Surrendering Reason to Hate?

Rick Moran's morning essay made me think about what I do as an online commentator.

The piece is a lengthy discourse on the craft of blogging. Moran explains his motives and development as an online writer, discussing some of the ups and downs of the trade. Of particular note is his discussion of partisan flame wars and the demonization of the other. Moran is introspective:

If my blog attracted only those who usually agreed with me and thought I was the bee’s knees when it came to commentary, blogging would be a marvelous daily exercise. But there is another side to blogging that most of us never talk about; the relentless, daily pounding of negativism, hurtful epithets, and outright spewing hatred that arrives in the form of comments and emails from the other side as well as other blogs linking and posting on something I’ve written.

We all like to think of ourselves as having thick skins and that such criticism rolls off our backs and never affects us. This is the macho element in blogging, one of its more unattractive and dishonest aspects. In this, some of us feel obligated to give back in kind, something I have done on too many occasions to count. Yes, I regret it. And believe me, I have often been the initiator of such ugliness.

Still, there are many bloggers on both the right and left who shame me with their equanimity in the face of the most virulent and nasty personal attacks. Ed Morrissey comes to mind on the right. The folks at Crooked Timber and Obsidian Wings on the left are generally cool in the face of such criticism as well.

But this is not a confessional post where I recognize my sins and ask forgiveness. I am what I am and doubt I will change. Rather, it is my intent to highlight the fact that despite my predilection for using violent language in my defense or to ridicule my political opponents, I have always granted them a certain rough integrity in their beliefs – that they are wrongheaded not evil; that they are arrogant and stupid, not unpatriotic or that they hate America.

Read the whole thing at the link (as well as the great additional resources, here and here). There's some conjecture as to whether longitudinally politics is nastier today than, say, 100 years ago. But one of the essay's payoffs is the (sort-of) suggestion of what-goes-around-comes-around for partisan attack-masters:

Those who accuse all liberals of being unpatriotic or un-American perhaps have no cause to grumble when an equally malicious lie like “racist” is directed at them. But having such an epithet tossed in my direction – especially as it has been done recently – I find to be reflective of a mindset that is terrified of open debate and thus resorts to twisting semantics in order to obscure a flawed critique. They can’t argue the issues so the magic word is applied and debate instantly ceases.

I think the conclusion here - that weaknesses in rational argumentation are remedied by resort to argumentum ad hominem - is basically right, although I'd suggest that the point about arguing that "all liberals" are unpatriotic (or pacifist, or irreligious, etc.), needs a bit of elaboration.

I started blogging precisely to combat the anti-Americanism and postmodern nihilism that had infected debates on America's post-9/11 foreign policy. At first I was a bit surprised when attacked as "racist" (or fascist, or Nazi, or neocon warmonger, etc.). But I soon realized, seriously, that these were people who would do me physical harm if they had the chance, or at least some have said.

But I differ in debate from my antagonists in that I seek to maintain a morality of reason in argumentation. Sometimes I'm sloppy by attacking the "left" in general, but when I deploy terms like "nihilist" it's in the descriptive, analytical sense, rather than as an effort to inflict emotional or psychological pain. In other words, there's a ontological basis to my partisan repudiations. I seek to understand and explain what's underlying the postmodern hatred of the anti-everything sensibilities of the American left.

For example, I'm coming around to fuller understanding of the notion of secular demonology.

While certainly both sides engage in extremist attacks on the other, there appears to be a difference in the attack culture of central players in the partisan debates. Folks like those at Daily Kos and Firedoglake, for example, are the netroots base of the Democratic Party, people who are embraced and recruited in the partisan battles of left-wing establishment politics. This is not true on the right, for the most part. While I'm sure some comment threads at major conservative blogs get out of hand on occasion, it is not the explicit policy of conservatives to demonize their foes (while Daily Kos openly advocates it).

The most recent outburst of left-wing demonization involved last week's shootings at Unitarian Universalist Church in Tennessee. The leftists became positively unglued, seeing in Jim David Adkisson a footsoldier of conservative hatred. The actions of a lone, unstable killer became the basis for smearing the entire GOP universe.

Elizabeth Scalia discusses how Adkisson's case illuminates our frequent descents into partisan recrimination:

Initial reports were that Adkisson had “problems with Christians.” Later reports suggested he also had “problems” with “the liberal movement” and with gays. Predictably, people on both the right and left immediately staked out claims of victimhood and identified each other as the true culprits upon whom both blame and condemnation must rain down. “They” inspired Adkisson to kill those worshipers, no, to kill those progressives, no, to kill those … those …

Those human beings.

If you’re wondering who “they” is, “they” is us, losing a little more of our shared humanity every day, as we increasingly insulate ourselves away from the “others” who do not hold the same worldview as we do. We label ourselves as belonging to some respectable group of believers, or agnostics, or liberals, or conservatives, and we live, work, socialize, and blog — as much as life will allow — amongst our “respectable” peers, in our “respectable” echo chambers. We label the “others” as disrespectable and then commence disrespecting.

It begins with name-calling, which seems so innocuous, so sandbox. Well, name-calling is infantile behavior, but it is hardly innocuous. As marijuana is to heroin, name-calling is to diminished humanity — the gateway. It begins the whole process of dehumanization. Call someone a name and they immediately become “less human” to you, and the less human they seem, the easier they are to hate and to destroy. A “fetus,” after all, is easier to destroy than a “baby.”

Thus, George W. Bush is “Chimpy McHitler.” Hillary Clinton is “a pig in a pantsuit.” Barack Obama is “O-Bambi.” Cindy McCain, who has exhibited some courage and laudable compassion in her life, is reduced to a “pill-popping beer-frau,” and so forth. From there it is smooth sailing down an ever-descending river of hatred, until we are incapable of seeing anything good in the “other,” both because we have willfully hardened our hearts, and because our hate — especially when it is supported by a group of like minds — feels safe and inviolable.

Recently I asked rabid Bush-haters if they could manage to say “one good thing” about the president. Predictably, they could not.

They are capable of sarcasm: “One good thing is he will die someday.” “One good thing is that he can’t serve three terms.” Once, when pressed, someone sneered: “He managed to marry a librarian who could read and explain books to him.”

Scalia notes that both sides do it - both sides are unwilling to find that "one good thing" to say about their political enemies. They're ready to "surrender reason to hate."

While I don't disagree altogether, it seems that most of the recent examples of surrendering to hate can be found on the left, for example following the deaths of Tim Russert, Jesse Helms, and Tony Snow. Robert Novak's announcement last week of illness offered another opportunity for left-wing demonization.

In contrast, when Senator Edward Kennedy was rushed to the hospital in May, to be diagnosed with a brain tumor, I found nothing but well-wishing across the conservative blogosphere.

Ben Johnson offered an explanation for all of this in "Kennedy's Illness, and the Left's." At base, for Johnson, there appears to be a deficit of the soul on the left, an absence of divine grace. This gap removes a prohibitive moral restraint in left-wing partisans and preconditions them to cheer the pain, suffering, and demise of conservatives.

I've gone even further in suggesting that Marxist ideology - which guides the class conscious, anti-imperialist project of contemporary "progressives" - provides leftists with a doctrine of hatred, a political demonology to drive the dehumanization campaigns against their opponents:

As a kind of universal secular Church, Marxism succeeded, in a historically unprecedented way, in satisfying the ideological, political, and psychological needs of marginalized and alienated intellectuals scattered all over the world. It became the first secular Umma of intellectuals....

Marxism has always been little more than pseudo-universalism, a false promise of intellectual and moral universalism, for an exclusive ideology, by definition, cannot be universalistic. Far from a symbolic design for human fellowship and peaceful coexistence of societies, cultures, and civilizations, Marxism rests on the assumption of radical evil and also on the quest for enemies.

This quest for enemies consumes far left-wing partisans. It is an endless search seeking to delegitimize and dehumanize those who would threaten the safety of a secular, redistributionist world of exclusive false brotherhood and psychological security.

This is why I think there are variations in the propensity to surrender to hate. The left's psychopolitical agenda is "clothed in darkness." It is this very difficult for them to find that "one good thing" about those with whom they differ.

The Anti-Patriot Culture of the American Left

I put up a couple of essays on patriotism and politics this last Fourth of July, for example, "Barack Obama and the Patriotism of Dissent."

The topic's endlessly fascinating as a primer on the rise of postmodern culture in contemporary left-wing politics.

Another excellent addition to the debate is found in Larrey Anderson's photo-essay from the Oregon Country Fair, "Why the Left is Unpatriotic and Why the Right Should Say So":

The Oregon Country Fair is an excellent example of the culture of the left in today's America. This is not a culture that favors middle-class capitalism or the traditional form of American patriotism. It is a culture seeking a one-world government, a primitive socialist economic system, a low-tech manufacturing infrastructure, and a religion that worships nature instead of God.

I've got more commentary on left-wing anti-patriotism here.

But for another example, see Perverted Truth, "The Problem of Patriotism."

Photo Credit: American Thinker

Obama Sees Traction in Continuing Racial Grievance

Election 2008 may be remembered for an odd counter-intuition on racial progress: For the first time in history, a black American has secured a major-party nomination for the presidency. This milestone should demonstrate America's equal political opportunity for people of color. Yet, simultaneously, the very ascendence of a black presidential nominee is forcing people to confront latent racial prejudices that seemed slowly fading as the pattern of post-civil rights integration normalized cross-racial comity and interaction.

Is Barack Obama to blame for the fraying of the integrationist consensus?

A man who advertised himself as America's postracial healer now appears to be complicit in the resegregation of American attitudes on skin color and the politics of racial recrimination.

Gallup polling, for example, finds a majority of Americans agreeing racism is widespread:

A recent USA Today/Gallup poll finds most Americans saying racism is widespread against blacks in the United States. This includes a slim majority of whites (51%), a slightly higher 59% of Hispanics, and the vast majority of blacks (78%)....

As on most issues involving race in the United States, blacks are much more likely to see racism as a problem than are whites. However, other questions in the poll showed that Americans remain optimistic that race relations could improve, if Americans could hold an open national dialogue on race and if Barack Obama were elected as the first black president.

Notice how black Americans are much more likely to view politics through a racial prism.

Indeed, today's Washington Post poll finds Barack Obama running strong overwhelmingly among narrow interest group constituencies sensitive to race-baiting appeals:

Democratic Sen. Barack Obama holds a 2 to 1 edge over Republican Sen. John McCain among the nation's low-wage workers, but many are unconvinced that either presidential candidate would be better than the other at fixing the ailing economy or improving the health-care system, according to a new national poll.

Obama's advantage is attributable largely to overwhelming support from two traditional Democratic constituencies: African Americans and Hispanics...

Yet:

Obama's standing with the white workers runs counter to an impression, dating from the primary season, that he struggles to attract support from that group. McCain advisers have said for months that they think the Republican can win a significant share of those voters because of Obama's performance in the spring.

The survey suggests it will be difficult, but not impossible, for McCain to increase his appeal.

Think about this: The Post's survey contacted people making at or below $27,000 annually - that is, the working classes. So, we are seeing lower-income whites who are favorable to the Obama campaign, but also, in Gallup's findings, only a slight majority of white Americans see society as racist.

In other words, the Obama campaign has an incentive to push racial politics as a wedge issue.

Black voters already cling to outdating notions of hegemomic racist domination of the political landscape. If Obama can sharpen racist thinking among white voters, by alleging that John McCain is exploiting racist stereotypical images of sexual predation among blacks, perhaps more white voters - who are more inclined toward electoral color-blindness, but may have debilitating white guilt - can be sucked into the frame of a racial recriminatory coalition: McCain's racist! Vote Obama!

Thus, strangely, Barack Obama has in fact no incentive to campaign on a post-civil rights platform of equality of opportunity. Indeed, Juan Williams notes that last week's outbursts might just be the beginning of racial general election campaign:

With polls showing the presidential contest between John McCain and Barack Obama getting closer, a question is now looming larger and larger. Is skin color going to be the deciding factor?

Just last week, Sen. Obama warned voters that Sen. McCain's campaign will exploit the race issue by telling voters that "he doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills." A few weeks earlier, he said they will attack his lack of experience but also added, "And did I mention he's black?"

The McCain campaign did not counter the first punch, but after last week's jab -- fearing that Mr. Obama was getting away with calling his candidate a racist -- campaign manager Rick Davis responded to the dollar-bill attack by saying, "Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck. It's divisive, negative, shameful and wrong."

Mr. Obama's campaign concedes it has no clear example of a Republican attack that expressly cites Mr. Obama's name or race. Yet in the last few days some Obama supporters were at it again, suggesting that a McCain ad attacking Mr. Obama as little more than a "celebrity," by featuring young white women such as Britney Spears, is an appeal to white anxiety about black men and white women.

The race issue is clearly not going away.

Williams suggest that the Bradley effect may be at work, with many white voters not revealing their genuine racial sensitivties to pollsters. Therefore, Williams notes that instead of continuing crass racial appeals to further divide the electorate, Obama needs to return to his original promise of racial transcendence:

To win this campaign, Mr. Obama needs to assure undecided white voters that he shares their values and is worthy of their trust. To do that he has to minimize attention to different racial attitudes toward his candidacy as well as racially polarizing issues, and appeal to the common experiences that bind Americans regardless of color.

Obama conceded last Friday that his "dollar bill" remark sought to play the race card. Hopefully, Obama will go further and fully repudiate the politics of racial demonization.

Polls show that Americans see race discrimination as continuing, and the odd implication for the Democrats is that they can score political points by further exacerbating those racial tensions that do exist.

Maybe America will one day have a campaign judging presidential candidates by the content of their character, but it won't be Barack Obama's presidential bid that helps us get there.

See also, Betsy Newmark, "It Always Seems to Come Down to Racism."

Graphic Credit: Gallup Poll

Bush War Crimes and the Fog of History

There's an intriguing set of articles and responses online today regarding the Bush administration and civil liberties in the war on terror.

For me, one of the things that pops out is that the outrage over America's response to terror, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and especially the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, is driven mostly by anger at President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. Routinely, I see suggestions that the impairments of civil liberties under Bush are the worst in American history. Much of this, even with the often super-sophisticated scholarly presentations, ends up being Bush derangement leavened with a foggy grasp of U.S. history.

We see this in Jonathan Mahler's, "The Fog of War-Crimes Trials," at the New York Times. Mahler compares the Bush administration's military tribunals to the Nazi's Nuremburg war crimes trials. He suggests that at that time the U.S. practiced a moderation of law, which stayed the hand of vengeance. It was the legal process of a civilized victory, which is meant as a contrast to the Bush administration's apparently uncivilized approach:

As civilized people, we have a natural desire to see criminals held responsible for their actions. The desire is that much stronger in the case of large-scale crimes like genocides or terrorist attacks, which seem to demand not just accountability but a reaffirmation of the moral order — a public enumeration of what is right and what is wrong — that can be delivered only in a courtroom.

The hope once was that military tribunals at Guantánamo Bay would meet this need — if not provide closure on the Sept. 11 attacks, then at least enable a collective participation in the trials of their perpetrators. There were practical reasons to opt for tribunals over the federal courts, which were not designed to try combatants captured on the battlefield: a soldier couldn’t very well be expected to read a prisoner his rights. But there was something else, too. Trying terrorists as war criminals would send a powerful message to the world.

And yet the tribunals that just opened hardly have the feel of history in the making. They haven’t merited much discussion in the presidential campaign; nor are we a nation riveted by the trial of the first defendant, a former driver for Osama bin Laden named Salim Hamdan. Instead of a landmark case, one that serves as a resonant reminder of the gulf separating us from our enemies, we have detachment and ambiguity — not just about the extent of Hamdan’s guilt but also about the wisdom of the entire tribunal process as well as many other aspects of the prosecution of the war on terror.

It has certainly not helped matters that we are now almost seven years removed from 9/11 and the trials are just getting under way, having been tied up in procedural issues for the better part of the Bush presidency. Of course, this is how adversarial systems are supposed to work. Hamdan’s lawyers were simply carrying out their obligation to provide their client with a vigorous defense by questioning the lawfulness of the system by which he would be tried. There was precedent for this. When Franklin Roosevelt convened a military tribunal to prosecute a group of Nazi saboteurs captured on American soil during World War II, their government-appointed lawyer, Col. Kenneth Royall, challenged its lawfulness before the Supreme Court, which met in an emergency summer session and ruled unanimously that the tribunal was legal.

But because the Bush administration’s detention policies were so extreme and uncompromising, they have invited numerous challenges that have yielded an expanding thicket of rulings in favor of the detainees — Hamdi, Rasul, Hamdan, Boumediene — which have obscured the larger question of guilt or innocence.

Note that oddity: The Bush administration's policies have been struck down in favor of the detainees? Sounds like constitutional checks and balances to me. The system's working, and the length of the process, if anything, means that we are granting more protection to suspected terrorists than anywhere else in the world. Yet, BushCo's still vilified as nearly as bad as those Nazis in the dock at Nuremberg.

The second piece of interest today is Alan Brinkley's review of Jane Meyer's The Dark Side at the New York Times.

Brinkley's essay is itself dark and melodramatic, painting President Bush as a puppet in the hand of an all-powerful vice-president. But the conclusion brings me back to this fog of history theme:

There is no happy ending to this sordid and shameful story. Despite growing political pressure, despite Supreme Court decisions challenging the detainment policy, despite increasing revelations of the once-hidden program that have shocked the conscience of the world, there is little evidence that the secret camps and the torture programs have been abandoned or even much diminished. New heads of the Defense and Justice Departments have resisted addressing the torture issue, aware that dozens of their colleagues would face legal jeopardy should they do so. And the presidential candidates of both parties have so far shown little interest in confronting the use of torture or recommitting the country to the Geneva Conventions and to America’s own laws and traditions.

The Bush administration is not, of course, the first or only regime to violate civil liberties. John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt all authorized or tolerated terrible violations of civil and human rights, all of them in response to great national and global crises. In some respects, the Bush administration is simply following a familiar path by responding to real dangers with illegal and deplorable methods. But Jane Mayer’s extraordinary and invaluable book suggests that it would be difficult to find any precedent in American history for the scale, brutality and illegality of the torture and degradation inflicted on detainees over the last six years; and that it would be even harder to imagine a set of policies more likely to increase the dangers facing the United States and the world.

Again, note here with some incredulity: George W. Bush is not the first president to mount a robust response to national crises, centralizing energy and power in the executive to meet the exigencies of the day.

Indeed, Abraham Lincoln today is widely regarded as America's greatest president, and further there's a new historical consensus (among scholars not obsessed with alleged BushCo war crimes) that the internment of Japanese Americans under the Democratic Franklin D. Roosevelt administration constitutes the low point in the civil liberties history in American constitutional law - "one of the darkest chapters in American history."

This is not by any means to minimize any potential human rights violations Americans have committed these last few years. It is to suggest that the history of the Bush years is still young, and questions of state power in the age of sacred, transnational terrorism are evolving.

Finally, Rick Moran has read portions of Mayer's book, and Brinkley's review here as well, and says:

I reject the view of Cheney (or any of the others involved in the torture regime) as being dark lords of the underworld. They were, in their minds, patriots out to protect the country from a very real threat (something with which both Brinkley in his review and Mayer in her book agree). But good intentions don’t excuse immoral and criminal actions. Nor do they obviate the need to air out the truth of what has gone on in the dark places where just because no one hears the screaming it doesn’t mean the law breaking didn’t take place.

Brinkley’s review – overly and unnecessarily dramatic at times...

Moran nevertheless calls out conservative partisans to think critically about the horrendous practices carried out in our name.

He's right to remind us to think critically, and to hold members of our own party to account.

At the same time, I can't help but remember Debra Burlingame's penetrating essay on Abdullah Saleh Al-Ajmi, the former Guantanamo detainee who upon his release returned to Iraq and killed over a dozen at Mosul in a suicide bombing attack last March.

Yes, all of this is complicated. The United States has a moral responsiblity to protect human dignity while prosecuting the legal war on terror. We also have a responsiblity to wage the fight to which we're engaged with vigor and dispatch.

Somehow I think folks like Mahler, Brinkley, as well as Jane Mayer, in their historical fog, overlook this last detail.

Obama Comments Racist, Poll Finds

As I've noted a couple of times (here and here), Barack Obama's likely to face a backlash should he continue to make allegations of racism against John McCain throughout the campaign.

This morning's release of new polling data support this conclusion.

For example, Gallup finds the race essentially tied, with Obama up 45-to-44 percent over McCain; and Rasmussen's daily tracking poll finds Obama up 44-to-43 percent.

Even more significant is Rasmussen's survey on last week's race controversy. It turns out that less than one-in-four respondents thought the McCain campaign's "Celeb" ad buy was racist, whereas a clear majority sees Obama's "dollar-bill" comment that way:

Sixty-nine percent (69%) of the nation’s voters say they’ve seen news coverage of the McCain campaign commercial that includes images of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton and suggests that Barack Obama is a celebrity just like them. Of those, just 22% say the ad was racist while 63% say it was not.

However, Obama’s comment that his Republican opponent will try to scare people because Obama does not look like all the other presidents on dollar bills was seen as racist by 53%. Thirty-eight percent (38%) disagree.

Not only has Obama been discredited by this data, but the findings point to a much larger challenge for his campaign through November: His Democratic supporters have had a field day portraying the GOP as "neck drooling, knuckledragging, moron[s]" who are engaged in a "nefarious" plot to plant "subconscious (or conscious) biases and evoke a particular visceral reaction," and they're just warming up.

If Barack Obama's skills as a transcendental post-partisan candidate are real, you'd think he might demonstrate a little more sway over his radical backers (who see hooded night-riders galloping around every move the GOP makes).

The Hatred of the Online Crowd

Popular culture has been transformed by new modes of online communications and social networking platforms. From Blogger to MySpace to YouTube, technology provides endless opportunities for people to make friends, share hopes and joys, and perhaps live dangerously.

One of the most disturbing manifestions of the today's online reality is the phenomenon of "trolling," which is discussed in today's New York Times:

In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word “troll” to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities. Early trolling was relatively innocuous, taking place inside of small, single-topic Usenet groups. The trolls employed what the M.I.T. professor Judith Donath calls a “pseudo-naïve” tactic, asking stupid questions and seeing who would rise to the bait....

Today the Internet is much more than esoteric discussion forums. It is a mass medium for defining who we are to ourselves and to others. Teenagers groom their MySpace profiles as intensely as their hair; escapists clock 50-hour weeks in virtual worlds, accumulating gold for their online avatars. Anyone seeking work or love can expect to be Googled. As our emotional investment in the Internet has grown, the stakes for trolling — for provoking strangers online — have risen. Trolling has evolved from ironic solo skit to vicious group hunt.

What caught my attention about this story is not the notion of "trolling" but the larger issue of the "hatred of the online crowd," referred as to "malwebolence."

Much of online communication is pseudonymous, and thus in the absence of fear of consequences we see the proliferation of the most horrendously depraved behavior from what is, essentially, a tech-savvy, un-lumpen web-prowl-etariat.

We know the dangers: tragedies like Megan Meier's MySpace suicide, the mysogynistic death threats to tech-writer Kathy Sierra, or the demonization of conservatives bloggers like Jeff Goldstein.

The intensity of the hatred itself is not new. What's novel is the unprecedented volume and retrievability, which is accelerated by the liberation of unaccountability.

I haven't been the subject of a social networking demonization campaign, although last week I was introduced to the term "cobag" by those friendly nihilists at Sadly No! (and I get "fair and balanced" malwebolence from extreme right-wing hate bloggers as well, who allege I'm RINO for speaking out against racist blog rings (as seen, for example, here, here, here, and here).

My wife sometimes worries about my safety, as I don't blog pseudonymously.

Much of this hatred is defended in terms of the First Amendment, and the legal protections against online demonization aren't so robust, as the Times indicates:

Does free speech tend to move toward the truth or away from it? When does it evolve into a better collective understanding? When does it collapse into the Babel of trolling, the pointless and eristic game of talking the other guy into crying “uncle”? Is the effort to control what’s said always a form of censorship, or might certain rules be compatible with our notions of free speech...?

Why inflict anguish on a helpless stranger? It’s tempting to blame technology, which increases the range of our communications while dehumanizing the recipients ... like ... Megan Meier presumably wouldn’t happen if the perpetrators had to deliver their messages in person. But while technology reduces the social barriers that keep us from bedeviling strangers, it does not explain the initial trolling impulse. This seems to spring from something ugly — a destructive human urge that many feel but few act upon, the ambient misanthropy that’s a frequent ingredient of art, politics and, most of all, jokes. There’s a lot of hate out there, and a lot to hate as well....

Many trolling practices ... violate existing laws against harassment and threats. The difficulty is tracking down the perpetrators. In order to prosecute, investigators must subpoena sites and Internet service providers to learn the original author’s IP address, and from there, his legal identity. Local police departments generally don’t have the means to follow this digital trail, and federal investigators have their hands full with spam, terrorism, fraud and child pornography. But even if we had the resources to aggressively prosecute trolls, would we want to? Are we ready for an Internet where law enforcement keeps watch over every vituperative blog and backbiting comments section, ready to spring at the first hint of violence? Probably not. All vigorous debates shade into trolling at the perimeter; it is next to impossible to excise the trolling without snuffing out the debate.

That's probably as good a description of the issues as we're going to get (although I'd be interested to read some legal and scholarly articles on this).

Read the entire New York Times article here: "The Trolls Among Us."

Barack Obama and Racial Preferences

One of the more important issues raised by Stanley Kurtz in his essay on Barack Obama's "lost years" in Chicago politics is the candidate's hypocrisy on racial preferences in affirmative action programs.

It turns out, in contrast to Obama's frequent claims to offer a transcendent post-racial sensibility, the Illinois Senator boasts an aggressive record of pushing racial preferences in minority and women's enterprise programs, in minority construction contracting, and in riverboat casino-gambling. As Kurtz notes:

Obama's intensely race-conscious approach may surprise Americans who know him primarily through his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention of 2004. When Obama so famously said, "There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America-there's the United States of America," most Americans took him to be advocating a color-blind consciousness of the kind expressed in Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream that his children would one day be judged, not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Anyone who understood Obama's words that way should know that this is not the whole story. In an essay published in 1988 entitled "Why Organize? Problems and Promise in the Inner City," Obama tried to make room for both "accommodation and militancy" in black political engagement. He wrote,

The debate as to how black and other dispossessed people can forward their lot in America is not new. From W.E.B. DuBois to Booker T. Washington to Marcus Garvey to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King, this internal debate has raged between integration and nationalism, between accommodation and militancy, between sit-down strikes and board-room negotiations. The lines between these strategies have never been simply drawn, and the most successful black leadership has recognized the need to bridge these seemingly divergent approaches.

However his views may have evolved in the ensuing 20 years, Obama surely knew that the King-like rhetoric of his keynote address would be taken by most Americans as a repudiation of the kind of race-based politics he and his closest allies have consistently practiced throughout his electoral career. It's difficult to gauge the extent to which Obama may have consciously permitted this misunderstanding to take hold, or the extent to which he still believes that the opposition between "integration and nationalism, between accommodation and militancy" is a false one. Neither alternative is particularly encouraging.

Kurtz's research represents the essential story on Obama's civil rights record, much of the which the mainstream press has blown off.

It's all the more noteworthy, therefore, that the New York Times offers a new, in-depth look at Obama's delicate path on class politics and racial preferences:

In 1990, as his fellow students rallied to protest the dearth of black professors at Harvard Law School, Barack Obama wrote a vigorous defense of affirmative action. The campus was in an uproar over questions of race, and Mr. Obama, then the first black president of The Harvard Law Review, decided to take a stand.

Mr. Obama said he had “undoubtedly benefited from affirmative action” in his own academic career, and he praised the intellectual heft and wide-ranging views of his diverse staff.

“The success of the program speaks for itself,” he said of the law review’s affirmative action policy in a letter published in the school’s student newspaper.

Mr. Obama, a Democrat, has continued to support race-based affirmative action, calling it “absolutely necessary” when he was a state senator in Illinois and criticizing the Supreme Court for curtailing it in his time in the United States Senate. But in his presidential campaign, he has unsettled some black supporters by focusing increasingly on class and suggesting that poor whites should at times be given preference over more privileged blacks.

His ruminations about shifting the balance between race and class in some affirmative action programs raise the possibility that, if elected in November, he might foster a deeper national conversation about an issue that has been fiercely debated for decades. He declined to comment for this article.

“We have to think about affirmative action and craft it in such a way where some of our children who are advantaged aren’t getting more favorable treatment than a poor white kid who has struggled more,” Mr. Obama said last week in a question-and-answer session at a convention of minority journalists in Chicago.

During a presidential debate in April, Mr. Obama said his two daughters, Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7, “who have had a pretty good deal” in life, should not benefit from affirmative action when they apply to college, particularly if they were competing for admission with poor white students.

While Mr. Obama’s biracial background in many ways makes him an ideal bridge between racial sensibilities, the issue remains politically treacherous, especially with race taking an increasingly prominent role in the campaign. Indeed, Mr. Obama’s comments have already begun resonating in the long-running dispute over affirmative action, emerging as three states consider ballot initiatives that would ban racial preferences altogether.

I seriously doubt that racial preferences constitute an issue that Obama wants to embrace as a main campaign plank.

There are few other programs in American public policy that fail as badly on the merits as contemporary affirmative actions programs. The U.S. is now committed to equality before the law - and equal protection for all people. To discriminate in favor of one group, or sets of groups, at the expense of a "privileged" white hegemonic class makes a mockery of notions of color-blind justice.

If Obama truly is America's post-racial candidate (and potential savior) he must abjure a politics of racial recrimination, reparations, and set-aside redistributionism. Should he not, he risks becoming just the latest black candidate of ethnic grievance and racial parochialism.

Obama will be seen as "all talk" if he can't help the nation rise above the peculiar divisions of our past: Personal responsibility? That's just for conservative traditionalists. Educational achievement? That's a "white thing." Yo, my man, the black community needs "progressive" programs and "social justice"!

Indeed, what may happen is that Obama ends up as serving as the set-aside savior for groups such as ACORN, La Raza, NAACP, NARAL, and Now.

This would be a tragedy.

The U.S. is ready for the post-racial transcendence that Obama's original campaign rhetoric promised. Family responsibility, educational opportunity, minority enterprise and capitial formation, universal programs in market-driven health care and taxes - and a considerable role for efficient government. These alternatives promise a much better avenue of color-blind uplift than does racial-preference divisiveness.

**********

UPDATE: See also, Just One Minute, "The Time To Lead Is Later," which points out the Times' description of how Obama might "foster" a deeper national conversation on race, while Obama refused at the same time to be interviewed for the article:

Obama is so eager for a national conversation on affirmative action that he won't talk to the Times about it...

You can't make this stuff up!

The Tragedy of Doha

In a 2005 essay, former U.S. Trade Representative Carla Hills noted:

It is no exaggeration to say that the Doha Round could do more to stimulate the global economy and to alleviate world poverty over the next quarter century than any other policy initiative the 148 WTO member governments could undertake together.

This is why last week's collapse of the Doha world trade negotiations is such a disaster for the global economy and the international developmental agenda.

The experience of America and the world since the end of World War II has been of expanding prosperity in both the developed and underdeveloped worlds. The growth of international trade has made the United States vastly more affluent and has lifted an estimated 375 million people out of extreme poverty since 1985.

Today, while the U.S. unemployment rate is edging up, trade exports have bouyed manufacturers and kept American workers in the employment sector.

I noticed some serious misunderstanding as to the causes and consequences of the collapse of trade among prominent commentators in the blogosphere (here and here). For example, the U.S. is generally not to blame for the failure of the Doha round. The developing nations, especially China and India, flexed their muscles and missed an opportunity to consolidate the current free trade regime, notwithstanding its longstanding flaws in American and European agricultural protection.

That said, as the New York Times reports, the collapse of Doha may signal a shift in world power:

Over the last two decades, China has managed to turn the forces of globalization into the most successful antipoverty project the world has ever seen. So how does one explain the fact that when the latest round of global trade negotiations blew up for good last week, ending seven years of talks to lower tariffs and free up trade around the world, it was China with a hand on the detonator?

The answer has a lot to do with how the world — and China in particular — has changed, and a lot to do with how the Chinese see the world that’s coming. In that world, countries like China and India will have much more clout at the bargaining table because they have much greater economic power than in the past.

It is not that the Chinese think the great era of globalization is over. Far from it. The glistening Beijing of today was built on dollars, yen and Euros earned around the world, and now being lent back to the United States.

But the era in which free trade is organized around rules set in the West — with developing nations following along — definitely appears over, and few are mourning its demise. Even in America, where for years free trade advocates assumed their own country would be the biggest winner, advocates of the system are on the defensive.

This is still incomplete, I would add.

Another way to think about it is that the developing nations, especially India, may not have realized that the U.S. is still in the driver's seat in terms of market power. American negotiators resisted India's demands for agricultural protection. The intransigence in New Delhi may have cost the Indian economy years of growing prosperity, for the price of satisfying domestic farming interests.

But here's how the Financial Times puts it:

The collapse of Doha ... speaks to the failure of both sides to own up to the world as it is. On the side of the rich countries, particularly the US but no less many European nations, there is a refusal to acknowledge that globalisation no longer belongs to the west. In previous trade rounds, the rich nations set the rules and the rest could take it or leave it. No longer.

Equally, the new powers now give the impression – and you see this as much in India as China – that they want to be free riders. They are happy to profit from the rules, but unwilling to support the architecture of the system. Doha, in this respect, saw both sides in blindfolds.

International trade is based on the notion of mutual gains. If parties to negotiations are captive to powerful interests and protectionist policies, further trade expansion cannot take place.

This is the trajedy of Doha.

Obama's Chicago Years: Race Conscious Big Government

Stanley Kurtz has been doing some of the best writing on Barack Obama's fundamental leftism.

  

As the 2008 presidential election quickens, Obama's ties to the oppositional elements of America's subterranean outposts of the American left are becoming increasingly clear, from William Ayers to ACORN. 

Kurtz is on the assignment with his latest piece, "Barack Obama's Lost Years," which takes a look at Obama's history as an Illinois state senator:

Barack Obama's neighborhood newspaper, the Hyde Park Herald, has a longstanding tradition of opening its pages to elected officials-from Chicago aldermen to state legislators to U.S. senators. Obama himself, as a state senator, wrote more than 40 columns for theHerald, under the title "Springfield Report," between 1996 and 2004. Read in isolation, Obama's columns from the state capital tell us little. Placed in the context of political and policy battles then raging in Illinois, however, the young legislator's dispatches powerfully illuminate his political beliefs. Even more revealing are hundreds of articles chronicling Obama's early political and legislative activities in the pages not only of the Hyde Park Herald, but also of another South Side fixture, the Chicago Defender.

Obama moved to Chicago in order to place himself in what he understood to be the de facto "capital" of black America. For well over 100 years, the Chicago Defender has been the voice of that capital, and therefore a paper of national significance for African Americans. Early on in his political career, Obama complained of being slighted by major media, like the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times. Yet extensive and continuous coverage in both the Chicago Defender and the Hyde Park Herald presents a remarkable resource for understanding who Obama is. Reportage in these two papers is particularly significant because Obama's early political career-the time between his first campaign for the Illinois State Senate in 1995 and his race for U.S. Senate in 2004-can fairly be called the "lost years," the period Obama seems least eager to talk about, in contrast to his formative years in Hawaii, California, and New York or his days as a community organizer, both of which are recounted in his memoir, Dreams from My Father. The pages of the Hyde Park Herald and the Chicago Defender thus offer entrée into Obama's heretofore hidden world.

What they portray is a Barack Obama sharply at variance with the image of the post-racial, post-ideological, bipartisan, culture-war-shunning politician familiar from current media coverage and purveyed by the Obama campaign. As details of Obama's early political career emerge into the light, his associations with such radical figures as Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger, Reverend James Meeks, Bill Ayers, and Bernardine Dohrn look less like peculiar instances of personal misjudgment and more like intentional political partnerships. At his core, in other words, the politician chronicled here is profoundly race-conscious, exceedingly liberal, free-spending even in the face of looming state budget deficits, and partisan. Elected president, this man would presumably shift the country sharply to the left on all the key issues of the day-culture-war issues included. It's no wonder Obama has passed over his Springfield years in relative silence.

Kurtz then goes on to break down each area of Obama's state governmental experience, from his racial legislative record, to his relationship to liberals and radicals, and to his big government redistributionism.

The picture that Kurtz provides is one not just of a Chicago machine politician - in the classic style of Illinios power and patronism - but also one of a personalist postmodern update of earlier eras of Democratic Party racial recrimination and state-centrism.

This vision is a good preview of the future of American politics under a Barack Obama administration in Washington, D.C. 

Obama's Stealth Socialism

Peter Wehner, at the National Review, notes:

John McCain, while still the underdog, has a chance to pull out this election. He's gotten more aggressive in the last week or so and it is, I think, beginning to pay dividends.

McCain's most recent dividends come from Obama's missteps on the race controversy. But his deeper vulnerability is found in his stealthy socialist agenda. Investor's Business Daily makes the argument:

During his NAACP speech earlier this month, Sen. Obama repeated the term at least four times. "I've been working my entire adult life to help build an America where economic justice is being served," he said at the group's 99th annual convention in Cincinnati.

And as president, "we'll ensure that economic justice is served," he asserted. "That's what this election is about." Obama never spelled out the meaning of the term, but he didn't have to. His audience knew what he meant, judging from its thumping approval.

It's the rest of the public that remains in the dark, which is why we're launching this special educational series.

"Economic justice" simply means punishing the successful and redistributing their wealth by government fiat. It's a euphemism for socialism.

In the past, such rhetoric was just that — rhetoric. But Obama's positioning himself with alarming stealth to put that rhetoric into action on a scale not seen since the birth of the welfare state.

In his latest memoir he shares that he'd like to "recast" the welfare net that FDR and LBJ cast while rolling back what he derisively calls the "winner-take-all" market economy that Ronald Reagan reignited (with record gains in living standards for all).

Obama also talks about "restoring fairness to the economy," code for soaking the "rich" — a segment of society he fails to understand that includes mom-and-pop businesses filing individual tax returns.

It's clear from a close reading of his two books that he's a firm believer in class envy. He assumes the economy is a fixed pie, whereby the successful only get rich at the expense of the poor.

Following this discredited Marxist model, he believes government must step in and redistribute pieces of the pie. That requires massive transfers of wealth through government taxing and spending, a return to the entitlement days of old.

There's more at the link.

See also, Kyle-Anne Shiver, "Why I'm Thanking God for Obama."

Cartoon Credit: Michael Ramirez

Blogger and Sitemeter

Yesterday I received an e-mail from Dave Marron at The Thunder Run with a heads up on a possible denial-of-service lock-out attack on his blog. (Perhaps this was a replay of the Pro-Bama lock-out controversy in June.)

This apparently happened to a number of bloggers as well, and the outrage prompted The Yankee Confederate to post this provocative entry: "Obama's Netroots Supporters Continue 'Blog Burning'."

The whole controversy, both political and technological, generated responses from both left and right.

Then, late afternoon yesterday, I had trouble logging onto my own blog. I tried a couple of different computers, and keep getting an error message. A Google search sent me to a Blogger help group, where I found that websites with SiteMeter code were gettting blocked in Internet Explorer.

I removed the code and that fixed the problem.

Wired has a nice summary, "Web Sites Using SiteMeter Are Crashing with Internet Explorer":

A number of web sites that use SiteMeter tracking code to monitor the number of visitors to their site are reporting that the code is causing Internet Explorer browsers to crash when users visit their sites.

I haven't spent time testing a lot of sites, but the Gawker Media sites all seem to be affected. These include Gawker, Valleywag, Gizmodo and Lifehacker, among others.

The problem appears to be affecting IE 5.5, 6.0 and 7.0. Internet surfers using IE to access a site that has SiteMeter tracking it receive a message saying the site cannot be loaded and "operation aborted." The issue seems to have begun late afternoon Friday.

SiteMeter has not responded to a request for comment and so far has posted no announcement to its web site addressing the issue. But SiteMeter's blog has a few posts published earlier this week referencing its move to a new platform and changes to its tracking code.

A number of sites are reporting that once they remove the SiteMeter code, the problem disappears and their page loads fine in IE.

Captain Ed notes that the Hot Air blogs were affected, and he suggests having a backup browser available for Internet Explorer users facing trouble with website accessability.

For techies, see The Reference Frame, "Fix: IE7 with Sitemeter: Operation Aborted."

Obama Missteps in Race Allegations

This morning's New York Times suggests Barack Obama has hit the wrong tone in his allegations of racism against presumptive GOP nominee John McCain:

Senator Barack Obama is a man of few rhetorical stumbles, but this week a few of his words opened a racial door his campaign would prefer not to step through. When Senator John McCain’s camp replied by accusing him of playing the race card from the bottom of the deck, the Obama campaign seemed at least momentarily off balance.

The instinctive urge to punch back was tempered by the fact that race is a fire that could singe both candidates. So on Friday the Obama campaign, a carefully controlled lot on the best of days, reacted most cautiously as it sought to tamp down any sense that it was at war with Mr. McCain over who was the first to inject race into the contest. Mr. Obama made no mention of the issue, except for a brief reference in an interview with a local newspaper in Florida.

“I was in Union, Mo., which is 98 percent white, a rural conservative, and what I said was what I think everyone knows, which is that I don’t look like I came out of central casting when it comes to presidential candidates,” he told The St. Petersburg Times. “There was nobody there who thought at all that I was trying to inject race in this.”

The furor started on Thursday when Rick Davis, Mr. McCain’s campaign manager, said, “Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck.” Mr. Davis was alluding to Mr. Obama’s remarks on Wednesday that Republicans would try to scare voters by pointing out that he “doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.”

As Mr. Obama carefully addressed the issue on Friday, his campaign’s formidable network of grass-roots activists, and the Web sites crafted to give them “talking points” to carry into battle against Republicans, remained uncharacteristically quiet on the matter, even though the issue dominated political blogs for a second straight day.

David Plouffe, the campaign manager, talked briefly, and not too eagerly, about it. And the campaign’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, blamed the Republicans for misconstruing Mr. Obama’s words as an attack, and quickly moved on.

The mainstream press is finally getting it.

It's the Democrats who have been obsessed with race this campaign, and now Obama's own allegations of racism have forced a system-wide backlash against the attacks.

The big question now is how long will the racial pull-back last?

Obama wants to use race to has advantage, just like the activist racial-recrimination base of the party. It's assumed that the guilt-mongering victim's mentality is gold for Democrats, as they can mine the presumed racial shame of white Americans for electoral and policy gain.

But the backlash is too risky, and whatever gains might be had in crass racial appeals aren't enough to justify turning this campaign into a referendum on racial tolerance.

The radical activists would love it, of course. See, "Obama Heckled on African American Policies."

Photo Credit: "Barack Obama addressed hecklers after he finished a speech in St. Petersburg, Fla., on Friday," New York Times.

Do Voters Tell Pollsters the Truth in Racial Surveys?

The question of the "Bradley effect" came up last January in controversies in public opinion surrounding Hillary Clinton's whopping comeback victory in the New Hampshire primary.

The workings of the Bradley effect were first suggested in the 1982 gubernatorial race in California, when black Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley lost a close challenge to George Deukmejian, after holding a strong lead in match-up surveys heading into election day. Since then, survey specialists have suggested that pollsters might be overestimating black candidate support in pre-election surveys in general.

John Judis offered an overview for this year at the New Republic:

Pollsters - along with nearly everyone else on earth - failed to predict the result of the New Hampshire Democratic primary. According to Real Clear Politics, they estimated that Barack Obama would defeat Hillary Clinton by an average of eight percent. She won by three, and eleven percent is an awful lot for pollsters to be wrong by - well beyond the margin of error. In the scramble to explain how this could have happened, several writers, including Andrew Sullivan and Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, have suggested that the discrepancy might be the result of what is called the "Bradley effect."

Judis took particular issue with Andrew Kohut, who had looked at the New Hampshire controversy in, "Getting It Wrong."

All of this is a nice background review to the Wall Street Journal's weekend analysis, "When Voters Lie":

One of the toughest questions on any poll is whether people are telling the truth. It is a conundrum that looms front and center as voters look ahead to the first U.S. presidential contest that an African-American candidate has a chance to win. With polls showing overwhelming voter support for the idea of a black president, researchers and pollsters are trying to determine who really means it.

Peter Hart, a Democrat on a bipartisan team conducting the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, estimates that 10% of current Democrats and independents who say they support presumed Democratic Party nominee Barack Obama may not be giving a fully honest answer, at least based on their responses to broader questions about race. "This election is exceptionally tricky," he says.

While most political pollsters say they don't find large numbers of people lying on polls, they are taking extra precautions....

Pollsters look for the "Bradley Effect," the idea that some white voters are reluctant to say they support a white candidate over a black candidate. The phrase refers to California's 1982 gubernatorial election, when the late Tom Bradley, a black Democratic mayor of Los Angeles, led in exit polls against white Republican George Deukmejian. Mr. Bradley lost the election. The conclusion: some voters hid their true choice from pollsters. Skeptics say the issue was neither race nor honesty. One theory is that Mr. Deukmejian's supporters simply didn't want to participate in polls.

Sen. Obama leads Republican rival John McCain 47% to 41%, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey last month. Aides to Sen. Obama and Sen. McCain declined to discuss the details of the candidates' polling strategies. But the two camps no doubt take surveys with a grain of salt. "There certainly is a presumption that people self-censor to some degree," says Scott Keeter, director of survey research at the Pew Research Center in Washington.

In a recently released study, Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn., found nearly 11% of people who have reported being polled said they have lied to pollsters about their views on politics and public affairs. "Why they're lying is probably as varied as individuals are varied," says Jerry Lindsley, director of the school's polling institute. "Halfway through a survey, they might all of a sudden get nervous about the kinds of questions they're being asked and start to lie or not be totally straightforward."

Questions about polling and race were raised during this year's presidential primaries. In New Hampshire, polls gave Sen. Obama as much as a 10-percentage-point advantage over Hillary Clinton the day before the primary. Sen. Clinton went on to win the state. Pollster Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, doesn't blame lying. Instead, he says, some voters who were poorer, less-educated and white may have had less favorable views of African-Americans and were less likely to take surveys. "When polls get it wrong, it's not because people lied, it's because the people who turned down the polls have different attitudes than the people who took the polls," he says.

Read the whole thing, as well as the sidebar analysis by June Kronholz, "How the Unconscious Affects the Truth."

Note, though, that recent political science research finds that white voters show little disinclination to vote for black candidates in congressional, and state and local elections.

That's not to say, however, that racial bias in voting is insignificant after all. The Washington Post reported in June that "3 in 10 Americans Admit to Race Bias." However, that same survey found that voters were more concerned about John McCain's advanced age than they were about Barack Obama's racial background.

I wrote a beefy analysis on racial prejudice during the Democratic primaries, "Barack Obama and the Political Psychology of Race."

I don't think racially "sensitive" voting will ever totally be eliminated, but a hegemonic Jim Crow structure of racist sentiment is a thing of the past. Indeed, while Barack Obama's election seems to have stimulated latent racist ideological and psychological elements (even though much of this is justified in terms of free speech exceptions), the strong possiblity of the Illinois Senator's election to the presidency in November seems to make a lot of these debates moot.

Related: "Obama Aide Concedes 'Dollar Bill' Remark Referred to His Race."

Obama's Economic Illiteracy

This video analysis of Barack Obama's economic planning, from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation, is essential viewing. It's about ten minutes long, but well worth your time:

Additional analysis on Obama's political economy is provided by Michael Boskin: "Obamanomics Is a Recipe for Recession."

Hat Tip: Vulcan's Hammer

Terror's Continuing Evil

The continuing evil of terrorism was on display last weekend with the bombings in Istanbul, Turkey, and Jaipur, Bangalore and Ahmedabad, India. The Jerusalem Post explains the implications, in "Why Terror Thrives":

Someone set out to kill a lot of people on Sunday night in Istanbul, Turkey - and did. Two bombs were exploded, 10 minutes apart, along a pedestrian mall in a residential neighborhood. The first explosion attracted a crowd; the second, which could be heard a mile away, was intended to kill those drawn to the site of the first attack. Some 17 people lost their lives and over 150 were wounded. Turkish president Abdullah Gul said the attack showed "the ruthlessness of terrorism." Indeed it did.

Terrorism, meaning the systematic use of force against civilians to demoralize, intimidate or subjugate countries or peoples, has been a scourge of humanity from time immemorial. The assault against an El Al plane at Munich Airport on February 10, 1970 was not the first instance of a civilian airliner being targeted. That appalling distinction goes to a Puerto Rican communist who hijacked a US airliner to Havana in 1961. Cuba gave him asylum.

It was the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, however, that trailblazed attacks on airliners with its September 7, 1970 hijacking of three planes "to call special attention to the Palestinian problem." Sure enough, the Palestinian cause has since became synonymous with anti-civilian warfare, from the Munich Olympics' massacre in September 1972 to the Arab fratricide inside Gaza this weekend. And the slaughter of innocents is now part of the Islamists' struggle against "infidels." What the Palestinians began in the early 1970s is now paying "dividends."

This past weekend, for instance, Muslim attackers killed 49 Hindu civilians in western India, in 17 separate attacks. The modus operandi, as in Turkey, was a small explosion followed by more bombs set off to kill rescue service personnel and bystanders.

Yesterday, at least 25 Shi'ite pilgrims were killed and 52 wounded when female suicide bombers (presumably Sunni Arabs) attacked a religious procession in Baghdad.

Terrorism is now so ubiquitous as to be unremarkable. And always, obscenely, the onslaughts are carried out "in the name of Allah."

TRAGICALLY, the international community has only itself to blame for making terrorism permissible as a tool of war - depending on who is blown up, and who is doing the blowing up.

This distinction was first articulated by the world's most coddled terrorist, Yasser Arafat, on November 13, 1974, when the PLO chief made his debut appearance at the UN General Assembly: "The difference between the revolutionary and the terrorist lies in the reason for which each fights," he asserted. "Whoever stands by a just cause and fights for liberation from invaders and colonialists cannot be called terrorist... The Palestinian people had to resort to armed struggle when they lost faith in the international community...." The family of nations responded with a standing ovation.

Although Arafat would make a number of tactical flip-flops on the use of violence against innocent civilians, he ultimately rejected gains he could have made at the negotiating table - at Camp David in 2000, for instance - in favor of unleashing the second intifada.

One can only fantasize about how much safer the world would be today had the UN, instead of legitimizing Arafat's terrorism, charged him with war crimes. Would disgruntled Muslims have established al-Qaida's global network - or Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, Al Shabaab in Somalia, or the Army of Muhammad in India - had the international community sent a different signal all those years ago? But not only did Arafat get a green light from the international community, the world has since helped nourish self-defeating Palestinian tendencies toward violence, intransigence and radicalism.

Seldom have the Palestinians been told to choose between violence and political accommodation. When the Quartet gave Hamas precisely that choice, the Palestinians stood their ground. Far from penalizing them, the world went wobbly - the most recent example of this being a UK parliamentary committee, headed by Labor MP Ann Clwyd, which wants to "dialogue" with Hamas and lift sanctions against Gaza's Islamo-fascist regime.

VIOLENCE may be endemic to mankind, yet the community of nations nevertheless managed to outlaw poison gas and criminalize genocide. Is it beyond people's capacity to, belatedly, define deliberate attacks against civilians as a crime against humanity? Wouldn't the world be a better place if terrorists found no sanctuary, no financial backing and no diplomatic cover - because, simply, no "reason" justified their actions?

See also, "Unending Terrorism."