February 27, 2005

CALLING TOM FRIEDMAN: THE NAME IS W.

Tom Friedman may smugly compliment himself on his knowledge of pop culture and cite his globe trotting acquaintance with Saudi potentates, but here's word from inside the belly of the totalitarian beast, Egypt. Guess who is gratefully acknowledged? The dumb cowboy himself!

Saturday, February 26, 2005
Earthquake in Egypt!!
I never imagined what President Mubarak said today. He asked the parliament to amend the Egyptian constitution to allow multiple candidates to run for the presidency. This means that Muabark will have opponents running against him.

Now, I am not stupid nor am I living in la la land. Mubarak's decision today came after immense pressure from the US and the current earthquakes (the purple revolution in Iraq and the Hariri revolution in Lebanon) that shook the region days ago. However, I credit US pressure as the number one reason. Condoleezza Rice cancelled a trip to Egypt scheduled for next week because of the arrest of Ayman Nour and Mubarak's failure to "change". Well, it seems that Bush turned out to be bloody serious about this democracy in the Middle East thing. It also seems that Bushie will in fact make it to the history books that my grandchildren will be reading at school 50 years from today. If Syria or Iran fell, Bush can rest assured that he will add his name to the Lincoln-Wilson-Roosevelt-Reagan quartet.
Link to this Egyptian blogger here.

MADRASSA ON MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS: THE COVER-UP PROCEEDS

Nat Hentoff is a National Treasure. I first became acquainted with him as a wonderful jazz critic many years ago, but he is also one of a dwindling breed of liberals still anchored to reality. Here is his latest assessment of the ongoing Islamization of Columbia University.

"...Jimmy Breslin wrote a novel, The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight, that came to my mind while covering what is now an international story about charges that some professors in Columbia's Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC) bully and intimidate students who don't agree with them. Since one of my beats is education—from pre-kindergarten on—I have covered a number of dysfunctional college and university administrations around the country. But the handling of this controversy by Columbia's president, Lee Bollinger, and provost Alan Brinkley is a model of how to confuse and worsen a situation while trying to resolve its core problems..." See the rest here: Columbia Implodes!

Graduates of Columbia, grateful for the education in critical thinking they received many years ago, can only agree with Hentoff when he writes, "...It would also help clear the increasingly murky air at Columbia if eventually there were a new president and a new provost who know how to shoot straight to assure academic freedom for everyone on campus..."

THE DOG THAT DIDN'T BARK:

Liberal wordsmith Tom Friedman spins a self flattering fable to account for recent developments in the Middle East.

        For years now Friedman has left no doubt about who's to blame when things go wrong, the same man whose name is not mentioned once in this column, President George W. Bush. According to Friedman, for whom a paragraph without reference to himself is a paragraph wasted, "...I think that what's so interesting about the Middle East today is that we're actually witnessing three tipping points at once..." (see the rest here)

        Mr. Friedman, put down your copy of Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point and force yourself to acknowledge reality. No trendy reference to 'tipping points' is necessary. We know it hurts to admit it but it will be good for your soul and might help you to produce a column that's not filled with your usual cant about how Sharon is really to blame for the Palestinians' despair and intifada. You might notice that Sharon's aggressive attacks on the terror leaders while building a defensive wall have worked fairly effectively. Like Bush, he understood the need to use force to defeat his country's enemies. All sorts of new understandings will occur once you bite your tongue and force the 11 words out: these changes would not have occurred without President Bush's firm leadership. Thank God he never listened to or followed your condescending advice.

February 23, 2005

SIXTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE IWO JIMA FLAG RAISING

The next time critics shed crocodile tears over the loss of American lives in Iraq recall that in 5 weeks on Iwo Jima, 6824 Americans died. The most reproduced photo in history, the flag raising over Mt. Suribachi on Feb. 23, 1945, fifth day of the battle, has come to overshadow the battle itself. Many assume that the flag raising marked the end of the battle, but it was really just beginning. What follows is an anonymous account of what it was like to fight a foe determined to fight to the death, and fighting from underground. This is truly a battle that took place in hell, with no ground cover, no vegetation, no place to hide, no foxholes-and a foe that was not visible. The Japanese assumed that Americans were soft and decadent (sound familiar?)and could not sustain heavy casualties without pleading for a negotiated withdrawal. Instead they got the Marines.

The Battle

On Monday, February 19, 1945, U.S. Marines hit the sands of Iwo Jima.

The battle for Iwo Jima can be described in many ways.

Most simply, 70,000 Marines routed 22,0000 Japanese in a 36 day battle. It bore little resemblance to today's' modern warfare. It was a fight of gladiators. Gladiators in the catacombs of the Coliseum fighting among trap doors and hidden tunnels. Above ground gladiators using liquid gasoline to burn the underground gladiators out of their lethal hiding places.

The Marines had overwhelming force and controlled the sea and air. The Japanese had the most ingenious and deadly fortress in military history.

The Marines had Esprit de Corps and felt they could not lose. The Japanese fought for their god-Emperor and felt they had to die fighting.

The Marines were projecting American offensive power thousands of miles from home shores with a momentum that would carry on to create the Century of the Pacific. The Japanese were fighting a tenacious defensive battle protecting the front door to their ancient land.

The geography, topography and geology of the island guaranteed a deadly and bizarre battle. The large numbers of men and small size of the island ensured the fighting would be up close and vicious.

Almost one hundred thousand men would fight on a tiny island just eight square miles. Four miles by two miles. If you're driving 60 miles an hour in your car, it takes you four minutes to drive four miles. It took the Marines 36 days to slog that four miles. Iwo Jima would be the most densely populated battlefield of the war with one hundred thousand combatants embraced in a death dance over an area smaller than one third the size of Manhattan island.

From the air the island looked like a bald slice of black moonscape shaped like a porkchop. All its foliage had been blown off by bombs. The only "life" visible on the island were puffs of "rotten egg" stinking sulphur fumes coming from vents that seemed connected to hell. Correspondents in airplanes could see tens of thousands of Marines on one side of the island fighting against a completely barren side of stone.

On foot it was a morass of soft volcanic sand or a jumble of jagged rock. The Marines sought protection in shell holes blasted by the bombardment. Foxholes were impossible to dig, either the sand collapsed in on you or your shovel failed to dent the hard obsidian floor.

Bullets and mortars would come from nowhere to kill. The Marines would come across a cave or blockhouse and shoot and burn all its defenders to death. They would peer into the cavern and assure themselves no one was left there to hurt them. They'd move on only to be shocked when that "dead" position came alive again behind them. The Marines thought
they were fighting men in isolated caves and had no idea of the extensive tunnels below.

A surgeon would establish an operating theater in a safe place. With sandbags and tarp he'd build a little hospital and treat his patients away from the battle. Then at night when he lay down exhausted to sleep he'd hear foreign voices below him. Only when his frantic fingers clawed through the sand and hit the wooden roof of an underground cavern would he realize he had been living atop the enemy all along.

The days were full of fear and nights offered terror. The Marines were sleeping on ground that the Japanese had practiced how to crawl over in the darkness, they knew every inch. Imagine sleeping in a haunted man-
sion where the owner is a serial murderer who knows the rooms and stairways and trapdoors by touch and you are new. Then you can imagine the tortured sleep of the Marines.

Experienced naval doctors had never seen such carnage. Japanese tanks and high caliber anti-aircraft guns hidden behind walls of rock and concrete ensured that the Marines would not just be cut down, but cut
in half or blown to bits.

A seventy five year old veteran of Iwo Jima would still reflexively open his bedroom window in 1999 after dreaming of the battle once again. Fifty four years after the battle the stench of death still filled his nostrils.

The bodies lay everywhere. Young boys who had never been to a funeral became accustomed to rolling another dead buddy aside. Kids full of life

worked on burial duty unloading bodies from trucks stacked with death.

Mothers back home would tear open the ominous telegrams with trembling fingers. The survivors would remember sailing away and seeing the rows and rows of white crosses and stars of Davids. Almost seven thousand. Today there are still over six thousand Japanese dead still entombed under the island, dead where they fell in their tunnels and caves. Recently two hundred sixty were excavated, some mummified by the sulphur gases, their glasses sitting straight atop preserved noses, hair still on their heads.

Military geniuses predicted a three day battle, an "easy time." Some of the nicest boys America would ever produce slogged on for thirty six days in what would be the worst battle in the history of the US Marine Corps.

Generals conferred over maps while tanks, airplanes, naval bombs and artillery pounded the island. But it was the individual Marine on the ground with a gun that won the battle. Marines without gladiator's armor who would advance into withering fire. Marines who would not give up simply because they were Marines. A mint in Washington would cast more medals for these Iwo Jima heroes than for any group of fighters in America's history.

America would embrace these heroes, but they were enthralled by an image of heroism, by a photo. Millions of words would be written in the US about 1/400th of a second no one on Iwo Jima thought worthy of remark at the time. Thousands would seek autographs from three survivors who felt "we hadn't done much." Battles would be fought over that image, some dying early because of their inclusion, some living bitterly because of their exclusion.

But that would all come later. After two battles were fought on Iwo Jima, one for Mt. Suribachi and the southern part of the island the other for the northern part. And after one hundred thousand individual battles, personal battles of valor and fear, of determination and dirt. --Author Unknown

February 21, 2005

THE MINISTRY OF TRUTH SPEAKS

The New York Times editorial board has decided to enter the discussion on Lawrence Summers of Harvard. In a slimy piece of hit-and-run journalism it has completely mischaracterized the informal remarks made by Summers at the National Bureau of Economic Research conference held on January 14. [Click HERE for the editorial] The meeting was a conference of scholars and intellectuals the purpose of which was to discuss the dearth of women entering the fields of science and mathematics, and to stimulate thinking about solutions to the problem. In this context—let’s try to understand why there are so few women in science and, if possible, correct the problem—Summers made some remarks. As a public service HORSEFEATHERS is reprinting Summers’ remarks that are most relevant to the Times’ editorial so the reader may judge for him or herself whether the Times’ editorial is fair.

Excerpts of Lawrence Summers's remarks at a Jan. 14 meeting of the National Bureau of Economic Research:

The full text may be found at:
http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/nber.html

“There are three broad hypotheses about the sources of the very substantial disparities that this conference's papers document and have been documented before with respect to the presence of women in high-end scientific professions. One is what I would call . . . the high-powered job hypothesis. The second is what I would call different availability of aptitude at the high end, and the third is what I would call different socialization and patterns of discrimination in a search. And in my own view, their importance probably ranks in exactly the order that I just described.

“The most prestigious activities in our society expect of people who are going to rise to leadership positions in their 40s near-total commitments to their work. And it is a fact about our society that that is a level of commitment that a much higher fraction of married men have been historically prepared to make than of married women. That's not a judgment about how it should be.

"If my reading of the data is right -- it's something people can argue about -- that there are some systematic differences in variability in different populations, then whatever the set of attributes are that are precisely defined to correlate with being an aeronautical engineer at MIT or being a chemist at Berkeley, those are probably different in their standard deviations, as well. So my sense is that the unfortunate truth -- I would far prefer to believe something else, because it would be easier to address what is surely a serious social problem if something else were true -- is that the combination of the high-powered job hypothesis and the differing variances probably explains a fair amount of this problem.

“There may also be elements, by the way, of differing -- there is some, particularly in some attributes that bear on engineering -- there is reasonably strong evidence of taste differences between little girls and little boys that are not easy to attribute to socialization. . . . So, I think, while I would prefer to believe otherwise, I guess my experience with 2½-year-old twin daughters who were not given dolls and who were given trucks and found themselves saying to each other, ''Look, daddy truck is carrying the baby truck," tells me something. And I think it's just something that you probably have to recognize. There are two other hypotheses that are all over. One is socialization. Somehow little girls are all socialized towards nursing, and little boys are socialized towards building bridges. No doubt there is some truth in that. I would be hesitant about assigning too much weight to that hypothesis for two reasons. First, most of what we've learned from empirical psychology in the last 15 years has been that people naturally attribute things to socialization that are in fact not attributable to socialization. We've been astounded by the results of separated twins studies. The confident assertions that autism was a reflection of parental characteristics that were absolutely supported and that people knew from years of observational evidence have now been proven to be wrong. And so the human mind has a tendency to grab on to the socialization hypothesis when you can see it, and it often turns out not to be true. The second empirical problem is that girls are persisting longer and longer. When there were no girls majoring in chemistry, when there were no girls majoring in biology, it was much easier to blame parental socialization. Then, as we are
increasingly finding today, the problem is what's happening when people are 20 or when people are 25, in terms of their patterns, with which they drop out. Again, to the extent it can be addressed, it's a terrific thing to address . . .

“I've given you my best guesses after a fair amount of reading the literature and a lot of talking to people. They may be all wrong. I will have served my purpose if I have provoked thought on this question and provoked the marshalling of evidence to contradict what I have said. But I think we all need to be thinking very hard about how to do better on these issues and that they are too important to sentimentalize rather than to think about in as rigorous and careful ways as we can. That's why I think conferences like this are very, very valuable.”

Anyone familiar with the relevant scientific data having to do with personality formation, which includes choice of profession and the complex behavioral phenomena associated with it, will understand that such processes entail a large array of influences from genetic, developmental, experiential, and later, educational, and social spheres. No one set of influences is determinative and it is clear that they impact differentially on males and females from conception on. There is, of course, much overlapping in function between males and females, and between one person and another, since the species shares the same genome, more or less. But there are unique and individual differences between human beings and between males and females. There can be no such thing as biological equality or indentical-ness between people, not even in the case of identical twins. Unfortunately, the feminist myth of equality of the sexes is a hopeless fantasy and one of the major follies of post-modern life.

February 20, 2005

IVY LEAGUE GROUPTHINK

A few days ago the “Boston Globe” published a short essay written by three of America’s most esteemed leaders in the world of higher education—John Hennessey, President of Stanford University; Susan Hockfield, President of MIT; and Shirley Tilghman, President of Princeton University. Not only is each of them a leader of a major institution of higher learning, but each of them touts his or her personal connection to a science—Hennessey, computer science; Hockfield, neuroscience; and Tilghman, molecular genetics.

Pretty heavy intellectual artillery, eh?

As it happens their sights were trained on Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard, for his now infamous remark to a group of intellectuals and academics implying that the unequal representation of women in the fields of science and math might have a basis in the different biologies of men and women. It should be noted that his remark was apparently nearly fatal to several of the lady professors attending the meeting and, choking with rage, they called the “Boston Globe” and tattled on Mr. Summers, who then had to run for cover and take a lot of crap from the intellectual left saying that he was beastly and hopelessly medieval in his thinking about women.

The “Boston Globe” essay, written by the trio of academic presidents with impeccable credentials was meant to establish once and for all where the academy and the scientific world stood on this matter. It was meant to put the kabosh on further legitimate discourse on the question of gender differences in cognitive functioning.

Most of the essay is a plea for affirmative action for women in the sciences. The model expressed here is based on the idea in a previous generation that blacks were discriminated against in medical or law school and required special recruitment and dispensations in the way they were educated. The authors implicitly and explicitly claim that women are discriminated against consciously and unconsciously by their mentors and teachers and that that accounts for the fact that they turn up in fewer numbers than their male counterparts in science programs.

Thus the solution to the problem is to rid the system of biases in teachers and mentors and teach the latter how to nurture the blighted kernel of science that exists within the souls of girls and young women.

One might have expected more from Stanford, Princeton and MIT than this politically correct mushy thinking. We might have expected a full-throated defense of academic and scientific values—open and fearless discourse of even the most unpopular ideas; the unbridled pursuit of truth, evidence, facts; the questioning of cant; and the disavowal of political correctness whenever it is found in the academy. Instead we have the reverse—political activism and cant-like political correctness. Here is a sample of their views: “Extensive research on the abilities and representation of males and females in science and mathematics has identified the need to address important cultural and societal factors. Speculation that ‘innate differences’ may be a significant cause for the under-representation of women in science and engineering may rejuvenate old myths and reinforce negative stereotypes and biases.”

The above quotation represents a complete denial of the existence of powerful evidence that there are neonatal and early childhood differences that exist in brain, nervous system, and later in cognitive functioning. And that these gender differences are partly genetic and partly based on universal biological experiences such as the observation of sexual behavior in animals, pregnancy and birth of animal and human babies, and menstrual blood.

An example of brain differentiation during the neonatal period is summarized by Bruce S. McEwen, Professor and Head of Laboratory of Endocrinology, Rockefeller University: “What does all this mean for our understanding of behavioral sex differences? It means that male and female brains begin postnatal life with subtle structural and functional differences that bias the input and output of information and modify the storage of experience. Modern neuroscience teaches us that each experience and each psychological process involves neuronal activity and underlying chemical responses. The very chemistry of neurotransmission has the ability to modify nerve cell structure and function; these modifications can last for hours and may even lead to virtually permanent changes, as in learning. In fact, neurotransmitters, like hormones, can alter the expression of genes, leading to long lasting changes in the brain.”

And these long lasting changes in brain functioning may result in differential tendencies in cognitive behavior. A typical area of cognitive difference between boys and girls and men and women confirmed by countless studies is in spatial processing and abilities.

Thirty years ago such a claim was controversial and a tough minded French lady sociologist, Evelyne Sullerot, was determined to prove the claim false. Here is the description of her observations:

“My work in France involves career counseling for adult women. I decided to study the career orientation and training of girls and women in seven European countries, East and West. Ten years ago, when I began this project, I was convinced—and my publications record this—that social conditioning and education were entirely responsible for all the differences observed between men and women in career choice and career success. I still think this is true for an extremely large part of the differences in interest and taste that help determine one's choice of training and career.

“All the same, my environmentalist faith was shaken by facts—by stubborn facts. Hence I have followed the opposite path from those who of late have inordinately magnified the role of social causes. Social analysis no longer seemed sufficient to explain sex distributions in certain occupations, or the failure of certain educational experiments that were meant to change stereotypes. I began to look at the results of the differences in spatial aptitudes between boys and girls. Not, to be sure, that I think they explain everything! I would simply like to state that, starting from facts that have major economic and social consequences for women, I began, of course, by explaining everything in terms of the environment, the interconnectedness and ubiquity of stereotypes, the difficulties facing girls in entering new fields, and the politico-economic domination exercised by men for their selfish benefit.

“I investigated individual sectors of precision engineering, such as watch-making, where the tasks do not call for physical strength and the environment is neither dirty, noisy, nor rank with the smell of burning oil. I also knew that women had been involved in jewelry making since the Middle Ages, and watch-making can in a sense be seen as a branch of jewelry making. I had to face the facts: everywhere, women make clocks and watches, rapidly and expertly. With extremely rare exceptions, they do not design the mechanisms, do not invent any, and do not even repair them. In the Soviet Union, girls and boys were initially placed in the same watch-making schools. Today, there is one course of training for assembly and another for repair; there are only girls in the first and only boys in the second. This division was not intentional, and was even resisted. Yet little by little it imposed itself. I could give many other examples, all of them involving professions in which spatial aptitudes are a factor. Such differences between girls and boys may be exploited and transmitted by socioeconomic and sociopolitical structures that magnify their effects. [but] These social structures cannot be considered the sole causes of the consequences observed.”

Even though the three educrats tag themselves as scientists, they clearly have strayed from the values and methods of science. (Really first-rate scientists, rarely give up the scientific work they love in order to become fundraising figureheads.) They are more interested in rhetorical manipulations in the service of cant—that women are under-represented in science—than truth.

The outpouring of hostility from the academy against Lawrence Summers for being open-minded about a controversial area of human knowledge and understanding which is supported by the leaders of three of the most prestigious educational institutions in America shows to what degree our culture has been plundered, confiscated, and transformed into a drab Orwellian campus of group-think.

February 19, 2005

SMART PEOPLE CAN BE VERY STUPID: THE CASE OF LAWRENCE SUMMERS

        Horsefeathers' sympathy for Lawrence Summers, victim of a spreading academic and media inquisition, is tempered by bemusement that such an intelligent man could be so ignorant of human nature. Summers, himself a liberal, does not yet realize that the contemporary Liberal Imagination is a utopian one, a faith that does not welcome questioning. It is defined by a shared egalitarian fantasy in which most differences and inequalities are imposed by malign social forces. A world in which some individuals possess greater musical, athletic, intellectual or artistic ability, is unfair and unjust. Differences some of us might welcome, and perhaps enjoy, constitute an affront to liberal egalitarians. When utopia never seems to arrive, scapegoats are required to protect the Liberal mind from being forced to question its own faith.
        Stanley Kurtz, in NRO has a very interesting take on the Summers transcript. Kurtz believes the feminist outrage at Summers is not the main motivation for the inquisition: "..it’s pretty clear from this transcript that their deeper goal is to get rid of Summers because he is asking too many uncomfortable questions about the way affirmative action works. In this talk, Summers calls for research on whether affirmative action does what it claims to do. Do diversity searches really find top quality professors who were only being overlooked because they are minorities, or do these searches only yield professors of middling or low quality? Summers also points out contradictions in what diversity advocates are asking for. Some of them want faculty picked on purely objective criteria like number of papers published. This will supposedly eliminate subtle hiring discrimination. But other diversity advocates want the opposite. They call for choosing minority candidates based on subjective considerations like potential and collegiality, supposedly to overcome the discrimination built into “objective” criteria. Summers asks, which is it? He also wants data to back up the choice of strategy. So in this talk, Summers is subtly but clearly exposing the contradictions and secrets of the campus diversity industry. By calling for objective proof that diversity searches really produce faculty equal in quality to color blind or sex blind searches, Summers is laying out a standard that he knows diversity proponents can’t meet..." Summers dares to ask for scientific study of the results of Affirmative Action, one of the central dogmas of utopian Liberalism.
        While Kurtz is correct in praising Summers for raising the issue, it is not affirmative action that has provoked the outburst of emotion and demands for Summers's head now spreading across Ivy League campuses. It is his daring to talk about the possibility of biological differences between the sexes. For example, at Yale, female student "..protesters criticized President Richard Levin for not joining the presidents of Stanford, Princeton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in denouncing comments made last month by Harvard President Larry Summers. Summers said biological differences may help explain why more men than women excel in science, but has since apologized several times. "Summers' comments revealed a systemic problem," said Melissa Mason, co-chairwoman of the Graduate Employees and Student Organization. "Levin, as head of an Ivy League university, has a responsibility to respond..."
        Summers doesn't understand that apologizing over and over only inflames his foes, for it makes them believe he shares their view of the injustice he, as a representative of the privileged patriarchy, embodies. In fact, Summers's apologies ARE his pathetic attempt to cling to his own liberal faith. "You're right", he seems to say, "it's unfair that I'm male. I'll be more self-flagellating, I'll make up for the injustice of my being male, and therefore inevitably biased against women. In fact, I'll help you emasculate me if only you'll let me stay." What Summers fails to realize, because he himself resides within the Liberal hive, is that the ultimate intolerable difference for the Liberal imagination is the biological difference between the sexes. One of the major projects of Ivy League Post-Modern intellectuals, has been to impose their belief that 'male' and 'female' are not biologically determined, but rather, "constructed". This is not something logically argued or subjected to factual scrutiny; it's simply dogma, more reminiscent of Stalin than of science. The famous unclarity of Post-Modern writing, its lack of logic and its resemblance to schizophrenic thinking, is the perfect expression of its assault on difference and distinction, the foundations of logic, reason and clarity. If these habits of thought--reason, logic, the scientific method- are regarded as patriarchal constructs, obstacles to the arrival of egalitarian utopia, then they must go. Their defenders, like Summers, must be denounced and excommunicated. Curiously enough, the loathsome imposter, Wade Churchill, understood human nature better than Summers. No apologies from Mr. Churchill; instead he attacked his critics and presented himself as a bold defender of free speech. And who knows? If Summers's foes are less generous than the Inquisition was to Galileo, Mr. Churchill may find his new job search ending in Cambridge, Ma.

February 11, 2005

THE HERBERT LEHMAN PROFESSOR OF GOV'T . AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY EXPLAINS 9-11. GUESS WHO'S TO BLAME.

        Herbert H.Lehman (1878-1963) was a distinguished New York Senator and Governor, as well as a successful businessman, philanthropist and defender of Israel. Jewish New Yorkers took pride in his accomplishments,and Jewish intellectual life held a special place in Lehman's philanthropic concerns. He donated money to many educational and cultural institutions, including the Jewish Theological Seminary and Columbia University. He was a trustee of the Seminary, and its Institute For Talmudic Ethics is named for him. Lehman also supported Columbia during the period of time when it opened the doors of the college and its faculty to the brightest of New York's Jews. Thus it is not surprising to learn of an endowed faculty position, The Herbert Lehman Professor of Government.
        Columbia alumni recently received notice of a lecture to be given by the current occupant of that chair, Mahmood Mamdani. The lecture is titled: Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror. It shouldn't be too hard to guess the thrust of the lecture from its title: America is to blame for Islamic rage and terrorism. Ronald Reagan's cold war created terrorism, blah, blah, blah. Islamic jihad has nothing to do with 9-11. Besides, America was built on crimes against Indians and blacks, thus suggesting we got what we deserved. Mamdani offers a more sophisticated PoMo version of Wade Churchill's argument that America brought 9-11 on itself. The text of Prof.Mamdani's lecture is full of the tropes and tics of "Post-colonial" studies, the intent of which is to inculpate America and Israel, and to explain 9-11 as the inevitable consequence of American Middle East policies. In Professor Mamdani's view, the anti-semitic hate fest sponsored by the UN at Durban was a noble enterprise and the U.S. refusal to join in the denunciations of Zionism and Israel was evidence of our irresponsibility. He puts it this way: "Official America has a habit of not taking responsibility for its own actions. Instead, it habitually looks for a high moral pretext for inaction. I was in Durban at the World Congress Against Racism (WCAR) when the US walked out of it. The Durban conference was about major crimes of the past, about racism, and xenophobia, and related crimes. I returned from Durban to listen to Condoleeza Rice talk about the need to forget slavery because, she said, the pursuit of civilized life requires that we forget the past.
        It is true that, unless we learn to forget, life will turn into revenge-seeking. Each of us will have nothing but a catalogue of wrongs done to a long line of ancestors. But civilization cannot be built on just forgetting. We must not only learn to forget, we must also not forget to learn. We must also memorialize, particularly monumental crimes. America was built on two monumental crimes: the genocide of the Native American and the enslavement of the African American. The tendency of official America is to memorialize other peoples crimes and to forget its own to seek a high moral ground as a pretext to ignore real issues..."

        All this and more from the holder of the Herbert Lehman professorship. What a posthumous outrage! Could Columbia have made a more dreadful choice for the Lehman professorship than an intellectual fraud who devotes himself to apologetics for our enemies? If Goebbels were alive would he be courted by Columbia to occupy a chair in Jewish studies? The anti-American, anti-semitic sickness afflicting Columbia is not restricted to the dept.of Middle Eastern Languages and Culture. It has spread through the liberal arts faculty and if not excised quickly will utterly destroy a once great university. President Bollinger, hurry up please, it's time.

February 10, 2005

KOFI ANNAN BANS SEX: ISRAEL TO BLAME FOR LAPSES

Utopian fantasists at work:

"UN bars peacekeepers from sex"

From correspondents in United NATIONS
February 11, 2005
From: Agence France-Presse
UN peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have been barred from having sex with locals after reports of sexual abuse of girls as young as 13, the United Nations announced...
See the rest here.

February 08, 2005

SEND IN THE PSYCHOTHERAPISTS: AL QAEDA OPERATIVES SUFFER FROM "DEPRESSIVE ILLNESS"

        The therapeutic culture is not confined to the upper East and West sides of Manhattan. A special anti-terrorist court in Great Britain "...concluded in October 2003 that Mr. G had "actively assisted terrorists who have links to al-Qa'eda", he was released from Belmarsh prison into house arrest last April after his continued detention caused a "serious relapse" in his mental condition. He was suffering from a "depressive illness". After release on bail, Mr. G. violated the terms of the release by meeting with unidentified visitors. However, when his bail violation was brought to the attention of the court, his lawyer argued that removing bail was like the "sword of Damocles hanging over anyone's head"... the "ultimate nightmare" for Mr. G. This argument prevailed. No doubt a combination of Prozac and psychotherapy will be provided at state expense.
See the rest here.

February 07, 2005

JOHN KERRY: HE DID IT BEFORE HE DIDN'T DO IT--BUT HE WILL DO IT SOON

        Horsefeathers regards the likelihood of John Kerry signing the form 180 authorizing release of his military records as approximately equal to the likelihood of my dog signing a contract to pitch for the Yankees. Still, Kerry has lately spoken repeatedly of his intention to sign; in fact, responding to Don Imus's question he said he had already done so---or did he?

IMUS: You also told Tim (Russert) that you would sign this Form 180 releasing all of your military records. Have you done that?
KERRY: Yes, we’re going do that. Absolutely, I will do that.

February 05, 2005

THE CASE OF WARD CHURCHILL: PROFESSORIAL EXTREMISM AND THE EXPLOSIVE POWER OF BOREDOM

        Horsefeathers maintains that contemporary liberalism has devolved into little more than a pose. It has become a stance, an attitude- self flattering and insistent on its intellectual and moral superiority. Its childish utopianism,and its adolescent craving for excitement require scapegoats to explain the failure of the real world to match its longings. The Jews are the always available, anti-utopians. George Bush is the functional equivalent, for today's liberals of the universal scheming and nefarious, Jew--the dreaded Neo-Con. It should come as no surprise that leftist Amerika hater, Ward Churchill, is a Jew hater as well. Prof. Edward Alexander exposes the nature of what passes for thought in the precincts of Churchill's academic left.

        "Some ideas," wrote George Orwell over half a century ago, "are so stupid that only intellectuals could believe them." The truth of this observation is daily reenforced at countless universities.
        Amidst a glare of nationwide publicity, University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill has been asked to resign as chairman of that school's Ethnic Studies Department because he published an essay in which he likened the 3000 people massacred at the World Trade Center on 9/11 to "little Eichmanns." For good measure, he added that their killers had made "gallant sacrifices" to achieve noble ends. Prior to this incident, Churchill's scholarly reputation was based mainly on a squalid tract called A LITTLE MATTER OF GENOCIDE (1997), in which he argued that the murder of European Jews was not at all a "fixed policy objective of the Nazis," and accused Jews of seeking to monopolize for themselves all that beautiful Holocaust suffering that other groups would very much like, ex-post facto, to share. He argued that Jewish "exclusivism" had nearly erased from history the victims of other genocidal campaigns, and that Jewish scholars stressed the Holocaust in order to "construct a conceptual screen behind which to hide the realities of Israel's ongoing genocide against the Palestinian population." He not only likened Jewish scholars who have argued for the unique character of the Holocaust to neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers; he said that the Jews are worse than the latter-day Nazis because "those who deny the Holocaust, after all, focus their distortion upon one target. Those [Jewish scholars] who deny all holocausts other than that of the Jews have the same effect upon many." Given the current academic atmosphere, it is a safe bet that what might delicately be called Churchill's shortage of sympathy in the Jewish direction made him a strong candidate to head Colorado's Ethnic Studies program.
        Extremism is the order of the day on campus.In the aftermath of 9/11 a professor at University of New Mexico effervescently declaimed: "Anyone who can blow up the Pentagon gets my vote." An academician at University of Massachusetts told his students that "The American flag is a symbol of terrorism and death and fear and destruction and oppression."
        At Columbia University, Professor Nicholas DeGenova vaulted to national renown when he declared, at an anti-war rally in March 2003, that "U.S. patriotism is inseparable from...white supremacy" and then expressed the "wish for a million Mogadishus in Iraq." (This was a reference to the 1993 incident in Somalia when eighteen U. S. troops were killed.) In June 2002 Trent University philosophy professor Michael Neumann bravely declared (in Alexander Cockburn's online publication Counterpunch) that "if an effective strategy [for promoting the Palestinian cause] means encouraging vicious, racist antisemitism or the destruction of the state of Israel, I still don't care." And Noam Chomsky, the ne plus ultra of anti-Americanism (and the person historian Arthur Schlesinger long ago, in 1969, called the consummate "intellectual crook")pontificated: "Let me repeat: the U.S. has demanded that Pakistan kill possibly millions of people..." And so on ad nauseam.
        What the poverty of the English language compels me to call the 'ideas' in these professorial fulminations are pretty uniform: anti-Americanism, antisemitism, tenacious attachment to the motto: "the other country, right or wrong." The uniformity of opinion has a comic element to it: the extremist professors nearly always present themselves as brave dissenters confronted by a mob of thick-skinned louts; in fact they belong, perhaps more than any other segment of American society, to a community of CONSENT, in which "diversity" means that people look different but think exactly alike.
         But what is more disturbing than the opinions uniformly expressed is the hysteria, bordering on mental imbalance, that characterizes them. People we
used to think of as harmless drudges pursuing mouldy futilites are now revealing to us the explosive power of boredom, a power that may well frighten us.
--Edward Alexander
Professor Emeritus of English
University of Washington

February 04, 2005

PATTON AND MATTIS

Horsefeathers apologizes for inadvertently offering the bowdlerized, P.C. version of George Patton's speech to his troops on the eve of Operation Overlord, June 5, 1944. Here's the real thing:

"Men, this stuff that some sources sling around about America wanting out of this war, not wanting to fight, is a crock of bullshit. Americans love to fight, traditionally. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle. You are here today for three reasons. First, because you are here to defend your homes and your loved ones. Second, you are here for your own self respect, because you would not want to be anywhere else. Third, you are here because you are real men and all real men like to fight. When you, here, everyone of you, were kids, you all admired the champion marble player, the fastest runner, the toughest boxer, the big league ball players, and the All-American football players. Americans love a winner. Americans will not tolerate a loser. Americans despise cowards. Americans play to win all of the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Americans have never lost nor will ever lose a war; for the very idea of losing is hateful to an American."
See the rest here.

VICTOR HANSON: THE GEORGE PATTON OF THE WAR OF IDEAS

Hanson's latest shot demolishes the ideational structure of modern Liberalism. Do not expect a coherent response--just howls of rage.

Victor Davis Hanson on THE GLOBAL THRONG: Why the world's elites gnash their teeth.

MADRASSA ON MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS:(CONT.)

        President Lee ('I'll appoint a committee')Bollinger has to qualify for the most hapless President of a major University since Nathan Pusey.

        Here's a first hand report in the NYSUN of the latest anti-semitic Columbia festival, disguised as an academic panel.

Mideast Parley Takes Ugly Turn At Columbia U.

Letter From Morningside
BY SOL STERN and FRED SIEGEL
February 4, 2005
        "You might think that Columbia University would be on its best academic behavior on the issue of the Middle East conflict these days. After all, several professors in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, known as MEALAC, are credibly accused of anti-Semitism and intimidating pro-Israel students. The university's president, Lee Bollinger, has appointed a committee to look into the charges. But even with the media spotlight on, Columbia apparently can't help itself.

        Last Monday night we attended a university panel on the Middle East conflict titled "One State or Two? Alternative Proposals for Middle East Peace." Even the panel's title was a giveaway that we were in for more anti-Israel bias on campus. The "one state" solution is a euphemism for the destruction of the Jewish state - a trope of the most extreme rejectionist elements within the Palestinian movement and their allies in Syria and Iran. Terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah want to create an Islamic Republic in place of Israel. A few splinter Marxist groups such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, founded by George Habash, offer the Jews a solution that's far more "progressive." They murder innocents merely to replace Israel with a "secular democratic" Palestine..."
See the rest here.

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