It’s Not the 1930s: Time to Retire Talk of Depression

I respect Robert Reich, the former Clinton administration Labor Secretary who is presently a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley.

Still, he's stretching reason in making the case that the current economic downturn should rightly be called a "depression":

When FDR took office in 1933, one out of four American workers was jobless. We're not there yet, but we're trending in that direction.

Read the whole thing for Reich's argument in context.

I've written numerous times to reject the comparison between now and the 1930s (see "War Mobilization Ended the Great Depression"). Times are tough today, sure, and they will get tougher, but there's a fundamental incommensurability here: I seriously doubt the country will ever have as deep a crisis as we saw in America after the stock market crash of 1929. As Daniel Gross recently pointed out:

All this historically inaccurate nostalgia can occasionally make you want to clock somebody with one of the three volumes of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.'s New Deal history. The Credit Debacle of 2008 and the Great Depression may have similar origins: both got going when financial crisis led to a reduction in consumer demand. But the two phenomena differ substantially. Instead of workers with 5 o'clock shadows asking, "Brother, can you spare a dime?" we have clean-shaven financial-services executives asking congressmen if they can spare $100 billion. More substantively, the economic trauma the nation suffered in the 1930s makes today's woes look like flesh wounds.

"By the afternoon of March 3, scarcely a bank in the country was open to do business," FDR said in his March 12, 1933, fireside chat (now available on a very cool podcast at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's Web site). In 1933 some 4,000 commercial banks failed, causing depositors to take huge losses. (There was no FDIC back then.) The recession that started in August 1929 lasted for a grinding 43 months, during which unemployment soared to 25 percent and national income was cut in half. By contrast, through mid-November of this year, only 19 banks had failed. The Federal Reserve last week said it expects unemployment to top out at 7.6 percent in 2009. Economists surveyed by the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank believe the recession, which started in April 2008, will be over by next summer. (Of course, the same guys back in January forecast that the economy would grow nicely in 2008 and 2009.) But don't take it from me. Take it from this year's Nobel laureate in economics. "The world economy is not in depression," Paul Krugman writes in his just-reissued book "The Return of Depression Economics." "It probably won't fall into depression, despite the magnitude of the current crisis (although I wish I was completely sure about that)."

It's time to retire the notion of an economic "depression."

Since the 1930s the U.S. has had cyclical economic recessions of varying depth and duration. I recall walking door-to-door in 1992 (for just two days, as a canvasser for CalPIRG, which I hated) asking people for political contributions. People wanted to give, but they were hurting economically, and many said it felt like "a depression." Santa Barbara at the time was going through the trauma of the post-Cold War defense conversion, and I recall tons of shuttered retail stores up and down Santa Barbara's normally-upscale State Street. In Fresno, where I lived while finishing up my undergraduate work until July, I met people who were leaving the state to start fresh in the Rocky Mountain states and other points east. I worked at Chevron station at the time, and folks came in to fill-up with all of their belongings loaded up on pick-up trucks, towing U-Hauls behind 'em. It was a difficult time.

More recently, I'm reminded of how bad the economy was during the 1970s, when the U.S. struggled through two oil shocks and "stagflation" stumped Keynesian economists. President Carter was reduced to announcing the country's "malaise." We had gas lines and rationing, and interest rates hit 20 percent by the early 1980s. It was another very difficult time.

I'll eat my words if unemployment hits 25 percent in the months ahead, but I'm confident that we'll see things bottom out in 2009. We'll have a continuing deflation in housing for some time, probably over the next couple of years. But the Obama administration will restore some confidence to markets and consumers with an aggressive stimulus program seeking to put people to work, stabilize employment, and build infrastructure and "green" industries.

Meanwhile, today we're seeing oil prices tumbling, and some economists are predicting that gas may be as cheap $1 a gallon early next year. Reduced energy prices will boost all sectors of the economy, from consumer spending to shipping and transportation, to air travel and industrial production. People will start taking longer vacations next year, and home heating costs will decline. Cheaper energy costs will act as a Keynesian stimulus, and consumers will increase demand of goods and services as the expansionary multiplier of cheap fuel provides a stimulus that no government "rebate" check could match.

Again, this could be all wrong. Three months ago folks thought $700 billion would stablize the financial system; now analysts are suggesting a $1 trillion dollar spending package will be needed for effective pump-priming.

Still, leftists might as well hang up the discourse of the "depression." No matter what, the U.S. under Barack Obama will see one of the biggest expansions of state power and domestic policy since the Johnson administration of the 1960s.

But the black-and-white desolation of soups kitchens and Dorothea Lange-imagery is long ago, and the United States today is a post-industrial service economy with higher technology and more flexible labor markets than ever before. We have a better regulatory structure and we are a wealthier people as a whole, with a quality of life - in cars, computers, and the comforts of home - that would make Depression-era citizens gasp at the scale of everyday luxuries.

As Roosevelt himself might say, "we have nothing to fear but itself," so leftist can lay off their economic fear-mongering.

Simpson Will Do at Least Nine Years Behind Bars

I watched O.J. Simpson's sentencing this morning.

I was reading online and looked up a few minutes after CNN had begun broadcasting the drama from the courtroom of Clark County District Court Judge Jackie Glass. Judge Glass previewed her ruling with an emphatic and riveting statement that her decision was in no way influenced by events 13 years ago, when Simpson was aquitted in his trial for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. She proceeded deliberately to hand down sentences for Simpson and his accomplice, Clarence Stewart. The reading was legalistic, with the sentences announced in months (rather than years), so it took me a couple of seconds to figure out the terms of incarceration. On the main counts, first for Stewart, then Simpson, it sounded like 15 years in Nevada's correctional facilities with a possibility of parole after about five years.

In the end, as the Los Angeles Times reports, Simpson will do at least nine years behind bars for the kidnapping and robbery of two sports memorabilia dealers in Las Vegas.

Especially dramatic was when CNN showed a picture-in-picture image of Fred Goldman, Ronald's father, along with other family members:

Among those in the courtroom to hear the sentencing was Fred Goldman, whose son was slain alongside Simpson's ex-wife in 1994. Simpson was tried for the murders but acquitted in 1995. Two years later, a civil jury found him liable for their wrongful deaths and ordered him to pay $33.5 million to their families. During the trial, prosecutors argued Simpson's desire to avoid paying the judgment led to the Las Vegas incident. He stashed mementos with friends to keep them out of the hands of the Goldmans, whom he nicknamed the "gold diggers," and then became frustrated when they were not returned, the prosecutors claimed.

The judge took pains to say that the sentencing was not "payback" for the 1995 acquittal, as Simpson's attorneys have suggested. Glass said that as a judge, she respected the Los Angeles jury's decision.

"There are many people who disagree with that verdict, but that doesn't matter to me," she said.

Be sure to check out the Times' photo gallery, which includes images of Simpson begging for leniency.

Deepak Chopra Responds to Dorothy Rabinowitz

Deepak Chopra has responded to Dorothy Rabinowitz's Mumbai essay in a letter to the editor at the Wall Street Journal:

Dorothy Rabinowitz's Dec. 1 commentary "Deepak Blames America," is a personal attack on me. Since your newspaper wholeheartedly cheered the disastrous war in Iraq, I can understand why you continue to mount a rear guard action in defense of the Bush administration's approach to militant Islam.

That approach involves unilateral militant aggression without the slightest care for the effect being made on the vast majority of peaceful Muslims. Now that the right wing can no longer continue this discredited policy overtly, Ms. Rabinowitz and her ilk have adopted a fall-back position: Attack anyone who suggests a new way.

I stand by my remarks and have full confidence that the Obama administration will adopt a "root cause" approach of the kind I endorsed. The very thing Ms. Rabinowitz derides is our best hope for peace.

This is a typical response to criticism by those who are utterly paralyzed in the face of unspeakable evil in the world. The response is, frankly, to blame the Bush administration for the chillingly remorseless massacre of the innocents in India last week.

I wrote previously about this in my essay, "Moral Paralysis on Mumbai." I do not know Deepak Chopra other than by seeing him on TV on occasion. My first thoughts upon reading the Rabinowitz piece, as well as a couple of other reports of Chopra's appearance on cable news interviews (see video above), was that the man should stick to self-awareness and transcendentalism. International security issues require hard thinking. The realm's not conducive to fluffy new age exhortations such as "happy thoughts make happy molecules!"

Chopra's original comments on Mumbai that the "war on terror" has "caused" the outbursts of contemporary nihilist violence are not only preposterous, but morally repugnant. Rabinowitz nailed it with her original essay, and Chopra's horror that she would dare criticize him has produced a characteristic resort to victimhood rather than a defense of his own derangement in the face of the Bush administration's audacious foreign policy.

But wait! All is not lost. The Wall Street Journal has also published a letter from Chopra's son, Gotham. It's more stunned outrage at Rabinowitz's moral clarity, but this part's worth examining:

Our collective inability to construct a creative solution that goes beyond declaring a "war on terrorism" or insanely cheering "shock and awe" campaigns in Arab regions is a complicit part of the problems we face. Yes -- America, with all the democratic ideals for freedom and liberty it declares to the rest of the world, has a fundamental responsibility to stay true to them and be held accountable when we fail to even give the appearance that we care for them, as unfortunately the Bush regime has shown the past eight years. To pretend that we have no part in a global community plagued by the sickness that is Islamic fundamentalism largely brought on by economic disparity and ideological hypocrisy, not to mention policy and actual oil money and arms that nurture it, is to perpetuate and encourage more brazen attacks. To think that this creative solution should not appeal in some way to the world's 1.6 billion Muslims, the vast majority of whom are not terrorists, is plain negligence.

Go ahead and read the rest, here.

Not surprisingly, nowhere to be found in Gotham Chopra's letter is a condemnation of the Mumbai killers. I'm almost sick as I write this, again..., thinking of the Holtzbergs, and all of the innocent people of India, who were caught in this time-warp of barbarian evil (in some cases from pure curiosity, as was true of Manush Goheil, a tailor in the city, who stepped out of his shop to check out the commotion, to be gunned down by one of the terrorists, who opened fire on him from the top floor of the Chabad house - that is, gunned down by the same murderers who tortured and massacred Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg and seven others at the Jewish mission).

American foreign policy has been the world's anchor since World War II. We have maintained a strategic presence in South Asia as the region's offshore balancer and arsenal of anti-Soviet hegemony. Since 9/11, American forces toppled the Taliban and eliminated the potential threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. We have much work to do, not least of which will be to finish the job begun in Operation Enduring Freedom.

The first priority of the coming antiterror agenda will be to organize an American-led multilateral response to the Mumbia attacks, with India and Pakistan as primary actors in the coalition, to root out Lashkar-e-Taiba sanctuaries along the Afghan-Pakistani border.

This is the first fundamental responsibility of the West today (lest the terrorists win this round and prepare for the next), while we, of course, continue the larger, systemic goal of economic development and global cooperation that can help toward the achievement of international peace.

Comparing Health Care

We may very well be on the way to some variation of single-payer health care in this country, with the coming Obama administration to push for government mandates to guarantee universal coverage.

One of the leading advocates on the left for universal health is Ezra Klein. He offers some provocative thoughts on all of this in his post, "What is Life Worth?", especially this comparison of health systems in the U.S. and Britain:

People often compare American health care to Canadian health care. It's the wrong comparison. The inverse of the American health care system is the British health care system. Where we are the priciest, they are the cheapest. We refuse to make any explicit decisions, instead denying care based on criteria that makes the denial the fault of the patient rather than the system. You don't have enough money for the treatment. They make all their decisions explicit, relying on criteria that makes the denial the fault of the system's judgments. We don't think that treatment worth the cost. Their system gives patients someone to be angry at. Ours has no connection to value. Their system creates more blame, ours engenders more tragedy.

Beyond the techno-babble of "explicit decisions" and "treatment worth the cost," we have Klein making an essentially normative argument pitting state control versus personal responsibility in health provision.

Which works better? Well, while we're on the British case, recall the big story from last summer on Britain's experience with the nationalization of dental care. Access to good dental health declined in Britain with the advent of a single payer system, as this Telegraph story indicates:

The shake-up of NHS dentistry has been a disaster with standards of care dropping and almost one million fewer people being treated on the health service under the new system, a damning report by MPs has found ....

Instead of improving access to NHS dentistry the reforms have made it worse, the report by the House of Commons Health Select Committee found.

The number of dentists working in the health service has fallen, the number of NHS treatments carried out has dropped and in many areas patients are still experiencing severe difficulties in finding a dentist to treat them.

Worryingly, complex treatments carried out on the NHS have dropped by half while both referrals to hospital and tooth extractions have increased.

This suggests dentists are simply removing teeth rather than taking on complicated treatments because they have become uneconomical to provide ....

The Government hoped the new contracts would give more patients the chance to register with an NHS dentist, encourage more preventive work and reduce the "drill and fill'' culture.

They were also designed to simplify the payments system, so that instead of being paid per treatment, dentists were given a flat annual salary in return for carrying out an agreed amount of work known as units of dental activity (UDAs).

However, the select committee found that as a result of the changes, dentists no longer had any financial incentive to give appropriate treatment.

For folks like Ezra Klein - who have been pushing for a radical expansion of the state sector - well before the economy started cooperated with a collectivist-inspiring crisis of capitalism - the key will be to demonstrate how an expansion of state-control and governmental mandates will not worsen care in the United States.

Rather than build bureaucracy and limit choice among service providers, government should seek to increase competition in insurance markets, and find ways to subsidize, through grants and tax incentives, the affordabiliy of health coverage for lower income and disadvantaged Americans.

Pakistan and Lashkar-e-Taiba

This morning's Los Angeles Times focuses on Pakistan's ties to Islamist militants:

Lashkar-e-Taiba, the self-styled "Army of the Pure," has left its footprints in the snows of Kashmir, the back alleys of Lahore and Karachi, the harsh terrain along the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier -- and now, investigators say, in Mumbai, India, the scene of last week's horrific rampage by gunmen.

The growing case against the Pakistan-based militant organization speaks directly to a doubt that has plagued U.S.-Pakistani relations since the two countries became allies after the Sept. 11 attacks: whether present or former officials in Pakistan's powerful security establishment continue to nurture radical Islamic groups.

Pakistan's relatively weak civilian government, in power less than a year, has shown a degree of reluctance to forcefully confront militant groups or to assert control over the intelligence establishment -- a pattern that could bode ill as fallout from the attacks on India's financial capital poisons relations between the two nuclear-armed countries.

Lashkar-e-Taiba's alleged social wing, which gained prominence after Lashkar was officially banned in 2002, operates openly on a sprawling campus outside the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore. Its head, Hafiz Saeed, was one of the founders of Lashkar and is on a list of about 20 militant suspects India has demanded be handed over.

Pakistan's government vehemently denies involvement in the Mumbai attacks, which left more than 170 people dead and 300 injured, and U.S. officials say no formal links between the attackers and Pakistani officialdom have been found.

However, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told Pakistani officials during a visit Thursday that the evidence gathered so far by Indian and Western investigators against Pakistan-based militants was compelling enough that Islamabad should be acting on it.

Successive Pakistani governments have tolerated and even abetted Lashkar-e-Taiba, which for much of its two-decade history was used by Pakistan's intelligence service as a proxy for fighting Indian rule in the disputed Himalayan territory of Kashmir.

Pakistani officials insist that in recent years the country's premier spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, or ISI, has been purged of militant sympathizers. But as recently as four months ago, U.S. intelligence officials alleged that the ISI aided militants who struck another Indian target, its embassy in the Afghan capital, Kabul.

"You could argue that if you have 20 years of active sponsorship, it takes time for these linkages to disappear from the state apparatus," said Ishtiaq Ahmad, a professor of international relations at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital.

Read the whole thing, here.

This passage is key:

The investigation of the Mumbai attacks is complicated, analysts say, by the fact that much of Lashkar-e-Taiba's operational capability has migrated from the Pakistan-controlled slice of Kashmir to the lawless tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan, where many of its camps and training centers are now believed to be.

Someone, the United States, the Pakistani government, India, or a multiltateral coalition, needs to go into the area and sweep out the sanctuaries. It's no brainer. You go to the source. Lashkar-e-Taiba is said to have been working out of the tribal areas since 1990, the group has ties to al-Qaeda, and the borderlands are the mountainous redoubts where Osama bin Laden and the Taliban extremist fled after the U.S. mission in Afghanistan in 2001.

If we didn't finish the job then; it's time to do it now. The terrorists have spoken. How will the West respond?

Unflinching Against Evil

I don't advocate the state-sponsored assassination of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

I do, however, believe that the U.S. government has a responsibilty to defend the nation against the abundantly-manifest evil that exists in the world. The Nazis were evil, Soviet totalitarianism was evil, Saddam Hussein was evil, and the Mumbai terrorists were evil. We defeated the former three in two hot wars and a cold one, and I hope that this nation will rise to confront the latest demonstration of evil we saw in the terrorists who massacred the innocents in India.

There is evil in the world, and the United States has historically been the world's greatest bulwark against it. When we flinch, civilizations teeter on the brink. America has always been the last best hope of mankind. It's who we are, and what we do. There's no need to apologize for it, and it's criminal negligence to repudiate it.

The issue arises with reference to the apparent comments Pastor Rick Warren made on Sean Hannity's show. Here's Steve Benen's recap:

Pastor Rick Warren has a reputation for being far more stable and grounded than religious right leaders and TV preachers like Pat Robertson, but it's worth remembering that he's not exactly a moderate.

Last night, on Fox News, Sean Hannity insisted that United States needs to "take out" Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Warren said he agreed. Hannity asked, "Am I advocating something dark, evil or something righteous?" Warren responded, "Well, actually, the Bible says that evil cannot be negotiated with. It has to just be stopped .... In fact, that is the legitimate role of government. The Bible says that God puts government on earth to punish evildoers. Not good-doers. Evildoers."

Read the rest of Benen's post, here (there's a discussion of those who have combed scripture for the biblical authority for Warren's exhortation).

My interest is the response to this on the nihilist left, among people who have been building up preemptive arguments against any forceful action in South Asia to eradicate the terror sanctuaries from which last week's killings were launched.

For example, here's Andrew Sullivan's response to Warren:

Some insist that Warren is a centrist, moderate type. He is, in fact, a very hard-core Christianist integrated firmly into the GOP. As such, he sees government as a divine institution authorized to punish evil and promote good - as fundamentalist Christians view those things.

Here's Melissa McEwan:

Even if the Bible does justify such a thing, which is dubious (see further discussion at the link), the Bible is not the handbook of the Department of Defense—a sentence I can't believe I even have to write, but there you go.

Matt Duss draws out an analogy:

In any case, if this were a conversation between an Iranian TV host and an ayatollah in which they discussed scriptural justifications for “taking out” high ranking members of the U.S. government, you’d probably see Sean Hannity running the clip on his show — while slowly shaking his head in pious disapproval — as evidence of what crazy extremists those Iranians are. As it is, they’ll probably be running this on Iranian TV as evidence of what crazy extremists those Americans are.

Spencer Ackerman, however, hits a moral-relativist home run:

Let's say a preacher appeared on a massively popular TV show and offered scriptural justification for an unprovoked attack on a foreign country. What would you say? "Oh, there goes Yusuf Qaradawi again"? Or maybe, "I truly hope these people turn away from bin Laden like some of their colleagues have"? Or perhaps, "How is it these fanatics can't understand that they, in fact, are the evil people they seek to rid the world of"?

Ah, but you'd be neglecting the cancer of religious extremism right here at home. Matt Duss at the Center for American Progress takes note of pastor Rick Warren, who appeared on Sean Hannity's scummy little Fox News show to say that the U.S. has a divine obligation to attack Iran ....

Am I drawing an equivalence between Rick Warren and Islamic extremists? Why, yes, yes I am. That's because his statements are identical to those of the demagogic, fanatical preachers who motivate perplexed children into fighting religious wars....

Andrew Sullivan claims his anti-Christianist project is rooted in his faith, but that faith cannot be Christian, for Sullivan and the others here - in their response to Hannity and Warren - represent the powerful oppositional culture of radical secularism that has taken over public intellectualism on the American left.

These folks will tell you otherwise, of course, but their ideological program is of a piece: the repudiation of objective good and absolute truth in favor of a relativist epistemology; a rejection of Thomistic doctrines of rational faith in favor of scientist ontology; welfare state expansion as the solution to social problems, such as poverty; the repudiation of patriotism as anachronistic, in favor of a global loyalty - "imagine there's no countries"; and, most of all, the refusal of God's goodness as the precursor of universal right, a rejection of the divine moral code.

This oppositional secularism - despite attempts to seek the cover of ad hoc spiritual coating - refuses the moral guideposts that allows us not only to distinguish good from evil, but for us to always choose the good.

Rick Warren is not a Iranian mullah sanctioning the stoning of women and the execution of homosexuals. He is a man of deep spiritural learning, values, and wisdom, a man who knows that Americans have a manifest charge to resist the evil darkening the world. He is not a "Christianist" who gives a "religious blessing" to murder.

And Warren is not a "demagogic, fanatical preacher" who is no better than some damned Ahmad attempting to smuggle some lethal C-4 on a civilian transcontinental jetliner.

There are distinctions to be made in this world, and when there is evil, it's to be confronted, not enabled.

When I speak of the forces arrayed against traditional culture, the folks cited above are at the top of the masthead. Their time is now, with "The One" in power. But I believe their recent electoral victory is Pyrrhic, and that eternal right - as articulated in Pastor Warren's moral clarity - will again prevail against the creepy cultural totalitarianism we're witnessing today.

$1 Trillion Stimulus Package?

The numbers floating around for the continuing rescue of the American economy are beyond the wildest dreams of even the most retrograde big-government liberal.

Bloomberg reports that the price tag for the proposed Obama administration economic stimulus package is now at $1 trillion:

The one thing that isn’t shrinking in the U.S. economy these days is the size of the stimulus package that financial experts say is needed to turn it around.

With automobile sales dropping, payrolls plunging and manufacturing contracting, economists from across the political spectrum are raising the ante on how much the government should lay out. Some are now calling for at least a $1 trillion boost.

Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard University professor who was an adviser to Republican presidential candidate John McCain, and Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winner who served in President Bill Clinton’s White House, are among those who say President- elect Barack Obama should push for a package of that size.

“They need a stimulus of $500-to-$600 billion a year for at least two years to counter what is going to be a collapse in consumption,” said Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund.

That number may grow. This week brought news that the economy has been in recession for a year. Tomorrow the government will release November employment data, which economists say will show another 330,000 jobs lost, the most in seven years.

“Every day it looks like the stimulus package needs to be bigger,” said Bill Samuel, the lead lobbyist for the AFL-CIO, the largest U.S. labor federation. “You’re talking $500, $600, $700 billion or even more” for a year.

‘Things Are Evolving’

Obama, who has said that enacting a stimulus plan will be his top priority once he takes office on Jan. 20, has himself been steadily increasing the amount he thinks is needed.

Earlier in the presidential campaign, he proposed a package worth $50 billion, then raised that to $175 billion as the election approached. Advisers have since said the program may total as much as $700 billion, although that number, too, may rise.

“Congress should think in terms of $900 billion in 2009, with possibly more in 2010,” said James Galbraith, a self-styled liberal economics professor at the University of Texas in Austin who has talked with the Obama transition team about the issue. “I may be higher than they are at this point,” he said, “but things are evolving.”

Whatever its size, the package is likely to include tax cuts, aid to the states, higher unemployment benefits and increased spending on infrastructure such as roads and bridges.

Recall my earlier post from September, "Paulson Plan Could Lay Foundations for Recovery"? Whatever optimism analysts had at that time has given way to a grudging confirmation that this economic crisis is virtually unprecedented, with perhaps the exception of the 1930s. The housing market in particular just continues to drag things down, and as long as home prices decline or stagnate, the rest of the financial sector - nearly universally "securitized" by mortgage-backed instruments - will continue to implode.

In this sense, it's always hard to argue against "big government," with what's essentially the collapse of the contemporary mixed economy (we have had a "free market" for decades), but the size of the stimulus being discussed is mind-boggling.

What are the limits of U.S. capacity to borrow? At what point does the credibility of the economy and the U.S. dollar evaporate?

“A stimulus of this magnitude helps push government debt as a percentage of GDP closer to dangerous levels, when inflation and interest rates start to rise,” said Thomas Atteberry, who manages $3.5 billion in fixed-income assets at First Pacific Advisors in Los Angeles.

Freedom of Conscience Hypocrisy

We've had this debate on freedom of conscience around here, which was in response to Kathy at Comments From Left Field, and her essay, "Pledging Allegiance and Freedom of Conscience."

Kathy hammers "social conservatives who strongly support “conscience exemptions” for health care professionals who do not want to provide abortions or dispense contraceptives or even refer a woman needing an abortion or contraception to where she can obtain those services."

Then she says:

It appears, however, that conscience only matters to the extent that it adheres to neoconservative and right-wing Republican orthodoxy. The voice of conscience can be safely ignored when it speaks to concerns like capital punishment, or torture, or war, or pledging allegiance to the flag.

In other words, conservatives are hypocritical fascists. How dare they desire to exercise moral foundations in objecting to the pledge of allegiance? The other stuff about capital punishment, torture, war, blah, blah ... is really just added condemnation, as each issue for conservatives is based on a different foundation of moral opposition.

But Kathy's got no time for that. She just wants to demonize those EVIL Neocons and their allied "theocons" and "Christianists" who are allegedly mounting a hegemonic project of traditionalism and flag-waving bigotry.

But wait!

Kathy's got more to say on freedom of conscience as it applies to the provision of abortion services. As cited, many doctors, as a matter for conscience, will not perform abortions because they consider it murder of an unborn human being.

But according to Kathy, the all important "freedom of conscience" that she champions for resisting the death penalty and torture, should not apply to the killing of the unborn:

On tonight’s show, Rachel Maddow interviewed Melissa Harris-Lacewell, who teaches politics and African-American history at Princeton University, about the “Right of Conscience” rule that soon-to-be former Pres. Bush is pushing through for all entities that receive federal funding from the Department of Health and Human Services.

Most people probably don’t realize the sweeping consequences this “conscience exemption” could have. As Maddow pointed out in her interview setup, the right to opt out of performing an abortion, or directly participating or assisting in an abortion procedure, has always existed. But this rule would go well beyond that, in terms both of the employees and the procedures that would be covered [emphasis mine]:

For more than 30 years, federal law has dictated that doctors and nurses may refuse to perform abortions. The new rule would go further by making clear that healthcare workers also may refuse to provide information or advice to patients who might want an abortion.

It also seeks to cover more employees. For example, in addition to a surgeon and a nurse in an operating room, the rule would extend to “an employee whose task it is to clean the instruments,” the draft rule said ....

The HHS proposal has set off a sharp debate about medical ethics and the duties of healthcare workers.

Last year, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology said a “patient’s well-being must be paramount” when a conflict arises over a medical professional’s beliefs.

In calling for limits on “conscientious refusals,” ACOG cited four recent examples. In Texas, a pharmacist rejected a rape victim’s prescription for emergency contraception. In Virginia, a 42-year-old mother of two became pregnant after being refused emergency contraception. In California, a physician refused to perform artificial insemination for a lesbian couple. (In August, the California Supreme Court ruled that this refusal amounted to illegal discrimination based on sexual orientation.) And in Nebraska, a 19-year-old with a life-threatening embolism was refused an early abortion at a religiously affiliated hospital. [So much for exceptions to save the life of the mother.]

“Although respect for conscience is important, conscientious refusals should be limited if they constitute an imposition of religious or moral beliefs on patients [or] negatively affect a patient’s health,” ACOG’s Committee on Ethics said. It also said physicians have a “duty to refer patients in a timely manner to other providers if they do not feel that they can in conscience provide the standard reproductive services that patients request.”

As broad as this rule is, it could potentially be exercised in the context of many other medical procedures to which a given employee objected on moral or religious grounds: blood transfusions and surgery in general (opposed by Jehovah’s Witnesses), anesthesia, vaccinations, removal of ovaries or uterus, stem cell research, and providing terminal sedation to dying patients.

I’m sure others could up with many more.

As Maddow said, “They can’t make abortion illegal, so they’ll make it impossible.”

Thus, it goes both ways, and conscience is not really the issue for leftists like Kathy.

The right to abortion on demand - incuding the insertion of surgical knives into the skulls of 8-month "fetuses," or the abandonment to linen closets of babies who survive these executions - is what all of this pseudo-moral outrage is all about.

Facing "Fear" of Terrorism

Rosa Brooks is a mindless left-wing crank, frankly. In today's column she argues that the "war on terror" is useless, that there's always been terrorism, and there always will be - so why bother with outrage? Just get used to it:

Mumbai should remind us -- again -- of the folly of the Bush administration's "war on terror." Terror is an emotion, and terrorism is a tactic. You can't make "war" against it. Even if meant as mere metaphor, "the war on terror" foolishly enhanced the terrorist's status as prime boogeyman, arguably increasing the psychological effectiveness of terrorist tactics. Worse, it effectively lumped together many different organizations motivated by many different grievances -- a surefire route to strategic error.

Like crime, terrorism will always be with us, and terrorist attacks will increase as long as we succumb to the panic they're intended to inspire. But if we resist the temptation to lash out indiscriminately, we can take sober steps to reduce terrorism through improved intelligence, carefully targeted disruptions of specific terrorist organizations and efforts to address specific grievances (such as disputes over Kashmir). With a new U.S. administration about to take office, isn't it finally time to say goodbye to the "war on terror"? After all, we already have two real wars to worry about.

Actually, like crime, terrorism can be defeated if societies take the appropriate steps to combat it.

If there's any moral outrage for Brooks, it's directed against those who refuse to give terrorists the upper hand, like the Bush administration. And that's really what this essay is all about: President-Elect Obama, "The One," has a chance to heal the world with his magical powers - no more "war" against the major ideological challenge now facing facing us. Transcendance and understanding will overcome.

But wait! Brooks' recommendations for a new effort to combat terrorism look a whole lot like the old efforts to combat terrorism: intelligence, targeting of terror cells, political initiatives (all of which describes current administation policy).

What Brooks is trying say is we should never use violence, because supposedly we'll be giving the terrorists what they want.

And really, all that's suggesting is that Western societies should disarm themselves, and focus on "confidence-building" and the "lessening of tensions."

Click here to see what it looks like when societies capitulate to the "fear" of alienating their enemies.

The Good Shall Not Perish From the Earth

I've become increasingly convinced that we have reached a new, epochal stage in the long-running cultural war in America.

The turning point was the November 4th election. It's not so much Barack Obama himself (although his election was certainly one of the biggest frauds ever imposed on this country). It's the larger creeping fog of political-correctness and postmodern moral equivalence that is like a gathering storm of death for this nation's historic vision of the moral good: Indeed, a left-wing cultural totalitarianism is fastening its grip on American society. From the unquestioning media bias toward the Democratic presidential ticket, to the left's political demonization of anyone who respects and defends traditional culture, to the anti-democratic movement of the fringe masses to overturn a popular voter initiative in California, we today are witnessing the triumph of a cultural realignment that may very well end up destroying this nation.

Some time back, in the 1980s - and during a period of powerful Cold War tensions - I recall reading Jean-Francois Revel's, How Democracies Perish. I was young then, and still figuring out much about politics, but the basic theme has stayed with me, thank goodness:

Democracy tends to ignore, even deny, threats to its existence because it loathes doing what is necessary to counter them. What we end up with in what is conventionally called Western society is a topsy-turvy situation in which those seeking to destroy democracy appear to be fighting for legitimate aims, while its defenders are pictured as repressive reactionaries. Identification of democracy's internal and external adversaries with the forces of progress, legitimacy, even peace, discredits and paralyzes the efforts of people who are only trying to preserve their institutions ...

The key for democractic survival is an unflinching will to stand for liberty and moral goodness, and, sadly, today I think this country may be losing its consciousness of clarity; the country is not comprehending the enormity of the impending battle, and it is losing the resolve to wage the fight that will come.

I write this from a very personal perspective, not just from what I see in the headlines. I have been writing overwhelmingly on moral questions facing the nation, for example, the controversy over the left's increasing strident program of imposing its culture on the rest of society, with particular reference to the No on H8 campaign that has created a climate reminiscent to the Stalinist show trials of the 1930s.

For example, I argued recently that the refusal among leftists to pledge allegiance to the flag was a classic manifestation of postmodern transnationalism and the repudiation of the American nation-state. That essay generated a very disturbing backlash, which I see as, frankly, the kind of creepy ideological entitlement cum totalitarianism that is truly representative of the country's internal enemies today.

One commenter in particular - who refused to actually engage the argument I had made at the post - became increasing belligerent and intolerant, to the point of essentially calling me a terrorist:

... you just happened to pick a fight ... that not only were you wrong about, but which you proceeding to try to psychoanalyze your way around because it just never occurred to you that you, a upstanding, righteous conservative intellectual, could be wrong about anything.

And that is the problem, Donald. And that is why I called you out on it ....

And there is no weaseling your way out of this one, in the real world. Play games all you want to in your head. The fact is that you are being defensive on a matter that you are both wrong about and that you condescended this person's quite reasonable position of conscience and tried to intellectually strong-arm your way through by pretending that your disagreement was just an argument when, in fact, you had overtly argued that this person hated their country because they didn't agree with you and then tried to weasel your way around that by intellectualizing the whole exercise.

And then when you got called on the same, you backtracked instead of owning up.

And not owning up on these questions is exactly what is wrong with the world, right now, Donald. And it is exactly what leads to the nonsensical conclusion that power and not respect for conscience is necessary to avoid a regime where, in your words, "there will be no possibility of conscience, only death."

If I'm using too much intellectual muscle, here, Donald, I apologize. But I don't like watching people with intellect manipulating their way through conversations where they are insulting peoples' love for their country, where they are disrespecting their conscience, an argument about respecting conscience, doing so all in the name of preserving conscience, and just can't admit they are being a jerk ....

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is actually a kindred spirit with you, on this point. And he is wrong too. And I don't care how much power he wields. It will never be legitimate as long as it does used in the service of a more honest and decent conscience and as little as possible to boot.

The irony, Donald, is that you have more in common with those terrorists and despots that you rightly villify with that argument.

Actually, there's not much "intellectual muscle" there, but readers might want to check the comment thread to see what was so objectional to this person, but mostly, it was superior argumentation and the very moral clarity that this author outwardly rejects.

Now, as readers can see, the attacks in the comments are often relentless, and they've seemed to pick up even more with all of my recent writing and analysis on the Mumbai massacre.

But as I was reading Snooper's recent post a light came on, reminding me once more that we now indeed battle demons internal to the nation, demons who will not relent in their program of hegemonic destruction of our culture and tradition.

Indeed, one of the commenters there has responded to this at his own blog, with a post entitled, "Donald Douglas: Enemy of Americans." The main body of the entry is in the "Obey Obama" genre, that with the election of "The One," all partisanship must end, for anyone who continues to stand up for the moral beliefs is a traitor to a newly-created set of political standards. But this addtional commentary by the publisher, in the comments, is particularly macabre (referring to my concurrence in Snooper's moral outrage):

He didn't write those words [Snooper's]... He only quoted them approvingly.

Of course, the fact that Anyone who thinks those words were written by someone in his right mind is not in his/her, um, right mind. still stands.

And all the freakish namecalling done by either of 'em doesn't do a thing to change that "I hate my fellow Americans" thinkin' that's becoming so pervasive among some elements on the right.

That they find it impossible to work for the changes they seek in a positive way, & without attacking those who don't share their political & social goals, is just plumb sad. But this need to demonize "the other," whoever they may be, seems to be the only thing that keeps these types going. As long as they see us as an "enemy," rather than as fellow Americans who just don't share their politics, they have no need of common decency, which I guess makes them feel more powerful, or something.

I could never live my life that way, and I predict that they'll reap the same hatred they sow. Bright as Nero may be (& I happen to think he is, which makes him all the more pathetic), he lacks the human decency God should've given him, and the values America should've instilled in him. That he claims to speak for both, while understanding so little about either, baffles me. But in the end, I really feel sorry for him, living in a world he so reviles, and is so powerless to change to his liking.

Note something here, dear readers: I haven't attacked anyone in either of the posts I'm referencing. I have simply made (1) a logical argument on the implications of the rejection of the nation-state for the absence of patriotism on the left, and (2) a confirmation of Snooper's own sense of insanity at the nihilist destruction of this nation's soul.

I have no need to defend myself, in the long run, against these smears that I am a terrorist or that I've abandoned God's gift of decency. I am not and I have not. I am a loving family man and a caring teacher, and my values are affirmed every day when I see little bits of goodness in a prevailing environment broken loose from the moorings of eternal right.

But let me share an e-mail, by permission, from a newer reader to my blog, who contacted me before the election:

This is a thank-you note for your eloquence and reason on American Power. I am happy to have found your site.

Just as there are people whose beliefs were shaken and galvanized by September 11, there are (I suspect) many conservatives besides me who are now at a new higher level of civic involvement due to the stunning array of outrageous events this election year. A babyboomer, I have been a conservative since the days of Ronald Reagan (beliefs made even stronger by a year at U.C. Berkeley), but until this year I had never experienced such deep fear and concern for my country.

Normally my time is spent in a very different world, a tranquil one of art and fiction. I have no love for politics or civics, if the truth be known, but it's pretty hard to have an attitude of 'business as usual'.

This new, dear friend thanked me further, and pledged to add my page to her blogroll. But it's not the gratifying sense of moral recognition that's important here - as reaffirming as that is - it's this notion that my reader is not a political person - she is, in fact, a lover of art and literature - but one who is so shaken by the current times, that she is genuinely fearful of an approaching cultural apocalypse.

So then, let me just say to finish: There is a flame that is flickering, but it cannot be extinguished unless those of good will and values capitulate. Many traditionalists are now looking inward, and my hope is that from that introspection they will draw strength and be empowered by a new birth of righteous awareness that our roots are divine and just, and that the banishment of values from the public square will surely bring a wrath of evil upon this nation, and that the time is now to say, no ... the good shall not perish from the earth. That we, as Americans, will tolerate difference but will not countenance a hegmonic, evil destruction of universal American values.

The American democracy will endure only so long as people of right and faith reject the perversion of morals, language, and culture that we see in the current program of leftist totalitarianism across the land.

We Must Trust Obama!

Via the Distant Ocean, "Obama Followers Patiently Awaiting Instructions":

Defending his unbroken string of establishment/hawkish/conservative appointments, the general speaks:

"What we are going to do is combine experience with fresh thinking. But I understand where the vision for change comes from. First and foremost, it comes from me. That's my job -- to provide a vision in terms of where we are going, and to make sure then that my team is implementing."

And a soldier responds (see the comments at the link), in words that really must be read in their entirety to be appreciated:

Obama is picking people with the toughness and experience to get things done. We should be more supportive of his choices. The way I see it, we (the people who support Obama) are like foot soldiers in a nonviolent war for revolutionary change. Like any good soldier, I must trust my commander. Obama is my commander (in-chief) and I trust him. Okay, so here's the tricky part. In a war, it is not the duty of a foot-soldier to develop the entire strategy for the war, nor is it the duty of a foot soldier to decide what orders to obey and which to disobey. No war could be won by an army governed by anarchy.

In this war, (against radical Right-wing government and social forces) it is up to Obama to craft a winning strategy, not us - the disorganized rabble. When we judge his strategy in a negative light, our criticism is ignorant, because we do not know what his full strategy entails. Keep in mind, it would be foolish, in a state of war, to simply divulge what that strategy is. So we must have faith in Obama and trust him. If we want change (and I know I do) then we must trust him, even when we feel we can't. We must see beyond our fears, and remember that sometimes it is more important to follow than to try to lead. The Left does not need more wannabe leaders and more petty infighting. It's like each of us has a piece of a puzzle, but only Obama can put the pieces together to create an image for our future.

This is really weird.

See also, "Obey Obama!"

Naomi Klein: Most Influential Figure on the American Left?

Readers will get a kick out of this piece on Naomi Klein at the New Yorker, "Outside Agitator."

Here's a passage from the scene in Toronto where Klein was being introduced:

“We apologize for starting late, but it’s typical activist time, so I’m sure you’re used to it,” a young woman organizer said from the stage. The young woman wore a black necklace, black jeans, and black hoop earrings. She urged the audience to fight racism and poverty, and to work for education, international solidarity, justice for immigrants and refugees, and solidarity with Palestine and with the Mohawk of Tyendinaga and the Algonquin of Barriere Lake, on whose behalf the fund-raiser that night was being held. She squinted into the lights. “I’m glad you can’t see the audience from here,” she said, “because I don’t think I’ve ever spoken in front of eight hundred and fifty people except at a protest, and then you can always dissolve into a chant.” She consulted her notes. “To a different audience—to those that hold capital and power in this society—Naomi Klein’s words and her ideas are seen as a serious threat,” she said. “Her words are a source of inspiration . . . for those of us who were and are being radicalized by the anti-globalization, anti-colonial, and anti-poverty movements and the demands to change the system totally and completely.”

Like I said: You've got to love it!

Hey, solidarity between Mohawks and Algonquins and Hamas? Oh, it's "imperialism." I got it.

Here's the description of Klein's book, The Shock Doctrine:

The central thesis of the book is that capitalism and democracy, free markets and free people, do not, as we’ve been told, go hand in hand. On the contrary, capitalism—at least fundamentalist capitalism, of the type promoted by the late economist Milton Friedman and his “Chicago School” acolytes—is so unpopular, and so obviously harmful to everyone except the richest of the rich, that its establishment requires, at best, trickery and, at worst, terror and torture. Friedman believed that markets perform best when freed from government interference, so he advocated getting rid of tariffs, subsidies, minimum-wage laws, public housing, Social Security, financial regulation, and licensing requirements, including those for doctors—indeed, virtually every measure devised to protect people from the market’s harsh logic. Klein argues that the only circumstance in which a population would accept Friedman-style reforms is when it is in a state of shock, following a crisis of some sort—a natural disaster, a terrorist attack, a war. A person in shock regresses to a childlike state in which he longs for a parental figure to take control; similarly, a population in a state of shock will hand exceptional powers to its leaders, permitting them to destroy the regulatory functions of government.

Read the whole thing, here.

The piece goes on to say that Klein's "the most visible and influential figure on the American left—what Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky were thirty years ago."

Of course, like her predecessors, she'll quietly recede into irrelevance as the current economy emerges out of recession - unless, shock!, she ends up being a true prophet of the coming progressive moment in world history.

See also my earlier essay, "Naomi Klein's Anti-Imperialist Blueprint for the Left."

Sandra Samuel Credited With Moshe Holtzberg Rescue

CNN reports that Sandra Samuel, the nanny of Moshe Holtzberg, whose parents, Gavriel and Rivka, were massacred at Mumbai's Chabad house last week, mounted a heroic rescue of the boy from the clutches of death at the hands of the terrorists:

A 2-year-old survived an attack that took the lives of his parents, thanks to a quick-thinking nanny who grabbed the boy and dashed past gunmen to safety.

It could be called one the miracles of last week's tragedy in Mumbai, India. Two-year-old Moshe Holtzberg and nanny Sandra Samuel were the only ones to make it out of the Chabad House alive after gunmen stormed the house, killing Chabad House directors Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife, Rivka, and four others.

Rivka Holtzberg, who arrived in Mumbai with her husband five years ago to serve the city's small Jewish community, was pregnant, her father said at her funeral Tuesday, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported.

Those at the Chabad House were among 179 people killed last week when gunmen targeted several sites across Mumbai, including two luxury hotels, a train station and a hospital.

As the siege at the Chabad House began, Samuel heard the commotion, locked the doors and hid in a room.

"She heard Mrs. Holtzberg -- Rivka -- screaming, 'Sandra, Sandra, help, Sandra,' " said Robert Katz, executive vice president of the Israeli organization Migdal Ohr.

She then ran upstairs to find the Holtzbergs shot dead, lying on the ground with their son crying over them.

"She literally picked him up and made a dash for the exits, almost daring the terrorists to shoot a woman carrying a baby," Katz said.

The two arrived in Israel early Tuesday on a flight with the boy's maternal grandparents and the bodies of his parents.

"Moshe, you have no living mother and father. ... Today you become the child of all Israel," Rabbi Moshe Kotlarsky, a Chabad official from New York, said in a short ceremony at the Ben Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv.

The return of the bodies was delayed until authorities removed hand grenades from the bodies, left there by the attackers, Katz said.

The hand grenades, of course, are booby traps designed to kill the recovery teams coming to collect the dead.

Sandra Samuel has been granted a one-year visa in Israel to help care for Moshe while he he transitions to his new life.

Video Credit: "Oh, the Humanity!", Atlas Shrugs.

India Names Lashkar-e-Taiba as Mumbai Mastermind

The Wall Street Journal reports that New Delhi has identified Pakistan's militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba as the central terrorist organization behind last week's attacks in Mumbai:

India has accused a senior leader of the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba of orchestrating last week's terror attacks that killed at least 172 people here, and demanded the Pakistani government turn him over and take action against the group.

Just two days before hitting the city, the group of 10 terrorists who ravaged India's financial capital communicated with Yusuf Muzammil and four other Lashkar leaders via a satellite phone that they left behind on a fishing trawler they hijacked to get to Mumbai, a senior Mumbai police official told The Wall Street Journal. The entire group also underwent rigorous training in a Lashkar-e-Taiba camp in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, the official said.

Mr. Muzammil had earlier been in touch with an Indian Muslim extremist who scoped out Mumbai locations for possible attack before he was arrested early this year, said another senior Indian police official. The Indian man, Faheem Ahmed Ansari, had in his possession layouts drawn up for the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower hotel and Mumbai's main railway station, both prime targets of last week's attack, the police official said.

Mr. Ansari, who also made sketches and maps of locations in southern Mumbai that weren't attacked, had met Mr. Muzammil and trained at the same Lashkar camp as the terrorists in last week's attack, an official said.

U.S. officials agreed that Mr. Muzammil was a focus of their attention in the attacks, though they stopped short of calling him the mastermind. "That is a name that is definitely on the radar screen," a U.S. counterterrorism official said.

Information gathered in the probe also continues to point to a connection to Lashkar-e-Taiba, that official said. Along with a confession from the one gunman captured in the attacks, officials cited phone calls intercepted by satellite during the attacks that connected the assailants to members of Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan, and the recovered satellite phone from the boat ....

The Mumbai attacks have ratcheted up tensions between the two nuclear-armed neighbors, who have been exchanging verbal fire for the past several days and sparking fears of a conflict. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is scheduled to arrive in India Wednesday, as is Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Indian authorities say evidence highlights how Lashkar has broadened its operations to include recruitment of both Indian and Pakistani Muslim extremists.

Lashkar-e-Taiba - literally Army of the Good - has been implicated by Indian officials in several recent terrorist attacks on Indian soil. The group initially focused on fighting the Indian army in the disputed state of Kashmir. Over the years, it has expanded its cause into the rest of India and aims to establish Islamic rule.

India has told Pakistan that the latest attacks in Mumbai were masterminded by Mr. Muzammil, aided by others in Lashkar's senior ranks including an operative named Asrar Shah, according to a senior Pakistani official. Mr. Muzammil, a Pakistani in his mid-30s, became head of Lashkar-e-Taiba's anti-Indian planning cell some three months ago, according to Dipankar Banerjee, director of the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, an independent think tank in New Delhi. Indian authorities believe he is in Pakistan but officials there haven't acknowledged that.

India also claims the attacks were approved by Hafiz Muhammed Saeed, the Pakistani official said. Mr. Saeed is the head of Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the parent organization of the Lashkar group. Mr. Saeed, who is free in Pakistan, denied the accusations. "India has always accused me without any evidence," he told Pakistan's GEO News television channel.

Indian investigators - helped in part by the testimony of the one terrorist they captured alive, Mohammed Ajmal Kasab - say they now possess solid proof. "We have made substantial progress in the investigation," said A.N. Roy, director general of the State Police of Maharashtra, where Mumbai is located.

Be sure to read the whole article, which features an excellent map and chronology of the suspected terrorist plotting inside Pakistan.

The quesion now is how India, Pakistan, and the United States respond to the latest developments. See my earler essay for more on that, "An Indian Incursion into Pakistan?"

The UN's Obsession with the Death of Israel

Recall that Dennis Prager noted how the Holtzberg murders last week at the Jewish Chabad house in Mumbai came at precisely the same time that "the United Nations General Assembly passed six more anti-Israel resolutions."

At my post on this, Here's LFC comments in response:

I take some issue ... with the second to last paragraph of the column, where he says it's "exquisitely fitting" that the UNGenAssembly passed 6 "anti-Israel resolutions" the week of the Mumbai attacks. It's not "exquisitely fitting" b/c the 2 things actually have rather little to do w/ each other.

LFC took issue with me as well, saying that:

Speaking of fitting, it might be fitting for you to express some outrage at the killing of the other 170-some people who died in the attacks ...

Well, regular readers know that I've condemned the attacks on Mumbai as attacks against Western civilization, and I've specifically hightlighted how the attackers killed citizens from all over the world.

No matter.

LFC's got a larger design, and that's to delegitimize any blogging that privileges Western values against the advocacy of nihilist destruction seen in defenders of evil, including the leading dictators who compose the membership the U.N. General Assembly.

Jeff Jacoby actually wrote about this last weekend:

THE PRESIDENT of the UN General Assembly, Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann of Nicaragua, last week denounced the policies of a certain Middle Eastern nation. They are "so similar to the apartheid of an earlier era," he said, "that the world must unite against them, demanding an "end to this massive abuse of human rights" and isolating the offending nation as it once isolated South Africa: with a punishing "campaign of boycott, divestment, and sanctions."

Of which country was he speaking?

Was it Saudi Arabia, where public facilities are segregated by sex, and where a pervasive system of gender apartheid denies women the right to drive, to dress as they choose, to freely marry or divorce, to vote, to appear in public without a male "guardian," or to give testimony on an equal basis with men?

Was it Jordan, where the law explicitly bars Jews from citizenship and where the sale of land to a Jew was for decades not only illegal, but punishable by death?

Was it Iran, where homosexuality is a capital crime - at least 200 Iranian gays were executed last year - and whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, asserted at Columbia University that there are no homosexuals in Iran?

Was it Sudan, where tens of thousands of black Africans in the country's southern region, most of them Christians or animists, have been abducted and sold into slavery by Arab militias backed by the Islamist regime in Khartoum?

It was none of these. The General Assembly president, a radical Maryknoll priest who served as Nicaragua's foreign minister during the Sandinista regime in the 1980s, was not referring to any of the Middle East's Muslim autocracies and dictatorships, virtually all of which discriminate against ethnic and religious minorities. He was speaking of the Jewish state of Israel, the region's lone democracy, and the only one that guarantees the legal equality of all its citizens - one-fifth of whom are Muslim and Christian Arabs.

D'Escoto's call for Israel to be shunned as a pariah and strangled economically came on the UN's Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, an annual occasion devoted to lamenting the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty in the 20th century, denouncing the national liberation movement - Zionism - that made that rebirth possible, and championing the cause of the Palestinian Arabs. The event occurs on or about Nov. 29, the anniversary of the UN vote in 1947 to partition Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. There are impassioned speeches, in which Israel's sins are enumerated and condemned, and the statelessness of the Palestinians is bewailed. Unmentioned is the fact that Palestine's Arabs would have had their state 60 years ago had they and the Arab League not rejected the UN's decision and chosen instead to declare war on the new Jewish state.

Like so much of what takes place at the UN, the obsession with demonizing Israel and extolling the Palestinians is grotesque and Orwellian. More than 1 million Israeli Arabs enjoy civil and political rights unmatched in the Arab world - yet Israel is accused of repression and human-rights abuse. Successive Israeli governments have endorsed a "two-state solution" - yet Israel is blasted as the obstacle to peace. The Palestinian Authority oversees the vilest culture of Jew-hatred since the Third Reich, and wants all Jews expelled from the land it claims for itself - yet Israel is labeled an "apartheid state" and singled out for condemnation and ostracism.

Make no mistake: In likening Israel to apartheid-era South Africa, the UN is engaged not in anti-racism but in anti-Semitism. In the 1930s, the world's foremost anti-Semites demanded a boycott of Jewish businesses. Today they demand a boycott of the Jewish state.

"No good German is still buying from a Jew," announced Hitler's Nazi Party in March 1933. "The boycott must be a universal one . . . and must hit Jewry where it is most vulnerable." Seventy-five years later, the president of the General Assembly urges the world to throttle Israel's 6 million Jews with "boycott, divestment, and sanctions." There is no significant difference between the two cases -- or the animus underlying them.

When the UN adopted its odious "Zionism is racism resolution" in 1975, US Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan minced no words. "The United States," he declared, "does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act." Where is such a voice of moral outrage today?

Echoes From WWII: Islamists and the Jews

Dennis Prager has published one of the most profound essays I've read so far in my coverage of the Mumbai massacre.

The enormity of the terrorists' evil is now clear, as we haved learned more and more about the killings of Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife Rivka.

Here's Prager:

Why would a terrorist group of Islamists from Pakistan whose primary goal is to have Pakistan gain control of the third of Kashmir that belongs to India and therefore aimed to destabilize India's major city devote so much of its efforts - 20 percent of its force of 10 gunmen whose stated goal was to kill 5,000 - to killing a rabbi and any Jews with him?

The question echoes one from World War II: Why did Hitler devote so much time, money, and manpower in order to murder every Jewish man, woman, and child in every country the Nazis occupied? Why did Hitler - as documented by the late historian Lucy Dawidowicz in her aptly named book "The War against the Jews" -- weaken the Nazi war effort by diverting money, troops, and military vehicles from fighting the Allies to rounding up Jews and shipping them to death camps?

From the perspective of political scientists, historians, and contemporary journalists, the answer to these questions is not rational. But the non-rationality of an answer is not synonymous with its non-validity.

For the Islamists, as for the Nazis, the destruction of the Jews -- and since 1948, the Jewish state -- is central to their worldview.

If anyone has a better explanation for why Pakistani terrorists, preoccupied with destabilizing India, would expend so much effort at finding the one Jewish center in a country that is essentially devoid of Jews, I would like to hear it.

With all the Pakistani Islamists' hatred of Hindus, they did not attack one Hindu temple in India's major city.

With all their hatred of Christian infidels, the terrorists did not seek out one of the 700,000 Christians in Mumbai.

To reinforce my point, imagine a Basque separatist terrorist organization attacking Madrid. Would the terrorists take time out to murder all those in the Madrid Chabad House? The idea is ludicrous. But no one seems to find it odd that that Pakistani Muslim terrorists who hate India and want it to give up control of Indian Kashmir would send two of its 10 terrorists to kill perhaps the only rabbi in Mumbai. As Newsweek reported during the siege, "Given that Orthodox Jews were being held at gunpoint by mujahideen (sic), it seemed unlikely there would be survivors." Newsweek, like just about everyone else, simply assumes Islamists will murder Jews whenever and wherever possible.

They are right.

For years I have warned that great evils often begin with the murder of Jews, and therefore non-Jews who dismiss Jew-hatred (aka anti-Semitism, aka anti-Zionism), will learn too late that Jew- and Israel-haters only begin with Jews but never end with them. When Israeli Jews were almost the only targets of Muslim terrorists, the world dismissed it as a Jewish or Israeli problem. Then it became an American and European and Filipino and Thai and Indonesian and Hindu problem.

It's always a serious thing to invoke the memory of the Holocaust to explain contemporary threats to international security and Western civilization.

But because of the ineluctable conclusion that of all the deaths last week, the killings of the Holtzbergs was the result of singularly unspeakable design and diabolical guile, the reference to the Nazi program of anti-Semitic eliminationism is completely appropriate.