August 12, 2004
Owen to Real Madrid
Now the BBC is reporting it.
Speaking of soccer, how 'bout those Iraqis?
Quote of the Day
Jimmy Johnson, upon being told that the other team didn't like him running up the score:
"Well, if they don't like it they should stop us from scoring."
(via Tim Blair)
This story came out of nowhere
The governor of New Jersey, James McGreevey, has announced that he's gay.
I cannot excuse extramarital affairs (gay or straight), and marrying a woman while closeted is fundamentally selfish and dishonest. On the other hand, a lot of gays remain in anguished denial for a long time, so I must admit to having some sympathy for McGreevy's plight. I can't know what he's been thinking all these years, but I'll bet he thought he could "get over" his homosexuality by getting married, and that's genuinely sad.
Now, on a less sensitive note, I'll say what everyone else is thinking: his wife is seriously hot. (And presumably available again. GiggityGiggityGiggity!!!)
Chinese Wheels
A former Subaru distributor in Arizona plans to import vehicles from independent Chinese automakers, including a pickup truck called the "Great Wall Admiral II". I hope he has a good lawyer, because if the Admiral II is not a blatant ripoff of the Toyota Tacoma, the word "ripoff" has no meaning.
Personally, I think you'd be a fool to bet against Chinese automakers eventually gaining acceptance in North America, following the lead of the Japanese and South Koreans. But it won't be for quite some time yet. (Even the Malaysians, now established in Europe, haven't tried selling cars over here yet.)
Anti-Americanism indicted
I finished Jean-Francois Revel's Anti-Americansism (an English translation of his book, L'obsession anti-americaine) the other night. I posted an excerpt from the book the other day, and let me assure you, there's plenty more good stuff where that came from. This is an absolutely devastating indictment of European (and, presumably, Canadian) anti-Americanism - not criticism of American policies, but a passionate, implacable hatred of the United States, even when it means taking contradictory lines of argument to put down the Yanks. (As more than a few writers have noted, the Americans are savaged for "interfering" in other nations' affairs, such as Iraq or Panama - except when they're savaged for "isolationism" when they don't intervene in other nations, such as Rwanda.)
Revel's key theme is the sheer, staggering hypocrisy of Europe's knee-jerk attacks against the United States. They say America is "fascist" while cracking down on free speech in ways no American government would ever get away with. They accuse America of supporting dictators while selling weapons to any tyrants who want them. They say America is crime-ridden, while their crime rates - especially among a disaffected, unassimilated immigrant population - are skyrocketing while American crime rates fall. The list goes on and on.
The author does not mean to suggest the United States or its policies should never be criticized (indeed, this book came out before the Iraq war, but I understand Revel opposed that war and openly admits he wants Bush defeated this fall). But such criticism should be fair and consistent, and much of the anti-Americanism so prevalent among his countrymen is neither.
L'obsession anti-americaine, unfortunately, was not a cultural phenomenon in France like that no-plane-crashed-into-the-Pentagon book, but it was a best-seller in that country. Americans may see the French as an undifferentiated mass, united in its unanimous hatred of their country - but Revel doesn't feel that way, and neither do all of his compatriots. This book is essential reading on both sides of the Atlantic.
Update: this post, in slightly different form, is my first review at Blogcritics.org.
Crossing the line
You must be a subscriber to get it, but the latest National Review cover story, about Lynne Stewart, is a fascinating look at a lawyer who may very well have crossed the line from defending her client - Omar Abdel Rahman, accused of masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing - to actively working for his cause. What makes an old-school leftist support a man who wants to set up an Islamic theocracy? A rabid hatred of America, of course.
To anyone unaware of the alliance between the radical Left and fundamentalist Islam, it may be hard to believe that a '60s radical would go out of her way to help an Islamist sheikh. Stewart, a Protestant girl from Queens, turned political in the 1960s while working as a public-school librarian in Harlem. There she met her second and current husband, Ralph Poynter, a black militant and then schoolteacher who would later lose his job and serve six months on Rikers Island for assaulting a police officer. Stewart went to law school angry at America for its racial and economic injustices, and after graduating started a criminal practice defending underground groups such as the Ohio Seven and the Black Liberation Army. As those movements dwindled, she moved on to defending individual cop killers and drug dealers, all of whom, according to her worldview, had been in some way betrayed by "the system."
Having spent her life defending homegrown miscreants, Stewart didn't know much about the Egyptian sheikh in 1994. But famed radical Ramsey Clark persuaded her to take his case. As George Packer told it in the New York Times Magazine, Clark said that the Arab world would feel betrayed by the American Left if Stewart didn't step up. And for her, Rahman is a natural fit. Like many of her previous clients, he is a public enemy and a revolutionary: anti-liberal, anti-bourgeois, and most of all anti-American. Stewart has always seen violence as the unavoidable result of the struggle of the oppressed against their oppressors, and though she might not say it explicitly these days, "Amerika" is Oppressor No. 1.
"I felt that [the sheikh] could be a tremendous political influence for change in Egypt," Stewart told me. And she said to the Washington Post, "My own political sense tells me the only hope for change in Egypt is the fundamentalist movement."
(Didn't you know Ramsey Clark was going to pop up somewhere in this story?)
I take a keen interest in stories like this, because I do some criminal defence work myself. I've never defended a terror suspect before, and I doubt I ever will (there really aren't many tempting terrorist targets in Corner Brook), but you never know. Given my political views as a whole, I'd have to question whether I could bring myself to adequately represent someone accused of carrying out a terror attack in the name of militant Islam, but I would never suggest the suspect has no right to a defence at all. (A lawyer should not represent someone if he thinks his political or social views will prevent him from wholeheartedly providing a defence, and it's not uncommon for solicitors to turn away people accused of certain offences on that basis. One solicitor with whom I worked at legal aid will not defend people accused of sexual crimes against children - and, according to the NR story, neither will Lynne Stewart herself.)
Everyone is entitled to a defence. But there's a fine line between representing an accused person in court and demanding that the state prove its case, and openly advocating for the accused's cause outside of court. Doug Christie, the British Columbia lawyer best known for defending neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers, is one example. Lynne Stewart - a "liberal" who openly, unashamedly defends civil-liberties crackdowns in Communist states - is another.
"I don't have any problem with Mao or Stalin or the Vietnamese leaders or certainly Fidel locking up people they see as dangerous," she has said. In other words — as David Horowitz points out in his forthcoming book about the "unholy alliance" between the American Left and radical Islam — it's okay for states Stewart likes to squash the freedom of their citizens, but criminalizing acts that help terrorists undermine and attack America is not.
[...]
In a 2003 speech before the notorious National Lawyers Guild, Stewart exhorted her followers to defend her so that she could continue defending "the people" against our "poisonous government." She paid homage to those "modern heroes" such as "Ho and Mao and Lenin, Fidel and Nelson Mandela and John Brown, Che Guevara, who reminds us, 'At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.'" Make that hate — hatred of America, in Lynne Stewart's case. Fortunately, in this country of laws, her revolution is unlikely to come to pass.
Even Stewart's beloved Chinese and Vietnamese have abandoned Communism in all but name (in the economic sphere, at least, though unfortunately the repression remains), leaving only murderous clowns like Castro and Kim Jong Il to carry out her dreams. And like many on the far left, she's abandoned one utopian dream for another - and while leftists may disagree with Islamofascists on piddling issues like whether gay people should be allowed to live or whether women should be allowed to leave the house, a shared, seething contempt for the United States is enough to bridge the gap.
August 11, 2004
No comment
Heather Mallick in the Globe and Mail:
"Author Naomi Klein wrote recently of her horror at having to settle for 'Anyone but Bush' as a political slogan. I agree. I want a Chomsky or a Che, not an Edwards or a Clinton. But I will not have that in my lifetime."
"Why do the bloodsucking Jews think we're antisemitic?"
Anthony Browne, in The Times, says the Muslim Association of Britain - one of that country's most high-profile Islamic lobby groups, and a major backer of the 'Stop the War Coalition' and George Galloway's RESPECT party - is a front for the xenophobic, antisemitic Muslim Broherhood.
The MAB responds that "Browne and his anti-Islam colleagues...offer loyalty and allegiance to Israel and the Zionist lobby." Well, I guess that settles the matter.
Inexcusable
A group calling itself the "Full Blooded Israeli Brigades," seemingly intent on proving correct everything Islamofascists and the ultra-left say about "Zionists", is issuing death threats against Muslim students at Ryerson University in Toronto:
Flyers threatening Muslim students with violence and death have been discovered at Ryerson University, forcing the campus to investigate its second hate crime of the summer.
''The Islamic infidels have no belonging in Toronto and in the world at all ... we ask that whenever you spot a Muslim ... that you beat them and cause harm to them. Kill these Islamic infidels,'' reads one of the notices in broken English and signed by a group calling itself the Full Blooded Israeli Brigades.
[...]
University officials met with representatives of the Canadian Arab Federation and the Canadian Jewish Congress yesterday.
In a joint statement, the two groups and the university condemned the recent incidents and called for tolerance. "This is beyond hatred -- this is a direct threat of violence against Arabs and Muslims that has been produced by a disturbed individual or individuals," Omar Alghabra, president of the Canadian Arab Federation, said yesterday.
This is every bit as disgusting as the anti-Jewish grafitti popping up on university campuses, and should be acknowledged as such.
Update: many of my readers think this is a hoax, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't suspicious about parts of it. ("Islamic infidels"? "Full blooded" Israelis?) Still, until I see evidence to the contrary, I'm assuming it's legit.
A rally for freedom
5,000 people demonstrated on Parliament Hill yesterday to protest the CRTC's decision to shut down CHOI-FM.
When was the last time that many Canadians gathered to demonstrate against such blatant infringement on freedom of expression? I can't remember. It gives me hope, really.
Update: several Canadian bloggers were there.
August 10, 2004
Weatherbeaten old neo-fascist skank condemns seal hunt
Brigitte Bardot is at it again. Hey, Bridget, I'm not going to take any lectures on "humanity's sense of compassion" from a friggin' Front National supporter, okay?
Jews attacked. At Auschwitz. In 2004.
I'm sure the people who did this would say they're just "anti-Zionist," not antisemitic. And many of their countrymen would agree with them, chiding those paranoid Juifs for being so sensitive.
While on a tour of the museum at the Auschwitz death camp in Poland on Sunday, a group of around 50 Jewish university students from Israel, the U.S. and Poland were verbally attacked by a three-member gang of French male tourists.
Evidently incited by the presence of an Israeli flag wrapped around the shoulders of Tamar Schuri, an Israeli student from Ben Gurion University, the first assailant ran at the group while its members were being guided through a model gas chamber and crematoria and began swearing and hurling anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli insults.
"He told us to go back to Israel and said that we were stupid and should be ashamed to walk around with an Israeli flag," testifies Maya Ober, a 21-year-old Polish student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan and member of the Polish Union of Jewish Students (PUSZ), which organized the 16-day summer learning program along with the World Union of Jewish Students (WUJS).
After the initial altercation, a second assailant grabbed Ober by the arm. "One of the guys held me by the arm and wouldn't let go," says Ober, who lost several members of her family at Auschwitz. "I was afraid. I couldn't move and I didn't know what he was going to do.
In Europe, history just keeps repeating itself, time and time again.
Exotic Car for sale
Okay, it will only go 96mph, getting parts is a nightmare, and it probably won't make it to the end of your street without something important falling off.
On the other hand, it has only 78 miles on the odometer, it's a convertible, it would probably attract more attention than a Ferrari, and it's available on eBay for the low, low price of $10,000.00. Who can resist?
(via Autoblog)
Back again
Thanks so much to everyone who wrote or left comments with condolences and messages of support. My grandfather was laid to rest yesterday afternoon near Greenspond, his wife's hometown.
The whole family is doing quite well, under the circumstances. But there's nothing like a death in the family to make you wonder just what you've been doing with your life, how much time you've wasted, and whether you've been as good to your neighbours as you could have been. We only get one shot at this - as far as we know, anyway - and we have to make the most of it.
Regular posting should resume later today, although I have quite a bit of work to catch up on. Thanks again for all your kind words, and let me say I sincerely appreciate your continued support for this site. It really means a lot to me.
August 07, 2004
The news I didn't want to hear
My grandfather, Frank Carter - my mother's father - passed away early this morning after a mercifully brief battle with cancer.
He was diagnosed just a few months ago, and this was something we knew would come before the summer was over. But I still clung to some hope that maybe he'd pull through. He never complained about what had happened to him, and while I knew this was inevitable, I never stopped hoping that his indomitable spirit would somehow pull him through.
I was planning to go to Badger's Quay, Bonavista Bay, to see him this weekend. Now I find myself preparing to travel there for a funeral. I'm deeply saddened that I didn't get to see him one last time - especially because I was thinking about going out there last night - but at least I will remember him before this terrible disease really began to take its toll. Maybe that's a blessing, in its own way. I'd rather remember him taking us out in his boat, through Badger's Quay and up around abandoned Safe Harbour, on beautiful spring mornings.
Frank was 80. He leaves behind his wife, four children, eight grandchildren and a great-granddaughter.
I'll be travelling out today. The funeral will likely be Monday or Tuesday, so there will be no new posting until Monday night at the earliest.
August 06, 2004
Rick James, R.I.P.
He was found dead this morning. James was just 56 years old.
Maybe there's a greater cautionary tale about the dangers of drug abuse, but I can't think of one right now. The man was talented, and you have to wonder what might have been.
The most right-wing movie ever made?
Well, nothing will ever top Red Dawn. And I have no doubt Team America: World Police will savage the right just as much as the left. But my God...I knew anything from the South Park guys would be a must-see anyway, but how on earth can I resist a movie in which Susan Sarandon and "a permanently mustard-stained Michael Moore" are among the bad guys?
The trailer is here.
We know what he really meant, but it's still funny
President Bush, at a bill signing:
President Bush offered up a new entry for his catalog of "Bushisms" on Thursday, declaring that his administration will "never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people."
Bush misspoke as he delivered a speech at the signing ceremony for a $417 billion defense spending bill.
"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we," Bush said. "They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
D'OH! John "Six-Pack" Kerry, meanwhile, has got to stop pretending he's a regular guy:
To get his Ohio rallies up and rolling, Kerry used a set of jokes to open his events. In Bowling Green, his shtick went something like this:
"If you elect me and my running mate, John Edwards, we are going to give you the courageous leadership you need. We'll take the tough positions, the courageous positions, the tough stands. But there's one tough position I will not take: I am not going to choose between the Falcons and the Rockets" -- this is a local reference to the well-known rivalry between Bowling Green University and the University of Toledo.
"I will say this," he added. "There is nothing better than Buckeye football, period!"
Kerry used this set piece several times in Ohio, to great effect, never mind the waffling with the generality of "Buckeye" football. Was he talking Ohio State University specifically? Or just football in the state in general? Only Kerry knows.
But then Kerry dug a huge hole for himself. On Sunday and into Monday, Kerry hit Michigan, where he attempted to use the same Ohio jokes. Clearly, the sports humor has to be taken out of his hands before he really embarrasses himself.
"I just came here from Bowling Green," Kerry told the crowd to subdued applause. "I was smart enough not to pick a choice between the Falcons and the, well, you know, all those other teams out there. I just go for Buckeye football, that's where I'm coming from."
At that point, before all the boos began raining down upon him, Kerry seemed to realize his error. In an attempt to silent the angry crowd of University of Michigan supporters, Kerry said, "But that was while I was in Ohio. I know I'm in the state of Michigan and you got a great big M and a powerhouse of a team." Then his face, presumably, the Botox permitting, turned Big Blue.
Gibraltar is British. Deal with it
The Spanish government is whining about Gibraltar again. The great John Keegan responds that Britain won it fair and square; no Spaniards ever lived there in the first place; the overwhelming number of people who live there want to remain British; that the territory has vital strategic importance for the British; and that the Spaniards are hypocrites who still maintain their own disputed enclaves in Morocco.
Read it all. Rule Britannia, baby!
(via Ghost of a Flea)
The pride of Canada
The Canadian Forces' 3rd Battalion, Royal 22nd Regiment Battle Group, which has been patrolling Kabul for the past six months, is coming home.
I've never hesitated to criticize Canada's post-9/11 policies, but one thing is certain: when Afghanistan makes the transition to democracy, our soldiers will deserve no small part of the credit.
