Scrapbook
Scrapbook The Chattering Asses Four-fifths of the British public support a war against global terrorism. Three-quarters approve of George W. Bush's leadership. But don't tell the chattering...
...Answer: Sorry...
...She is—an e-mail she circulated to her "sisters and friends" last week reminds us—an NEA-award winning poet, the founder of the Sisterhood is Powerful Institute, the 1990 Feminist Majority Foundation "Woman of the Year," and the former editor-in-chief of Ms...
...It's a trick question...
...magazine...
...And "Muslims make an incredibly valuable contribution to our country...
...Good folks...
...Then there's the Muslim Public Affairs Council, also represented at the Bush meeting...
...Alas, something came up...
...Looks like the myriad news organizations that covered the event were asleep at the switch, too...
...missile strikes on Osama bin Laden's training camps in 1998 "illegal" and "immoral," and who has likened Arab terror bombers to American min-utemen during the Revolutionary War...
...Campus Comedy Since September 11, any conservative with an e-mail account has been on the receiving end of countless dispatches of political lunacy from American campuses—pro-Iraqi teach-ins here...
...Citing research by Daniel Pipes, Stoll reports that the Council on American-Islamic Relations, one of the groups in attendance at the mosque last week, is . . . um, kind of radical...
...We could go on—at great length...
...CAIR also, in May 1998, co-sponsored an all-day rally at Brooklyn College, the highlight of which was an anti-Semitic screed by Wagdi Ghuniem, a militant cleric from Egypt...
...This morning the National Guard arrived—and on my dawn walk I could just as well have been walking through a military state: police, state troopers, and emergency personnel on every corner below 14th Street, with trucks filled with Guardsmen, rifles bayoneted and at ready, beginning to roll through the streets...
...Chattering Asses, III In certain circles, you're supposed to know who Robin Morgan is...
...blame-America-first chaplains there...
...That last part is no doubt true as a general matter...
...But his promotion of that institution as the world's only legitimate arbiter of the use of force looks about to become a historical curiosity...
...And so on...
...Many people and nations in the world resent and dislike the United States—its political system, its culture, its way of life and power—but they do not kill innocent civilians and make war for that reason...
...But it appears to be questionable as specifically applied to some of the president's hosts, the people Bush called "the good folks standing with me" at the Islamic Center...
...B. "It is this record of unabashed national egotism and arrogance that drives anti-Americanism among swaths of the world's population, for whom there is little democracy in the current distribution of global wealth and power...
...But here, for sheer tastelessness and moral vacuity, she has outdone herself 50 times over: "We have a robotic president who assures us that America still stands tall...
...The idea that the terrorists' primary, if not only, objective was to kill thousands of Americans and humiliate this country seems not to have penetrated the mind of the secretary general...
...are doing everything we can to avoid this kind of escalating nightmare—and a network of safe houses is already being set up to shelter and help innocent Arab or Muslim civilians who might be persecuted in the wake of this tragedy...
...Message, I CAIR Alarmed and disappointed—as is THE SCRAPBOOK—by reports that some Muslims around the country have been subjected to harassment in recent days, President Bush last Tuesday visited the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., for "wide ranging discussions" with representatives of leading Muslim organizations in the United States...
...There was the tasteless punning of Georgetown's "Grave New World" conference...
...It means, The Scrapbook gathers, that since the "objective" was not yet known, Kofi Annan wanted to keep his powder dry...
...Kennedy suggested that the great power of the United States, its extraordinary influence in the world on international organizations, the attractive power of its political and social ideas— seen as 'offensive cultural messages'— understandably provoke hatred, as they would in us if the roles were reversed...
...In the New York Times last Friday, Annan went so far as to argue that retribution for the terrorist attacks should belong to the United Nations since its "conventions already provide a legal framework for many of the steps that must be taken to eradicate terrorism...
...When he was done, Ghuniem led his audience of 500 in a song with the memorable refrain: "No to the Jews, descendants of the apes...
...I for one don't find this entirely consoling...
...Sontag long ago mastered that most annoying of all prose poses: unusual stupidity that imagines itself to be unusual intelligence...
...Our Muslim "fellow Americans" must be "treated with respect...
...CAIR has in the past criticized—as "ethnic and religious stereotyping"— the criminal prosecution of two men arrested in Cleveland for the "honor killing" of their female cousin...
...A. "During my lifetime, America has been constantly waging war against much of humanity: impoverished people mostly, in stricken places...
...There was a memorable conclave of defeatists at Yale, denounced by Donald Kagan: "No one seems to have challenged the primacy of concerns expressed by history professor Paul Kennedy and Strobe Talbott, director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, that focused on the reasons that caused the perpetrators to act and our need to understand and sympathize with them...
...Doesn't look like it...
...Annan's anti-American stands are generally characteristic of—if no worse than—the lamentable norm for the United Nations...
...after all, the objective might turn out to be admirable, even though the terrorists' means were not...
...For in an act of wince-making sadism, said editor has included three paragraphs from Sontag in the middle of an otherwise elegiac and elegant series of short essays on the World Trade Center attack...
...D. "It is men who perpetrated this violence and men who organise the response...
...Which is understandable, of course, given that the entire event revolved completely around Robin Morgan...
...Moreover, far from being the main perpetrators of terrorism, Islamic peoples have been its victims—more often than not of an American fundamentalism and its proxies...
...We've been bombing and invading other countries at will.' In a seminar a student says, 'The level of patriotism in America is scary.' As two students enter a classroom, I hear one say to the other, 'The most horrible part of this whole thing is all the racial profiling.' I hear others saying, 'You have to separate the political from the personal' and 'I'm getting sick of all the sob stories.' . . . "A minister at the prayer service at the University last Wednesday told the audience to pray that the government remains peaceful and doesn't attack anyone else...
...I trust with all my heart that you will each do all you possibly can in your own countries, cities, and situations to educate people as to WHY this kind of tragedy happens—that it is NOT just 'madmen' or 'monsters' or 'subhuman maniacs' who commit dramatic violence, but that such acts occur in a daily climate of patriarchal violence so epidemic as to be invisible in its normality—and that such tactics as this come from a complex set of circumstances, including despair over not being heard...
...Looks, instead, as though President Bush was very poorly served by whatever White House staffer arranged this visit...
...C. "A bully with a bloody nose is still a bully...
...Condoleezza Rice seems to be the one exception...
...I will wear my red, white and blue, I will revere our flag flowing in the wind and hold in contempt the terrorists who attacked the wrong country...
...Its leader is a man named Salam Al-Marayati—who called U.S...
...The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible...
...Instead, we'll give the last word to Alexandra Wolfe, a senior at Duke, who wrote a fine column for that school's The Chronicle on the "Lack of Outrage...
...Islam is peace," the president said...
...Can you spot the bin Laden comment...
...Yes, their thoughts turned to civil liberties, but not to terrorism or war...
...They're all from the Guardian...
...The power structure is exposed at such times, as the token women slide into the background, leaving war to men...
...So perhaps personal pique has played a role in the secretary general's post-September 11 performance...
...Who now cares about his assertion two years ago that "only the [U.N] Charter provides a universally legal basis for the use of force...
...I'll pray against it...
...So here's a little multiple choice test...
...Already, mosques are being defaced and Internet chat rooms are spewing hate against 'all Arabs.' We (feminists, progressives, etc...
...The enterprising Ira Stoll, who runs the invaluable smartertimes.com, has looked into the background of "the good folks" in question...
...I won't be listening...
...Um, we hear you loud and clear, Robin...
...Wake Up and Smell the Kofi Immediately after the September 11 attacks, United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan stated, "We do not know yet who is behind these acts, or what objective they hope to achieve...
...She is also, like Susan Sontag, considerably less well endowed in the cerebellum department than she appears to believe...
...Yes, the United Nations has many conventions...
...When his private talks at the mosque were through, Bush spoke a few public—and moving—words...
...Our country is strong,' we are told again and again...
...And then there's the American Muslim Alliance, another co-sponsor of Brooklyn College's "no to the Jews" festival in 1998, and a group that has, for example, distributed Holocaust denial literature at its annual convention...
...In another historical curiosity, it turns out that September 11 was a U.N.-declared "International Day of Peace" for world citizens to "imagine a world free of conflict and violence," not to mention "picture hatred turning into respect, bigotry into understanding, and ignorance into knowledge...
...Believe whatever you want, cower at our patriotism, but unless you have a close friend with a father who drove her to school every morning and tucked her in at night and whose day was interrupted by a 757 smashing into his office, driving temperatures up to 1,500 degrees and hurling him and his co-workers out through the walls, just don't tell me about your political correctness...
...A class begins and the voice from the front of the room says, 'We only got what we deserved...
...Although we've all been brought up wanting world peace, I will not pray for pacifism...
...The American Political Science Association urged its members "to undertake appropriate professional responses to these horrific events in their classes and departments, reflecting upon implications for the well-being of the United States, civil rights and liberties, international order, and democracy...
...The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy...
...Virtually the only female faces in the media at the moment are the victims...
...Now, U.S.-U.N...
...What an affectless bit of blather that was...
...They don't look too good...
...One is from Osama bin Laden...
...In the immediate aftermath of the World Trade Center attack, our Woman of the Year—who lives in Greenwich Village—received concerned inquiries, her e-mail explains, from "women in 18 different countries...
...Three of the following quotations are from the Guardian over the past week...
...Wolfe writes of the "fatuousness" of what she "heard all around me for the past week here on the Duke campus...
...Those people who do may be pitied for their derangement— but first, they must be stopped...
...So many, many of you have astonishingly cited my book The Demon Lover as the essential expression/analysis of what has just happened (as well as the background and underlying conflicts) that even in the midst of deep sorrow and grief you have renewed my belief that art, an attempted clarity of thought, and a stubborn politics of transformation do make a contribution...
...women are cast as passive...
...Chattering Asses, II Some senior editor at the New Yorker really, really doesn't like Susan Son-tag...
...If it turns out that Tuesday's attacks were the work of Osama bin Laden's supporters, the sense that the Americans are once again reaping a dragons' teeth harvest they themselves sowed will be overwhelming...
...The Guardian, Britain's leading liberal paper and house organ of the intellectual class, has become a hotbed of rabid anti-Americanism...
...relations have generally improved under this secretary general, but that's only because they couldn't get much worse...
...This morning I was touched to learn that the Pagan and Wiccan community is doing the same thing, in the name of religious freedom from persecution...
...First, thank you from my heart for all your thoughts...
...Sign this woman up to write for the Guardian...
...But don't tell the chattering classes...
...What we do know is that no just cause can be advanced by terror...
Vol. 7 • October 2001 • No. 3
