Minority Report

2009-08-14T14:50:00.000-07:00

Munenori--Just checked the blog for the first time in at least half a year--seems I forgot all about it. I don't belong to myspace or any other internet site, so I'm not sure how to access your material.

Nor do I have any idea when you posted your comment. Moreover, whatever appears on my blog was added by a friend, who created it in the first place. Myself, I'm completely helpless in the Cyberia.

David

2008-10-04T11:57:00.000-07:00

Better late...

Apologies for the sporadic updates. I've posted three new essays. But first, a Youtube interview recorded soon after the publication of The Big Lie.

2008-10-04T11:54:00.000-07:00

2008-10-04T11:52:00.000-07:00

The Reviewer Reviewed: A Reply to Clifford Orwin

I find it curious, to say the least, that the only negative criticism of my book The Big Lie thus far has come, not from Muslims or Christians who might understandably take offense at some of my claims, but rather from my own landsmen, those whom I like to call the “good Jews.” But perhaps this is not as surprising as it seems, for one of the primary targets of The Big Lie is precisely these high-minded, compassionate, serenely meditative Jewish humanists, mired in bland ineffability, who are in effect the intellectual descendents of Sir Herbert Samuel, Martin Buber and Shimon Peres.

I acknowledge that Clifford Orwin is one of our intellectual eminences, but I also sense that Orwin is no Orwell and that his ideological lineage puts him at a disavantage in coming to terms not only with my humble book but, of far greater importance, with the incendiary era in which we live. The presuppositions inherent in his review of The Big Lie do little service to any of us who are committed to grappling with the major problems and conflicts of our time. To begin with, the arguments he marshals against my thesis tend to shrink the debate down to a distressingly facile or pedestrian level—for example, his insouciant conviction that Jews are free “to opt out” from their tradition or heritage (this has never stopped the determined Jew-hater from opting them back in), his contradictory accusation that I did not provide my children “with a serious Jewish education” (contradictory, since he himself recognizes that I came late to Judaism), his professional defense of his academic colleagues—the “loyal spouse,” the “doting parent,” the “worthy friend”—where have we heard this before? (but who, as David Horowitz has amply pointed out in several recent books, are massively engaged in the attempt to transform the modern university into a kind of bootcamp for the anti-Israeli Left), his complaint that I do not “explain the stages” of my political change of heart after 9/11(!), his dismissal of my apparently “wistful suggestion” that my identity is involved not only with blood but with ink (the distinction, attributed in the text, belongs to the medieval Jewish mystic and poet Abraham Abulafia, whose musings were by no means wistful), his flagging of my “serious factual errors,” of which he cites three, none of them errors, and so on. As for Orwin’s corresponding disparagement of Michel Houellebecq, who has clearly recognized the threat of Koranic Islam, I will say only that the French novelist has been crudely defamed not just by various Islamic groups—which is much to his credit—but has been routinely scorned by our comme il faut intellectuals—which is even more to his credit.

Most of Orwin’s gripes, I would submit, are mere cavils, a set of minor or irrelevant objections, a reduction of scope. But to give him his due, one of his critiques does merit consideration. Where he faults me for the comparatively weak or ambiguous nature of my Jewish identity, which he derogates as a species of “wishful thinking,” Orwin may well have a point. There is little I can muster in my defense except to reiterate that, as I was inexcusably tardy in repudiating the elements of a left-wing ideology to which I more or less adhered for most of my adult life, so I was a late arrival to the texts and muniments of the Jewish faith. The five years I spent writing The Big Lie represented my bid to catch up. Learning to acquire a better understanding of the mystery of Jewish identity, to align the pragmatics of ritual, exile, affect, scripture and memory, is, for me, a work in progress. But the reader must decide for himself or herself whether Orwin is correct in his assumption that I “evince[ ] no familiarity with these writings” or whether I “remain[ ] shackled to [my] own case.” I hope I may be permitted to suggest that Orwin, regrettably, remains shackled to his.

For the real subject of my book escapes his attention almost perfectly, as it does that of most of my Jewish detractors—namely, the “unholy alliance” between the political Left and the Islamic Right, the absurdity of “root cause” arguments, the scourge of multiculturalism and its attendant language of political correctness along with the consequent abdication from the struggle to preserve the central values of our beleaguered civilization, the fear of exposing oneself to ridicule or assault, and especially the rising wave of antisemitism across the world, evident not only in the frequent attacks against Jewish citizens of European countries but in the growing campaign to marginalize the Jewish state through boycott, divestment, sanctions and outright slander.
One of the crucial tenets of The Big Lie is that antisemitism is not only an expression of a vicious, irrational and immemorial hatred of the Jew. It is also a symptom of a deep flaw within our civilization and a sign of an abiding resistance against our cultural patrimony. Hatred of the Jew, wrote Max Nordeau in The Conventional Lies of our Civilization (1884), bespeaks the corruption of the national spirit and character, but the deformity goes beyond the nation state. Antisemitism, as I have argued in work-in-progress Living in the Valley of Shmoon, is “the public expression of the underlying irrationality that brings the great civilizing project of the West from the time of the Greeks and the Romans through the advent and diffusion of Christianity to the present moment into serious question. It is the way in which we turn against ourselves, the pagan residue of acrimony against a God who is One, the concept of a universal moral law, the practice of skeptical inquiry and the pressure of individual choice and judgment in taking responsibility for personal salvation—Judaism’s bequest to mankind…It is no exaggeration to say that the Jew is the test case of a civilization [resentful of its own civilizing imperative] —a test we appear to have failed.”

I don’t mean any disrespect, but I intuit that Orwin, like the majority of his congeners, just doesn’t get it. Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, put it succinctly: the Jews were “one people—our enemies have made us one.” Antisemitism, as Herzl understood, will persist as a defining force for Jewish consciousness. Whether we like it or not, it is here to stay. The only question is one of degree. In the long run, assimilation will not work; indeed, as nouveau philosophe Alain Finkielkraut has intimated, the desire to assimilate is paradoxically one of the chief causes of anti-Jewish ressentiment. And for this reason, as Jews we must never seek to temporize, to mount the podium as pulpit intellectuals, to put things always into the most agreeable perspective, to present ourselves as reasonable and accommodating interlocutors who will do everything in their power not to offend. We must cease to be “good Jews,” those who, in the words of Emanuele Ottolenghi, a research fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford and a frequent contributor to Commentary, aspire to a place of honor in the sun of secularism or religious pluralism and choose “to live in the light, stopping only to burnish their qualifications by noisily joining the chorus that has consigned their fellow Jews to the dark.” My only emendation to Ottolenghi’s definition is that the chorus is not always noisy; it can be quite subtle and modulated. Nevertheless, the fact remains. The “good Jews” are those who “renounce a core component of their identity...finding favor and reward by exerting every effort to assimilate themselves to whatever is required of them.” One recalls poet A. M. Klein’s response to the famous Jewish critics of his day who ignored or downplayed his Hitleriad: “Fadiman, Untermeyer, Cerf, Kreymborg…you may think of this junta as the composite of their initials.” The temptation to appease, soothe and tranquillize is one that too many Jews find irresistible.

On the contrary, we need to confront the realties of a harsh and problematic world squarely and uncompromisingly. As Irving Layton advised in his celebrated poem to his sons, abjuring “The cultured Jew: the sensitized exile…/The Jew, old and sagacious, whom all speak well of…”:

Be none of these, my sons
My sons, be none of these
Be gunners in the Israeli Air Force

Hyperbole aside, Layton had it right, in precisely the way that the Jew who averts his eyes “in compassion and disgust” from the “doom of nations” has got it wrong. As Abraham Tarasofky writes in his memoir of the poet, “Irving Layton As I Knew Him,” “For the Irving I knew, the fighting Jew was the only self-respecting Jew. He had no time for the Jew as victim, trying to demonstrate to the goyim what a good, misunderstood fellow he is.” Certainly, in an eschatological time, neither Jews nor Gentiles can afford to avert their eyes from the unsparing conflict in which we are equally embroiled or labour to minimize the impact of contemporary events, bringing our demurrals down to the plane of the anecdotal, the merely private or the flaccid dispensations of academic propriety. It is really a question of scope, rigour and fortitude. Those who believe, for example, that they can subvert or neutralize the Islamic agenda by appealing to a few scattered moderates here and there, or who out of a fear of provoking, an appetite for propitiation, a disinclination to act decisively and to think in scale, have sold their inheritance for a mess of pottage. In this context, the “good Jew” constitutes a real danger, in the same way that the “good Muslim” does: they divert our attention from the real nature of the threat which confronts us. Further, the sacrosanct principles of “balance” and “objectivity” which they embrace are no match for the sheer savagery and cynicism of Islamic terrorism. Wars are fought not with subtle arguments and good intentions but with fire power, from both the pen and the cannon’s mouth.

In a very real sense, my book as such is not what is at issue here. I readily admit that it is a blemished production and deserving of much legitimate criticism. Notwithstanding, it is an honest effort to come to grips with what I have called “the rites of evasion,” the myopia, conciliation, sophistry and equivocation that we continue to practice in one of the axial moments in the life of our civilization. We are all at risk. But since the Jew is the first and most conspicuous victim, it behooves the sons and daughters of the Jewish people to show the courage, resolve and clarity to rise once again to the historical occasion.

2008-10-04T11:48:00.000-07:00

Procrustean History

In Greek mythology, Procrustes was a highway robber who tied travellers to his bed and made them fit; if their legs were too short, he stretched them; if they were too long, he cut them off.
Dictionary of Classical Mythology

The crisis in which the West now finds itself is largely one of its own making and is rooted primarily in the false relation it has entered into with history. Its response to the tangled exigencies of the contemporary world is grounded in a willful and Procrustean tendency to reconfigure the past in such a way as to decomplexify or distort the issues which confront and surround us. In effect, we lay the past upon the iron bed of our received assumptions and preconceptions and then proceed to adjust it to the bed’s dimensions. The past is consequently made to conform to the mold of the West’s majority prejudices while at the same time appearing to offer an explanation for the complexities of the present—which for this reason remain unamenable to our best efforts at understanding and amelioration. The process by which we manipulate the historical annals is twofold, involving on the one hand a selective bracketing of episodes and periods in the life of a nation and on the other a deliberate rewriting of the dynamics at work in the life of a people, that is, history is either politically truncated or mythologically stretched beyond the lineaments of the actual—the Procrustean options of the simplifying sensibility. And this double process has proven highly effective in creating a climate of obscurity and misapprehension from which, barring a crucial change of mind and heart, it seems unlikely we will emerge.

There is no doubt that the United States is reaping the harvest of its sullied past. Many Americans who came of age in the revolutionary 60s still see their country sub species Vietnamis, refusing to allow that its foreign policy and its projection of power may have changed in the intervening span of time. Other countries persist in exacting revenge for America’s past sins. Greece, for instance, still cannot forgive the United States for its misguided support of the military Junta between 1968 and 1974 and the Iranian Ayatollahs continue to link the Great Satan with the long-deposed Shah. The list of grievances cherished by the Muslim nations, whether justified or not, is so extensive only the past is large enough to contain it and the future to nurture it. Europe as a whole has conveniently forgotten that it owes its liberation and economic recovery to the very country it condemns for the continental depradations of Manifest Destiny. Under the ideological leadership of pre-Sarko France—and with some backing from current pseudo-scholarship—the United States it chooses to remember is that of a renegade British colony that ruthlessly suppressed the indigenous populations in the territory it aggressively claimed as its own. That such means of colonization are common to the entire “civilized” world, including America’s most persistent critics, is of course never taken into consideration.

Times change as do official government policies, yet America gets no credit for ending the despotic regime of a mass murderer like Saddam Hussein, attacking the Taliban in Afghanistan and scrubbing out the al-Qaeda bases and training camps which threatened an entire world, or for coming to the defence of Muslim populations in Kuwait, Bosnia and Kosovo. That the United States is the largest contributor to the budget of the United Nations and shouldered the lion’s share of the relief efforts in tsunami-stricken Thailand does not absolve it from universal disdain. In restricting America to one or another given period in its evolution as a nation and so assigning it a fixed narrative identity, the so-called “enlightened” free world cannot accept that America has opened a new era in global strategy, making its interests approximately identical with its values, and that it now represents the free world’s only hope of survival in a war to the finish with a theocratic antagonist that will use any and every means at its disposal to ensure victory, including the deployment of chemical and radiological weapons and the deliberate targeting of blameless civilians.

The fact is that America is needed and relied upon by nation after nation, yet it is ubiquitously condemned for whatever sins it may have committed in the past. As Albert Camus insisted with respect to France and its brutal and shortsighted campaign in Algeria, “Problems must be seen in relation to the future, without endlessly going back over the errors of the past.” What he calls a “policy of expiation” is, in his view, utterly pointless. But this is a world so mortgaged to its singular and preferential view of the past that it cannot envisage the future which is rapidly foreclosing—and for which America is held responsible. As Mark Twain quipped, “To my mind, this is irregular. It is un-English. It is un-American. It is French.” Only, in today’s political milieu, it is also quite English and, for that matter, quite American Left. And very, very mainstream Canada.

Israel, for its part, is perceived as a perennially close ally of the United States, acting as its bridgehead in the Middle East, and is therefore tarred with the same political brush despite the fact that the relationship has often been strained over the years. One gets the distinct impression that international journalists and left-wing authors would find evidence of joint American and Israeli obliquity in the oracle bones of defunct cultures. Some fantasists even go so far as to reverse the order of precedence in their dearly held quinella relation between the two countries and see America as a policy satellite of Israel, the Mini Me to Israel’s Dr. Evil. This inversion, ludicrous as it may be, is perhaps somewhat understandable since with respect to Israel the situation is somewhat more complicated and history, instead of being compactified and, so to speak, monocropped, is distended and refashioned. For Israel is the victim not of a discretionary past in which it is arbitrarily detained, as has happened to the United States, but of an imagined past with regard to the presumed Jewish role in the chronicles of the human race.

Thus “Palestine” is not only a country or a region but an invention or a myth. Jews are still denounced as deicides for what was in effect a Roman administrative decision just as they are blamed for displacing the Palestinians who, in point of fact, flooded the region during the Mandatory period, the result of a British administrative decision, as Joan Peters has conclusively shown in her magisterial study of British political malfeasance and census gerrymandering, From Time Immemorial. (“It was the Jews who were displaced by the Arabs—the Arab immigrant flocks would migrate into the Jewish areas of development…on land designated at that very time as the mandated ‘Jewish Homeland.’ ”) To adopt the metaphor of anthropologist Grant McCracken, the true history of the Middle East has become the “sunken ship” around which “new species and populations establish themselves”—only these later encrustations are now taken for the ship itself. Indeed, from the Palestina of the first century C.E. to the Palestine of today, Jews are held responsible for the ills of civilization as such, which is to say, they are conceived as the perpetrators of dark conspiracies which are accorded historical warrant although such conspiracies are and have been regularly exposed and disproved by impartial scholarship.

That which has no existence on the historical plane has come to assume a central place in the collective imagination of mankind as a veridical record of hypothetical events, substituting what we may call a homiletic allegory of evil for a factual account of what actually occurred. So ingrained has this mutilation of reality become that even what actually did occur is often dismissed as a partisan illusion: for example, the Holocaust never happened. Similarly, there is almost no recognition of the fact that the world profits enormously from Israeli innovations in technology, medicine and agriculture, fields in which Israel is a world leader. If Israel could reverse the boycott process to which it is regularly subject, our laptops would stop running, the world’s antibiotic drug supply would markedly decrease and alternative energy R & D would be severely crippled. But to admit this would shatter the myth of Israeli and Jewish turpitude. It is tempting to assume that the Jew is the chosen bearer of the world’s guilt for its own ignorance, hypocrisy and villainy, but this malign transference is only made possible by the construction of a fake yesterday, the simulation of the preterite, a historical forgery of which The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is merely one small chapter heading. It has, to put it bluntly, become OK to lie, or rather, to continue lying, about the Jews; indeed, the lie—what we might call the Biggest Lie of all—has become necessary to the homeopathic equilibrium of both the European and the Islamic conscience.

This is where we find ourselves today, plying between two ideologically forged conceptions of the historical archive, two systematic forms of mnemonic self- deception. There is the limited past which America is not permitted to escape or transcend even though the present may have little in common with it. And there is the fabricated past to which Israel, and Jews in general, have been consigned, leading to the uniform misrepresentation of the present, whether in the Middle East or on the larger world stage. It is these two strictly contrived versions of the past, one operating as a specific constraint and the other as a widespread counterfeit, which have deformed the present and compromised the future, to the cost of all of us. This is how either selective memory or artificial memory deprives us of the ability to make authentic sense of the contemporary world. The exemplary abridgement and the precedent fiction always serve as the condition of the current subterfuge. Whether as cause or effect, bad history walks hand in hand with bad faith.

Ludwig Wittgenstein defined the world as “all that is the case.” This is no less true when it comes to our reading of the historical record. The lesson we might have learned by this time is that our view of history cannot underwrite the image of the good or project an ideal which can shape beneficially both the present and the future, unless it also struggles faithfully to preserve the past via an honest and meticulous study of the muniments. The historical record, of course, is always to some extent compromised by the ideological biases of historians. Yet, apart from the fact that historiography is largely what we have to work with, requiring circumspection and alertness in the consultation, there are ascertainable and documentary facts as well, which can be isolated, studied and applied toward a valid understanding of current situations. To take just one example from a myriad, United Nations Resolution 242 is such a documentary fact that is not a matter of interpretation but is historically verifiable, yet it has been consistently Procrusteanized. Article 1(a) is generally cited by the press and the pundits against Israel’s expansion of its borders following the defensive wars of 1967 and 1973. Article 1(b), however, which establishes the context in which boundary demarcations may be settled and which allows Israel room for maneuver, is almost never mentioned.

What is needed, then, is readerly diligence and good faith. If our knowledge of history remains defective, incomplete or constructed—if it is either chopped down or inflated beyond the limits of “the case” to fit a preconceived mold—we can only expect to suffer what we have imprudently attempted to revise. And the irony is unmistakable. In pursuing a prior agenda rather than seeking to acquire the facts that actually fit the case, we do not need to be coerced: we recline on the Procrustean bed of our own volition.

2008-10-04T11:44:00.000-07:00

Global Warning

But, omne bene, say I, being of an old father’s mind,
Many can brook the weather that love not the wind.
Love’s Labour’s Lost, IV, ii

In 1956, a popular song called “Green Door” soared to the top of the hit parade charts. The question it posed was “what’s behind the green door” and the answer it gave was a merry band of revellers whom the singer wished desperately to be part of: “All I want to do is join the happy crowd behind the green door.” The song’s open sesame “Joe sent me” didn’t cut any ice; the correct password, proleptically speaking, would have been “Al sent me.” And Al has sent so many people through the green door that a vast new premises has become necessary to house the happy crowd that bloats and thickens by the day.

No one doubts that the environment has (or had) been heating up; the controversy it has engendered has to do less with an indubitable fact than with isolating its supposed causes. The trouble is that the “science” involved is highly debatable insofar as it has been commandeered by a political crusade whose underlying purposes are distressingly suspect. Some of the movement’s proponents, to put it bluntly, are more concerned with saving their wilting careers than saving the planet; others are building new careers at the expense of public credulity, the perks and salaries being just too good to give up. I suspect that a great number of them are dealing from the bottom of the deck. We might note that Mars is also warming at present, though it seems there are no SUVs chugging along the planet’s surface or light bulbs flicking on in its many kilowatt communities. And not so long ago, we might recall, we were all getting ready to freeze: in 1971, the Global Ecology network forecast the “continued rapid cooling of the earth,” in 1975 the New York Times brooded that the earth “may be headed for another ice age,” in the March 1975 issue of Science, we were informed that “the approach of a full-blown 10,000-year ice age [was] a real possibility,” and in the July 1975 issue of National Wildlife, C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization warned that “the cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed.”

Naturally, charges of fraud, incompetence and self-interest will fly Right and Left. Those who are resisting the official vogue will be suspected of ulterior purposes, as for example Canadian geographer/climatologist Timothy F. Ball whom the Calgary Herald, in a legal defence statement (filed December 7, 2006), viewed as “a paid promoter of the agenda of the oil and gas industry.” (Ball had launched a libel suit against the Herald for printing a letter by Dan Johnson, a professor of Environmental Science at the University of Lethbridge, impugning Ball’s credentials—a suit he later and rather suspiciously withdrew.) But the argument can cut both ways. Thus William Gray, professor emeritus of the Atmosphere Department of Colorado State University, laments that “fellow scientists are not speaking out against something they know is wrong. But they also know that they’d never get any grants if they spoke out” (Investor’s Business Daily, October 15, 2007). Gray has also shown that Al Gore’s Exhibit A, hurricane intensity and frequency, plays fast and loose with the available data which imply the very opposite of his conclusions. “There were 101 hurricanes from 1900 to 1949, in a period of cooler global temperature,” Gray writes, “compared with 83 from 1957 to 2006.”

That Ball and Gore are both rather dubious characters suggests that neither side can claim total purity for all of its adherents, but this should not prevent us from trying to assess where the greater harm is done. We should also stay alert for purpose-built mendacity, as when ABC news reporter Dan Harris conducts a smear campaign against atmospheric physicist and Nobel Laureate Fred Singer, one of the world’s most eminent scientists (ABC News, March 23, 2008). In seeking to rebut Singer’s anti-alarmist position, Harris relies on the opinions of Singer’s “fellow scientists,” all unnamed (and whom Singer has offered to debate once they are identified), and trots out the personal animadversions of Greenpeace eco-activist and “global warming specialist” Kert Davies who, as an Internet search reveals, appears to have no scientific qualifications.

As has been remarked more than once, the Global Warming Movement has filled the vacuum left by the flight of the Transcendent. Its high priests are Al Gore and David Suzuki, the former with a carbon footprint of Sasquatch proportions and the latter buying carbon credits—another swindle—to run his supersized tour bus. The Live Earth concerts sponsored by Gore and featuring celebrity performers whose greenhouse gas emissions rival their bombast in volume and output has provided the Rock liturgy for this quasi-religious movement. The hucksterism of these new-age evangelists has been preserved in amber in Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry, as pertinent today as it was in 1927. Interestingly, shortly before it was announced that Gore would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, a UK court ruled that his global warming movie, An Inconvenient Truth, contained at least nine salient falsehoods, in particular with respect to his claim that Hurricane Katrina was caused by global warming, and that the film was scientifically unsound and little more than a form of “political indoctrination.” It cannot legally be shown in U.K. classrooms without disclaimers and counter-arguments.

As we have seen, hurricane frequency is one of Gore’s central arguments in prosecuting his case. He would have taken comfort in a later, supporting study sponsored by the University College of London (Nature, January 30, 2008). Unfortunately, as Steven Millroy, adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, pointed out in an article in JunkScience.com (January 31, 2008), the researchers in question left out several important variables from their computer model, such as atmospheric humidity, sea-level pressure and long-range cycle activity, which severely damaged their thesis. The researchers themselves admitted that their analysis “does not identify whether greenhouse gas-induced warming contributed…to the increase in hurricane activity.” But the real nail in the coffin of the Gorean hypothesis comes from the hammer of the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), which published a study in Geophysical Research Letters (January 23, 2008) positing a recent decrease in such activity. Adding to Gore’s embarrassment, the NOAA in its February report, relying on satellite data, showed that so-called “lost” ice had been restored to nearly its original levels, and a report in the London Daily Express (February 18, 2008) revealed that Antarctic levels had risen by a factor of one third.

The scientific consensus today is slowly beginning to shift away from the catastrophism of Gore, Suzuki and the United Nations IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report. True, the shift has been tentative. Carbon-driven global warming was an easy sell, but it will be a hard buyback—too many professional reputations are on the line. Nonetheless, the evidence is piling up to suggest that the human contribution to global warming is far less than originally assumed and that a meteorological calamity is highly unlikely. (The IPCC, which certified and entrenched the so-called “scientific consensus,” is essentially a political body with an agenda of its own.) See Inhofe EPW Press Blog, Daily Tech online, and the journal Energy and Environment, whose findings are based on a survey of the ISI (Institute for Scientific Information) Web of Science database covering almost 9000 scientific publications. Similarly, a study published in Nature (January 2, 2008), entitled “Vertical structure of recent Arctic warming,” co-authored by Rune Graversen, Thorsten Mauritsen, Michael Tjernström, Erland Källén and Gunilla Svenson of Stockholm University’s Department of Meteorology, while not categorically ruling out human intervention in climate warming, places the emphasis elsewhere. In attempting to explain the phenomenon known as “Arctic amplification,” the study cites “changes in oceanic atmospheric circulation” as one of the main drivers of observed temperature increases in the high North. In other words, periodic “atmospheric energy transport into the Arctic” from the equatorial latitudes, via currents and storms, “may be an important cause of the recent Arctic temperature amplification.” According to Fred Singer, who also contributed the journal article, the effect of the terrestrial magnetic field is an equally impinging element although, as he brings to our attention, “The ice sheets of Greenland have not melted in historic times at all, even though it was much warmer 1,000 years ago and very much warmer 5,000 years ago.” The solar magnetic field is also a factor but operates in a reverse direction to its terrestrial counterpart: every 200 years the sun’s magnetic output diminishes, producing lower temperatures, an effect known as the Maunder Minimum.

Other reports conclude that “solar variability” is the major component in climate change and will run its course regardless of human intervention. As David Douglass writes in the International Journal of Climatology of the Royal Meteorological Society (December 2007), in a peer-reviewed article co-authored with several prominent scientists, “The observed pattern of warming…does not show the characteristic fingerprint associated with greenhouse warming. The inescapable conclusion is that the human contribution is not significant and that observed increases in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases make only a negligible contribution to climate warming.” While not ruling out the human effect on climate, Sami Solanki, director of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, has added his voice to the controversy, declaring in an article for the London Telegraph (July 20, 2004) that “The sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be affecting global temperatures.” It is only fair to mention that the question is still being debated, with pros and cons flying thick on both sides of the polemical ecliptic. In a later issue of the Telegraph (July 11, 2007), we find Michael Lockwood of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory countering that divergent graph readings indicate that solar radiation is not a major contributor to climate change while Jeremy Clarkson of the London Times counter-counters that the human addition of CO2, which is only 3% of the total .038% CO2 in the atmosphere, much of which is re-emitted into space, suggests otherwise. In any event, the Douglass study, which is as persuasive as it gets, concludes by rejecting “the proposition that greenhouse model simulations and trend observations can be reconciled.” In addition, records of temperature fluctuations over the last two and half centuries show a close symmetry between solar radiation cycles and changes in temperature.

The most sophisticated climate models indicate an undeniable discrepancy between surface and tropospheric temperature changes, the former being higher than the latter, a value which violates greenhouse theory. Some scientists, however, are skeptical of current satellite readings, but more work remains to be done to substantiate their doubts. Others have deposed that the lower stratospheric temperature may be explained by ozone depletion; their opponents point out that ozone depletion has been reversed with the gradual closing of the ozone hole. The evidence does seem to imply that the sun is the primary agent in the long-term, fluctuating temperature curve. John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel, patiently explains that the sun, which contains 99.8% of the mass of the solar system, in its hydrogen-fueled atomic fusion process, “consumes more mass in a second than all the fossil fuel ever burned on Earth,” the terrestrial impact of which reduces the human input to global warming to a level of insignificance. Though Coleman doesn’t cite actual figures, the fact is that the sun pours in excess of a million billion megawatt-hours annually on the earth. But he does quote the highly respected Australian mathematician and former carbon consultant for the Australian government, David Evans, who argues that “carbon emissions don’t cause global warming.”

According to Evans, the IPCC models are wrong and the mathematics show that the human signature in the atmosphere is missing (KUSI News online, November 8, 2007). Writing in The Australian for July 18, 2008, Evans reports that after spending six years building climate models for the Australian Greenhouse Office, he determined that “by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming.” For one thing, radiosonde tests in the atmosphere “show no hot spot. Whatsoever. If there is no hot spot then an increased greenhouse effect is not the cause of global warming.” For another, temperatures have declined since 2001. By 2003 it was known from the study of ice cores that carbon was not a causal factor in temperature rise, “yet Al Gore made his movie in 2005 and presented ice cores as the sole reason for believing that carbon emissions caused global warming.” Western governments, Evans fears, are about to wreck their economies in the service of a dishonest ideology and poor science.

Indeed, H. Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow at the nonprofit National Center for Policy Analysis, has shown that the famous “hockey stick” image used by the IPCC (also wielded by Gore) to support its concluson about an unprecedented spike in global warming, is entirely flawed. The UN researchers “used the wrong time scale to establish the mean temperature to compare with recorded temperatures of the last century,” which accounted for the sudden vertical shaft rising from the blade of the hockey stick. Countering the 600 or so scientists who have signed on to the IPCC consensus, the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine has inaugurated a “petition project” containing the names of over 31,000 scientists who reject the IPCC findings (May 20, 2008), Two can play at the numbers game, if it comes to that. Another recent NCPA study found that the ICPP violated 60 of the 127 principles governing prediction assessments and strictly followed only 17 of these forecasting principles (Washington Times, March 14, 2008). A panel of statisticians at George Mason University corroborated the NCPA results.

Jonathan Newman, an evironmental biologist at the University of Guelph, has further confirmed these skeptical conclusions. In a study published in the journal Global Change Biology (Volume 14, Issue 8, August 2008), Newman and his colleagues reveal that the 31 computer climate models used by the IPCC produce different results: “this shows that…predicting the biological impacts of climate change can vary depending on which climate model is being used.” A paragon of scientific understatement, Newman recommends that “we ought to be extremely cautious about research results…before running off and making policies.” Freeman Dyson, one of the most acclaimed physicists and mathematicians of our time, would certainly agree. “Concerning the climate models” that are so much in dispute, he told an interviewer for the blog Uncommon Descent (April 14, 2007), “I know enough of the details to be sure they are unreliable.” Bjorn Lomborg’s two books on the subject, The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It, although advancing an economic rather than purely scientific argument, are also needed correctives to current reflex thinking. For an equally refreshing perspective on these contentious issues, one might consult Daniel Botkin’s Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-first Century. Botkin, whose work is predicated on separating soothsaying from science, is the former Chairman of Environmental Studies of the University of California at Santa Barbara and the current president of the Center for the Study of the Environment; his qualifications are impeccable.

The Keeling Curve, named after Charles David Keeling, a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, measures the gradient levels of CO2 in the atmosphere from ice core samples. It has become the standard construct on which the Global Warming Movement relies. At the top of the graph representing the year 2002/3 we find a value of close to 380 molecules of CO2 per one million molecules of air, grossly insufficient to trigger the catastrophic effects of global warming that our climate zealots have been announcing. And, as Jeremy Clarkson reminds us, only a fraction of this number may be attributed to human input. In any case, atmospheric levels of CO2 would have to rise to 5000 parts per million for it to become a problem. Scientists favourable to the thesis have had to fall back on the hypothesis of “CO2 forcing,” or a chemical chain reaction producing a multiplier effect, to justify their projections.

It is precisely this theory that has come under fire and ultimately been dismissed as unconvincing by a growing number of cutting-edge scientists, mathematicians and climatologists, including those mentioned above as well as experts such as Lord Christopher Monckton who specializes in exploring scientific frauds and New Zealand climate researcher Vincent Gray who has been reviewing IPCC drafts from 1990 to the present. In addition, as Holly Fretwell, in an interview with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (January 19, 2008) indicates with respect to rising CO2 levels, “correlation is not causation.” Moreover, there is no reason to believe that CO2 is the causative agent in temperature change, she continues, since if we “look at the data that shows CO2 levels and temperature changes over the last 650,000 years, what we find is that temperature actually changes first and CO2 in the atmosphere follows…CO2 lags the temperature change.” Her quip about forecasting is also well-taken. “Think about how well we are at predicting the weather tomorrow or next week and now try to extend that out 100 years. We really are no better at predicting long-term climate change than we are at predicting short-term climate…” Tim Patterson, director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Center, concurs: “C02 variations show little correlation with our planet’s climate on long, medium and even short time scales.” But he and his team have found “excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations of the sun and earthly climate” (Financial Post, June 20, 2007).

The US Climate Change Science Program introduces an equally sober note into the current hysteria over global warming. Its 2004-2005 report asserts that the droughts of 1998-2002 “were part of a persistent climate state that was strongly influenced by…unusually cold sea surface temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific.” It goes on to isolate other influences for observed differences in temperature readings, including a “natural weather pattern called the North Atlantic Oscillation/Northern Annular Mode.” Anthropogenic forcing is only one determinant in the complex motility of weather patterns, one that is yet far from being properly understood. And there is still, the report makes clear, a “large uncertainty about the precise effects of aerosols on Earth’s radiation balance.”

But the crucial issue, as I have suggested, has to do with the profound human predicament posed by the Deus Absconditus, the evacuation of the Divine and the resulting erosion of moral principle from the conduct of modern life in the Western world, leaving a vast abyss in consciousness that must be filled by a substitute pseudo-celestial, a new species of pietism. In his recent book A Secular Age, philosopher Charles Taylor argues that the experience of transcendence is not obsolete and opts for an “exclusive humanism” to re-energize our “social imaginary,” but this effort at re-enchanting a dessicated world seems dubious. A strange inversion has occurred in which the Earth itself, a Divinity called Gaia, has arisen to sit upon the empty throne of Heaven. But Gaia is a false god (or goddess). It cares nothing for human activity, whether reverent or invasive, will absorb our depredations as it has metamorphic natural disasters over the evolutionary time scale, is utterly devoid of values, and confers neither obligation nor love upon us. We idealize that which has no interest in us whatsoever and which cannot open and sustain a dialogue with the human soul. We have come to revere a cold, deterministic and solipsistic deity, attributing our own values, ideals and sentiments to that which cannot feel or respond to them. The irony latent in such an upheaval is that, in effect, man is now worshipping himself; and the sense of his own planetary nobility is fueled by a kind of quasi-religious hysteria that operates in defiance of critical facts.

But can so twisted a collective response to the spiritual vacancy of modern Western life be characterized as the expression of a genuine religious impulse? Religion, properly understood and when it is not itself perverted, is about the enhancement of human life; the global warming regime envisages the impoverishment and even the destruction of human life under the sign of saving the earth. Don Feder, writing in GrassTopsUSA.com, considers the Global Warming Movement nothing less than “a suicide cult whose prophets and priests warm to the idea of the mass extinction of humanity.” Thus the spectacle of “warming alarmists” who are “content to repeal the industrial revolution, and others [who] favor the end of civilization through gradual de-population.” Feder quotes many examples of such degenerate contemporary shamans for whom self-love is the paradoxical equivalent of self-hate, of which I reproduce a selection here from his text:

• “Given the total, absolute disappearance of Homo sapiens, then not only would the Earth’s community of Life continue to exist, but in all probability, its well-being enhanced. Our presence in short is not needed,” Paul Taylor in “Respect for Nature, A Theory of Environmental Ethics.”
• “We have no problem in principle with humans reducing their numbers by killing one another. It's an excellent way of making humans extinct,” a spokes-creature for the Gaia Liberation Front.
• “Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs,” John Davis, editor of the journal Earth First.
• In the book The World Without Us, Alan Weisman celebrates what he sees as the inevitable extinction of humanity, as vine and branch, deer and bear, reclaim our cities.
• There’s even a Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, which describes itself as “the humanitarian alternative to human disasters.” VHEMT explains that “the hopeful alternative to the extinction of millions of species of plants and animals is the voluntary extinction of one species: Homo sapiens... us.”

Feder might also have mentioned Paul Watson, Greenpeace co-founder and head of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, who famously described human beings as the “AIDS of the Earth.” “The problem with the environmentalists,” writes Dinesh D’Souza in Letters to a Young Conservative, “is that the movement seems to have been taken over by the environuts.”

One wonders what Arne Naess would say about all this. Are such abysmal depths of sheer imbecility implicit in the Deep Ecology movement, untenably extending, in Naess’ words, “the equal right to live and blossom”? But from whatever angle we look at this species of “painful thinking,” we might reasonably conclude that it’s all becoming a bit much. As William Logan says of Robert Hass’ eco-poetry (a thriving genre lazily piggybacking on current fashion): “by the time he’s done preaching about the destruction of the ozone layer” and “droning on about chlorofluorocarbons…you’re counting the tiles on the floor” (The New Criterion, December 2007). This state of dementia can take many different forms. Witness the nonsense spouted by Clare Short, former Secretary of State for International Development in Britain’s Labour Government. Speaking at the United Nations International Conference of Civil Society in Support of Israeli-Palestinian Peace, held in Brussels at the end of August 2007, Short declared that Israel may cause the “end of the human race” since it represents a serious distraction from the weather—another of Israel’s unforgiveable crimes. According to this eminence, Israel “undermines the international community’s reaction to global warming.”

No less bananas, Penn State University law professor Regina Austin teaches a course on “Environmental Racism” in which the question of race is coupled with environmental activism and which is intended to support something called “the environmental racism claim” (DiscoverTheNetworks.org). In his new book The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don’t Want You to Know About Because They helped Cause Them, Iain Murray provides incontrovertible evidence how ill-conceived programs to avert hypothetical environmental catastrophe have led to disastrous consequences, for example, how corn ethanol biofuels have actually increased greenhouse gas emissions while taking land away from crop production—leading in turn to steeply rising food prices. There is, so to speak, a lot of hot air in the mental atmosphere.

Consider the sheer authoritarian looniness of David Suzuki who, addressing the McGill University Business Conference on Sustainability on January 31, 2008, stated: “What I would challenge you to do is put a lot of effort into trying to see whether there’s a legal way of throwing our so-called leaders into jail” for not acting more quickly on environmental issues. (Scientist James Hansen echoed the same scary, autocratic sentiment in an article in The Guardian for June 23, 2008, in which he urged that CEOs of fossil energy companies “should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.”) It is becoming increasingly difficult not to regard Dr. Suzuki as the Fu Manchu of the environmental movement. Or perhaps the Old Man of the Mountains, whose dogmatism resists the influx of fresh data. Dr. Suzuki predicted some 20 years ago that we had only 10 years to go before suffering environmental collapse. In the meantime what has collapsed is Dr. Suzuki’s credibility, though his authority remains intact among the naïve and impressionable since he offers a perfect example of theocracy at work in the scientific domain. For that matter, Dr. Suzuki does look a bit like God in His Sistine incarnation, a resemblance which no doubt facilitates his attempt to remake the world in his own image.

But to give him his due, he is surely more sincere than Al Gore who, in essence, buys his carbon offsets from the company he co-owns and chairs, Generation Investment Management, in which Gore is heavily invested and whose stock values have skyrocketed (Canada Free Press, March 13, 2007; The Citizens Journal online; WorldNetDaily.com, etc.). Gore is apparently doing very well on other fronts too; the Live Earth event, according to James Bowman in Media Madness: The Corruption of our Political Culture, was “also an opportunity for Mr. Gore and the other self-appointed trustees of the alleged Global Warming crisis in the pressure group, the Alliance for Climate Protection, to make money which they can then use to influence real political events, such as elections.” It doesn’t stop there. According to several news outlets (The Tennessean, March 17, 2000, The Wall Street Journal for June 29, 2000 and March 19, 2007, USAToday, March 18, 2007, and many others) Gore has earned $570,000 in royalties from Pasminco Ltd. for a highly toxic zinc mine on his property. Quantities of zinc, barium, arsenic, chromium, lead and trace amounts of cyanide were released into into the adjacent Caney Fork River—which served as a backdrop to his film An Inconvenient Truth. The river and surroundings are clearly not “as pure as they came,” as Gore insisted that “the lakes and rivers [that] sustain us” should be in his book Earth in the Balance.

And what is one to make of the Greenpeace report, Cool Farming, released on January 7, 2008, which recommends a vegetarian diet to reduce the level of greenhouse gas emissions? Greenpeace is quite serious, solemnly deponing, in the language of the report, that “For individuals wishing to reduce their GHG footptint, adopting a vegetarian diet, or at least reducing the quantity of meat products in the diet, would have beneficial GHG impacts.” But this is not the least of it. Among other pollutants, Greenpeace is concerned with the amount of methane produced by ruminants, whose digestive systems work overtime to bring us ever closer to the end of days. Based on kg CO2 equivalents on a 100 year time scale, beef and sheep alone, the SUVs of the animal world, generate a whopping amount of CO2 per kg. of product, according to the “Global warming potential” tables used in the report (page 36). There is no doubt that we must work quickly to avert an impending catastrophe while there is still time. The bovine fart-and-dung ratio is evidently imperilling the planet.

Breathing is also a giant problem. In his recent book Oh, Oh, Canada!, William Gairdner, basing his estimates on the scientific research conducted by the Fraser Institute’s 1997 publication Global Warming: The Science and the Politics, points out that each human being “exhales about one hundred thousand litres of CO2 per year, which comes to about a third of the amount” expelled by the Earth’s entire annual automotive traffic. Animal lovers should also take note. The Earth’s atmosphere contains about 750 gigatons of CO2, to which the planet’s animal population contributes in the vicinity of 150 gigatons. The solution is obvious: wholesale extinction of man and beast. But perhaps we should not react over-hastily. Gairdner reminds us that CO2 levels during the Ordovician Age of 440 millions years ago were ten times higher than they are at present. And that the Ordovician happened to coincide with an ice age.

No one is suggesting that humans have not had a pejorative effect on the earth’s ecosystems, an exigency that should be addressed and corrected sooner rather than later. But this is not tantamount to an around-the-corner ecological implosion and certainly not to a latter-day, man-made climatic holocaust. There is clearly a popular fascination with the prospect of imminent human extinction from “natural” causes, an obsession with cultic overtones generally signifying a hunger for spiritual nourishment that goes otherwise unsatisfied. How else explain the best-seller status of a book like Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us with its depiction of the human ripple effect on the environment, the restoration of the soil following upon our disappearance, and the epiphany of a “redesigned atmosphere.” Weisman’s book is perhaps not quite as off the wall as Don Feder thinks, but it does tap into the current frenzy inspired by an apocryphal religious groundswell.

Even so, one need not focus on the more disastrous scenarios and slapshot recommendations of the lunatic fringe of the Movement—those who, according to Steven Milloy, are responsible for “global smarming.” More worrisome, the facile doomsayers and photovoltaic sensibilities of the scientific community are propelling us, in Walter E. Williams apt phrase, into “the wild green yonder” (Washington Times, May 13, 2008). It has been reliably estimated by many researchers into the subject that in fulfilling the draconian prescriptions of the Kyoto Accord or its successors, millions of jobs will be lost in the developed world, the quality of life will sink to substandard levels, and the inhabitants of the Third World will be even more severely punished as they are deprived of the minimal immunities, comforts and amenities of modern life to which they aspire. The NCPA’s Burnett concludes his above-mentioned report with an apposite warning to policy makers. Recommendations based on “flawed statistical analyses and procedures that violate general forecasting principles” should be taken “into account before enacting laws to counter global warming—which economists point out would have severe economic consequences.” But once minds are set, it is very hard to change them, which would be like transmuting National Geographic into Playboy, as much as that result is to be desired. “What a man has not been reasoned into, he cannot be reasoned out of,” said Jonathan Swift. Still, one must at least make the effort.

As has Czech President Vaclav Klaus, author of the soon-to-be-translated Blue Planet in Green Chains, who is on the mark when he warns of the irrationality of the bullish “global warming” industry: “As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism…Let us not scare ourselves with catastrophic forecasts, or use them to defend and promote irrational interventions in human lives” (Financial Times, June 14, 2007.) Klaus’ alarming scenario is no intellectual fidget. In an article for the Washingtom Post Writers Group (May 31, 2008) in which he also refers to Klaus, Charles Krauthammer casts a sharp light on the dangers of carbon chastity, documenting how environmentalism has become the salvation of the Left after the collapse of communism and the failures of technocratic socialism. Filling the void, the new “Church of the Environment,” like its ideological predecessors, will strive to regulate our lives down to the tiniest details, stipulating “how much [we] can travel, what kind of light [we] can read by and at what temperature [we] may set [our] bedroom thermostat.” Krauthammer also points to the British parliamentary committee which met on May 26, 2008, proposing “that every citizen be required to carry a carbon card,” specifying the extent to which we are permitted to travel or how much electricity we can use.

Liberal environmentalism is the cutting edge of the movement for bureaucratized state control of both private life and free market economics, conscripting not only the media, the NGOs, government departments and the intellectual classes to advance its agenda but shrewdly operating through the very corporations it seeks to regulate by offering tax and other incentives to ensure compliance. And it seems to be working. The UK utility Npower has recently initiated a new promotional campaign inviting children to apply for a “free climate cops challenge diary” with a view to informing on their parents who might be committing “climate crimes.” Children are prompted to build up a “climate crime case file” not only on their parents but on “uncles, aunts or friends from school” (London Sunday Times, July 27, 2008). Shades of the communist and fascist dictatorships, and more recently of Taliban Afghanistan where, as Khaled Hossein writes in The Kite Runner, “the rafiqs…taught children to spy on their parents, what to listen for, whom to tell.” An exaggeration? But, as in the Lenny Bruce joke about a Catholic murderer who confesses that his pathological career “started with bingo in the Catholic church,” from small beginnings. The totalitarian mindset, in whatever form and at whatever stage in its evolution, is a monstrous thing. Like Vaclav Kraus, we might one day find ourselves living under a regime that would in many ways resemble the Communist nightmare from which half of Europe has only recently emerged.

Klaus quotes Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, to good effect. Lindzen wrote: “future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21rst century’s developed world went into a hysterical panic [that] on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age” (Wall Street Journal, June 26, 2006). Ultimately, we should agree, at the very least, that an enormous amount of research still needs to be done before the science is sufficiently stabilized to yield results that are not perenially contestable. We might also remember that the warmest year of the 20th century was 1934, an anomaly, perhaps, in a period of global cooling.

“Caring for nature,” as Bruce Thornton reminds us in Decline and Fall, “is the luxury of those who aren’t worried about eating for another day.” Not that caring for nature is contra-indicated—far from it—but the manner in which we now comport ourselves is actually narcissistic, cold-hearted, witless and incontinent. The prognosis is indeed a dismal one, not for the planet but for human reason and human welfare. And all this to accomplish what, on the best evidence to date, may not even be necessary, a fact which would become increasingly obvious as the climate begins once again to cool following the abatement of solar activity. Global warmists will clamour that temperatures have certifiably risen on Baffin Island this year; they will not mention that Alaska is simultaneously experiencing a record cool summer. Indeed, climatologists Kenneth Tapping of the National Research Council of Canada and Oleg Sorokhtin of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences have both concluded that sunspot activity has diminished to the point of presaging the onset of colder winters and leading to a period of widespread cooling (Investor’s Business Daily, February 7, 2008 and RIA Novosti, February 25, 2008, respectively). In other words, global warming is a temporary phenomenon. Similarly, geophysicist Phil Chapman, basing his findings on analyses from the four major weather-tracking agencies—the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama and the Remote Sensing Systems Inc. in California—reports that global temperature is “falling precipitously,” having decreased by .7 C in 2007, and that drastically reduced sunspot activity heralds a new approaching ice age for which we are wholly unprepared (The Australian, April 23, 2008). The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory web portal has adduced new evidence in support of the global cooling thesis. The long-term current fluctuations of the Pacific Ocean, called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, indicates that “we have just entered a ‘cool’ phase.” Global Ecology, the New York Times, Science and the World Meteorological Organization may have been on the right track after all, though the track leads to a destination many thousands of years in the future.

Certainly, while aiming to clean up the natural environment and improve living conditions on the planet, as well as reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, we should not act from hysteria and panic blended with a generous amount of self-righteousness and puritanical conviction, falling into what Klaus has called the trap of “salutary flagellation” in the service of an imagined deity. The state of affairs we wish to rectify would then only continue to deteriorate. The “trap” is also one of lazy self-obliviousness, a refusal to understand how we “work” as human beings. The religious impulse, Christopher Hitchens not withstanding, will not go away; it will only be diverted into other, covert and non-traditional channels—the brotherhood of man, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Kantian dream of universal peace, the super-filial relation to Gaia—in effect, raising politics to the level of theology. Precisely as Nietzsche predicted when he wrote in The Will to Power that the decay of faith would give rise to “the millenarian urge in temporal form.”

This deep-seated impulse may even exert a kind of back-channel or detour effect, offering to reinvigorate religious belief by circling back and substituting for its withering doctrinal base. As Thornton says, the church has begun to shift “its mission from saving souls and ministering to its flock, to changing the world and agitating for ‘social justice.’ ” Left-wing theologians are especially prone to relying on a thermogenic rhetoric to ignite a questionable campaign. Thus the Very Reverend Gordon Mursell, Bishop of Stafford, circulates a pastoral letter comparing those “who ignore the effects of climate change to the Austrian child sex molester Josef Fritzl…we are as guilty as he is” (Birmingham Post, May 31, 2008). A false or obscene analogy never stopped a devout solicitor for a cause. Somewhat more modestly, the Reverend Joan Brown Campbell, former General Secretary of the National Council of Churches (of “What Would Jesus Drive” fame), stressed on the Council’s website that climbing aboard the Global Warming buggy and participating in the Church’s “Eco-Justice Program” should be a “litmus test for the faith community.” Judging from a statement issued by the Program’s director, Cassandra Carmichael, religious worship is now only one factor among many, equated with “education, lifestyle changes, or public dialog.” She seems to have forgotten that St. Paul did not write about prison conditions when incarcerated by the Romans. He had other things on his mind.

Amongst the Western public at large, as well as many of the “experts,” global warming is more of a social and political issue than a scientific one. But because politics is now all we have, it is inevitably transfigured into a religion—or a cult with religious trappings—bringing to bear upon the empirical sphere of human life practices and attitudes that properly apply to the spiritual dimension. Far too many of these experts and activists are not so much dispassionate scientists or rational thinkers as they are instinctual religious crusaders. NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin, who has professed some skepticism about certain aspects of global warming research, especially with regard to theoretical computer models that tend, as he says, to run before they have learned to walk, was startled to realize that “you can’t express any sort of contrary opinion or a comment without it being treated almost as a religious issue” (Newsmax.com, March 17, 2008). The doxastic progression here is: science→politics→religion. To use Irving Kristol’s word, human beings are, whether we like it or not, “theotropic” beings.

Indeed, the metamorphosis of politics into a debased form of religion may be the bedrock definition of that otherwise debatable term, “fascism,” further specified as “ecofascism” by Janet Biehl and Peter Staudermaier in their book of that title. This would be true in many different spheres of human endeavour as an entire cultural world is gradually emptied of its marrow and vitality and rendered unsustainable in the long run. In our present context, as Jonah Goldberg observes in Liberal Fascism, “environmentalism gives license to the sort of moral bullying and intrusion that, were it couched in terms of traditional morality, liberals would immediately denounce as fascist.”

In particular, when the dictates of faith are allowed to impinge upon the need for understanding a range of events in the natural world and to validate solutions to problems which are either inherently ambiguous or dauntingly complex, we end up doing far more harm than good. In striving to supplant the City of God by the City of Man, the result is that we generally find ourselves living in the City of the Devil. Genuine spirituality then gives way to a profusion of cults, fads, idolatries, social rituals and hero-worship. “When men stop believing in God,” G.K. Chesterton is alleged to have said, “they don’t believe in nothing; they believe in anything.” Serious conviction is replaced by earnest frivolity, self-transcendence by self-infatuation masking as self-transcendence. Such are the wages of the religious sensibility when it goes off the rails and does not recognize itself as the affective and psychic distortion produced by the vestigial terror of abandonment. It is the weather of the soul that has changed for the worse.

The happy celebrants living it up behind the green door are no longer a troupe of boisterous party-goers. They have segued into a fervid church congregation of saints-in-the-making, chanting the glossolalia of climate warming. As the song puts it, “they play it hot behind the green door.”

Note

There is a rapidly growing adversarial bibliography on the subject of climate change which anyone interested in the global warming controversy might do well to consult. A partial list would include:

Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, by Fred Singer and Dennis
Avery

An Appeal to Reason, by Nigel Lawson

Climate Confusion, by Roy Spencer

The Deniers, by Lawrence Solomon

Meltdown, by Patrick Michaels

Taken by Storm, by Christopher Essex and Ross McKitrick

The scientific expertise assembled in such books cannot honourably be ignored or discounted. The last chapter of William Gairdner’s Oh, Oh, Canada!, “Global Warming in a Nutshell,” should also be required reading. It is the most effective short account of the Global Warming scam that I have yet come across.

2007-10-24T15:20:00.000-07:00

On Terror and Liberalism Revisited

Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism is an indispensable book for anyone interested in disambiguating the forces, impulses and ideas governing the major conflict of our times. Berman—who exemplifies in the main the only intellectual position that makes sense in today’s apocalyptic world, namely, the stance associated with what we might call the Liberal Right—soft-pedals Samuel Huntington’s thesis of the “clash of civilizations” and proposes instead the notion of a “clash of ideologies,” claiming that Islam is not so much the adversary as the ground on which a long ideological struggle is currently being fought—“the war between liberalism and the apocalyptic and phantasmagorical movements that have risen up against liberal civilization” in the twentieth century. Berman’s hypothesis is scaffolded by Amir Taheri’s conviction that the conflict “is not between the West and Islam; it is between democracy and a global fascist movement masquerading as religion” (National Post, February 9, 2006). The Syrian-American doctor Wafa Sultan, one of the most powerful voices among secular Arabs, put the question even more bluntly on al-Jazeera TV in Qatar in February 2006: “It is a war between civilization and backwardness,” she said.

Historian Niall Ferguson offers a somewhat different assessment, adducing what he calls a “crash of civilizations,” a torrent of “centrifugal tendencies” that, as in Iraq, “are tearing apart the very civilizations identified by Samuel Huntington” (Los Angeles Times, February 27, 2006). Ferguson sees both the West and Islam as sinking inward in various degrees of vortical implosion—the “tendencies” he isolates may be centripetal rather than “centrifugal”—and while there may be some truth in his general idea, he admits that the friction between religious conservatives and secularized liberals in the United States is not likely “to spill over into outright civil war.” More significantly, the Sunni/Shi’ite rift, with each side regarding the other as rafidis (heretics), has been in place for centuries and does not seem to have prevented Islam from launching its jihad against the West, both in the past and in the present moment.

As for Iraq, it is not a civilization, but a country. Huntington’s argument has received support recently from an unlikely quarter, namely Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Iran’s leading ideological preceptor Ayatollah Mezbah-Yazdi, who are gearing up to promote what they have called “the coming clash of civilizations.” Efraim Karsh, in Islamic Imperialism: A History, believes that the “clash” is really one between millenarian visions for world domination—a “clash of imperialisms,” as he calls it. Daniel Pipes, on the other hand, writing in The Gobe and Mail (February 14, 2006), believes that what we are witnessing is a “mutual pulling apart,” a radical disengagement between two world cultures, what we might call, perhaps, a chasm of civilizations. But the opening of so vast a crevice must surely be indistinguishable in its effects from a great collision. Daniel Johnson argues in an essay entitled “Islam, Western civilization and the nation state” (The New Criterion, Volume 25, Number 5) that the “present confrontation between Islam and the West is…not, strictly speaking, a clash of civilizations, but the attempt to impose a theocratic religion upon a secular civilization, if necessary by force.” The secular West, he continues, “is reluctant to face the fact that it is faced by a holy war for which it is almost entirely unprepared.” Lee Harris gives a slightly different twist to these diverse speculations. In his just released The Suicide of Reason, he argues there is no such thing as a clash of civilizations but rather a clash of “different visions of the end of history”—the aspiration of liberal internationalism which seeks to create a New World Order favourable to secular democracies and a fanatical, theocratic agenda intent on achieving a totally new world dispensation predicated on Islamic law and worship. Harris paints a very grim picture of the future: “the specter that looms before us is not the clash of civilizations, but the crash of Western civilization.” But all these differing scenarios and descriptions may well be rhetorical rather than substantive.

The fashionable theory advanced by some heads of government and political pundits that the central struggle is within Islam, presumably between “moderates” and “radicals,” is patently preposterous and serves only as a license to shirk what is nothing less than a civilizational duty. (No less absurdly, British Conservative Party leader David Cameron has stated that we are not engaged in a clash of civilizations but in a series of discrete conflicts—but this is clearly an electoral ploy, an act of voter appeasement rather than a serious intellectual argument.)

Whether we are facing a clash of civilizations, a crash of civilizations, a tectonic separation of cultures, a clash of imperialisms, a conflict between Liberalism and Fascism, a holy war between a religion and a civilization, a clash of different visions of a utopian future, a series of discrete conflicts, a war between civilization and backwardness or a major fault line within Islam itself, there is no doubt that the secular world is pitted against a theological adversary in a struggle to the death, for the extremist agenda and its political expression is founded explicitly on the eternal Koran which serves as both its source and its official sanction.

It is difficult to determine which thinker, Huntington or Pipes or Ferguson or Karsh or Sultan or Johnson or Harris or Berman (Cameron is not a thinker), is on firmer ground here—the intra-Islam supposition barely merits consideration—but the latter writer, despite the force of his general argumentation, seems less persuasive in opting for the recrudescence of a “Third Force,” reminiscent of Leon Blum’s anti-communist strategy in post-war France, to sponsor democratic values throughout the world and to promote the growth of secular pluralism, ethnic and religious tolerance and liberal politics in Muslim countries. This is an admirable conviction but, in my estimation, runs counter to everything we know about Islamic theology and the ecumenical violence to which it is susceptible and regularly unleashes. The political hope that the Arab cesspool can be drained by the application of democratic principles imported from outside or by the exercise of civic tolerance seems vain and misguided, that is, if it is not accompanied by a realistic assessment of the religious culture and political history which are being engaged and if this hope is not allayed by what we might call a certain modesty of purpose. We must remember that the adversary is not simply a league of despotic nations, many of whose citizens may or may not legitimately crave a more progressive state of affairs in their homelands, but a universal faith whose basic principles are strictly unfavourable to democratic structures and representative government and which will constitute the determining factor in how the policy of “regime change” will play itself out. Neither the Left nor the Right is comfortable with this notion, the former because it violates the axioms of political correctness and the latter because it renders its strategic efforts problematic. Berman, as a left-wing thinker espousing right-wing appraisals of the global situation, is caught in the middle, like the Aesopian duck who cannot decide whether it is beast or fowl.

Berman’s general position regarding the weakness and absurdity of the stance adopted by the liberal-left in its refusal to reckon with the new geopolitical situation is sound and convincing. But it is as if, brilliant as his overall analysis may be, he cannot face up to his own darkest insights and wishes to turn the Pandora’s box he has opened into a Fabergé egg. Canadian policy analyst W.R. Clement, in his Reforming the Prophet: The Quest for The Islamic Reformation, may be closer to the truth when he concludes that “Islam’s structure is so circumscribed that the Muslim world has no choice except to disintegrate.” How this is to come about is another question. My own sense of reality tells me that in the nuclear age we inhabit the radical Islamist cadres must be decisively defeated and that Western society must recover its resolve, backbone and will to exist if we are to avoid the disintegration of the way of life we have far too long assumed as a given. For it is no longer a question of one nation refusing or unwilling to to recognize another nation as its mortal enemy, as was the case in 1938 when Britain shut its eyes to the menace of Germany or in 1940 when the U.S. underestimated the Japanese. It is a matter of one civilization refusing or unwilling to recognize another civilization as the gravest threat to its existence. And in this blindness and demoralization lies the seed of its demise.

This argument is passionately and lucidly developed by Lee Harris in his earlier volume, Civilization and its Enemies, in which he tackles our historical Alzheimer’s, the fantasy thinking of our liberal illuminati and the very suppression or misapprehension of the category of “the enemy,” whose face they are incapable of recognizing. As a result of the relativist and multicultural predisposition that has come to dominate the “left-liberal West,” he writes, “The very concept of the enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary.” Even after 9/11 we continue to flounder helplessly in a world we have failed to understand and seem incapable of coming to grips with. “The ideals that our intellectuals have been instilling in us are utopian ideals, designed for men and women who know no enemy and who do not need to take precautions against him.” Harris , in effect, elaborates the anti-Utopian thesis of James Burnham who, in his remarkable and plain-spoken 1964 volume Suicide of the West, anatomizes what he calls “the grave weakness in liberalism’s doctrinal equipment.” Burnham calls attention to the danger inherent in the prevalent liberal belief that human nature is “plastic and even subject to beneficient change,” that it is “perfectible in large if not quite infinite degree, ready to blossom when the winter cover of ignorance is lifted.” But if this conviction is unfounded, “then what happens to the liberal confidence in universal education and universal democracy…as the necessary and sufficient key to progress, to peace, justice and well-being? What if some men, and some tendencies within all men, prefer lies to truth…What if they use free speech for deceiving instead of educating?” His conclusion needs to be seriously pondered: “if human nature is scored by innate defects, if the optimistic account of man is unjustified, then is all the liberal faith in vain.”

Harris targets the same class of left-liberal Arcadians as Burnham. The central difference is that Islamofacism has replaced Communism as the enemy of choice, the enemy that our “gallant” intellectuals, preening themselves on the consoling illusions of “universal dialogue” and the “goodness of man,” refuse to acknowledge as such. Influenced by the Progressivist strain in modern education and the revolutionary dreamworld of the sixties, these Dewey-eyed intellectuals inhabit a transcendental mirage that is perpetually out of sync with historical reality. Should they ever decide to come down from the swinging baskets of Cloud Cuckoo Land, they may find they have no choice but to throw their weight behind the national security state and to support political figures with whom they are not in sympathy or whom, for reasons that are only in some ways legitimate, they roundly detest, as, for example, President George W. Bush, one of the few world leaders who, because he is neither an intellectual nor a political aristocrat nor a confirmed ditherer like the majority of his European and Canadian enclitics, has since 9/11 at least approximately understood the threat that confronts us. In the last two years of his first administration, he was the President the times required.1

But Bush certainly has his share of disabling weaknesses, including a penchant for inconsistency, a cognitive dependency on subordinates, a propensity he shares with most other politicians to let polls water down principles, the tendency not to go far enough in the implementation of his anti-terrorist policies and the habit of isolating his targets selectively, leaving both domestic and foreign offenders to operate in many cases with relative freedom. The Saudis remain welcome guests in the country, the Syrians are still getting away with murder, and the Iranian mullahs are banking on American policy reverting to the passive/defensive posture put in place by the disastrous Carter administration in the 1970s should Bush decide to follow the diplomatic avenue paved by the Europeans rather than pursue the confrontational approach toward the Middle East. For in the present imboglio, Western diplomacy is a fetish and a fixation that only benefits a scheming and bellicose adversary who does the walk while the West does the talk. And unfortunately, with respect to the Israeli/Palestinian deadlock, the present administration has failed to grasp the history and complexity of the region and will probably do no better in pioneering a comprehensive peace than did the Clinton administration before it. Indeed, in terms of foreign policy, Bush in his second administration, under the influence of the lamentable Condoleezza Rice, a restive Congress and the perilous stupefactions of the State Department, has started to behave like an honorary Democrat.2

True, there are very few political leaders of any stripe, as is the case with the majority of their constituents, who are willing to even contemplate what may well be the only solution to our collective dilemma, namely, the transforming of an asymmetrical war we are losing into a conventional war we would win. As Ralph Peters warns in Fighting for the Future: Will America Triumph?, the enemies we will be increasingly having to combat will not be soldiers but warriors, “erratic primitives of shifting allegiance, habituated to violence, with no stake in civil order.” Turning this circumstance around would involve the alarming but necessary prospect of geopolitical upheaval, the possible seizure of the oil fields, and the reduction of rogue nations and theocratic imperial states in which the cateran irregulars Peters speaks of are trained, supplied and given refuge, in particular Iran which subsidizes proxy warrior hordes. We must remember, too, that Iran has pledged the nuclear annihilation of Israel and is developing missiles that can reach the major European cities. Strategical thinking must take into account that in a nuclear exchange with a hellion Iran, an Israeli counter-strike against Kharg Island, the Iranian oil depot in the Persian Gulf, would ignite a thermonuclear fire that could not readily be put out, with obvious consequences for the entire globe.

A full-scale assault against the desperado states of the Muslim Middle East may, in the last analysis, be the only way to forestall the unthinkable, and probably the only way to prevent the gradual Islamification of the Western world, as prophesied by Said Nursi in his famous Damascus Sermon. Relying on soft diplomacy, sporadic skirmishes and local interventionism with its daily body count and unpredictable outcomes will only prolong an untenable situation until it is too late to do anything about it. But it does not appear that we have the stomach for survival as we allow ourselves to be ushered into the darkness of time and the midden of the civilizations, assuming we can avoid the worst-case scenario I have touched upon. Indeed, as Lee Harris points out in his new book, we are forbidden by our own liberal and neo-ethical principles to act in a truly decisive manner even when our very existence is up for grabs. But let us at least be honest about it, as we prepare for the clash, crash or chasm of civilizations that portends, and for the very real possibility of our eventual disappearance.

Notes

1 In The Suicide of Reason, Harris has come to see Bush as part of the problem, but not for the usual reasons. For example, he does not consider the “mess” in Iraq as “all due to the bumbling incompetence, or the lust for oil, or the deluded zealotry of a single individual,” marshalling compelling arguments to absolve the American President on all these counts. What failed in Iraq—and by extension in the rest of the Islamic world—“was not just the policy of George W. Bush; what failed there is liberal internationalism—an unhappy truth that has been hidden behind the misleading rhetoric of both Right and Left.” If Bush is to be faulted for anything, it is the naïve sincerity of his belief that all people desire the benefits of liberal capitalist democracy, that they want what we want, that 1400 years of Muslim history and theology can be remade from scratch, and that reason must ultimately prevail against “the politics of fanaticism.” Indeed, this belief is equally fanatic in its stubborn refusal to recognize that there are forces in the world that are not amenable to “reason,” that are “interested not simply in gaining tactical advantages over other players but seek to destory the status quo itself.” Bush is not so much simple-minded as single-minded.

2 For the moment the American political elite may not be in great shape, but compared to its subfusc European counterparts it glimmers in the night. This, I admit, is not saying very much, but in a bad situation, the sitting American President, for all his evident shortcomings and planning deficiencies, is the only leader who is in a position to act effectively. As of this writing, however, there are only two Western leaders who display the courage and intelligence necessary to deal with a deteriorating world situation, Canada’s Stephen Harper and Australia’s John Howard. Unfortunately, neither wield the power and influence sufficient to stall or reverse the course of our descent.

2007-08-01T13:03:00.000-07:00

A review of my The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and Identity recently appeared in one of our newspapers. The review, though generally favourable, was also critical of certain aspects of what the reviewer took to be my ideological stance. A writer should not object to an informed critique but when the reviewer’s caveats are merely expressions of his own ideological premises, a response may be in order. In this case, as the points raised by the reviewer in question are potentially representative of the uneasiness and wilfull misundertstanding my book may be expected to trigger, a pre-emptive rebuttal here seems appropriate. (Readers who wish to examine the original should scan the Montreal Gazette online for Saturday, March 31, 2007.)

The reviewer implicitly adopts the tone of moral equivalence so dear to the majoritarian left, which is nothing less than the contemporary form of political idolatry. We must strive to understand the grievances of the other side even as it is gearing up to destroy us. Even though we have no aggressive wish to obliterate or oppress the adherents of another faith, we must credit their resentment against us despite the fact that it may manifest in indiscrimate violence. Aftar all, fair is fair. Like many of the bleeding hearts I target in my book, his moral position is tepid and strenuously politically correct—another leftist intellectual running for safety rather than confronting an avowed enemy.

His blithe assertion that few leftists "object to a hard line against terrorism" is so wrong-headed as to be almost unbelievable. My book lists dozens of these milquetoasts who have done their utmost to convince us that terrorism is not the major issue of the day or that it should even be qualified as a serious threat. Doesn't he read the newspapers? Is he not aware that the opposition parties ganged up on the government to see to the repealing of Canada's anti-terrorist legislation? Is he not aware that Norway and Sweden are in the process of establishing ties with Hamas? Has he not read Tony Judt, Thierry Meyssan, Webster Tarpley, Howard Zinn, William Blum, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, R.T. Naylor, Anthony Hall, Robert Fisk and scores of others?

As for his "millions of Palestinians living in a state of limbo," does he not know that the so-called "occupation" involves merely 6% of the West Bank, and for good reason, given the plague of suicide bombers. Does he not know that much of this property is legally owned by Jews? Or that Gaza has been politically independent for over a year, devolving into a state of self-inflicted chaos and becoming radically Hizbullized in the process. This issue was addressed at length in my book but the reviewer does not seem to have read the relevant passages.

Further, his ostensible "durable peace" which Israel has forged with Egypt and Jordan is nothing of the sort. Both these countries recalled their ambassadors during the Arafat-inspired second intifada; King Abdullah is currently insisting on the "right of return" to Israel of millions of foreign born refugees, which would mean the demographic subversion of the Jewish state; and a significant number of Egypt's parliamentarians have been threatening to impeach or expel the Israeli ambassador and to abrogate the cold peace between the two countries on the flimsy pretext that Israeli film director Ran Edelist's recent documentary Ruach Shaked shows that Israel massacred Egyptian prisoners in the Six Day War—the the "prisoners" in question were not prisoners and not Egyptian but Palestinian fedayin trying to infiltrate into Israel.

The logic itself is curiously off. "Being right doesn't solve the problem," he purrs. But it is hard to see how being wrong can help to solve a problem in any field of human endeavour. What the reviewer really wants to say is that the force and validity of one's position must often be negotiated with tact. At the same time, when one is staring down the barrel of a gun, tact will be contra-indicated. In my own case, I never claimed that I would try to "solve the problem," especially as no one else since the dawn of antiquity has been able to. Additionally, "being right" is nothing to be ashamed of nor should one labour to suppress the truth of one's argument.

His misreading of my pages is equally palpable. Far from treating the Muslim world with "cold, academic distance," The Big Lie, as I think most readers familiar with my work would agree, is the most impassioned book I have ever written. Though he allows that my research is impressive, it is obvious that I am not an academic—after all, I write from outside the establishment, he concedes—and there is no ice in the book but plenty of fire.

Nor is there anything amiss with my discovering my Jewishness "against the backdrop of anti-semitism," as he complains. This is precisely what happened to Theodor Herzl who was a secular, non-juring Jew until he visited France at the time of the Dreyfus trial and saw what antisemitism was like at first hand. Will this reviewer then impugn the credentials of the founder of the Zionist movement?

The reviewer, like me a Jew, exemplifies precisely what is wrong with the Jewish world today, especially in its left-leaning incarnation. This is why I decided to write The Big Lie in the first place.

2006-09-13T14:52:00.000-07:00

On Speaking the Truth

I will say without qualification that any person or organization maintaining an anti-Zionist stance is either ill-informed, dishonest or antisemitic. Nor would I hesitate to place the United Nations, which devotes fully one third of its resolutions to condemning Israel, and its Secretary General Kofi Annan squarely in the latter category. There is no room for nuance, subtlety or gradation in this matter, as even a partial record should render obvious.

The United Nations Environmental Programme curiously refers to Egypt, with its nearly all-controlling central government, its 60,000 laws (some relics of Ottoman times), its fraudulently-elected leaders, and its ban on free assembly and the right of protest, as “a western-style democracy”—no doubt Israel must be a theocratic oriental-style tyranny. The UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People refers in its September 2004 workshop to “such sterile paradigms as ‘Israel’s self-defense’. ” The UN International Protection Workshop calls for “a boycott of Israeli goods” without mentioning Palestinian terror operations or systemic Palestinian corruption. The UN Interreligious Mobilization Workshop approves of “challeng[ing] Christian Zionism in moderate Christian communities.” UN special rapporteur on the right to food, Swiss national Jean Ziegler, calls on the EU to suspend its association agreement with Israel; of the more than 190 places in the world with malnutrition problems, Ziegler singles out the West Bank and Gaza, delivering a highly selective report on the situation there while passing over the devastation wrought by the Khartoum government on the Darfur region. Indeed, Ziegler has defended the abysmal record of notorious human rights abusers like Cuba and Libya, as well as Sudan, while accusing the United States of every crime imaginable including backing Israeli “state terror.” (Interestingly, Ziegler is a co-founder of the Moammar Khadafi Human Rights Prize—an award which he himself later received.)

Kofi Annan in his opening speech to the General Assembly on September 21, 2004 cites only one country on earth for violating international law—Israel. Nothing on China in Tibet, Syria in Lebanon, the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe, Russia in Chechnya, Sudan in Darfur (the word “Sudan” is never mentioned), or Palestinian rocket attacks and suicide bombings in Israeli towns and cities. In February 2006, Annan criticized Israel’s policy of targeted killings of terrorists as “executions without trial”—he made no mention of the suicide bombings of Israeli civilians, planned and carried out by these same terrorists. Are these murderous forays, then, forms of legitimate execution? And on June 14, 2006, referring to an explosion on a Gaza beach that killed eight people and was almost to a certainty caused by a Palestinian mine, Annan told the Al-Hayat daily, “I don’t believe it is plausible that the Palestinians planted charges in a place where civilians often spend their time”—which, in point of fact, is a common Palestinian practice. UN envoys subsequently laid the blame on Israel, a pro forma gesture, since they did not examine the evidence put forward by the IDF nor, obviously, did they peruse the full retraction printed by Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung which had originally accused Israel of the atrocity. The UN human rights report, prepared by UN Human Rights representative John Dugard and presented to the General Assembly in October 2004, charges that Israel is guilty of “massive and wanton destruction of property” and calls for international sanctions, but makes no reference to Palestinian rocket attacks against Israeli communities such as Sderot, gunrunners’ tunnels or suicide bombings. As keynote speaker at an emergency session of the UN Human Rights Council on July 5, 2006, Dugard described Israeli conduct as “morally indefensible” and called the Israeli arrest of Hamas cabinet ministers in the wake of the June 25 crisis a violation of the Geneva Convention article prohibiting the taking of hostages. He had nothing to say about the event which sparked the crisis, the Palestinian raid into Israeli territory and, yes, the taking of a hostage. Dugard, we might recall, notoriously praised the Palestinian terror groups for their “determination, daring and success.” The UNDP (United Nations Development Program), under Mark Maloch Brown, has regularly transferred funds to Palestinian charities, such as Zaka Jenin and the Tul Karem Charity Committee, known to be fronts for terrorist groups. A typical example of the double standard at work in UN deliberations, brokering peace at the cost of Jewish lives, is its outcry against the IDF demolition of houses in Rafah, the Gaza terrorist nest along the Egyptian border, and its threat to brand Israel as a war criminal for defending its citizens.

Indeed the UN can always be counted on to sandbag Israeli initiatives in the field or pro-Israeli resolutions in the General Assembly. The tepid response of Kofi Annan and the UN to the Hizbullah attack on Israel in July 2006, coupled with calls for Israeli “proportionality”—this in the face of 12,000 Iranian and Syrian supplied missiles targeting Israel, many of which were launched against Israeli towns and cities—is only another example of the institutional prejudice which governs its proceedings. When UNFIL (the United Nations Force in Lebanon)—which had done absolutely nothing to prevent Hizbullah cross border raids or the buildup of its rocket arsenal and even suppressed video footage of Hizbullah incursions—was struck during fighting in the summer 2006 war by Hizbullah rockets that fell short of their targets in Israel, an officer of the command post immediately blamed Israeli artillery fire. When an UNTSO (United Nations Truce Supervision Organization) base in southern Lebanon was mistakenly struck by the IAF in the midst of a chaotic war zone, Kofi Annan, flouting both impartiality and common sense, went on record as saying that Israel was guilty of an “apparently deliberate” attack.

Not only did Annan not retract this accusation, he had nothing to say when twelve days later Hizbullah rockets hit another UN command post. And when the IDF launched a commando raid into Lebanon on August 19, 2006 to intercept a transfer of Syrian arms to Hizbullah—an ongoing process from which the UN has studiously averted its gaze and which ensures another and more bitter round of hostilities—this same perfidious windbag condemned Israel for “a violation of the cease fire.” Yet the provision of weaponry is in clear violation of UN Resolution 1701, brokered by Annan, which calls for the disarming of all militias, including Hizbullah, and especially of Paragraph 8 which embargoes “sales or supply of arms and related material to Lebanon except as authorized by its government.” Louise Arbour, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, responded to the conflict by issuing a statement stipulating the “personal criminal responsibility” under international law of those “in a position of command and control” for violating the “obligation to protect civilians during hostilities”—a thinly veiled threat against Israel’s leaders since terrorists do not have fixed addresses and do not answer summonses. Ann Veneman, Executive Director of UNICEF, charged that Israel was engaged in “the continued targeting of civilians, particularly children.” Although 4000 Hizbullah rockets and missiles fell on Israel and one quarter of the country’s population—including “children”—was effectively paralyzed, Jan Egeland, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, isolated Israel for “the excessive and disproportionate use of force.” UN draft resolutions seeking to stem the conflict failed to name Hizbullah or its sponsors, Syria and Iran, and made no mention of terrorism—indeed, in all the years of its existence, the United Nation has not yet gotten around to defining terrorism. Its new Human Rights Council voted on August 11, 2006 to condemn Israel for “massive violations of human rights” in Lebanon, to investigate the “systematic targeting and killing” of civilians, and to assess “the extent and deadly impact of Israeli attacks on human life, property, critical infrastructure and the environment.” Again, no mention was made of the fact that such “targeting and killing” was neither systematic nor deliberate, that the “critical infrastructure” was used to supply and to shield Hizbullah, that Israeli “life” and “property” had been severely impacted, and that Israel’s northern forests, also part of the “environment,” had been set ablaze by rocket fire and would require fifty to sixty years to regenerate. On August 31, 2006, Jan Egeland again, speaking for the UN (and seconded by Amnesty International), accused Israel for the (legitimate) use of cluster bombs in Lebanon, which he called “completely immoral,” but did not breathe a word about Hizbullah rockets packed with steel ball bearings intended to maximize civilian casualties in Israeli communities. One may responsibly wonder whether it is not high time to disband this partisan organization on the grounds of both irrelevance and bad faith and have its remaining productive bodies convened under different auspices.

The same sort of jaundiced unscrupulousness is true of the EU whose Irish president at the time immediately accepted the distorted account of the Rafah operation by Palestinian spinmeisters. Not only did these latter bump up the casualty figures and dissemble the tactical policy of using Palestinian civilians as cover for armed insurgents as well as squaring the number of demolished houses, they also presented film footage going back several years to substantiate their claims of a current "massacre"—the Jeningrad canard all over again. Of course, little is said, either by the UN or the EU, about the reasons for the Israeli action, the use of these famous 59 houses as bunkers for terrorists and as camouflage for tunnels through which illegal weapons, including Sager missiles which can be used against civilian aircraft, mortar shells and RPGs, are brought across the border from Sinai. Indeed, little is said about the fact that the majority of these “houses” were not houses at all; as Major-General Doron Almog, former chief of the Southern Command, revealed in an interview with David Horovitz of the Jerusalem Post on July 13, 2006, “It wasn’t 59, and it wasn’t houses; it was unroofed kinds of storerooms/yards.” Any calculation of truth potentials, respecting IDF officers in the field on one side and UN apparatchiks and Palestinian operators on the other, should dispose us to credit the former. Little is said about the point-blank shooting of a pregnant Israeli woman, Tali Hatuel, and her four young daughters, Hila (11), Hadar (9), Roni (7) and Meirav (2), by Palestinian gunmen operating out of Rafah, unless it is to establish a “moral equivalency” between the Palestinian targeting of civilians and the Israeli effort to protect them. Little is said about the two toddlers, Dorit Aniso and Yuval Abebeh, aged two and four, slain in a Gaza-launched rocket attack in the western Negev on September 30, 2004, who were buried in a small column in the middle pages of our newspapers. Little is said about the six Israeli youngsters wounded by mortar shells in Neveh Dekalim or about the twenty three victims of the Jerusalem no. 2 bus bombing in 2003, most of whom were children. Nary a word about Yehudit Pesachov and her seven year old grandson Omer, killed like so many others by a Hizbullah katyusha—though TV news cameras zoomed close-up on a ledger page inscribed with the names of Lebanese dead—”this was a housewife,” said the commentator, pointing to a handwritten scrawl—for all the world to see. Little is said about Hamas deploying Palestinian children in Jabalya as human shields to protect their units of rocket launchers from Israeli defensive air attacks. Less is said about the eleven year old boy tricked into carrying a package containing a bomb through a checkpoint, which was luckily discovered and rendered harmless by a security guard before it could be detonated by remote.

Almost nothing is said about the British contractors who were the victims of threats and intimidation from the Palestinians in response to their efforts to build new, European-standard houses for the inhabitants of Jenin, since the Palestinian propaganda machine would then no longer be able to blame Israel for the fact that people have been languishing in the camps for decades—which is not an Israeli responsibility but a function of deliberate Arab policy, in collaboration with the United Nations, to keep the refugee question alive in its prolonged campaign against the Jewish state. Even less is said about the Israeli right to defend its northern borders against Hizbullah armed aggression—Britain equivocates, Spain chastises, France pontificates, Finland wrings its hands, though not one of these nations would remain quiescent were their soldiers being abducted and rockets and missiles raining down on their communities. And so it goes. Indeed, by refusing to add Hizbullah to the list of terror organizations, the EU allows its member countries to continue transferring funds to Hizbullah and to shelter its European assets. (The same would apply, mutatis mutandis, to Canada if the recommendations of a Liberal/NDP “fact-finding” mission to Lebanon in August 2006, that Hizbullah be taken off the terrorist list, should be adopted.)

And still less is said by those who condemn the security fence, built to protect Israeli citizens against suicide attacks, about the wall being built by the government of Thailand—a wall higher and longer than the Israeli barrier—to cordon off two million Muslims living in the south of the country. In fact, the Israeli fence pales in comparison with some of the national walls and barriers listed in The Atlantic (March 2005), including, among others, the “Wall of Shame” dividing Morocco from Western Sahara (1,500 miles), the electrified fence between Botswana and Zimbabwe (300 miles), and the soon-to-be-completed, ten-foot-high barrier along the entire border between Saudi Arabia and Yemen, built by the Saudis to discourage terrorist infiltration! As Alan Dershowitz points out in The Case for Peace, security fences have also been built by India, Spain, Cyprus and even by the United Nations which “installed a security barrier to protect Kuwait from Iraq.” None of this was given consideration when the World Court passed judgment against Israel for undertaking to defend itself.

When it comes to speaking truth, little is said.