The incredible gall of James Zumwalt's op-ed contribution in today's New York Times strains the limits of shamelessness. He claims that six Muslim imams who were singled out by "concerned passengers" (ostensibly because they looked "suspicious," i.e. Muslim) are intimidating good, honest, terrorist-fearing 'mericans by bringing suit against both the airline and the passengers who were clearly spooked by seeing "ragheads" onboard their plane. This is classic blame-the-victim rhetoric in which obviously the imams were asking for it! Far be it from to defend any religious leaders on grounds that they are "holy" men—but, come on! Really?
Witnesses described conduct that suggested something ominous might in fact be in the offing. The imams, the passengers reported, prayed loudly in the open terminal before boarding, sat in different seats on the plane from those assigned, positioned themselves near exits, asked for unneeded seatbelt extensions (which they then placed under their seats) and, most disturbingly, made anti-American comments.
This is all hearsay, but let's go through the list, anyway:
- They prayed loudly? Must be terrorists.
- They sat in different seats on the plane than those assigned? Only terrorists make mistakes when boarding planes. Or perhaps only terrorists prefer the better seat that seems to be unoccupied.
- They positioned themselves near exits? Only terrorists prefer the roomiest seats on a plane. (See tip 2 in that link.)
- They asked for "unneeded" seatbelt extensions? I got nothing for this one. Perhaps we could ask them why they needed these. "Unneeded" is a little presumptuous: I'm pretty sure Mr. Zumwalt wasn't there to confirm that they did not, indeed, need the extensions. Besides, what can you possibly do with seatbelt extensions that you can't do with a common belt, anyway?
- They made anti-American comments? Never mind, that's the clincher. If you don't like everything 'merica does, you can just get out! We'll bring democracy to your country soon enough anyway.
Let's be reasonable. Suppose there were terrorists on a flight and they planned to hijack the plane or crash it into something.
Would they dress up as Muslim clergy and behave in an attention-grabbing way? Or maybe our citizen-heroes just saw past their clever disguises and their subtle terrorist tactics. With a nation full of Jack Bauers, I think we can all rest easy and fly the safe blue skies.
Labels: 'merica, airlines, sham, terrorism
I don't know about the five people who read this page, but I'm tired of:
- . . . this page not being updated. Where's the content? I don't know. Read a book.
- . . . the ugly yellow color. Last time I checked, the "ELEVATED" yellow of the terror alert meant that there is a "significant risk of terrorist attacks." I don't know about you, but if there were, say, a significant risk of my apartment losing its structural integrity, I would freak out. If there were a significant risk that I would have a pop quiz in Latin on Monday, I would study. But there is apparently a significant risk of a terrorist attack happening, and I've been seeing yellow for so long that my response to this threat is, well, jaundiced.
(Postscript - A previous incarnation of this blog used to change background color according to the terror alert level.)
Labels: blogging, fud, terrorism
Bruce Reed is positively gleeful as he points out President Bush's low approval rating.
He's not alone. In fact, the
New York Times has been hammering the point home all month. The trouble with this assessment, of course, is that it's just
plain wrong. Don't get me wrong, I think Gilroy goes a bit nuts in his piece, but he's right that all of these rhetorical losses mean very little in terms of political power.
Ladies, do you really dig UNIX?
I ran into
this shirt on ThinkGeek and it made me wonder: how many of the girls in these action shots actually have a computer running some UNIX or *nix OS? I'm guessing the
Google employee probably does. The
cute girl holding the
O'Reilly book probably does, too. The
girl with the stuffed Tux (the penguin) is also a likely candidate. But I'm skeptical of
some of the more
teenybopper-looking photos. Maybe those girls dig
eunuchs. Touché, double-entendre'd shirt, touché.
Rock alert:
I just received an email saying that
Lifetime will be playing in San Francisco in January! I definitely don't listen to the same music I listened to in 1998, but you can bet I'll be at that show. Tickets go
on sale on the 20th.
Lightning rods are the Devil's work.
There is an interesting
op-ed contribution in the
New York Times today about how some Americans have always valued "faith" over reason.
Seasonal Colors
Now that I'm skinning my page (this refers to an earlier incarnation of this blog) according to the terror alert level, I'm hoping that the Department of Homeland Security plans to change the terror alert level according to the seasons (that is, the
natural seasons, not the
electoral ones - another
link), because this yellow/orange color suits the fall, but winter is fast approaching and I wouldn't want my page to go out of style.
Labels: fud, music, politics, religion, technology, terrorism
Since I found out about it, I have been duly disgusted by the "
Conservative Punk" website, not because I don't like conservatives, though I tend to reject a lot of what they stand for, and not because I don't like punks, though I can't help but recoil in embarrassment at my own punk rock youth. Rather, the whole "wolf in sheep's clothing" conceit is a powerful deterrent, and here is that motif played out as fully as anywhere. I am not a big fan of contradictions, and "conservative punk" sounds more like a bad joke than a real movement. Anyway, there is a funny segment of that site endorsing a
boycott of Chinese goods:
While some websites will encourage you to boycott companies based on the perceived political bend of their CEO (IE Buyblue.org), we at Conservativepunk feel that punishing workers because the suits might have made donations to political causes we might not like is not an intelligent use of the power of our dollar. Instead, we believe that our consumer power can be put to the best use through the boycott of Chinese goods.
So, basically, it's wrong to punish workers because "the suits" might have politics we don't like, but
it's perfectly fine to punish the Chinese because
their "suits" have politics we don't like. Good call. What was it I was saying about contradictions, earlier?
The punks go on to point out several reasons why we should boycott Chinese goods. Some of them are indeed valid, but the very first one is:
China's labor practices encourage outsourcing and drive down American wages. Aren't you tired of manufacturing jobs leaving the US?
In effect, aren't you tired of allowing the Chinese to compete with us fairly? Wouldn't you prefer to tip the scale back in our favor? I guess they take the punk D.I.Y. ethic so seriously that they demand we "do it ourselves."
Heir Apparent apparently errs:
I'm a little mystified by
this report that Prince Charles plans to "explain the virtues of Islam" to President Bush. Apparently, he believes that the US has been too confrontational against Islam (as a religion, I take it). Believe me, I have plenty of objections to the Bush administration, and I have often complained about them here. But I do
not think Bush has misrepresented Islam as a religion, and I can think of many occasions where he has made it a point to stress that our enemy is
not Islam or Muslims. Frankly, I think too often our liberal (and honorable) tendency to try not to offend the sensibilities of others leads us to absurd situations where we are paralyzed to speak the truth. One group I particularly admire for taking a hard line against Islamist terrorism are the
Free Muslims. Perhaps if Prince Charles advocated a line more akin to the Free Muslims (which British Prime Minister Tony Blair is now beginning to do) than an unconditional appeal to multiculturalism and acceptance, then Britain might be a less hospitable place for
radical clerics who want to destroy the open governments that allow them to preach in the first place.
Sort of related to terrorism, I guess:
My friend Brandon asked to see the code for the terror alert function, so I thought others might be interested as well. Here it is:
function getTerrorAlert() 'Version 1.1
'*********************************************************************
'Do not modify the variables unless you know what you're doing. *
'(1) intTimeout is fair game, change it to whatever timeout length *
'you like, but don't exceed Server.ScriptTimeout. *
'(2) strErrorResponse is self-explanatory. *
' *
'Version 1.0: Got the alert *
'Version 1.1: Includes a timeout value. *
'Future versions aren't planned unless something is wrong with this. *
' *
'Afshin Darian - http://eighties-night.com/ *
' *
'AS USUAL, THIS IS UNDER A CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSE. CHECK MY SITE *
'FOR THE LINK TO THE MOST CURRENT VERSION OF THE LICENSE. *
'*********************************************************************
dim intTimeout : intTimeout = 10 'in seconds
dim strErrorResponse : strErrorResponse = "couldn't contact dhs"
'*********************************************************************
dim strTemp, xml, xmlhttp, timeStart, timeCurrent, LOADED, strURL
strTemp = ""
LOADED = 4 'This is the readyState value when xmlhttp has loaded
strURL = "http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/getAdvisoryCondition"
set xmlhttp = server.createObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP")
set xml = server.createObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM")
xml.async = false
call xmlhttp.open("GET", strURL, false)
call xmlhttp.send()
timeStart = now
do
timeCurrent = now
intTimeTaken = cint(datediff("s", timeStart, timeCurrent))
if (intTimeTaken > intTimeout) then
strTemp = strErrorResponse
call xmlhttp.abort()
exit do
end if
loop while xmlhttp.readyState <> LOADED
if (xmlhttp.readyState = LOADED) then
call xml.loadxml(xmlhttp.responsetext)
strTemp = xml.selectsinglenode("/THREAT_ADVISORY").getAttribute("CONDITION")
end if
set xmlhttp = nothing
set xml = nothing
getTerrorAlert = strTemp
end function
Labels: coding, conservatism, fud, islam, music, politics, religion, terrorism
Afshin Molavi, who is a fellow at the New American Foundation, contributes an op-ed piece in today's
New York Times, called "
Our Allies in Iran." He makes the case for easing some of our relations with Iran, in order to encourage the democratic-minded middle-class of Iranians, without ceding anything to the hardline regime. I think he's right, but I don't imagine anybody in the Bush administration would be convinced by his argument.
Speaking of the New America Foundation . . .
While I was reading about the New America Foundation, I ran into
this blog entry, by Nathan Newman, which complains about a statement made by the New America Foundation that points out the basic flaw in employer-based healthcare. Newman makes an analogy that should strike you as flawed even if you don't catch the immediate problem:
When Wal-Mart's trucks break down, no one expects the government to pay to repair them. Wal-Mart pays to fix them and the costs are included in the price of the goods they sell.
Yet moderate Democrats apparently think that when workers get sick, companies don't have the responsibility to "repair" their workers.
The problem, of course, is this:
Wal-Mart owns its trucks, but Wal-Mart does not own its employees. So while it is perfectly natural that Wal-Mart should expect nobody to care for its possessions, it simply does not follow that Wal-Mart has to pay for its workers' healthcare.
And while I'm pretending to be a right-winger . . .
(note: this has since been disabled)
In the spirit of civic awareness, I have decided that my page should serve as more than just a waste of time. So, I have changed my theme to indicate the Department of Homeland Security's Terror Advisory level at the time you load the page. If the DHS's website is unavailable, the theme will default to the "baby blue" theme I had before. However, if the DHS site is down, you should probably be more concerned about what happened to the DHS than what color my page will render. Of course, the problem could be on my end, so you might want to (perhaps) check a more reputable news source. In case you need to brush up on what the colors mean, here is the Terror Advisory
reference, or you can just look at the "terror_alert" sidebar on this page. If you want to do something similar, here is the XML file from the DHS site. It is sparse:
www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/getAdvisoryConditionLabels: conservatism, fud, iran, politics, terrorism
Unsurprisingly, everyone is scrambling to come up with an ideological backdrop against which Islamic terrorism can be explained. There's an op-ed piece on today's
New York Times which makes perfect sense to me. I was going to comment that Professor Roy states the obvious:
[I]f the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine are at the core of the radicalization, why are there virtually no Afghans, Iraqis or Palestinians among the terrorists? Rather, the bombers are mostly from the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, Egypt and Pakistan - or they are Western-born converts to Islam. Why would a Pakistani or a Spaniard be more angry than an Afghan about American troops in Afghanistan? It is precisely because they do not care about Afghanistan as such, but see the United States involvement there as part of a global phenomenon of cultural domination.
(nytimes.com/2005/07/22/opinion/22roy.html)
But it turns out that what's obvious to me isn't accepted by everyone. Fred Kaplan has an article on
Slate today that says pretty much the opposite of what Professor Roy's column says:
Three new studies, by very different authors taking very different tacks, reach much the same conclusion about modern terrorism: that its practitioners, especially its foot soldiers, are motivated not so much by Islamic fantasies of the caliphate's restoration and the snuffing of freedom, but rather by resistance to foreign occupation of Arab lands.
(slate.com/id/2123010)
Kaplan agrees with these studies in large part because of an examination of terrorist activity in Iraq. An Israeli researcher, Reuven Paz, who has compiled the most complete study of foreign terrorists in Iraq comes up with this conclusion:
The vast majority of Arabs killed in Iraq have never taken part in any terrorist activities prior to their arrival in Iraq.
Of course, neither Paz nor Kaplan seems to notice that there is a good logistical reason for this fact. Most suicide bombers don't survive to bomb another day. And even terrorists who are not suicide bombers don't wage multi-front wars. They are, after all, just the foot soldiers, not the commanders like bin Laden.
So while I typically agree with Fred Kaplan, I have to disagree here. It is very much
who we are that Islamic terrorists want to attack and it has less to do with
what we do than they would like us to think. And finally, it is worth pointing out again that Muslim terrorists are not squeamish at all when it comes to killing other Muslims if they disagree with their interpretation of their religion. So perhaps it's not even who we are so much as who we are not (like-minded Muslim fantasists).
Labels: afghanistan, iraq, terrorism, war
