Jan 22, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
From the New York Sun Thursday:
American officials said the deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, told his Israeli counterpart, Yoav Biran, in a meeting Tuesday that Washington has evidence that a Syrian cargo aircraft returned from Tehran in the first week of January with arms for Hezbollah....In an interview with Israel Radio, [Israeli president Moshe Katzav] said of [Syrian president] Assad, "he was also using the aircraft that were flying humanitarian aid to the Iranian earthquake victims to smuggle weapons for Hezbollah from Iran."... Mr. Biran presented Mr. Armitage with the Israeli evidence of the arms transfer and Mr. Armitage confirmed that the Israeli assessment matched the American government's.
"This was interesting because the Syrians usually do not use their own aircraft for these shipments," one American official said yesterday. This official said most of the small arms shipments for Hezbollah reached Damascus from Iran on Iranian Boeing 737 aircraft. But in recent months it has gotten much harder for Iran to ship arms to their proxies in southern Lebanon. While Saddam Hussein's government allowed the arms flights over its territory, Iraqi airspace is no longer accommodating to these flights. Also, the Turks have stopped allowing the flights to use their airspace for the shipments as well.
Jan 21, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
From Cox and Forkum:
An overly optimistic CNN report from yesterday further indicated the problem of allowing Islamic law into the new Afghanistan Constitution:A low point of the [constitutional] convention occurred when the chairman of the convention, Sibghatullah Mujaddedi -- who is considered a moderate -- reportedly told women delegates, "Don't try to put yourself on a level with men. Even God has not given you equal rights, because under his decision two women are counted as equal to one man." (Mujaddedi was referring to a contested provision of Islamic law that says that the testimony of two women is equivalent to that of one man in some cases.)
And despite President Bush's recent praise of the new Constitution for "providing fundamental rights to women," let's not forget this BBC report. Just days after the adoption of the new Constitution, the Afghanistan Supreme Court reacted to a woman singing on TV:"We are opposed to women singing and dancing as a whole," Judge Manawi told Reuters. "This is totally against the decisions of the Supreme Court and it has to be stopped."
Apparently Lady Liberty is not welcome in the new Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.Jan 21, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
Israel's ambassador to Sweden vandalized a work of "art" approving of Palestinian terrorism, and while I do not agree with the form of his action, I agree with its spirit. Here's the best part of New York Sun columnist Hillel Halkin's column on the subject:
[The] "artistic installation" depict[ed] the young Palestinian woman who carried out the Maxim bombing, Hanadi Jaradat, as Snow White floating in a pool of blood-colored liquid beside a lyrical text....
Jaradat would have gladly murdered me too; the text, which concluded with the line "and the red [of the blood shed in the restaurant] looked beautiful upon the white [of Jaradat's clothing in the floating photograph of her]," made it clear that the artist... sympathized with what she did; and so the museum's exhibit, ironically meant to accompany an international conference on genocide set to open in Stockholm next week, was in effect approving of my and my family's murder.
... Nor did I, in my first reaction, give a damn for the Swedish government's declaration that it was "unacceptable" for him "to destroy art"--not when the art in question was proposing to destroy me. (The ambassador did not, by the way, destroy the installation, but rather disconnected the electricity illuminating it and tossed one of its spotlights into the liquid.)
... [I]t is nonsense to criticize the Israeli ambassador, as the Swedish government and press have done, for his contempt of "artistic freedom" or his disrespect for the boundaries between politics and art. The first to erase these boundaries have been artists such as Mr. Feiler.... Nor is there any such thing as a purely aesthetic response to [his work]. There is only a political response, which is precisely what Mr. Mazel's response was.
Perhaps this response should have been more subtle. Perhaps the ambassador should have thrown into the liquid not a spotlight but 21 photographs of the dead at Maxim's and let Mr. Feiler fish them out one by one. Alas, he is only a diplomat, not a conceptual artist.
Notwithstanding Mr. Halkin's argument, if the work in question doesn't fall within the legitimate legal boundaries of incitement, the law is bound to protect it and to forcibly prevent actions such as the ambassador's. But one wonders what the reaction would have been to an "artistic installation" that had a picture of Hanadi Jaradat immersed in a jar of urine, say...
Jan 20, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
According to a New York Sun editorial, various court orders make illusory the claim that the mayor has won back control of the NYC schools:
[A court order commonly] referred to as Jose P. ... mandates the administrative and financial particulars of the city's special ed system, requiring among other things a team of three administrators to evaluate each pupil in the system and a host of special services at every school with special education students. While Jose P. began in 1980 as a slim 47-page document, it expanded to 515 pages of regulations by 1982 and has continued its gross growth since....
[B]ilingual education... is controlled by the court order stemming from 1974's Aspira of New York v. the Board of Education of the City of New York. The decision, which originally mandated that the city maintain bilingual education for Spanish-speaking students, now applies to languages including Chinese, Russian, and Haitian Creole....
Between the more than 135,000 students covered by Jose P. and the 125,000 whose academic experience is governed by Aspira, the city lacks educational and financial discretion over more than 25% of the children placed in its schools. And those more than a quarter of a million students consume a disproportionately large percentage of the system's spending.
Jan 20, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
John Edwards - He set out an American dichotomy, an America of producers and an America of second-handers (my words but his implications), and he supports the second-handers whole heartedly. Loot the productive Americans for everything they have and give it to the bums. My god his rhetoric is disturbing.
Howard Dean - You'd almost think that he'd won. This man's dimentia is unbelievable. He seems to believe that coming in third after being in first for such a long time is a good thing. He claims to want to take the country back for ordinary Americans yet I wonder how he explains the fact that most of the people who have donated to President Bush aren't millionaires but "ordinary" Americans.
Dick Gephardt - Good riddance to you. As to his speech, I wanted the fiddle to play the sad music and bring on the tears. How often does he plan to use the story of his son getting cancer? Ad misercordium fallacies really are crummy when they don't end sadly. Thanks to the labor unions? What an idiot, they already are getting artificially high wages, what more does he want, Lamborginis and mansions? Neither of his parents got through high school, he says this as something to be proud of. He's getting out of the race, Democrats are going to win, blah, blah, blah.
John Kerry - I like how Kerry doesn't stand for special interests, what are welfare recipients, people who want free healthcare, and has he ever heard of the "big dig"? He attributes victory to a four leaf clover? He quotes John Paul Jones for his dopey little political campaign, good comparison. More talk of powerful interests and fairness, does that mean he's going to steal more money from us? Oh no, he's got names of common folk, some baby factory who has a minimum wage job, so sad. He thinks someone who makes $28,000 a year with four kids is middle class? Universal healthcare to improve healthcare? Perhaps he should go to Canada, Britain, France, Scandanavia to see the long lines and fleeing doctors (fleeing to America). What an unadulterated communist this man is. And the dopey crowds lap it up.
From Cox and Forkum:
Jan 20, 2004 | Dollars & Crosses
From Cox and Forkum:
The Washington Post reports: Women in Iraq Decry Decision To Curb Rights: Council Backs Islamic Law on Families.For the past four decades, Iraqi women have enjoyed some of the most modern legal protections in the Muslim world, under a civil code that prohibits marriage below the age of 18, arbitrary divorce and male favoritism in child custody and property inheritance disputes. Saddam Hussein's dictatorship did not touch those rights. But the U.S.-backed Iraqi Governing Council has voted to wipe them out, ordering in late December that family laws shall be "canceled" and such issues placed under the jurisdiction of strict Islamic legal doctrine known as sharia. [...]
The order, narrowly approved by the 25-member council in a closed-door session Dec. 29, was reportedly sponsored by conservative Shiite members. The order is now being opposed by several liberal members as well as by senior women in the Iraqi government.
The council's decisions must be approved by L. Paul Bremer, the chief U.S. administrator in Iraq, and aides said unofficially that his imprimatur for this change was unlikely. But experts here said that once U.S. officials turn over political power to Iraqis at the end of June, conservative forces could press ahead with their agenda to make sharia the supreme law.
Hopefully this Islamist move by the council will be struck down by the U.S. But even if it is, there's still reason for concern considering that the new Afghanistan Constitution was allowed to be based on "sacred Islam."
Commenting on Afghanistan but with no less applicability to Iraq, David Holcberg of The Ayn Rand Institute was recently quoted at Capitalism Magazine:The United States should demand that the new Afghan constitution include an explicit separation of state and religion. It makes no sense to have gone to war to overthrow one tyrannical Islamic theocracy just to replace it with another one. But to do that would require the current administration to identify Islamic fundamentalism as our ideological enemy and to recognize that the separation of state and religion is a crucial requirement of freedom not only in Afghanistan, but also here in America.
This is not very likely with President Bush. Just this weekend he spoke approvingly of the Afghan constitution in his radio address, and last week he renewed his push for faith-based initiatives, federal programs that would subsidize religious charities with taxpayer money."My attitude is, the government should not fear faith-based programs -- we ought to welcome faith-based programs and we ought to fund faith-based programs. Faith-based programs are only effective because they do practice faith. It's important for our government to understand that," [Bush] said.
The point here is not that Bush will some day force American women to wear burqas. But if he can't see the importance of separating religion and state in America, why should we believe he can see it in Iraq and Afghanistan? For more on this topic, see Robert W. Tracinski's America: The Secular Republic.
