civil libertarian grounds ought not to mean defending them on political grounds. One of these, Dalton Trumbo was an avowed Stalinist who even censored new editions of his 1939 antiwar novel, Johnny Got His Gun, when the Hitler-Stalin pact evaporated with the Wehrmacht's invasion of Russia. Trumbo also blocked -- in a rather “McCarthyist” fashion, you might say -- the Hollywood adaptation of Arthur Koestler’s anti-Communist masterpiece, Darkness at Noon.

-- Indeed, Communists, fellow travelers and Soviet spies and agents of influence who eventually “broke” with Moscow faced much harsher public defamation campaigns in the international press and threats to their survival than did any blacklisted screenwriters. Former underground activist turned national whistle-blower Elizabeth Bentley was repaid for her service to national security by having her sexual escapades ventilated in the American media. KGB agent Ignace Reiss was murdered in Switzerland. KGB defector Walter Krivitsky committed suicide in a Washington, D.C. hotel room. The aforementioned Chambers, who narrow escaped the NKVD/GPU’s attempts to find him after he'd abandoned the underground, then had a pleasure of facing Alger Hiss's rebarbative national defense team, which persists today, in spite of all evidence, in the masthead of The Nation magazine. Within the last few years, Trumbo has been the subject of a fawning documentary while Chambers’ much more fascinating and film-worthy career has so far failed to find studio backing.

-- So preoccupied is the intelligentsia with this brief but shameful episode in American history that McCarthyism has become its own statute in politically correct thought policing even to the point of absurdity. Angela Davis was thus described as an “activist” in the Stanford University newspaper when she came to speak at the California campus because to name her as the actual vice president of the CPUSA would have been “McCarthyist” of the student press. The Italian film Il Postino lost an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film because it dealt with Stalinist indoctrination and the Italian media complained to the Los Angeles Times that such subject matter was... you get the idea.  In the same manner, Rauf’s unpleasant-to-cretinous views on everything from Israel’s right to exist to the Khomeinist concept of vilayet-i-faqih to the “root causes” of the September 11 mass murders are papered over or ignored by histrionic defenders of "tolerance," even when those not necessarily opposed to the idea of a mosque close to Ground Zero mention them.

-- Former Soviet officials used to seriously suggest to Western interlocutors that McCarthy himself was a Russian spy. As cited earlier, he was a rhetorical or polemical scarecrow for distracting audiences from grave Soviet atrocities and, after all, didn’t he receive electoral help from the Wisconsin Communist Party in first unhorsing Robert LaFollette for the senatorship? It seems unlikely in the extreme that Al Qaeda's lieutenant corps has made the equivalent inquires of Osama bin Laden about Newt Gingrich, Abe Foxman and Sarah Palin's true identities.

-- On balance, McCarthy underestimated the extent of Soviet espionage in the United States, particularly in the State Department. For a good summary of what the Russian archives and FBI Venona decrypts have turned up on the surprising level of Communist infiltration in the 1930s and 1940s, see The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West, by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, and also Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev.

-- McCarthy’s ultimate downfall followed his stupid attempt to hunt suspected Communists in the U.S. military, the one precinct of state power that the Soviets put the least amount of effort in infiltrating. Being publicly abjured by General Eisenhower put an end to the senator’s overlong career. By contrast, the Islamist organization Hizb ut Tahrir believes that the easiest way to establish a worldwide caliphate is to take over militaries in Muslim countries from within and foment coups. In a U.S. context, the ascension of Major Nidal Malik Hasan would seem to tell against a paranoid fear of at least a strong attempt at this clandestine strategy.

-- The severest bullies in the present conflict are fanatical Muslims, not the United States or Western countries, which, if anything, have been far too lax and submissive in combating Islamism’s farsighted entryist agenda. If there is a pointlessness to the mosque controversy it is that it has turned a real cultural argument into a sentimental brief on cultural sensitivities. Last Spring, Ibn Warraq and I wrote a long essay for City Journal on how the Organization for the Islamic Conference (OIC) operated as a kind of sacred Comintern, working to criminalize “blasphemy” by instituting speech and literature codes in Western countries. It has so far had its most impressive success in controlling the largest voting bloc of the UN Human Rights Council, a body designed to protect internationally against abuses of human rights but has instead, at the OIC's prompting, remained silent on genocide in Darfur, the crackdown of civil dissent in Iran and murder of homosexuals in Saudi Arabia. It has even re-written the mandate of its Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Speech such that this official must now inform on people saying critical or unflattering things about religion, with one in particular in mind. Meanwhile, Saudi sheiks engage in libel tourism and get embarrassing books about themselves banned from the shelves in Europe. Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who has endowed two major Middle East academic centers at Harvard and Georgetown, sponsors tele-a-thons in Riyadh where clerics are permitted to spout the vilest incitements against Jews, secularists and Americans. Last I checked, it was Muslims claiming “offense” who have hauled their critics before actual government tribunals where verdicts rendered against the defendants can carry real financial and civil consequences. See Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant's separate skirmishes with the “Human Rights Commissions” of Canada. If this is not a more accurate semantic updating of the McCarthyism card, then nothing is.

With the resumption of Arab-Israeli direct talks comes the regurgitation of a minority view that these talks are destined to fail because Hamas is excluded. The first salvo in this ongoing campaign came from Palestinian-American blogger Ali Abunimah, an advocate of the one-state solution, who expounded upon the need for recognizing Hamas in the New York Times. Peter Beinart made the same case in a broader Daily Beast column about Obama's failed foreign policy. What both had in common, apart from thinking rather generously of a totalitarian and anti-Semitic Islamist party, is use of the Irish Republican Army and Northern Ireland as a convenient analogy for the Middle East peace process. Didn't the British government eventually sit down with Sinn Fein, the IRA's "political wing," after decades of murderous mayhem in Belfast and Tube, pub, and other bombings on the mainland? And can't the same lessons learned from the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which inaugurated the end of the Troubles, be applied to the Arab-Israeli conflict?

There are many obvious reasons why this analogy fails. The IRA never employed suicide bombers or called for the wholesale destruction of Great Britain. Nor was it the client of a theocratic state intent on becoming a nuclear power. It was also thoroughly integrated with Sinn Fein and could therefore act with greater strategic cohesion than the fragmented Hamas, whose political and paramilitary leadership is spread throughout Gaza, the West Bank, and Damascus, Syria. But, most important, the analogy misconstrues the history of the Northern Ireland peace process and the ultimate aim of the Good Friday Agreement, which was, chiefly, to undermine the terrorists, not to legitimize them.

Abunimah and Beinart both refer to Hamas' 2006 election victory, although neither acknowledges that the group has twice refused to hold new national elections this year, fearing a likely walloping at the polls. Moreover, Hamas has loudly denounced each and every framework for Arab-Israeli negotiations from the Clinton-brokered Oslo Accords of 1993, which created Palestinian democracy in the first place, to the Bush administration's 2002 roadmap for peace. It's worth measuring all this against the way "inclusive dialogue" with the IRA really proceeded.

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BBC Arabic's Jerusalem correspondent Ahmad Budeiri claims that were it not for "hostile environment training," he might have been beaten and kidnapped by "an angry mob" of Israelis in Ashdod in response to his reporting on the Free Gaza flotilla raid.

In an online dispatch for the BBC World Service, Budeiri describes a scene in the Israeli port city as something out of Somalia or Waziristan. Only by his own quick-witted recourse to the BBC's safety-first self-preservation seminar, Budeiri insists, did he and his crew narrowly escape being assaulted or taken hostage by a violent gang of Ashdod residents. He writes:

"I remembered what I was trained for in a kidnap situation and used the exact process during the mob incident. The cameraman and I had a password that, if used, he will start packing and I would be on the phone for more than ten minutes. By doing this the mob lost interest in me and gave us a gap to leave the location without being spotted. Other Arab crews were beaten when they all left as one big group and were slow departing because of their equipment."

Budeiri says that the Ashdod police merely looked on with indifference and "never reacted to nor stepped in to prevent the threats" - an odd disclosure in that these "threats" were evidently backed up by real actions and yet our correspondent doesn't explain what the police response to those might have been. Also, assuming others saw and reported on the Ashdod "chaos," why is this first-person testimony the BBC's first and only statement on the matter?

Even as a primer on institutional methods of journalistic precaution in the field, Budeiri's piece does little to avoid a descent into macabre self-parody:

"The course also taught me to avoid any confrontation, but at the same time not to be seen as a weak person. While I was on air, the mob tried to distract me and some then even blocked the camera. I tried to get them to speak on air and show I was not weak, but also fight back in a positive way to gain respect for a moment - other reporters did not do that which resulted in more fury."

It seems almost cruel to inquire of Budeiri how a furious mob of would-be kidnappers were first approached for on-air testimony, or to what secret location in Israel's fifth largest city they might have repaired with a foreign stringer from a multinational news organization. Other daunting obstacles standing in the way of Budeieri's broadcasts that week included "having to charge my mobile phone four times a day" and tolerating the beastly heat and unreliable bus schedule of Beersheva.

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Old wounds shall be worried anew; stale arguments shall be leavened once more.

Tony Blair's record-shattering memoir, A Journey, which has been marketed for its salacity of disclosures about Gordon Brown (emotionally unintelligent, blackmailing), the Queen (lunch-maker and dish-washer), and Princess Diana (dangerously emotional, manipulative) was published on a day when its author wasn't even in England but the Labour party was in the midst of deciding its next leader. This was either a twofer display of chutzpah or a sign of his centripetal significance.

In the last several months, the former prime minister has given testimony at the Chilcot Inquiry, where every arcane footnote in the British preparations for the Iraq war was cited to challenge him once more on the decision that has defined his legacy. He has also, as the Mideast envoy of the Quartet, overseen the Palestinian state-building effort in the West Bank led by Salam Fayyad, delivered a blockbuster speech on de-legitimization of Israel at Herzliya, and acted as a key participant in the Arab-Israeli direct talks currently taking place in Washington. If David Cameron has worked this hard in office, he has yet to let on.

The re-emergence of Blair in the press means the re-emergence of demonic Blair hatred, which Roman Polanski's conspiratorially silly film The Ghost Writer utterly failed to capture. What's left of this ragtag contingent of "war crimes" accusers is not very impressive by way of number or influence. This contingent specializes in organized disruption: A tour stop in Dublin has already been interrupted by egg and shoe throwing protestors allied with the Stop the War Coalition, a potpourri of irrelevant Marxists and hyper-relevant Islamists led by Tony Benn, the second-longest serving Labour MP and a type of befuddled English radical that only grows more fuddled with age. (Benn was last heard explaining the agricultural achievements of Mao Zedong on the BBC World Service documentary about useful idiots.) Nevertheless, this party stalwart is treated somewhat reverentially in A Journey, a volume that his Stopper coalition, ever professing concern for the blood spilled in Iraq and Afghanistan, wishes to see unsold despite the fact that all proceeds go to a veterans' charity.

The neo-fascist British National Party had threatened to attend a similar demonstration, planned for last Wednesday, during a scheduled book signing at Waterstone's in Piccadilly, an appearance Blair decided to cancel at the last minute rather than risk a public disruption. The Socialist Workers Party has already moved scores of memoirs to the "Crime" section of book retailers where a reading public glutted on the fiction of Dick Francis and P. D. James is more likely to discover it anyway.

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No one believes that Arab-Israeli direct talks are likely to lead to a viable peace deal since none of the preconditions for one are in place. Hamas still controls Gaza and tosses Fatah loyalists off of rooftops. Jerusalem is either a Palestinian capital or an undivided Israeli one. Religious-nationalist settlements in the West Bank are due to renew their "natural growth" at the end of the month. Palestinians demand that all refugees of the 1948 and 1967 wars, and their descendants, be allowed back into what is now the State of Israel. Given this dour climate for rapprochement, one would be forgiven for not taking notice of the substantive if prosaic achievements that these negotiations may yet yield, namely, those fixed around furthering Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad's state-building efforts in the West Bank.

A year ago, Fayyad introduced a two-year plan for laying down the armature of a future Palestinian state with an emphasis on economic development, security and bureaucratic housecleaning. The goal was to end the corrupt, Tammany-style system of patronage that formerly defined the Palestinian Authority under Yasser Arafat and create transparent and accountable institutions beholden to no one party, particularly Fatah. Not only were these the necessary preconditions for a functioning democracy, Fayyad reasoned, but they were also indispensable indicators of financial health and stability necessary for luring foreign capital. Halfway through, Fayyad's two year-program is working.

The West Bank economy, according to the International Monetary Fund, grew 8.5 percent last year despite a global recession and ongoing military occupation. Nablus, formerly a flashpoint in the second intifada, is today home to a burgeoning marketplace of imported luxury goods and a brand new cinema featuring the latest Hollywood blockbusters. An older movie house in Jenin, another memorable locus for Arab-Israeli violence, reopened last month after being shuttered for twenty years and just in time for a three-day film festival. Ramallah, the de facto Palestinian capital, is undergoing both a cultural renaissance as well as a housing boom, with apartments in well-off neighborhoods now selling for as much as $200,000 each. The trendy Jordanian cafe-restaurant chain Tche Tche has unveiled a branch in Ramallah, and a 5-star Movenpick hotel is set to open this month.

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The BBC World Service recently broadcast a two-part investigative documentary, hosted by John Sweeney, on the useful idiot, a concept that Lenin didn't invent so much as expropriate to denote the semi-witting accomplices of Western imperialism. Although more frequently employed in the service of deriding apologists of the totalitarian system Lenin created, the phenomenon to which useful idiocy alludes is transferable to any and all modern tyrannies. (The closely related concept of 'fellow traveler' is not nearly as fungible because it still retains the definition Trotsky intended in Literature and Revolution--that of being a halfway-there Bolshevik whose political future was as yet undecided by historical circumstances.) The Sweeney documentary examines the Soviet Union, Red China, apartheid South Africa, and Ba'athist Iraq, and while all interviewees and case studies are well chosen, one is still left feeling unenlightened as to the etiology of this troubling condition. What causes useful idiocy, and how is it that so many sufferers are eventually cured?

A common precipitant is a broad ideological sympathy with the long-term goals of a tyrannical state matched by an incuriosity about measuring its touted claims with tangible reality. Very often this isn't entirely the sympathizer's fault as the state makes every effort to mask its deformities and keep the fantasy in tact. "I was taken around and shown things," a very candid Doris Lessing tells Sweeney. "I can't understand why I was so gullible." The Potemkin dupe may have begun with Catherine the Great, but it is a more rampant species in the twentieth century. None has grimly excelled or exceeded the category better than Maxim Gorky.

Lenin's favorite novelist had spent the formative early years of the Soviet Union on the isle of Capri and thus counts as something of a Westernized observer to his native Russia. After being welcomed home by an ingratiating Stalin, then badly in need of writers who hadn't been arrested or shot, Gorky paid a visit to the notorious penal colony at Solovki in order to see how counter-revolutionaries were being rehabilitated by the state. The wretched reality of the place been masked in advance--with well-fed guards dressed up as prisoners--save for one minor oversight. Within three hundred yards of where Gorky and his retinue had alighted, a ship docked at Popov Island was being loaded up by a visibly bedraggled gang of real inmates. Of this infamous episode in useful idiocy, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writes:

Where can this disgraceful spectacle--these men dressed in sacks--be hidden? The entire journey of the great Humanist will have been for naught if he sees them now. Well, of course, he will try hard not to notice them, but help him! Drown them in the sea? They will wail and flounder. Bury them in the earth? There's no time. No, only a worthy son of the Archipelago could find a way out of this one. The work assigner ordered, "Stop work! Close ranks! Still closer! Sit down on the ground! Sit still!" And a tarpaulin was thrown over them. "Anyone who moves will be shot!"

This crude deception may have gone unnoticed by Gorky (though it'd be good to know what he thought those human-shaped objects under the tarpaulin were), but the unscripted encounter that followed left little to the airbrushed imagination. While touring the children's quarters, he was cornered by a fourteen year-old prisoner who proceeded to tell him of the day-to-day horrors of Solovki being kept from view. Gorky, writes Solzhenitsyn, left in tears, only then to register in the visitor's book his ecstatic praise for the "vigilant and tireless sentinels of the Revolution." (The boy was later shot.) Gorky had managed to work himself out and then back into a fantasy within the space of minutes or hours. How? We can see the self-preservation instinct easily enough in his decision: He knew that popularizing what he'd been told would result in his own imprisonment or death. But, like all artists in a patronage system, Gorky probably also felt that his reputation rested on catering to certain level of expectation. The very fact of his celebrity under Stalinism was proof enough against his possessing the courage needed to put that celebrity to good use. Gorky went on to author a famously bad book about the White Sea-Baltic Canal, built wholly by slave labor and to little economic benefit to the state, that argued in favor of the rehabilitation of enemies of the people, a claim, needless to say, never borne out by Soviet parole statistics.

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Daniel Henninger at the Wall Street Journal envisions a world still blighted by the presence of Saddam Hussein:

Saddam was obsessed with Iran. Imagine the effect on the jolly Iraqi's thinking come 2005 and the rise to stardom of Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, publicly mocking the West's efforts to shut his nuclear program and threatening enemies with annihilation. That year Ahmadinejad broke the U.N. seals at the Isfahan uranium enrichment plant. In North Korea, Kim Jong Il was flouting the civilized world, conducting nuclear-weapon tests and test-firing missiles into the Sea of Japan. In such a world, Saddam would have aspired to play in the same league as Iran and NoKo. Would we have "contained" him?

There are two possible scenarios to weigh and I can’t tell which is worse.

The first is that Saddam would have redoubled his efforts to reconstitute his own nuclear program either by cutting a deal with North Korea or A.Q. Khan (which all evidence shows he was trying to do anyway) but with new assistance. Arab regimes now quietly entreating the United States and Israel to take care of the mullahs’s atomic ambitions for them would likely hedge their bets by helping out the one Sunni brethren who stood the best chance of becoming a "deterrent." For Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Syria, the unpredictable adventurist of yesterday would suddenly appear a reliable countermeasure against Shiite predominance tomorrow.

The second grim outcome to contemplate is that Saddam might have once again become a military ally of the United States, providing us with intelligence on Tehran in exchange for a loosening of sanctions or some other material douceur to keep his dictatorship afloat. If you think such an arrangement impossible after the first Gulf War, the Anfal campaign and the No-Fly zones, you’d do well to remember the arguments that were in fact trotted out against removing Saddam from power in 2002. Mainstream war opponents took for granted that he was indeed seeking the bomb and yet they believed he was containable. Well, it's fairly easy to see the progression of this logic in light of a mounting Iranian threat: "realists" of both a right and left coloring would now make the case that only by soliciting the Baathist’s aid on this key national security challenge could we truly be able to cool his lust for a nuke of his own.

Co-written with Hussein Ibish.

Many contentious issues could bedevil the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that began Wednesday, but on one subject both sides can largely agree: The state-building program launched last year by Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has made measurable progress. While the terrorist group Hamas rules in the Gaza Strip, Palestinians in the West Bank are trying to build the framework of a future state.

The West Bank economy grew by 8.5% last year (according to the International Monetary Fund), despite the global recession and regional factors inhospitable to foreign investment. Palestinian GDP for the third quarter of 2009 was $1.24 billion, up from $1.18 billion a year before.

Real estate in the West Bank is booming. Property prices in Ramallah have risen 30% in the last two years, according to local developers. In July, construction began on Ramallah's Ersal Commercial Center, a $400 million project expected to create thousands of new jobs. And a joint Palestinian-Qatari company is currently building Palestine's first planned city, Rawabi, a high-tech suburb with business and commercial districts and 5,000 homes. A further accelerant to the housing market will be a new $500 million mortgage fund, established by the Palestine Investment Fund, which will begin issuing loans later this year.

These promising trends are reflected in the Palestine Securities Exchange, especially its main Al Quds Index, which in June experienced a 5% market capitalization increase to reach $76.8 million. According to the Portland Trust, four out of the five main sectors of the PSE increased in 2009, with banking up by 30.6%. That's one reason the European Investment Bank last December made a $6.4 million "anchor" investment in Palestine's first venture capital fund. The fund will target export-oriented information and communications technology businesses, which represent the only area of the Palestinian economy that has seen almost uninterrupted growth over the past decade.

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If radicalism has had any positive value in the last century, it was to scandalize an otherwise complacent centre-left consensus on civil rights, one reason why I’ll always prefer the hardheaded wisdom of “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” to the treacly pastiche of “I Have a Dream.”

Richard Just -- which rather sounds like the pen name someone in his position would adopt -- has authored an indignant essay in The New Republic against Barack Obama’s nonsensical views on gay marriage, which have objectively placed the Democratic president to the right of “Laura Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and, according to a new CNN poll, 52 percent of the American people.” The relevant portion is this:

Obama argues that he is against gay marriage while also opposing efforts like Prop 8 that would ban it. He justifies this by saying that state constitutions should not be used to reduce rights. (His exact words: “I am not in favor of gay marriage, but when you’re playing around with constitutions, just to prohibit somebody who cares about another person, it just seems to me that that is not what America is about.”) Obama appears to be saying that it is fine to prohibit gay people from getting married, as long as the vehicle for doing so is not a constitution. Presumably, then, he supports the numerous states that have banned same-sex marriage through other means, without resorting to a constitutional amendment? If so, he might be the only person in the country to occupy this narrow, and frankly absurd, slice of intellectual terrain. Obama has also said he favors civil unions rather than gay marriage because the question of where and how to apply the label “marriage” is a religious one. This argument makes even less sense than his stance on state constitutions, since marriage, for better or for worse, is very much a government matter.

By now it’s common knowledge that Ken Mehlman, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee and the former manager of George W. Bush’s presidential re-election campaign, prefers the company of men to women and believes in same-sex marriage legislation. Was it cynicism or prudence that impelled a high-ranking conservative not to make the most of this aspect of his “identity” when it might have made a political difference?   The Daily Show will no doubt have a sober and fair-minded discussion about this very topic in the days to come. But the DNC and those ever diminishing Obama torch-bearers are hardly in a position to score partisan points off of Mehlman’s disclosure.

In fact, the best arguments in favor of gay marriage have come from conservatives such as Jamie Kirchick and Jonathan Rauch, both of whom can’t quite fathom what’s leftist about gentrifying another ten percent of the population. (There’s also likely some forward-thinking Karl Rove in the younger crop of GOP operatives who sees expanding the party’s voter base by endorsing such a platform.)

Meanwhile, the best half-serious arguments against gay marriage come from cultural traditionalists, but not the kind you think. There are quite a few homosexuals, mostly older, who fear that by gaining admittance to mainstream institutions, they stand to forfeit the aura of camp subversiveness and bohemian affiliation that formerly clung to the "lifestyle." If you know anything about English poetry in the 1930's, you'll know exactly what this cultivated and storied aesthetic looks like: Larkin called it the oh-my-dear-ist school, best embodied by Auden and Spender. Yet this contingent is becoming a source for idiosyncratic nostalgia -- the sexual equivalent of Yiddish revivalism -- equally embarrassed by the term "partner" as it is by Bravo's reality television programming. A viable cultural movement it is not.]]> http://www.snarksmith.com/2010/08/obama_and_gay_marriage.html http://www.snarksmith.com/2010/08/obama_and_gay_marriage.html Fri, 27 Aug 2010 07:32:29 -0500 New @ The Weekly Standard:

Iranian authorities first arrested Shiva Nazar Ahari in 2001, when she was seventeen. Her 'crime' was attending a candlelight vigil in Tehran that commemorated the victims of 9/11. Since then, she's taught Iranian homeless children and Afghan refugees' children. In 2006, after she became the spokeswoman for the Committee of Human Rights Reporters (CHRR), Ahari was kicked out of university, whereupon her troubles really began.

She was re-arrested in June 2009 and sent to Tehran's notorious Evin Prison, where she spent 33 days in solitary confinement. The cells are so small that a short person can't even stretch her arms or legs. One informed observer has described them to me as 'human coffins.' Despite being verbally threatened by Saeed Mortazavi, Tehran's prosecutor general, who told her she'd be murdered if she didn't stop working on human rights campaigns in Iran, Ahari persevered. She was released in September 2009 on $200,000 bail and promptly resumed her defense of political prisoners. A month later, she paid a visit to the gravesite of Sohrab Arabi, a nineteen year-old student who'd been arrested in June 2009 for protesting Iran's sham presidential "election" and was subsequently shot in the chest while in state custody.

In December of last year, Ahari was arrested yet again, along with two other activists, while en route to the funeral of Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, a man considered to be the clerical inspiration behind much of the Green Revolution. Ahari went on hunger strike for two days, then fell ill and was taken to Evin's prison hospital.

According to the Revolutionary Court, which is due to try her case on September 4, she stands accused of "anti-regime propaganda by working with the CHRR website" and "acts contrary to national security through participation in gatherings on November 4, 2009 and December 7, 2009." These are the dates, respectively, of the anniversary of the U.S. embassy seizure, which is a sanctified Iranian holiday but last year became a ferment of democratic protest, and the Student Day demonstrations, which commemorate the murder of three Iranians students killed in 1953 by the Pahlavi government. Ahari maintains she was at home on both days.

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