From the WSJ Opinion Archives
Terror
at LAX
"Federal and local authorities say it is too early to determine whether
terrorism is to blame for the attack," CNN reports--a curious formulation,
since obviously it is the perpetrator who is to blame; "terrorism"
is merely a characterization of the attack. In any case, it is at the very least
a striking coincidence: On Monday, as we
noted, Yasser Arafat's al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades threatened "to strike
at Zionist and American interests and installations" throughout the world.
Arafat won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1994.
Yesterday an Arab man attacked just such an "installation": the El Al ticket counter at Los Angeles International Airport. Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, an Egyptian national and resident of Irvine, Calif., who held a green card and worked as a limousine driver, arrived at LAX late yesterday morning, armed with a knife and two guns. He began shooting and killed two people before El Al security guards shot and killed him.
It's not clear if this is an organized terrorist attack, but there's ample evidence that it is a "hate crime," arguably a form of terrorism. The Associated Press reports:
Neighbors said Hadayet lived quietly, but became incensed when an upstairs neighbor hung large American and Marine Corps flags from a balcony above his front door after Sept. 11. The flags remained there Thursday night.
"He complained about it to the apartment manager. He thought it was being thrown in his face," said another neighbor, Steve Thompson. The upstairs neighbor declined to comment.
A bumper sticker on Hadayet's front door said: "Read the Koran." It was later removed.
Hadayet's apparent hatred for America may explain why he chose Independence Day for his murder spree. He may have found the displays of patriotism every July 4 particularly galling, since, according to CNN, it was also his birthday. His abhorrence of America, however, did not prevent him from living and working here for 10 years.
Fox News quotes California's Gov. Gray Davis: "Like all Californians, I am outraged and deeply saddened to learn of today's shooting at Los Angeles International Airport. That it happened on the day on which we honor what America stands for--liberty, security and diversity--makes this particularly more tragic." Since when is Independence Day a celebration of "diversity"?
They
Shouted From the Rooftops, 'It's a Secret!'
"An American military planning document calls for air, land and sea-based
forces to attack Iraq from three directions--the north, south and west--in a
campaign to topple President Saddam Hussein, according to a person familiar
with the document," the New York Times reports. The "highly classified"
document "envisions tens of thousands of marines and soldiers probably
invading from Kuwait. Hundreds of warplanes based in as many as eight countries,
possibly including Turkey and Qatar, would unleash a huge air assault against
thousands of targets, including airfields, roadways and fiber-optics communications
sites."
Just one question: If the document is "highly classified," who leaked its contents to the New York Times?
The Times also notes that President Bush "has received at least two briefings from Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the head of the Central Command, on the broad outlines, or 'concept of operations,' for a possible attack against Iraq. The most recent briefing was on June 19, according to the White House." That's not news to this column's readers, who learned of the June 19 briefing last Monday.
Family
Ties
Now this is odd: Mohammad Nour Al-Din Saffi, a New Zealand citizen and Iraqi
native, has been arrested in Florida on immigration charges. The feds say Saffi
lacked the required student visa when he tried to enroll at the Aeroservice
Aviation Center, a flight school whose alumni include Ziad Jarrah, a Sept. 11
hijacker.
What's really weird is that Saffi is Saddam Hussein's stepson. The Associated Press reports:
Mohammed Saffi is the eldest son of Samira al-Shahbandar, Saddam's second wife. His father is Nour al-Din Saffi, an aviation engineer and former head of the Iraqi Airways.
According to well-placed sources in Baghdad and in Iraqi exile circles, Saddam forced Nour al-Din Saffi to divorce al-Shahbandar in the late 1970s before Saddam married her. He has since married again.
"Mohammed Saffi is believed to have left Iraqi after the 1991 Gulf War . . . following an argument with his mother," the AP adds. He worked as an engineer for Air New Zealand for six years.
When
Is a Terrorist Not a Freedom Fighter?
See if you can tell what's missing in this paragraph from a Reuters dispatch
from Athens:
Sensitive to criticism, especially from the United States, for being lax on terrorism ahead of the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, Greece has been seeking help from foreign security forces to step up its anti-terrorism efforts.
That's right, no scare quotes around terrorism. The article concerns a left-wing Greek group called November 17 that has killed several British and American diplomats. Does Reuters' policy that "one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter" apply only when the terrorists in question are Muslim?
We
Should Have Such Problems
Israeli military and security officials "are currently facing a somewhat
odd, though temporary, situation, where no terror activists in the West Bank
can be considered their 'most wanted,' " Ha'aretz reports:
Israel assassinated its last chief terror suspect on Sunday. Muhaned Taher, head of Hamas' military wing in the northern West Bank and thought responsible for the deaths of over 100 Israelis, was killed by a special crack force. In addition, the Israeli security forces systematic attacks on the heads of the militant organizations has meant there are very few obvious leaders of those networks that have survived.
Further evidence that Israel's antiterror efforts are succeeding comes from the Christian Science Monitor, which reports that Palestinians are suffering from "intifada fatigue." (As an aside, does anyone else find it incongruous to describe this 21st-century war in the language of late-20th-century psychobabble?)
The New York Times, however, sees things differently, repeating the argument that U.S. opposition strengthens Yasser Arafat: "Even though his standing appears low, most Palestinians have rallied around him, saying they will not allow outsiders to dictate their choice of leader." Another Times report argues that U.S. support for Pakistan's Gen. Pervez Musharraf weakens him: "General Musharraf's dutiful carrying out of Washington's demands is galvanizing a widespread feeling here that he has largely traded away Pakistan's sovereignty to the United States."
It's just like World War II, when America's support for Hitler ended up weakening and ultimately destroying the Nazi regime. Isn't it?
See
You in the Funny Papers
The Arab News, an English-language Saudi daily, hardly needs to have a comic
section, so comical are its news and commentary pages. (It does in fact have
cartoons, most of which are viciously anti-Semitic.) Here's how a "news"
story, datelined London, begins:
Prominent British-based journalist John Pilger took a front-page swipe at Washington yesterday, labeling the US a "rogue state" and charging that its bombs have claimed more Afghan civilian lives than those lost in the World Trade Center.
The article also describes the repellent Pilger as "an award-winning journalist." But what's really funny is the byline. The "report" is written by none other than the prominent, award-winning John Pilger!
The Arab News has featured commentaries from such luminaries as white supremacist David Duke and America-hating polemicist Robert Fisk. Add to that list one Jeffrey Steinberg, who has penned a vicious piece declaring Israel a "rogue state." So who is this guy with a Jewish-sounding name attacking the Jewish state? Read down to the fifth paragraph and you get a clue:
Democratic Party Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche reacted strongly to the Israeli announcement about an ICBM capability. He characterized it as a direct threat by Ariel Sharon against any nation that attempts to interfere with Israel's mad drive for its "Greater Israel" permanent annexation of the West Bank and Gaza and the mass expulsion of the 3.5 million Palestinians living in those territories.
Lyndon LaRouche? Who in the world would quote the crackpot perennial candidate as if he were a credible source of anything? The answer, of course, is someone who works for LaRouche's own Executive Intelligence Review, where the Steinberg piece originally appeared.
Speak
for Yourself, Buddy
"We are all capable of learning hatred--even the kind of hatred that produces
suicide bombers."--South African author Mark Mathabane, New York Times,
July 5
Pakistani
Justice--II
"The rape of a 16-year-old girl in Pakistan has been ignored by police
because of her religious beliefs," according to a statement by the Surrey,
England-based group Christian Solidarity Worldwide. "Shakeela Siddique,
a Christian from Fatewala village in the northeastern Gujranwala district, was
reportedly raped by an influential local Muslim landlord in February 2002."
Meanwhile, the Pakistani government is trying to make amends to the 18-year-old woman--not a Christian, we'd guess--who was gang-raped to preserve the "honor" of a rival tribe. (We noted the case Tuesday.) Islamabad gave the young woman a check for 500,000 rupees ($8,000) and promised to build a new religious school in her village and name it after her, the Associated Press reports. Just what Pakistan needs--another madrassa.
Batty
Brit Busted in Baroness Beheading
Paul Kelleher faces charges of "criminal damage" after he allegedly
used a cricket bat and a metal pole to behead a statue of Margaret Thatcher.
The statue was worth £150,000, or--let's get it right this time--a little
under $230,000. A prosecutor explains Kelleher's motives to the Press Association,
a British wire service: "This was all a vehicle to make sure he had his
day in court, to highlight his concerns about the future of the world and the
future of his two-year-old son--he said people like Baroness Thatcher were the
cause of capitalism and global problems."
Reality:
What a Concept
Sunday's Washington
Post quoted Al Gore suggesting he regrets the way he campaigned in 2000:
"If I had it to do over again, I'd just let it rip," Gore told a private gathering of many of his most significant donors and fundraisers, according to an aide who relayed the remarks to reporters. "To hell with the polls, tactics and all the rest. I would have poured out my heart and my vision for America's future."
Philosopher Crispin Sartwell argues in the Los Angeles Times Gore is trapped in a paradox:
The idea that Gore wasn't authentic enough in the last campaign is itself a media criticism of that campaign. It's precisely the commentators and the focus groups and the polls that have told Gore he wasn't real enough.
And so Gore has resolved to get real: "I would spend more time speaking from the heart on a few occasions each week, addressing the major challenges of the country in-depth, and spend a lot less time going to media events and making tactical moves."
But, of course, that is itself a tactical move and a media event.
Gore has abandoned his truth fatally, fully, permanently. His condition is chronic, and there is no treatment. Every attempt to regain his authenticity only casts a new, infinitely repeated image through the hall of mirrors that is his political life and our media experience of that life.
Back in 2000, we noted a lovely New York Press piece, in which Sartwell wrote: "To vote for Al Gore . . . is to endorse and to become the negation or abnegation of all truth and all reality; it is to take up a position as the destroyer not only of oneself, and not only of American political discourse, but of the entire fabric of the universe." Hard to believe we escaped that fate by a few hundred votes in Florida.
You
Don't Say
"Patriotism Drives July 4 Celebrations"--headline, Charleston (S.C.)
Post and Courier, July 5
Even
in Marin
Patriotism is in fashion even in the home county of Marin mujahid John
Walker Lindh. The Marin News reports that at an Independence Day parade in Corte
Madera, "Women and Men in Black, a peace group protesting the war on terrorism,
marched into view to the dirge-like beat of a tambourine. Members carried signs
that said 'Love America, Love dissent,' 'We are all New Yorkers, we are all
Afghans' and 'Dissent is the revolutionary light of democracy.' " According
to the paper, the crowd greeted WAMIB with "a wave of silence."
They
Want a Congressman?
"Political activists protested the District of Columbia's lack of voting
rights Wednesday by seeking the rights of full British citizenship in a ceremonial
protest outside the British Embassy," the Associated Press reports. The
district's government has officially protested its lack of representation in
Congress by way of license plates bearing the slogan "Taxation
Without Representation."
We once lived in Washington and now we live in New York, where we have a congresswoman and two senators. We can assure the capital's residents that taxation with representation is just as bad.
Your
Mileage, However, May Vary
"Study: Pregnancy Likely in 2 Years"--headline, Associated Press dispatch,
July 3
Red
Head
"The art world was last night trying to establish whether builders had
accidentally defrosted a seminal piece of Britart by unplugging collector Charles
Saatchi's kitchen freezer," Britain's Guardian reports. "Rumours spread
after suggestions that Saatchi had stored a blood sculpture made by Britart's
enfant terrible, Marc Quinn, among his frozen peas. The work, Self, consists
of Quinn's head cast in nine pints of his own frozen, congealed blood."
These Brits really seem to have trouble distinguishing bodily fluids. The Guardian characterizes the sanguine sculpture as "seminal." As we noted Tuesday, a spokesman for London's Tate Gallery used the same word to describe a piece of "art" consisting of the "artist's" feces, missing a rather alimentary distinction.
The Guardian doesn't specify, meanwhile, if the workers who "are said to have unplugged the appliances to find red liquid oozing across the floor" were union members or scabs.
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Today on OpinionJournal:
- Kenneth Starr: Anthrax was the biggest surprise of this Supreme Court term.
- Daniel Henninger: Rock is dead, but patriotism rocks on.
- John Fund: Will corruption cost Gray Davis California's governorship?
And on the Taste page:
- Review & Outlook: Conservatives have seized the moral high ground on civil rights.
- Tony & Tacky: Schools teach moral relativism, and business ethics suffer.
- Tunku Varadarajan: Yard sales demand serious sociological study.
- Sidney Goldberg: Dictionaries call Castro a "leader" and Stalin a "statesman."
- Elizabeth Crowley visits a Christian college in New York's tallest building.
And don't miss "WSJ Editorial Board With Stuart Varney," tonight at 9 EDT and PDT on CNBC.
