On November 1^st, HBO presented a new documentary called “To Die In Jerusalem: Two Daughters Lost in Conflict.” According to promotional materials, the film portrays two seventeen year old girls as they “die in a Jerusalem market, their mothers confront each other, revealing a microcosm of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the complexity of reconciliation.” Like the infamous Newsweek cover that inspired it, this documentary treats both girls – Palestinian Ayat al-Akhras and Israeli Rachel Levy – as victims of “faith or fate that brought each of them to the end of her life in such a tragic manner.” Appallingly, the filmmakers blur the distinction between murderer and victim, evil and innocence. The Israeli girl went to the market to buy Sabbath supplies; the Palestinian girl went there to murder strangers in a homicide bombing. The publicity for the film also downplays the security guard killed alongside the girls, and the thirty bystanders wounded in the blast. The real reason for the “complexity of reconciliation” is that the mother of the bomber, encouraged by a society that praises her murderous child as a heroine with posters and commemorations,  now feels “hesitant pride” in her heinous act. Ignoring the gigantic moral gulf between crazed killer and blameless target doesn’t advance the cause of peace, but perpetuates the ignorance and blindness that faciliates continued terrorism.

The sixth anniversary of the September 11^th attacks should have inspired remembrance and gratitude, since we’ve so far been spared the horror of another terrorist assault on American soil.

But unfortunately, commemorations this year were marred by a disturbing trend in our culture: polls show more than 30% of our fellow citizens believe 9/11 was an “inside job.” The so-called “9/11 Truth Movement” obsesses on a range of ludicrous suspicions about Building Seven, a missile—not a plane—striking the Pentagon, dynamite charges at the base of the twin towers, and so forth.

Aside from the poisonous impact on public discourse of such lunatic notions, the people who focus on these theories do incalculable damage to themselves. Someone who entertains the idea that his own government is part of a mass-murdering conspiracy will not only destroy his political effectiveness, but also make success in career and marriage far less likely.

Normal, productive individuals prefer to avoid long-term association with paranoid nuts.

In a desperate effort to revive his floundering presidential campaign, Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo has returned to his unhinged and wildly irresponsible discussion of punitive bombing of Muslim holy sites in Saudi Arabia.

On “This Week” on ABC, he suggested that such threats against Mecca and Medina could serve to deter Islamic terrorists from staging nuclear attacks on the United States. In the Republican debate of August 5^th, Representative Tancredo portentously intoned: “I read the national intelligence estimate. I see what they are planning. And I’m telling you right now that anybody that would suggest that we should take anything like this off the table in order to deter that kind of event in the Untied States isn’t fit to be president of the United States.”

His declaration drew warm applause from the Iowa audience, and many conservatives across the country (including numerous callers to my radio show) feel instinctively sympathetic to any pledge to use decisive force against our Islamist adversaries.

Rational consideration of Tancredo’s proposal, however, leads inevitably, inescapably to one of two conclusions:

1) He wants the United States to make empty threats that no Commander-in-Chief would ever dare to implement, or

2) He honestly expects our government to respond to a devastating terrorist attack with a course of action guaranteed to increase, rather than reduce, the chance of future assaults, while pushing our economy into ruinous chaos.

In the case of the first alternative, all students of history and statecraft understand the terrible danger when a nation makes promises it can’t fulfill, or pledges retaliation that it has no real intention of delivering.

Osama bin Laden has already derided the United States as a “paper tiger” based on our shameful retreats from Vietnam, Beirut, Somalia and, potentially, Iraq. In the event that our government declared its intention to respond to terrorist devastation by bombing Mecca, he and his colleagues might well feel tempted to subject the West to the ultimate humiliation by calling our bluff. Indeed, any calculating terrorist leader would rightly dismiss the possibility that America would actually conduct a devastating bombing raid against our most powerful Arab ally, thereby severely disrupting the flow of oil on which all Western economies depend. After sustaining the incalculable economic damage of a terrorist nuclear attack on American soil, no sane President would want to insure further commercial devastation by dispatching a fleet of bombers against symbolic targets in the nation with the planet’s richest known oil reserves.

The possibility of following through with such an attack remains so remote, so obviously counterproductive, that any pledge to undertake this response would only encourage jihadists to expose the hollowness of our rhetoric and the limitations of our power. In this sense, far-fetched public warnings about obliterating sacred shrines in Mecca and Medina might actually make terrorist violence more likely than ever. Making threats we don’t mean to actualize weakens, rather than strengthens, our national security.

Meanwhile, even a candidate as illogical and immature as Tom Tancredo should be able to calculate the catastrophic impact of a president ordering the actual incineration of the Grand Mosque in Mecca and Mohammed’s tomb in Medina. Every American understands that Islamo-Nazi terror arises from an all-consuming, suicidal rage against the United States – a rage already so powerful that it’s led thousands of “holy warriors” to blow their own bodies into pieces for the sake of murdering innocent Americans.

Representative Tancredo should confront a simple, obvious question about our terrorist enemies: if we turned the holiest sites in all of Islam in smoldering rubble, would their rage against us increase, or decrease?

Even a two-bit demagogue like the Colorado Congressman must acknowledge that anti-American fury in the Muslim world would not only intensify among jihadists, but would spread quickly among those previously identified as moderate or indifferent. If we feel menaced and overwhelmed by Islamic hostility today, one can only imagine the implacable hatred we would produce by deliberately destroying their holy places.

The violent reaction to such destruction isn’t the subject of mere speculation; it’s actually a matter of record. In February, 2006, operatives for al-Qaeda in Iraq exploded bombs that severely damaged the beloved golden dome of the Al Askari Mosque in Samara—an ancient site sacred to all Shi’ites Muslims. As expected – and, apparently, as intended – the Shi’ite response involved a ferocious increase in sectarian violence, with retaliatory slaying of literally thousands of innocent Sunnis. In light of this reaction to the incomplete destruction of a sectarian shrine, why would anyone expect a less violent result from the total destruction of a far holier Mosque in Mecca that’s equally sacred to Shi’ite and Sunni alike?

Among other things, a strike against the sacred cities of Saudi Arabia would fatally undermine our beleaguered and erstwhile allies in the Islamic world. Afghan President Hamid Karzai, for instance, who visited the White House earlier this week, would face new and irresistible pressure to distance himself from the Mosque-destroying infidels, or else share the blame with them for an atrocity against all of Islam.

Al-Qaeda and allied groups try to recruit future holy warriors by claiming that the United States isn’t simply defending itself and its interests, but rather pursues the implacable purpose of destroying Islam itself. Nothing could substantiate and underscore this argument more effectively than U.S. bombing strikes on non-military targets in Mecca and Medina. Destroying sacred buildings never serves to undermine or disarm bloodthirsty hostility, but only helps to mobilize such rage.

In October of 2000, howling Palestinian mobs opted for a Tancredo-like “retaliation” by ransacking one of the holiest sites of Judaism as part of the second Intifida. Without interference from Yassir Arafat’s security forces, these radicals destroyed and ultimately bulldozed to rubble the venerated tomb of the Biblical patriarch, Joseph. Rather than discouraging the Israelis, this wanton destruction of a cherished building stiffened their resolve to resist, obliterated their illusions and helped bring about the landslide election victory of a new, hard-line Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon.

Would anyone expect the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims to react with less indignation to the eradication of Mecca and Medina than did Israelis to the obliteration of Joseph’s tomb?

Of course, apologists for the crazed, delusional rhetoric of Tom Tancredo might argue that bombing holy structures in Mecca and Medina represents only the beginning of a new and necessary “no more Mr. Nice Guy” strategy for the United States – an appropriate but insufficient retaliation for terrorist excesses by Islamists. According to such logic, the American military ultimately will move from blowing up buildings to annihilating people until we finally succeed in breaking the Muslim will to fight back.

In this context, we should consider the example of war-time Japan—where it took the death of more than 3 million human beings, and two devastating atomic bombs, before the thoroughly defeated Empire finally agreed to surrender. Killing a comparable percentage of today’s Muslim population would require at least 50 million deaths. Even assuming some moral justification for such unprecedented genocide, we’re left with a practical problem: where, exactly, would we find our 50 million Muslims to slaughter? Would we try to kill them all in Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia, or Iran, or would we try to distribute the carnage throughout the Islamic world?

Of course, it’s an absurd question, and an obscene suggestion, that the United States should lash out at millions of Muslims, the innocent along with the guilty, in response to some new terror attack. As a practical matter of policy, however, the idea of bombing sacred buildings constitutes an even more irrational notion than the concept of slaughtering Islamic civilians at random. Blowing up the Grand Mosque in Mecca would produce at least as many enraged, indignant, and bloodthirsty responses as bombing Muslim population centers. At the same time, destroying a few buildings (unlike strikes against population centers) would do nothing at all to destroy the ability of believers to strike back against the infidels responsible for the outrage.

On my radio show, Jerusalem-based author Victor Mordecai (“Is Fanatic Islam a Global Threat?”) acknowledged that even though bombing Mecca wouldn’t take away Muslim capacity to terrorize societies in the West it would, in fact, remove their inclination to do so. He argued that the definitive destruction of the ancient Kaaba in Mecca (the large, black-draped cubical structure toward which devout Muslims direct their prayers five times each day) would serve a useful purpose: undermining Islamic claims that their God is, indeed, “the greatest.”

According to Mordecai’s logic, tens of millions of previously fervent believers would face a crisis of faith if American bombs succeeded in erasing the focus of their daily devotions and yearly pilgrimages; many of them, he insists, would turn away in disgust from the fanatical faith that had previously animated their lives. Never mind the fact that they’ve maintained their beliefs in the face of abundant prior evidence of the emptiness and falsehood of Mohammed’s promises that Islamic faith and practice would give believers permanent worldwide dominance over benighted infidels. Mordecai declares that turning the Kaaba into an unapproachable glow-in-the-dark nuclear waste dump would serve as the final, definitive rebuttal to Koranic claims, and that most Muslims would, instantaneously, abandon their religion.

Even in the unlikely event that he’s correct, and that the vast majority (say, 90%) of the world’s Islamic believers respond to Mecca’s destruction by abandoning Allah and rejecting the Prophet, that still leaves well over 100 million fanatics even more determined than before to sacrifice their lives, if necessary, to destroy America. The core problem of Islamo-Nazi terror has always been the fierce intensity and determination of the few, not the passive hostility of the many. If bombing Mecca did, in fact, seriously damage Islam’s credibility as a competitive world religion (a very big and doubtful “if”), such action still would leave millions upon millions of enraged fanatics sworn to do whatever it takes to exact mass-murdering revenge. It doesn’t take billions of believers to menace the United States – millions (even thousands) can perform that function quite nicely. On September 11, nineteen crazies with box-cutters managed to butcher thousands and to change the world.

Finally, Tancredo defends his own inflammatory rhetoric by firing back at unidentified political rivals who say we “should take anything like this off the table,” claiming that such nuke-averse wimps aren’t “fit to be President of the United States.” In this rhetorical strafing, the Congressman aims only at straw men rather than actual flesh-and-blood candidates. More serious White House contenders, along with officials at the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department, don’t want the Mecca-bombing option removed, but they don’t want it discussed, either. Opposing Tancredo’s public effort to place a doomsday scenario “on the table” isn’t the same thing as ruling out that possibility as some desperate, worst-case eventuality. The entire Mecca-bombing debate not only damages our present efforts to win cooperation and support from non-radical Muslims, but serves to constrict, rather than enlarge, the real-world policy options a future President might consider in response to some horrific terrorist incident.

In short, only a madman could seriously suggest that threatening Mecca and Medina (even as a campaign stunt) somehow enhances US security. The State Department rightly characterized the Tancredo remarks as “reprehensible” and “absolutely crazy.”

Giving Tancredo the benefit of the doubt, he may not count as crazy because he can’t count as serious. If nothing else, his lamentable “nuke Mecca” musings help to highlight the unmistakable difference between plausible candidates for President of the United States and a shabby, grandstanding demagogue who’ll say anything, and risk any damage to his country, in puerile pursuit of a few fleeting moments of media attention.

When considering the tragic impact of Islamo-Nazi terror, it’s only natural to think first of hot-spots in the Middle East— like Iraq, Lebanon, and Israel. But a new report for Human Rights Watch shows that since 2000, Islamic fanatics have killed or seriously wounded more than 1,700 civilians in the Philippines – making that island nation an unheralded but bloody front in the war on terror. The report describes Islamists who have “bombed buses carrying workers, food markets where people were shopping, airports where relatives were waiting for loved ones and ferryboats carrying families.” In 2004, they blew up a passenger ship off Manila Bay and killed 116. In Thailand, Islamic terror attacks have also sharply increased, now claiming close to a thousand casualties in the last six years. In Algeria, a stunning 200,000 civilians have died in the ongoing violence between the authoritarian Arab government and the Islamist, fundamentalist rebels. Such brutality in every remote corner of the world shows the global nature of the current struggle. It also shows that jihadist mass murder has little to do with US or Israeli policies – policies that bear virtually no association with the distant, suffering, brutalized (and mostly Christian) innocents who’ve been terribly victimized in the Philippines.

While US media give lavish coverage to terrorist horrors in Iraq and Afghanistan, they tend to ignore the simultaneous carnage by jihadists that claims even more victims around the world. On July 10^th , for instance, a teenaged suicide bomber killed ten and grievously wounded 35 in Algeria, and the day before Islamists killed fourteen members of a search party in the Philipines looking for a kidnapped priest—beheading at least ten of their slaughtered victims. The following weekend, at least seventy perished in suicide bombings in Pakistan. Most Americans don’t know that conservative estimates show at least 200,000 victims of Muslim vs. Muslim violence in Algeria in the last fourteen years. In the second week in July – just a typical seven day period—terror monitors recorded 74 Islamist attacks, claiming 623 dead bodies and 697 critical injuries – and the big majority of these attacks occurred outside Iraq or Afghanistan. It’s hopelessly nave to suggest that US withdrawal from Iraq, or new Israeli concessions to Palestinians, would put an end to the brutality in Pakistan, Algeria, the Phillipines, or Thailand – the recent scene of literally scores of vicious killings. Worldwide Islamo-Nazi violence began long before the US assault on Saddam Hussein, and will continue to afflict the world regardless of American policy

The latest example of political correctness run amok involves the BBC describing the Islamists who planned bombings in London and Glasgow as arising from “the disfranchised South Asian community.”

First, it’s ridiculous to describe successful physicians as disfranchised. Second, the reference to “South Asian community” is misleading, like the description of one of the plotters as “Indian.” The refusal to use the words “Muslim” or “Islamist” to identify these terrorists –echoed by the official policy of the new Prime Minister, Gordon Brown –suggests that the would-be bombers might be Hindu—since Hinduism is the primary religion of South Asia, and certainly of India.

But of course, they’re all Muslim, and at least two are from the Middle East, not Pakistan. The press identifies the ringleader, Mohammed Asha, as Palestinian, even though he spent his life in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Britain—another distortion from media outlets that often ignore or deny the truth about terrorism and about Islam.

Some conspiracy theorists insist that there’s nothing new or novel or dangerous in pointing to the hidden hand behind perplexing, painful present events. They argue that discerning observers and historians have always identified powerful conspiracies because these plots and schemes have played such a prominent role in human events.

 

Consider the assassination of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March. Wasn’t that high-minded plot an example of a diabolical and world-changing conspiracy? And what about the Nazis or the Bolsheviks or even the Sons of Liberty in the American Revolution? Didn’t such groups prepare secretive plans which they ultimately executed in the course of seizing power?

 

The difference between actual conspiracies like these and paranoid delusions about ongoing World Domination by various secret societies or hidden cabals involves the public display of power. After Cassius and Brutus led their cohorts in stabbing Caesar to death, they proudly and publicly claimed credit for their actions and seized control of Rome. Hitler and Lenin both wrote prolifically about their revolutionary plans—and publicly announced their intentions to anyone who cared to listen. The Sons of Liberty favored public displays – like the Boston Tea Party, or attacking tax collectors, or erecting “Liberty Poles” – as a means of rallying the people to their cause.

 

In any conspiracy – or confederation – some of the participants will claim credit and trumpet their success if they achieve, or else they will blame some of their colleagues if they fail.

 

Throughout human history, and particularly in this media-riddled age, the very essence of power is public influence or authority. The definition of a powerful ruler (or conspirator) involves the ability to force multitudes to bend to your will, to follow your orders. That ability remains meaningless or non-existent if your will and your orders and your plans remain a well-kept secret.

 

The last generation has witnessed a worrisome explosion of theories and nightmares suggesting that such invisible schemes play a deeply concealed role in shaping current events.

 

Two paranoid but popular obsessions provide evidence of the recent rise of brain-addled conspiracist thinking. After the world learned the shocking truth about Hitler’s Holocaust in the late 1940’s, no one – not even Nazi war-criminals themselves – attempted to deny the extraordinarily well-documented murder of millions of Jewish civilians. Thirty years later, however, with the spread of media culture , “Holocaust Denial” began to gain ground, openly encouraged (and funded) by anti-Israel Islamic dictators and potentates.

 

Even more recently, the JFK assassination horrified the nation but produced few skeptics concerning the wealth of evidence that Oswald represented a lone nut (like previous assassins of Presidents Garfield and McKinley, and would-be assassins who fired on Presidents FDR, Truman, Ford and Reagan), not an agent of some massive conspiracy. The Warren Commission provided a definitive account of the killing, and raised few questions until various charlatans and opportunists began to attack its findings nearly two decades after the events. Again, some odd feature of the late ‘70’s zeitgeist led to an obsessive pursuit (utterly discredited by Vincent Bugliosi’s magisterial new book “Reclaiming History”) of various lunatic speculations about Umbrella Men, and Grassy Knolls, and Magic Bullets.

 

Why the increasing desire to find conspirators behind every big event (including the death of Princess Diana, the Moon Landing in 1969, the Y2K Computer Bug,  the September 11^th attacks) and under every bed?

 

Two important factors in contemporary life help to feed the current conspiratorial mania: first, a lust for privileged “insider” status and information, and second, the decline of a religious view of history.

 

Countless commentators on the modernity and its misfortunes note the sense of disconnection and insecurity that come with our fast-moving, urbanized society and media-saturated culture. Many (if not most) Americans slight the old ties of neighborhood and extended family and devote a disproportionate amount of their time to communing with phantoms on TV, with video games, DVD’s and, of course, on the internet. The literally hundreds of millions of personal websites and blogs posted every day reflect a desperate desire to connect, to win attention, to achieve some status as noteworthy and special rather than resigning oneself to anonymous status as just another cog in the post-industrial machine.

 

In this context, anyone can qualify as a conspiracy “researcher,” or an important and uniquely well-informed specialist in some arcane speculation about numerology or cults or hidden cabals of world-shakers. Conspiracism provides the ultimate sense of privileged, “insider” information. According to those who traffic in these secret plans, only dupes, or fools, or ordinary “sheep-ple” would prove so naïve as to accept the “official” version of events (“Some nineteen Arabs with box-cutters could knock down the tallest buildings on earth? Only a gullible dolt, or a willing tool of the power structure, could believe such nonsense!”).

 

Whether the conspiracist is “blowing the whistle” about the New World Order of AIDS as a CIA Plot, or the Monster Superhighway through Texas, his special “knowledge” makes him, in turn, feel special.

 

The second factor fueling conspiracy theories involves the rise of secularism and atheism in the United States and, to a much greater extent, in Europe. Human beings feel a deep and perpetual desire to find some deeper meaning in the dramatic events around them. Religious believers can examine those developments and begin to discern God’s will. Those without strong faith, however, may feel the need to explain these alarms and disasters with reference to diabolical human agents determined to play god. Either way, the observer gets the satisfaction of seeing some larger purpose behind puzzling occurrences. With the JFK assassination, for instance, there’s no satisfaction whatever to the idea of the charismatic leader of the Free World felled at age 46 by a crazed, laughably pathetic loser who’d never achieved any success or impact of any kind before his lucky shot in 1963. The notion that JFK’s death meant something more, that he died as a martyr to some higher cause, provokes a deep-seated, instinctive preference for believing in some grand, all-powerful conspiracy that at least seems worthy of its target.

 

If spectators to history can’t pronounce the words “Thy Will Be Done” without having them stick in the throat, at least the formulation “The Conspiracy’s Will Be Done” provides more satisfaction than an assumption of randomness.

 

G.K. Chesterton once observed: “The problem with those who reject God is not that they believe in nothing. It is that they believe in everything.”

 

And believing in even the most outlandish conspiracies (much in evidence earlier Monday during full-moon “Conspiracy Day” on my radio show) at least involves some examination of the deeper meaning and long-term direction of recent events.

 

Karl Marx argued that it made sense to encourage anti-Semitism, because those who began by hating the Jews would go on to hate Capitalism in general. He called anti-Semitism “the Socialism of Fools” –hoping that it would ultimate lead the less foolish to embrace his statist ideas.

 

By the same token, conspiracism represents “The Historical Perspective of Fools/” No, it makes no rational sense, but it may for some theorists  represent the beginning of an effort to put our current age in context and to examine the broader sweep of human events.

With a big, juicy full moon high in the summer sky, and painting the surface of the lake near my home with silvery-yellow scales, it’s time for Conspiracy Day (Monday) on the Michael Medved radio show.

 

Every month, this exercise raises the question: why do so many Americans feel so powerfully drawn to conspiratorial explanations of current events?

 

The instinctive answer involves the sad state of the world today: the idea that with everything going wrong and people suffering from fear, anxiety and insecurity, there’s an irresistible urge to blame all the bad news on mysterious, all-powerful forces.

 

The chief problem with this explanation is that today’s world, while manifestly imperfect, is hardly nightmarish: in most respects, for Americans in particular, we’re living remarkably well and report high levels of satisfaction and optimism and satisfaction in our personal circumstances. Progress in other long-suffering parts of the globe (China, India, Eastern Europe) has been spectacular and benefited all humanity.

 

In 1942, we had reason to wonder about conspiracies: with most of planet earth devastated by war, or suffering horrendous oppression from multiple tyrannies (Hitlerism, Stalinism, Japanese militarism), having just escaped the global hardships of the Great Depression. But with all the reasons for worry and fear, the conspiracy industry hadn’t reached anything like the heights of insanity or popularity it enjoys today. Few people embraced the idiot theories about the Masons or the Council on Foreign Relations or the Illuminati as the hidden forces behind their misfortunes.

 

Twenty-five years later, the United States went through the most traumatic years of our recent history. The late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s not only produced a dispiriting, hugely costly War in Vietnam, but massive (sometimes bloody) protests at home (far more intense than any of the relatively mild protests against Iraq),  a series of devastating urban riots (with whole neighborhoods of Detroit, Newark, LA and many other cities burned to the ground, and serious talk of impending race war), run away inflation, rampant drug use, and the collapse of sexual morality. If any period naturally lent itself to the wildest conspiracy theories, it would have been the ‘60’s in the United States. But the paranoid fantasies remained relatively contained. Even the recent JFK assassination provoked far less skepticism regarding the official (and undoubtedly correct) explanation about Oswald as a lone gunman, than it does today (thank you Oliver Stone).

 

   In other words, by any fair or logical measure, it makes no sense for so many seemingly rational and informed people to turn so eagerly to elaborate, conspiratorial explanations for perplexing present events.

 

   What, then, accounts for the current conspiracy addiction?

 

    I’ve got an answer—which I’ll begin outlining on Monday’s radio show, and continue delineating in this blog.  

 

Surely my favorite headline of the week came attached to an Associated Press story about a Georgia camping trip.

 

“EX-MARINE KILLS BEAR WITH LOG” announced the June 21^st report with a dateline of Helen, Georgia.

 

It turns out that a 300 pound black bear picked the wrong campsite to assault, going up against Marine Corps vet Chris Everhart and his three sons. The ursine invader initially grabbed a cooler full of food and began retreating to the forest before 6-year-old Logan threw a shovel at the woodland thief.

 

At that point Mr. Everhart himself picked up the nearest log, and quickly managed to dispatch the bear. He later received a ticket “for failing to secure his camp site,” but he also drew admiring comments for protecting his children—especially after the recent reports of a bear attack in Utah which proved fatal to a human 11-year-old.

 

My talk radio colleague David Boze (co-host of the morning show on our Seattle flagship station KTTH) took some satisfaction in the story, but questioned the attention-getting headline-- “Ex-Marine Kills Bear With Log.”

 

“Memo to AP,” he appropriately commented. “There is no such thing as an Ex-Marine.” 

Many supporters of the so-called peace movement suggest that some dramatic shift in US policy might bring a quick end to the jihadist ferocity that claims innocent victims every day in some tortured Muslim corner of the globe. According to this logic, the brutality of Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas and other fanatical groups represents a predictable response to American meddling in Islamic affairs. These terror apologists (or at least terror explainers) forcefully reject the now common conservative formulation that “they hate us not for what we do, but for who we are.”

 

In this context, any open minded observer ought to look at a New York Times report from the Gaza strip by Steven Erlanger and Hassan M. Fattah. With a May 30^th deadline, this story began: “It was 2 a.m. when masked gunmen raided Al Wafa Net in the Khan Yunis camp in Gaza where 17 young men were surfing the internet. The gunmen tied their hands, then forced them to stand at the stairs while they broke all the screens, and then the server and the television and photocopier…Then they burned all 36 computers.”

 

Considering the appalling poverty in Gaza, it might seem surprising that the young techies had 36 working computers to burn in the first place, but the attack only left the wretched Palestinians even more isolated from civilization and modernity. “In recent months,” the Times continued, “there have been similar attacks on music and video shops and pharmacies accused of selling Viagra, as well as on American and United Nations schools…. With the fragmentation of authority in Gaza, and its isolation, said a Gazan analyst, Taysir Mhaisin, ‘there is an increase of fundamentalism and the birth of groups believing in violence and practicing violence as a model created by bin Ladenism.’”

 

Amazingly, these grim developments all occurred after Israel ended its “occupation” of Gaza nearly two years ago, and forcibly removed the few thousand Jewish residents who had established homes in the God-forsaken territory. The Palestinians, in other words, achieved their professed political ends: winning a totally Jew-free piece of ocean-front real estate, and the ability to govern it on their own terms with no interference as long as they avoided cross border attacks on Israel. The result, of course, has been an almost ceaseless barrage of Palestinian rockets against the Jewish state, with an estimated 250 in the month of May alone.

 

And the result has also been the clear emergence of savage gangs who dedicate themselves to hitting their fellow Palestinians, not Jewish targets--- to destroying schools and drug stores and video shops and computers.

 

In other words, the deadly fanatics in Gaza (and elsewhere throughout the Islamic world) don’t just reject a given US or Israeli policy: they unequivocally reject the 21^st Century.

 

Yes, they hate us for who we are, not for what we do—and apparently hate with even greater intensity when they’re given what they say they want, like (the profoundly misguided) unilateral withdrawal from Gaza.

 

In other words, this current War on Terror isn’t a “Clash of Civilizations” in Samuel Huntington’s phrase. It is, rather a “War Against Civilization” – launched and sustained by the crudest and cruelest barbarians on the planet.

  

The contrast between Palestinian territories in the Gaza Stirp and the West Bank provides powerful lessons for the USA. The West Bank, with continued Israeli military presence and some 250,000 Jewish residents, remains relatively quiet and safe. But Gaza, controlled entirely by the Palestinian Authority and with all Jewish inhabitants forcibly removed in 2005, has become a dangerous center of terrorist attacks--- including 250 cross-border rocket attacks in the month of May alone! Similarly, Israel made past territorial concessions to Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinians – and each of those areas teem with anti-Israel terror. With Jordan, however, Israel never returned an inch of the West Bank and Jerusalem land won in 1967– but Jordan has established the most peaceful relationship with the Jewish state of any Arab nation. The US should take note: Islamic societies don’t see compromise as an indicator of friendship, but as a sign of weakness – and seek to take advantage of that vulnerability.

One of the favorite rhetorical tricks of the secular left involves the comparison of Islamo-Nazi terrorists with Christian conservatives. Rosie O’Donnell on “The View” specifically declared that the American Christian Right represents a danger similar to Islamist fanatics while Howard Dean and others regular refer to “the Taliban wing of the Republican Party” as a way to stigmatize pro-lifers and other social conservatives.

 

Recent revelations about the Fort Dix Six (the Muslim fanatics in New Jersey who allegedly planned murderous attacks on US soldiers) serve as a potent reminder, however, that religious enthusiasm brings very special risks for Muslim families.

 

The New York Times quoted relatives of several of the accused terrorists as worrying over their increasing religiosity. Murat Duka, a relative of the three illegal immigrants at the heart of the conspiracy, declared: “It’s fine to be a religious man. But if you get too much to the religion, you get out of your mind and do stupid things.”

 

The father of another suspected plotter, Serdar Tatar, told reporters that “the young man had gravitated to radical Islam in recent years, prompting a rift between them. “I’m not a religious person,” said Muslim Tatar. “I don’t want my son to be a religious person, but he was a religious person.”

 

It’s true that in Christian and Jewish homes some casually religious parents may worry over the faith-based intensity of their offspring. But these concerns involve potential damage to the child himself – who may harm his career, or wear funny clothes, or embarrass the family by handing out obnoxious tracts. No Christian or Jewish parents need worry, however, that the intensifying religiosity of a child will lead to acts of violence against others, or to suicide as a means of gaining “paradise.”

 

Muslim parents do worry about such outcomes, however – because literally tens of thousands of their most devout young people have encouraged of horrifying acts of brutality and self destruction. When Murat Duka expresses concern that religion will cause you to “get out of your mind and do stupid things,” the stupid things he has in mind are far worse than talking in tongues, or growing an unkempt beard, or restricting your diet based on ancient law.

 

Outsiders may see radical Islam and Evangelical Christianity and Orthodox Judaism as similarly “fundamentalist,” but the nightmarish experience and legitimate fears of the Muslim families of the Fort Dix Six, suggest that not all fundamentalisms are created equal.

  Everyone makes mistakes, and not every misstatement of fact amounts to a lie.

  But if a gross distortion is repeated and defended, despite clear-cut evidence of its inaccuracy,  then a mistake can become a lie – a deliberate, or at least shamefully careless, falsehood.

  Senator Barack Obama recently provided a good example of a stupid mistake that in no way qualifies as a lie. Speaking to a campaign rally, the enthusiastic Senator expressed horror at the Kansas tornado which, he declared, “wiped out a whole town…. 10,000 people died.” Actually, he fell 9,988 casualties from the mark: only 12 people perished in the Greensburg tornado. Within minutes of his embarrassing speech, his campaign aides acknowledged the error and apologized to the media.

   In a similar if less spectacular vein, I also misstated a victim count on my radio show on Tuesday. A caller tried to make the ridiculous point that my talk about the “Fort Dix Jihadis” amounted to a deliberate diversion from the national emergency involving criminal aliens. The caller said that the New Jersey conspirators hoped to kill “only” 100 soldiers, but that illegal aliens murder several times that number every single week. He went on to claim that illegals murdered some 8,000 to 9,000 Americans every year.

   I insisted that his number counted as absurd, laughable, dishonest and ridiculous --- since, I said, only 10,600 Americans die of murder each year, and there is no chance that the heavy majority of them are killed by immigrants.

   Actually, the figure that I pulled from memory covers gun deaths each year – which is why it stuck in my mind after heavy repetition following Virginia Tech. Recent statistics for all murders are, in fact, somewhat higher – amounting to a bit over 16,000 killed annually in recent years. That number is still way down from the 23,438 murders logged in 1990 (before the current wave of mass immigration, by the way) and a dramatic decline in the murder rate—which reached 10.2 per 100,000 population in 1980, and stands at 5.5 per 100,000 today (all statistics from the FBI: Uniform Crime Reports). As I accurately commented on the air, the overall murder rate has been cut nearly in half in the last quarter century, despite a proliferation of guns and immigrants. Within minutes of my misstatement of the actual raw number of murder victims, I corrected the number on the air—and acknowledged my mistake to the listeners.

   But the claim of “8,000 to 9,000” killed by illegals remains ridiculous, unsubstantiated, irresponsible and, in fact, demented. The government doesn’t provide statistics on who committed every murder because many killings, of course, remain unsolved. We do have numbers, however, on those arrested for murder and those numbers (classified by race) show no basis whatever for suggesting that illegals predominate when it comes to killing their fellow US residents. The “Uniform Crime Report” doesn’t list a separate figure for “illegal aliens” or even for Hispanics, but it does divide murder arrests between blacks and whites --- with “blacks” representing 47.2% of all arrested murderers, “whites” amounting to 50.5% and “other” (mostly Native Americans) counted as 2.3%.

   Since only a tiny percentage of American blacks (most of whom descend from slaves forced to this country before the War Between the States) qualify as illegal aliens (or legal immigrants, for that matter), these numbers would mean that at least two-thirds of the self-described “white” murderers would have to be “illegals” to come up with anything close to the ludicrous figure of 8,000 murder victims of undocumented immigrants per year.

   To further settle the issue, consider the states with the highest murder rates per 100,000: they are Louisiana (12.7), Maryland (9.4), and by far the winner, the District of Columbia (with a staggering 35.8). None of these bloody jurisdictions is known for concentrations of illegals. Meanwhile, those states most famous for burgeoning populations of the undocumented show murder rates that only moderately exceed the national average of 5.5 – including Texas at 6.1 and California at 6.7. In other words, illegals may create a host of other serious problems (particularly for our over-taxed medical and educational institutions) but they can’t be blamed for the majority or even for half of the national murder rate.

   This conclusion then raises the touchy issue of a “statistic” that may have arisen from an honest misunderstanding, but now amounts to a ludicrous distortion, an irresponsible bit of demagoguery or, most likely, an outright lie.

    A few politicians and many, many conservative talk show hosts (who honestly ought to know better) have taken up the cry that “nearly one third of all inmates crowding our prisons are illegal aliens.” Sometimes, those citing this number will make a slightly more modest claim: that 29% of all prisoners are illegals, or 27%, or some other hugely disproportionate number.

    This claim is so dishonest, so wide of the mark, so utterly unsubstantiated that the people who continue to recycle it ought to apologize, and acknowledge their mistake – or else they’re participating in a deliberate lie.

     Here are the facts, easily available from the FBI, the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, the General Accounting Office, the Congressional Budget Office, or any other reputable source:

    Among inmates in federal prisons, it’s true that a highly disproportionate number of prisoners have been classified as “non-citizens” or “criminal aliens.” Many of these immigrants turn up in federal prison because of problems with their immigration status (surprise!) or because they’re involved with the interstate or international drug trade.

     But federal prisoners represent only a small percentage – just 8%--of our total prison population. The bulk of inmates have been incarcerated in state prisons (including nearly all convicts accused of murder)and there, non-citizens are, if anything, under-represented: amounting to less than 5% of the prisoner population.

    Taking the total state-federal prison population (2,193,798) and the total number of non-citizens in both systems (122,708), the actual percentage of “criminal aliens” in our prisons amounts to 5.5% --- not even remotely close to the 29% or “one third” claimed by clownish demagogues. 

   Repeatedly misrepresenting the percentage of “illegals” in our prisons by a factor of more than 5 to 1 amounts to more than a trivial mistake, and becomes an outrageous, irresponsible, indefensible lie.

   As a matter of fact, the distortion is even worse than an overstatement of some 500% because the 5.5% in the prison system represents not “illegal aliens” but all “non-citizens” –including legal immigrants, and those here on temporary visas, and so forth. Every academic study (including conclusive work done at Harvard, University of Chicago, University of California, San Diego, and elsewhere) suggests that illegal immigrants are less likely, not more likely, than legal immigrants to involve themselves in criminal activity—in part because of their fear of deportation.

  According to most estimates, legal immigrants who haven’t yet qualified for citizenship probably outnumber illegal immigrants in the overall population. There’s every reason to believe, therefore, that such legal immigrants also outnumber the illegals among the “non-citizens” or “criminal aliens” counted in the prison population.

   In any event, with a total of 5.5% of the prison population, including both legal and illegal immigrants, it’s virtually certain that illegals are actually under-represented among prisoners. The lowest current estimate for “undocumented immigrants” is 12 million--- or 4% of the national population. There’s little chance that these illegals represent more than – or even as much as --- 4% of our total prison population.

   Does this mean that illegal immigration is okay, or that it isn’t a problem, or that we ought to give up efforts to stem the flow of unauthorized entrants across our southern border?

   Of course not. As I’ve acknowledged time and again, illegal immigration represents a significant problem and a very real threat to US security and prosperity. We need to deal with that crisis honestly and effectively.

   But continuing to repeat and to recycle phony numbers about the number of illegals in our jails doesn’t help us move toward a solution. It only serves to marginalize the legitimate concerns of patriotic people who yearn to take effective control of our borders.

   The numbers are available, for anyone who cares about the truth.

   Those who love our country, who value honesty and integrity, who hope for a meaningful improvement in border security, should correct and acknowledge their mistakes, and avoid indulging in despicable l

Polling data suggesting widespread distrust and hatred of President Bush usually means bad news for Republicans, but a recent (April 30-May 1) Rasmussen survey on 9/11 suspicions should actually scare Democrats even more.

 

Asked the question, “Did Bush Know About the 9/11 Attacks in Advance?” a shocking 35% of Democrats said “yes,” another 26% said they weren’t sure, and only 39% said “no.” In other words, a stunning 61% of Democrats believed that the President of the United States may well have collaborated in the murder of 3,000 of his fellow citizens.

 

This willingness among most Democrats to entertain the idea that 9/11 represented a Bush-sanctioned “inside job” demonstrates the alarming extent to which conspiracy theorists, paranoids and America-hating extremists have taken over one of our major political parties. If someone honestly believes that the Commander in Chief received advance notification about attacks on his own country (including the Pentagon), but allowed those assaults to proceed for political purposes, then this sense of alienation and betrayal will poison all his other political attitudes and judgments.

 

Equally important, the crazed suspicions nurtured by much of the Democratic base serve to separate America’s liberal party from the national mainstream. Among Republicans, not surprisingly, those who realize that Bush didn’t “know in advance” outnumber those who suspect he did by a margin of 7-to-1.

 

And among independents – those not affiliated with either party – an overwhelming majority of more than 3-to-1 (57% to 18%) decisively rejects the idea that Bush knew about the devastating attacks before they occurred.

 

In other words, Democratic paranoia and conspiracy-mongering pushes the party to the lunatic fringe and leftwing edge of national opinion.

 

Ever since the disputed Bush-Gore election of 2000, partisan Dems have viewed the President as either a monstrous and diabolical manipulator, or else a drooling idiot and simpleton, or an improbable combination of guilty cunning and dim-witted incompetence. Either way, they hate the man with a sulfurous passion that blinds them to even the most obvious realities.

 

If Bush “knew in advance” about the attacks, for instance, then why did he look so confused and hapless on September 11^th? Surely, if they knew the terrorist strikes were coming, his political advisors might have suggested a more Presidential or martial setting for the moment the planes struck the buildings than sitting on an undersized chair and reading “My Pet Goat” to an elementary school classroom in Florida.