THE STANDARD READER

...All of which means that there were a large number of people with a vested interest in believing Steven Emerson wrong in 1992, and there remain nearly as many today...

...Worse may be the way the legitimizing groups gained their own legitimacy through being embraced by mainline American universities and religious organizations, always in the name of diversity and multicultural-ism...

...The sheer existence of the NEA remains a problem for some Republicans, and its effect on art—its permanent establishment through federal subsidies of an art world at something near its nadir—troubles thoughtful commentators and theorists...

...The FBI warned him that a Muslim group from South Africa may have been sent to the United States to kill him...

...Peter J. Hansen Uncivil Wars: The Controversy over Reparations for Slavery, by David Horowitz (Encounter, 147 pp., $21.95) David Horowitz has a knack for getting under the skin of his former soulmates on the left, particularly campus radicals...

...Still, Sandoz engages and provokes even when one disagrees with him...

...An organization like the Muslim Arab Youth Association doesn't practice terrorism, but it espouses radical Islam— and thereby, wittingly or unwittingly, provides cover for fund-raising and recruiting by the groups that do practice terrorism...

...we'd guess it was worth around $100...

...At last, however, America seems to be listening to him...

...You have my promise he won't be used again," producer Ellen Silva wrote to Ali Abunimah of the American Arab Action Network...

...Rather, it is evidence of the true freedom for which human beings are created...

...If the Bush administration can pick someone like Gelernter—or what about Gelernter himself?—to replace Michael Hammond as head of the NEA, there's a chance we won't have to report the comedy of contemporary art vandalism on the pages we ought to be using to talk about art...

...And so the only question now is what can be made of it...

...It ruined the whole aesthetics for me," artist Rick Magnuson complained...

...Certainly, the Republican-controlled Congress lacks any will to undertake the project...

...David Gelernter—painter, Yale computer-science professor, and WEEKLY STANDARD contributing editor—is someone with ideas for improving contemporary art, and his nomination last week to the National Council on the Arts, the advisory board for the NEA, is a step in the right direction...

...It exists instead to denigrate America's founding ideals— ideals that contributed to slavery's end—and to perpetuate a sense of race-based entitlement and victimhood that harms blacks today far more than does the legacy of slavery...

...And the fact it was passed off as a great concept for a work of art makes even art lovers—who aren't, after all, the usual applauders of vandalism—laugh when someone applies to it a wittier concept...

...There's something irresistible about reporting, as THE WEEKLY STANDARD did back in November, that a cleaning man had swept up and bagged as trash an expensive installation by Damien Hirst in a London art gallery...

...Like Daniel Pipes and a few others who've been prophesying for years about imminent assaults from radical Islamic terrorists, Emerson must be tired of being dubbed an "American Cassandra...

...These are also some of the groups that Steven Emerson shows, in his new book American Jihad, have reached deep into America to find money, organization, and recruits...

...But the death, at age 69, of Michael Hammond on Jan...

...And he suggests that the common strand in all these sources is a notion of man as an "in-between being," neither god nor beast, and therefore both in need of law and capable of liberty...

...I don't think it's a valuable piece now...

...Is the right to the "pursuit of happiness" enunciated in the Declaration of Independence really founded on the premodern concept of the summum bon-um...

...The key information in American Jihad concerns the use of organizations in the United States that have clear philanthropic and religious purposes...

...In his A Government of Laws he argues that the American founding grew out of a providential harmony of ancient philosophy, Christianity, the English republican and common-law traditions, and the thought of John Locke...

...Lee Bockhorn American Cassandra Steven Emerson's prophetic warning BY J. BOTTUM American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us, by Steven Emerson (Free Press, 261 pp., $26) Among the terrorist groups that President Bush explicitly named in his Jan...

...Encouraging people to pursue happiness wherever they believe it lies sounds rather like the denial of a genuine highest good...

...As a reformed leftist, he sees better than most that the reparations movement is motivated not primarily by a concern for justice...

...The latest example occurred last spring, when he tried to place in college newspapers nationwide an ad offering "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery Is a Bad Idea— And Racist Too...

...One can take issue, as many do, with Horowitz's pugnacious methods, but the force of his argument is impossible to deny...

...29 State of the Union address were Hamas, al Qaeda, and Islamic Jihad...

...Trouble is, Rick, it wasn't that valuable before...

...In Uncivil Wars, Horowitz recounts this episode as part of a larger examination of the reparations controversy...

...Elizabeth Royal A Government of Laws: Political Theory, Religion, and the American Founding, by Ellis Sandoz (University of Missouri Press, 240 pp., $45) The ambition of Ellis Sandoz's project is impressive...

...A chance encounter with a radical Islamic group in Oklahoma City while he was a reporter for CNN led Emerson to make a documentary called "Jihad in America," which PBS aired late in 1994...

...The response from student journalists, administrators, and faculty—the refusal of most papers to run the ad, the theft of copies of those that did, and the denunciations of Horowitz as a racist—served as a reminder of the hypocrisy, intolerance, and cowardice entrenched on American campuses...

...Meanwhile, in Colorado, the Aspen Art Museum hung a piece of conceptual art called "I Dare You to Steal This $100"—and someone took the dare, smashing the acrylic and replacing the $100 bill with five $20 bills...

...That's one of the astonishing pieces of information to come to public notice since the attacks of Sept...

...Dean of the School of Music at Rice University, a conductor and composer who also taught neuro-anatomy and physiology in medical schools, he was a serious man of serious purpose, and he might have helped move American art toward something more closely resembling genuine art...

...Cassandra had the same problem back in Troy...

...29— one week after taking office as the new chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts—was a blow...

...The struggle of Judy Genshaft, president of the University of South Florida, to disembarrass her school of its associations with Palestinian radical Sami Al-Arian is a case in point...

...He is one of the few thinkers in the conservative world who has managed to reject the idiocies of much of what passes for art these days, without falling into the philistine despair that threatens the rest of us...

...Through a dozen or so finely crafted essays, Schall explains that the deep human need for song, dance, and philosophy is not a form of escapism from the serious things of life...

...It is NPR policy...

...He reported the hate spewed forth against Israel and America at meetings of various Islamic youth groups, charities, and theological discussion centers— and, as a result, his own name was routinely chanted at such meetings, joining the Jews and American politicians as another who must be destroyed...

...Among other claims, he holds that modern civilization owes its existence to both Greek philosophy and Judeo-Christian religion—and a world that has forgotten these foundations is blind to the essential, inherent worth of each human being...

...He must be even more tired of being called a racist, a bigot, and a monomaniacal hater of Muslims...

...Still, we have hopes that things might get better...

...11—but the most astonishing part may be that Emerson has been saying it since 1992...

...One wonders, of course, if the views Sandoz draws together aren't really more at odds than he suggests...

...Books in Brief On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs: Teaching, Writing, Playing, Believing, Lecturing, Philosophizing, Singing, Dancing, by James V. Schall (ISI, 250 pp., $24.95) Georgetown University's James Schall happily cuts across the contemporary cultural grain...

...In a recent column in the Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby reported that National Public Radio in 1998 banned Emerson from appearing as an expert on Islamic groups...

...Emerson insists that most Islamic agencies are what they seem to be—just as he insists, despite the accusations hurled against him, that the vast majority of American Muslims are law-abiding opponents of terrorism...

...Particularly interesting are his discussion of Edward Coke, the great English lawyer, and his examination of the "civil theology" of Locke's Second Treatise, which draws on Leo Strauss's reading of Locke...

...But the American Islamic establishment has provided what he calls a "zone of legitimacy" within which terrorist groups can work...

...From then on, the denunciations have been unrelenting...

...But the moment for dismantling the arts endowment has passed, at least for now...