Vote for Love

On November 7, Be Smart: Vote for Love

Patch Adams, Common Dreams

While the State Department's Alberto Fernandez felt obligated to take back his comments that elements of U.S. policy in Iraq have been arrogant and stupid, the truth is that U.S. policy post-9/11 has been driven by arrogance and stupidity. What could be stupider than the idea that violence could end the threat of terrorism and make us safer at home? Simple logic tells us that responding to terror with more violence will only lead to more terror and more violence. Now we have that logic confirmed by the grim facts on the ground in Iraq.

Isn't it time for a radical change of course? There's only one thing more powerful than violence, and that's love. So shouldn't we be fighting violence with love? I don't mean relational love. I mean treating people with love. Feeding them. Educating them. Healing them. That kind of love.

As a doctor—and a clown—I've seen the tremendous healing power of love. The number one factor for surviving a heart attack is having a loving community. A study of 4,000 women with breast cancer found that with a little love—six hour-long support sessions—their survival rate increased five-fold. With the situation in Iraq imploding, tensions increasing with Iran and North Korea, and our government's policies leading more and more people to hate Americans, it's time to take the healing power of love to the global level. It's time for a love platform.

What's a love platform? It's a set of policies that shows compassion for the elderly, the mentally ill, the homeless, the poor. It's a platform that treats the environment with the loving respect it deserves.

A love platform would call for kissing, not killing. You switch two little letters and you get a whole new outlook on life. Kissing, not killing.

A love platform would put women in charge—women with loving instincts who would treat the world the way my mother treated my friends when they came to my house. She fed them, she wiped their noses, she was nice. That's it. We'd have a policy called "Be Nice." If everyone treated people like my mother did, we'd put an end to violence.

We need to create a massive global movement for loving. It would be like the Peace Corps times 10,000. People who have resources would go, en masse, to help those without. People with skills would teach those without. People who are healthy would take care of those who are sick.

We'd save cabinet positions for the Amish people who embraced the family of the man who killed their children. We'd put in charge of foreign policy the people who lost loved ones on 9/11 but insisted that revenge was not the answer, or the women of CODEPINK who tried desperately to stop the war in Iraq before it even began.

It really amazes me that we spend so many hours as a society focusing on love as sex or love that some consider perverse: Mark Foley sending emails to underage boys, Bill Clinton with an intern, love between people of the same sex. But we spend no time focusing on the big love that should drive our lives and our policies, i.e. love for the human family. We spend no time in school teaching young people how to grow up to be loving adults. The media gives us never-ending examples of violence and hate, but rarely gives us the uplifting examples of the kid who spends his lunch money on feeding the homeless.

We hear about the brave soldiers who fight, but not about the people—often women—who force the soldiers to put down their guns.

For those who say that a love platform is ridiculous and naive, I ask them to compare the results of the $300 billion we've spent on war in Iraq with what we would get if we had spent that money on setting up health clinics all over the world and feeding people who are hungry. I travel around the world and meet lots of people who fear and hate us. If we spent our energy and resources uplifting people in need—spreading laughter and light instead of bombs and bullets—we'd live in a world that was happier, healthier and safer.

So come November 7, be smart. Vote out stupid and arrogant candidates who think that occupying Iraq by force or bombing Iran will make us safe. And vote for candidates who understand the simple notion that love is not only the best medicine, it's also smart policy.

Patch Adams, M.D., is a nationally known speaker on wellness, laughter, humor and life.

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Who Killed the Electric Car?

By Ed Spivey Jr., Sojourners

They say you're not paranoid if people are really out to get you. The same can hold true for conspiracy theorists who walk the earth in constant vigil against the dark collusion behind every thwarted effort for human good. Those twitchy bands are no doubt high-fiving the release of "Who Killed the Electric Car?" a documentary that, at least in this one case, proves them 100% correct.

In 1992, after a billion dollars in research, General Motors produced 200 EVs, an all-electric vehicle that would comply with California's mandate that a zero-emissions car comprise up to 10% of the total fleet sold in that state. To those lucky few who were able to lease one, the car quickly became an object of love, smugness, and downright obsession. As promised, the car could travel at highway speeds for up to 100 miles on a single charge, more than enough for the average daily commute. The drivers reported nothing but passionate praise for their new rides, and environmentalists saw this as the first wave of a technology that would dramatically reduce air pollution and dependence on foreign oil.

They were wrong.If the film is to be believed (cue conspiracists), GM soon realized the EV would compete against its gas-fueled cars. Additionally, the company worried about dealers losing their primary profit centers—periodic maintenance and replacement parts that electric cars would never need.

Servicing the EV meant occasionally rotating the tires and replenishing the windshield washer fluid. A car company that had for decades built planned obsolescence into its vehicles had inadvertently produced a car that owners might never need to replace.

For their part, oil companies financed a multimillion dollar lobbying campaign against California's air quality regulations. Chevron purchased the patents of a superior battery that would have given the EV even more range, and then kept that technology from the marketplace. The pro-oil Bush administration weighed in by promoting hydrogen technology and then pressured a California regulatory agency to kill the zero emissions requirement in favor of this unproven fuel. In hopes of delaying the proven electric technology, other automobile manufacturers—including the now-green Honda and Toyota—hopped on the hydrogen promotional bandwagon despite the fact that production and infrastructure is decades away, if not a complete pipe dream.

Eventually, GM recalled all 200 of its electric cars and crushed them, sometimes within view of their heartbroken owners, many of whom were arrested for attempting to block the action. An aerial view of dozens of flattened EVs in a desert storage area bears mute condemnation of the corporations that purposely kept an innovative and environmentally conscientious technology from reaching the public.

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Absolute Truth

Truth? Absolutely!
A father's "dying words" to his graduating senior.
by Clark Cothern, Leadership Journal

Dear Son,

As your graduation from high school approaches, I've been thinking about the question, "What is the most important foundational truth I could share with my legacy before he leaves home?" That's how I came up with …

My Dying Words (hypothetically)

Don't be alarmed. I'm not dying … not that I know of. But if I were, if I was suddenly hit by a car and you saw the accident and ran over to me and asked, "Dad, what's the most important thing for me to remember as I carry your legacy into the world?" here's what I'd say: There is absolute truth, and that truth is spelled J-E-S-U-S.

The world and its philosophies will try to sell you on the idea that all truth is relative. They'll say, "What's true for you may not be true for me." Logic defies this notion, though.

In fact, the statement, "I know there is no absolute truth" is flawed. In response to that statement, you could ask, "Are you saying that you know it is absolutely and always true that there is no absolute truth?" And the person who made the statement will either storm off, or, if they are intellectually honest, begin to see the flaw in their argument.

The only basis for them to be able to claim that they know something absolutely is that absolute truth exists. And the most important reason it exists is because someone with great intelligence invented it. Someone actually wove into all of creation, and into our logical minds, that there must be things we can trust absolutely.

Will apples always fall down when you drop them? Will the earth always turn in the same direction as it rotates? Will water always freeze at 32 degrees? Will 7 times 7 always be 49?

The answer to all those questions becomes obvious when you look with intellectual honesty at creation. "YES!" the universe screams, "There IS absolute truth. The One who created all of this created absolute truth."

I've seen college students get really messed up when they study philosophy, because they start getting all these weird notions that come not from observing the created universe, but from watching too many sci-fi movies. They get these ideas that we may not even be sure if we really exist or not, or the notion that all truth is relative and that each society just has to work out its own morality.

Follow that relativistic thinking to its ultimate conclusion, though, and you get to a group of people who firmly believe that it's okay to do anything to anybody, without any consequence. That's a kind of people I wouldn't want to get very close to.

One of our greatest enemies is relativism. Once we start eroding the foundation of the fact that absolute truth comes from an absolutely truthful God, we will slide right off the man-made muddy hill into the abyss of man-made philosophies, and we'll sink.

Relativism grabs the one thread that is loose inside our brains, and it starts pulling. Start with relativism and you begin to unravel everything you ever trusted.

Pretty soon you think, "Well, maybe the stuff in Scripture really isn't true. After all, mere men wrote that stuff. How can that be trusted?" And then you think, "Maybe Jesus really was only a good teacher and maybe he was married. And maybe he was just conceived from a human father and human mother, like the rest of us. And maybe He was merely someone we can imitate."

And then you think, "And maybe all the other religions in the world aren't so bad." Then, "So if a radical group says that their religion includes killing everybody who doesn't believe exactly the way they do, that's their right."

I've had these discussions before and when I get to that point in my reasoning, that's usually when someone says, "Wait. That doesn't sound right." And I ask, "Of course it's right, if all truth is relative. There's no unchangeable standard of right and wrong in the world."

We do have a standard of right and wrong, and this moral code was given to us by God Himself. And the morality grows out of God's character. When you logically trace everything to its beginning, you get back to the creation of the world. And when you stack up the evidence, you can't help but arrive at the conclusion that a perfect God created the universe.

Those who fail to see this "suppress the truth," and invent other ways to keep from having to see it. They invent elaborate philosophies in an effort to make sense of the world, and yet they invent philosophies that will allow them to behave in ways they know God would not want them to behave.

They blind themselves to God's truth because they know if they see it they'll have to answer to the One who has some absolute moral expectations.

The greatest embodiment of that truth is Jesus. He is the one who claimed, "I AM the truth." That's a claim no other human on earth ever made. No other religion on earth points to Jesus as the one and only person capable of covering our sins and getting us to God.

Without the basis of absolute truth, you have no basis to follow the evidence, stack the facts against untruth, and decide for yourself if Jesus really lived, was crucified, was buried, rose again and appeared to many people. But if there IS absolute truth, then we can see the evidence for ourselves and determine whether or not Jesus did all the things he claimed.

Following the arguments I've just outlined, and seeing the evidence for myself, the one thing I will go to my grave proclaiming is this truth: Jesus IS truth. Absolutely.

So, my dear son, as you graduate—as you go forth into the world to discover what is out there—please remember this caution: Don't buy the lie that all truth is relative.

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Whose God may we mock?

Whose God may we mock?
By Pat Buchanan, Creators Syndicate

If "such lies and errors had been directed at the Koran or the Holocaust," said Archbishop Angelo Amato, the Vatican's secretary for the congregation for the doctrine of the faith, "they would have justly provoked a world uprising."

The archbishop was speaking of "The Da Vinci Code," the Ron Howard film that debuts at Cannes and opens worldwide this week, and is expected to gross $500 million by summer's end.The archbishop's point is undeniable. Blasphemous cartoons of the Prophet with a bomb in his turban, published a few months ago in a Danish newspaper and reprinted on the front pages of Europe's major papers, ignited demonstrations in Muslim communities across Europe and violent and deadly riots across the Islamic world.

Leaders friendly to the West, from Egypt to Afghanistan, felt compelled to denounce the cartoons, as did many in the West, as a provocation and insult to the faith of a billion people.

In the 1990s, the British novelist Salman Rushdie spent years in hiding after Ayatollah Khomeini issued a "fatwa" calling for his killing for publishing the blasphemous "Satanic Verses." In the 1970s, the film "Muhammad," starring Anthony Quinn, was pulled from many U.S. theaters after bomb threats. The film had offended Muslim faithful by showing the face of Muhammad.

Last February, British historian David Irving, whose books on World War II have sold in the millions, was convicted in an Austrian court of Holocaust denial and sentenced to three years in prison. His crime: In two speeches in Austria in 1989, Irving asserted there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz. Though he recanted in court, it did not save him. Prosecutors felt his sentence was too light.

In nine countries of Europe, Holocaust denial is a crime. In the United States, to deny the Holocaust happened or suggest that it has been exaggerated is not a crime, but marks one down as a social leper.

If you would know who wields cultural power, ask yourself: Whom is it impermissible to offend? Thus the hoopla attending the release of "The Da Vinci Code," based on the Dan Brown novel that has sold 7 million copies in the United States, tells us something about whose God it is permissible to mock and whose faith one is allowed to assault.

For what "The Da Vinci Code" says is that Roman Catholicism is a gigantic fraud, that the church has for centuries been perpetrating a monstrous hoax, duping hundreds of millions into believing something it knows is a bald-faced lie. At the novel's heart lies the contention that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married, that they had a daughter, that the Vatican has known this and been hiding the descendants of Jesus, that Opus Dei is a secret order whose agents will engage in murder to protect the secret.

Leonardo da Vinci's painting "The Last Supper" is said to hold the secret, as Jesus is portrayed touching the hand of the youngest apostle, John, who holds the place of honor at his side—and who is, on close inspection, Mary Magdalene.

In Catholic teaching and tradition, the Holy Grail is the chalice that contained the blood of Jesus. In the book, the Holy Grail is Mary Magdalene, carrying the flesh and blood of Jesus in her womb.

If "The Da Vinci Code" is based upon facts, no other conclusion follows than that to be a Catholic is either to be in on this fraud or to be the dupe of those perpetuating it. But if it is fiction, why would Hollywood put out so viciously anti-Catholic a film that can only have the effect of undermining the faith of millions of Christians?

Putting "The Da Vinci Code" on film, with what it alleges about the Catholic Church, is the moral equivalent of making a movie based on "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and implying this is the truth about the Jewish plot to control the world. One imagines Ron Howard and Tom Hanks would take a pass on that script.

Like the "Hitler's Pope" smear of Pius XII, a man who did more than any other to save the Jews in World War II, "The Da Vinci Code" is a Big Lie that, though readily refuted by the facts, will be believed.

But that it will be a box-office smash, that it is the subject of lavish praise in the press, that it is the best-selling novel of the 21st century, tells us we live not just in a post-Christian era, but in an anti-Catholic culture not worth defending or saving, for it is truly satanic.

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On Recent Wars

On Recent Wars
By Fred Reed

People ask how we got into our splendid mess in Iraq and why we can't get out. The question is a subset of a larger question: Why, since WWII, have so many first-world armies gotten into drawn-out guerrilla wars in
bush-world countries, and lost? Examples abound: France in Vietnam, America in Vietnam, France in Algeria, Russia in Afghanistan, Israel in Lebanon, etc. Why don't they learn?
The answer I think is that militaries are influenced by a kind of man—call him the Warrior—who by nature is unsuited for modern wars. He doesn't understand them, can't adapt to them. The Warrior is emotionally suited to pitched, Pattonesque battles of moral clarity and simple intent. I don't mean that he is stupid. Among fighter pilots and in the Special Forces for example it is not uncommon to find men with IQs of 145. Yet emotionally the Warrior has the uncomplicated instincts of a pit bull. Intensely loyal to friends and intensely hostile to the enemy, he doesn't want any confusion as to which is which. His tolerance for ambiguity is very low. He wants to close with the enemy and destroy him.This works in wars like WWII. It does not work when winning requires the support of the population. The Warrior, unable to see things through the eyes of the enemy, or of the local population, whom he quickly comes to hate, wants to blow hell out of things. He detests all that therapeutic crap, that touchy-feely leftist stuff about respect the population, especially the women. Having the empathy of an engine block, he regards mention of mutilated children as intensely annoying at best, and communist propaganda at worst.

On the net these men sometimes speak approvingly to each other of the massacre at My Lai. Hey, they were all Cong. If they weren't, they knew who the Cong were and didn't tell us. Calley did the right thing, taught
them a lesson. There is an admiration of Calley for having avoided bureaucratic rules of engagement probably dreamed up by civilians. War is war. You kill people. Deal with it.
If you point out that collateral damage (dead children, for example) makes the survivors into murderously angry Viet Cong, the Warrior thinks that you are a lefty tree-hugger.

Today, the battlefield as understood by the enemy, but seldom by the Warrior, extends far beyond the physical battlefield, and the chief targets are political. In this kind of war, if America can get the local population to support it, the insurgents are out of business; if the insurgents can get the American public to stop supporting the war, the American military is out of business. This is what counts.

It is what works. The Warrior, all oooh-rah and jump wings, doesn't get it. Vo Nguyen Giap got it. Ho Chi Minh got it.

Thus the furious, embittered insistence of Warriors that "We won Tet of '68. We slaughtered them! We won, dammit! Militarily, we absolutely won!" Swell, but politically they lost. It was a catastrophe on the order of Kursk or Dien Bien Phu. But they can't figure it out.

The warrior doesn't understand what "victory" means because he thinks in terms of firefights, courage, weaponry, and valor. His approach is emotional, not rational. Though not stupid, he is regularly out-thought.
Why?
It's not mysterious. An intelligent enemy knows that America cannot be beaten at industrial war. So he thinks, "What then are America's weaknesses?" The first and crucial one is that the American government enters into distant wars in which the public has no stake. Do you want your son to die for—get this—democracy in Iraq? You diapered him, got him through school-yard fist fights, his first prom, graduation from boot camp, and he comes home in a box –for democracy in Iraq?

The thing to do, then (continues thinking the intelligent enemy) is to make the Americans grow sick of the war. How? Not by winning battles, which is difficult against the Americans. You win otherwise. First, don't give them point targets, since these are easily destroyed by big guns and advanced technology. Second, keep the level of combat high enough to maintain the war in the forefront of American consciousness, and to keep the monetary expense high.

(Inflation and gasoline prices are weapons as much as rifles, another idea
that the Warrior just doesn't get. Bin Laden does.) Third, keep the body bags flowing. Sooner or later the Americans will weary of losing their sons for something that doesn't really interest them.

However, the Warrior does not grant the public the right to grow weary.
For him, America exists to support the military, not the other way around.
Are two hundred dead a week coming back from Asia? The Warrior believes that small-town America (which is where the coffins usually go) should grit its teeth, bear down, and make the sacrifice for the country.

Sacrifice for what? It doesn't matter.
We're at war, dammit. Rally 'round. What are you, a commy? To the Warrior, to doubt the war is treason, aiding and supporting liberalism, cowardice, back-stabbing, and so on. He uses these phrases unrelentingly. We must fight, and fight, and fight, and never yield, and sacrifice and spend. We must never ask why, or whether, or what for, or do we want to.
The public of course doesn't see it that way. In 1964 I graduated from a rural high school in Virginia with a senior class of, I think, sixty. Doug took a 12.7 through the head, Sonny spent time at Walter Reed with neck wounds, Studley I hear is a paraplegic, another kid got mostly blinded for life, and several, whom I won't name, tough country kids as I knew them, came back as apparently irredeemable drunks. (These were kids I knew, not all in my class.) It was a lot of dead and crippled for a small place. For what? I was on campus in 1966 on a small, very Republican, very patriotic, very conservative, very Southern campus. The students, and their girlfriends, were all violently against the war. So, I gather, were their parents. Why? Were they the traitors of the Warrior's imagination? No.

They didn't want to die for something that they didn't care about.This eludes the Warrior. Always, he blames The Press for the waning of martial enthusiasm, for his misunderstanding of the kind of war we are fighting. Did the press make Studley a paraplegic? Or kill the guy with all the tubes who died in the stretcher above me on the Medevac 141 back from Danang? Did Walter Cronkite make my buddy Cagle blind when the rifle
grenade exploded on the end of his fourteen? Do the Warriors think that people don't notice when their kids come back forever in wheelchairs?

They don't get it.

Another war quote--
A problem for many Americans is that they have never lived in the free republic created by our forefathers. We became a war state during World War II, and the Cold War was used as an excuse to maintain a war state and to expand it. We are spending more on defense than most of the rest of the world combined at a time when the only threats we face are isolated attacks by a loosely organized band of criminals. The government in Washington has become as secretive as the old Soviet Union.Charley Reese

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United States of Israel? Another hot one!!!

United States of Israel?
By Robert Fisk, The Independent

Stephen Walt towers over me as we walk in the Harvard sunshine past Eliot Street, a big man who needs to be big right now (he's one of two authors of an academic paper on the influence of America's Jewish lobby) but whose fame, or notoriety, depending on your point of view, is of no interest to him. "John and I have deliberately avoided the television shows because we don't think we can discuss these important issues in 10 minutes. It would become 'J' and 'S', the personalities who wrote about the lobby—and we want to open the way to serious discussion about this, to encourage a broader discussion of the forces shaping US foreign policy in the Middle East."

"John" is John Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago. Walt is a 50-year-old tenured professor at the John F Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. The two men have caused one of the most extraordinary political storms over the Middle East in recent American history by stating what to many non-Americans is obvious: that the US has been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of Israel, that Israel is a liability in the "war on terror", that the biggest Israeli lobby group, Aipac (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee), is in fact the agent of a foreign government and has a stranglehold on Congress—so much so that US policy towards Israel is not debated there—and that the lobby monitors and condemns academics who are critical of Israel.

"Anyone who criticises Israel's actions or argues that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over US Middle East policy," the authors have written, "...stands a good chance of being labelled an anti-Semite. Indeed, anyone who merely claims that there is an Israeli lobby runs the risk of being charged with anti-Semitism ... Anti-Semitism is something no-one wants to be accused of." This is strong stuff in a country where—to quote the late Edward Said—the "last taboo" (now that anyone can talk about blacks, gays and lesbians) is any serious discussion of America's relationship with Israel.

Walt is already the author of an elegantly written account of the resistance to US world political dominance, a work that includes more than 50 pages of references. Indeed, those who have read his Taming Political Power: The Global Response to US Primacy will note that the Israeli lobby gets a thumping in this earlier volume because Aipac "has repeatedly targeted members of Congress whom it deemed insufficiently friendly to Israel and helped drive them from office, often by channelling money to their opponents."

But how many people in America are putting their own heads above the parapet, now that Mearsheimer and Walt have launched a missile that would fall to the ground unexploded in any other country but which is detonating here at high speed? Not a lot. For a while, the mainstream US press and television—as pro-Israeli, biased and gutless as the two academics infer them to be—did not know whether to report on their conclusions (originally written for The Atlantic Monthly, whose editors apparently took fright, and subsequently reprinted in the London Review of Books in slightly truncated form) or to remain submissively silent. The New York Times, for example, only got round to covering the affair in depth well over two weeks after the report's publication, and then buried its article in the education section on page 19. The academic essay, according to the paper's headline, had created a "debate" about the lobby's influence.

They can say that again. Dore Gold, a former ambassador to the UN, who now heads an Israeli lobby group, kicked off by unwittingly proving that the Mearsheimer-Walt theory of "anti-Semitism" abuse is correct. "I believe," he said, "that anti-Semitism may be partly defined as asserting a Jewish conspiracy for doing the same thing non-Jews engage in." Congressman Eliot Engel of New York said that the study itself was "anti-Semitic" and deserved the American public's contempt.

Walt has no time for this argument. "We are not saying there is a conspiracy, or a cabal. The Israeli lobby has every right to carry on its work—all Americans like to lobby. What we are saying is that this lobby has a negative influence on US national interests and that this should be discussed. There are vexing problems out in the Middle East and we need to be able to discuss them openly. The Hamas government, for example—how do we deal with this? There may not be complete solutions, but we have to try and have all the information available."

Walt doesn't exactly admit to being shocked by some of the responses to his work—it's all part of his desire to keep "discourse" in the academic arena, I suspect, though it probably won't work. But no-one could be anything but angered by his Harvard colleague, Alan Dershowitz, who announced that the two scholars recycled accusations that "would be seized on by bigots to promote their anti-Semitic agendas". The two are preparing a reply to Dershowitz's 45-page attack, but could probably have done without praise from the white supremacist and ex-Ku Klux Klan head David Duke—adulation which allowed newspapers to lump the name of Duke with the names of Mearsheimer and Walt. "Of Israel, Harvard and David Duke," ran the Washington Post's reprehensible headline.

The Wall Street Journal, ever Israel's friend in the American press, took an even weirder line on the case. "As Ex-Lobbyists of Pro-Israel Group Face Court, Article Queries Sway on Mideast Policy" its headline proclaimed to astonished readers. Neither Mearsheimer nor Walt had mentioned the trial of two Aipac lobbyists—due to begin next month—who are charged under the Espionage Act with receiving and disseminating classified information provided by a former Pentagon Middle East analyst. The defence team for Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman has indicated that it may call Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley to the stand.

Almost a third of the Journal's report is taken up with the Rosen-Weissman trial, adding that the indictment details how the two men "allegedly sought to promote a hawkish US policy toward Iran by trading favours with a number of senior US officials. Lawrence Franklin, the former Pentagon official, has pleaded guilty to misusing classified information. Mr Franklin was charged with orally passing on information about a draft National Security Council paper on Iran to the two lobbyists... as well as other classified information. Mr Franklin was sentenced in December to nearly 13 years in prison..."

The Wall Street Journal report goes on to say that lawyers and "many Jewish leaders"—who are not identified—"say the actions of the former Aipac employees were no different from how thousands of Washington lobbyists work. They say the indictment marks the first time in US history that American citizens... have been charged with receiving and disseminating state secrets in conversations." The paper goes on to say that "several members of Congress have expressed concern about the case since it broke in 2004, fearing that the Justice Department may be targeting pro-Israel lobbying groups, such as Aipac. These officials (sic) say they're eager to see the legal process run its course, but are concerned about the lack of transparency in the case."

As far as Dershowitz is concerned, it isn't hard for me to sympathise with the terrible pair. He it was who shouted abuse at me during an Irish radio interview when I said that we had to ask the question "Why?" after the 11 September 2001 international crimes against humanity. I was a "dangerous man", Dershowitz shouted over the air, adding that to be "anti-American"—my thought-crime for asking the "Why?" question—was the same as being anti-Semitic. I must, however, also acknowledge another interest. Twelve years ago, one of the Israeli lobby groups that Mearsheimer and Walt fingers prevented any second showing of a film series on Muslims in which I participated for Channel 4 and the Discovery Channel—by stating that my "claim" that Israel was building large Jewish settlements on Arab land was "an egregious falsehood". I was, according to another Israeli support group, "a Henry Higgins with fangs", who was "drooling venom into the living rooms of America."

Such nonsense continues to this day. In Australia to launch my new book on the Middle East, for instance, I repeatedly stated that Israel—contrary to the anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists—was not responsible for the crimes of 11 September 2001. Yet the Australian Jewish News claimed that I "stopped just millimetres short of suggesting that Israel was the cause of the 9/11 attacks. The audience reportedly (and predictably) showered him in accolades."

This was untrue. There was no applause and no accolades and I never stopped "millimetres" short of accusing Israel of these crimes against humanity. The story in the Australian Jewish News is a lie.

So I have to say that—from my own humble experience—Mearsheimer and Walt have a point. And for a man who says he has not been to Israel for 20 years—or Egypt, though he says he had a "great time" in both countries—Walt rightly doesn't claim any on-the-ground expertise. "I've never flown into Afghanistan on a rickety plane, or stood at a checkpoint and seen a bus coming and not known if there is a suicide bomber aboard," he says.

Noam Chomsky, America's foremost moral philosopher and linguistics academic—so critical of Israel that he does not even have a regular newspaper column—does travel widely in the region and acknowledges the ruthlessness of the Israeli lobby. But he suggests that American corporate business has more to do with US policy in the Middle East than Israel's supporters—proving, I suppose, that the Left in the United States has an infinite capacity for fratricide. Walt doesn't say he's on the left, but he and Mearsheimer objected to the invasion of Iraq, a once lonely stand that now appears to be as politically acceptable as they hope—rather forlornly—that discussion of the Israeli lobby will become.

Walt sits in a Malaysian restaurant with me, patiently (though I can hear the irritation in his voice) explaining that the conspiracy theories about him are nonsense. His stepping down as dean of the Kennedy School was a decision taken before the publication of his report, he says. No one is throwing him out. The much-publicised Harvard disclaimer of ownership to the essay—far from being a gesture of fear and criticism by the university as his would-be supporters have claimed—was mainly drafted by Walt himself, since Mearsheimer, a friend as well as colleague, was a Chicago scholar, not a Harvard don.

But something surely has to give. Across the United States, there is growing evidence that the Israeli and neo-conservative lobbies are acquiring ever greater power. The cancellation by a New York theatre company of My Name is Rachel Corrie—a play based on the writings of the young American girl crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza in 2003—has deeply shocked liberal Jewish Americans, not least because it was Jewish American complaints that got the performance pulled.

"How can the West condemn the Islamic world for not accepting Mohamed cartoons," Philip Weiss asked in The Nation, "when a Western writer who speaks out on behalf of Palestinians is silenced? And why is it that Europe and Israel itself have a healthier debate over Palestinian human rights than we can have here?" Corrie died trying to prevent the destruction of a Palestinian home. Enemies of the play falsely claim that she was trying to stop the Israelis from collapsing a tunnel used to smuggle weapons. Hateful e-mails were written about Corrie. Weiss quotes one that reads: "Rachel Corrie won't get 72 virgins but she got what she wanted."

Saree Makdisi—a close relative of the late Edward Said—has revealed how a right-wing website is offering cash for University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) students who report on the political leanings of their professors, especially their views on the Middle East. Those in need of dirty money at UCLA should be aware that class notes, handouts and illicit recordings of lectures will now receive a bounty of $100. "I earned my own inaccurate and defamatory 'profile'," Makdisi says, "...not for what I have said in my classes on English poets such as Wordsworth and Blake—my academic specialty, which the website avoids mentioning—but rather for what I have written in newspapers about Middle Eastern politics."

Mearsheimer and Walt include a study of such tactics in their report. "In September 2002," they write, "Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, two passionately pro-Israel neo-conservatives, established a website that posted dossiers on suspect academics and encouraged students to report behaviour that might be considered hostile to Israel... the website still invites students to report 'anti-Israel' activity."

Perhaps the most incendiary paragraph in the essay—albeit one whose contents have been confirmed in the Israeli press—discusses Israel's pressure on the United States to invade Iraq. "Israeli intelligence officials had given Washington a variety of alarming reports about Iraq's WMD programmes," the two academics write, quoting a retired Israeli general as saying: "Israeli intelligence was a full partner to the picture presented by American and British intelligence regarding Iraq's non-conventional capabilities."

Walt says he might take a year's sabbatical—though he doesn't want to get typecast as a "lobby" critic—because he needs a rest after his recent administrative post. There will be Israeli lobbyists, no doubt, who would he happy if he made that sabbatical a permanent one. I somehow doubt he will.

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'A blend of journalism and acupuncture'—the 85-year-old who terrifies presidents

It is not entirely true that the White House press corps gave George Bush an easy ride on the road to war in Iraq. There was one significant exception. Almost every day the administration had to face the furious questioning of an octogenarian woman from Detroit who at times seemed to be the sole sceptical voice in the building.

At the age of 85, Helen Thomas is a little frail and her voice does not carry as well as it once did, but she cannot be easily overlooked. She has been reporting on the White House longer than most of her fellow journalists have been alive.She has interrogated every president since John F Kennedy, and she was on duty in Washington the day he was shot. She was standing in the doorway of the Oval Office when Lyndon B Johnson announced he would not stand for re-election, and she accompanied Richard Nixon on his historic trip to China in 1972.

Along the way, Ms Thomas, now a columnist for Hearst Newspapers, has become an institution. Her seat is reserved with a small brass plaque in the centre of the front row in the White House briefing room, and from that perch just below the podium she stares up at the administration's mouthpiece each day and poses arrestingly direct questions.

About a month before the invasion, for instance, she demanded to know why President Bush wanted "to bomb innocent Iraqis". Ari Fleischer, the spokesman at the time, assured her that he had no such intention.

Ms Thomas remains unconvinced. Like the chorus in a Greek tragedy, she seldom misses an opportunity to tell the president and his aides they have blood on their hands.

"I don't think history will ever vindicate anyone who starts a war on false pretences," she told the Guardian. "I think it diminished us as a people ... We are despised when we were once beloved."

After avoiding her for three years, President Bush relented last month and called on Ms Thomas at a press conference, an act of apparent recklessness that itself made news.

"You're going to be sorry," she told him, before unleashing a tirade vaguely disguised as an inquiry.

Reminding the president that "your decision to invade Iraq has caused the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis", she went on: "Every reason given, publicly at least, has turned out not to be true ... My question is: why did you really want to go to war?"

The president laid out his stock justification for the decision to invade, and joked that he "semi-regretted" calling on the doyenne of the White House scribes in the first place.

Everybody laughed, but his choice of questioners may not have been as foolhardy as it seemed.

At a time when the formerly quiescent White House press corps scents blood and the president is facing a barrage of questions on a festering array of scandals, Ms Thomas's opinionated style serves to bolster the Republican claim that the press has a liberal bias.

Ms Thomas admits her frontal assaults are relatively easy for the White House to deflect and that it is often the more crafted questions that elicit newsworthy answers, but "that's who I am", she shrugs. After 57 years as a reporter for United Press International, she turned commentator in 2000 and is not turning back.

Even in her earlier days as a reporter, Ms Thomas had a knack for making the powerful ill at ease.

President Kennedy said she was "a nice girl if she'd ever get rid of that pad and pencil".

Gerald Ford remarked that she practised "a fine blend of journalism and acupuncture" and Colin Powell, semijoking after being cornered at a cocktail party, wondered aloud: "Isn't there a war we could send her to?"

In theory, that is how reporters are supposed to be, irritating thorns on democracy's rose. But for a while in the wake of the September 11 attacks, through the Iraq invasion and until well after Mr Bush's re-election in 2004, Ms Thomas found herself a lonely heckler in the press room.

"You like to feel there is some sort of support in the room and I didn't feel that way at all," she said of her colleagues. "They felt the hot presence of the corporate heads in New York. Nobody was supposed to rock the boat or cross the line, and everybody was supposed to have an American flag on their lapel."

Ms Thomas is one of nine children from a Lebanese-American family, but she denies her vehemence over the Iraq war has anything to do with her Arab parentage. She shows as much disdain for the Vietnam war.

In fact—in one of many offhand remarks that serve as a reminder of just how long she has been around in the business—she points out that she was against colonial adventures in Indochina when the French muscled their way back in, in 1945.

Sitting in the front row of history is not always as glamorous as it might seem. The seats themselves are old and soiled, giving the appearance of having been ripped out of a 1950s cinema and not washed since.

The briefing room—which was built by President Nixon on top of Franklin Roosevelt's swimming pool—has seen better days. The reporters' cubicles are hopelessly cramped, a vending machine is the only source of food or drink and there is no wireless internet connection.

For all these indignities, Ms Thomas has no plans to retire. She rises each day ahead of the pack and can be found flicking through the papers from 5.30am at a Starbucks near the White House. She then takes her seat in good time for the "gaggle", the off-camera briefing that officially kicks off the morning.

She married once, at 51, to a fellow wire correspondent, Douglas Cornell, who developed Alzheimer's four years later and was dead seven years after that. She later called their time together "the most unexpected and wonderful thing that ever happened to me".

Both before and since, her life has been her work, and her work has been getting up presidents' noses.

"Why is it supposed to be courageous to ask questions of the president?" she wants to know. "He's a public servant ... He has to explain what he does, and its up to us to get him to do that.

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Nike University

Nike University
Vox Day, WorldNetDaily

Now that hundreds of thousands of parents have discovered for themselves how the public school system is an incredibly inefficient and ineffective means of providing children with an education, it is interesting to note that some of them are beginning to turn skeptical eyes on the hallowed institution of the university.I've written before regarding my own doubts about the logic of college, but a conversation with a friend who attended the Minnesota Association of Christian Home Educators annual conference last weekend got me thinking about the issue again. My friend, whose wife homeschools their children, had attended a workshop titled "Credentials without College," which resonated with him when he realized that he had never once had an employer ask for his diploma or review his college transcript.

What's particularly interesting about my friend's perspective is that he graduated from one of the more expensive and exclusive private universities in the country (picking up keys from Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Phi in the process). But not only did he find his education there to be largely superfluous, it actually got in the way of his career development, for as he informed me during our conversation, his senior year was largely a matter of taking philosophy courses while waiting to graduate and work full-time for the company he'd been with for the three previous summers.

My experience was similar. I remember being called a few years ago by a European headhunter who was looking for a technology executive. The headhunter was puzzled by the way in which my career did not coincide with my education, wondering how I had learned the management skills that brought me to her attention when my degrees were in economics and Asian literature. But learning and formal education are not synonymous, and any correlation between what we study in college and what we subsequently do to earn a living is often mere coincidence. Even in the case of the more technical fields and the professions, the vast majority of that which is taught in college is outdated by at least a few years. One need merely look at the equipment in any university computer lab to see that.

When confronted with these facts, university cheerleaders often like to say that a college education, especially a liberal arts education, is not about preparation for a specific career, but learning how to learn and think critically instead, providing skills that are useful in any job.

While this may have been true 100 years ago, it is certainly not true now. A 10-minute conversation with any recent Ivy League graduate will suffice to reveal how even very bright young individuals are not being taught how to think critically or logically, and worse, are permitted to continue wallowing in their parochial ignorance of the world and its history.

What college boils down to is a brand name stamped on the graduate for the benefit of corporate consumers. The large international corporations, like wealthy, upscale shoppers, prefer to make their selections from among the elite brands—the Harvards, Oxfords, Stanfords and Yales. At the other end of the scale, the small businesses paw through resumes from the Wal-Mart equivalents, hunting for bargains in the public universities and no-name two-year institutions.

Still, it is vital to note that to say something is merely a brand is very different than asserting it is without worth. One need merely look at Microsoft or Nike to understand that there is inherent value in a brand because consumers harbor such regard for them. If Man was a perfectly rational being, no one would buy Microsoft Office for $499 when OpenOffice 2.0.2 provides compatibility and 98 percent of the functionality for an infinitely better price, being a free download.

So, what is a brand worth to my child? That is the important question that every parent should ask when considering college applications. And university presidents will soon be forced to wrestle with that question themselves, as the gap between the perceived value of the brand and its actual value to the corporate consumer becomes more obvious with every inflated grade, every graduate with an English, sociology or philosophy degree and every new Women Talking About Feelings program.

Technology has an uncanny way of puncturing such structural vacuities. Already universities are flirting with various forms of Internet-based distance education, and once a brand-name university realizes that it is far more profitable to charge $1,000 per class to 10,000 online students than $40,000 in annual tuition to 1,000 on-campus freshmen without harming the brand, the next great revolution in higher education will begin.

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Top evolutionist preferred Bible reading for his own children

Top evolutionist preferred Bible reading for his own children
By Samuel L. Blumenfeld

With so many educators and judges objecting to the teaching of Intelligent Design in public schools because it infers the existence of God, you would think that the most famous 19th century advocate of evolution would be on their side. But such is not the case. Thomas H. Huxley (1825-1895), famous as a biologist and Darwinist, preferred to send his own children to a decidedly Christian school than a purely secular one for a very good parental reason. He wrote:
My belief is, that no human being, and no society composed of human beings, ever did, or ever will, come to much, unless their conduct was governed and guided by the love of some ethical idea….And if I were compelled to choose for one of my own children, between a school in which real religious instruction is given, and one without it, I should prefer the former, even though the child might have to take a good deal of theology with it.

Huxley advocated Bible reading in the schools on moral grounds, because he could not see how children could be taught to hate evil and do good without the ethical teaching of the Bible. At the time he wrote the above in the Contemporary Review in December, 1870, Parliament was debating the issue of Bible reading in the schools, which parents strongly wanted.

Huxley wrote: "I do not see what reason there is for opposing that wish."

He wrote further:

On the whole then, I am in favor of reading the Bible, with such grammatical, geographical, and historical explanations by a lay teacher as may be needful, with rigid exclusion of any further theological teaching than that contained in the Bible itself.

Huxley cherished his own childhood memories of Bible reading:

Some of the pleasantest recollections of my childhood are connected with the voluntary study of an ancient Bible, which belonged to my grandmother….What come vividly back on my mind are remembrances of my delight in the histories of Joseph and David; and of my keen appreciation of the chivalrous kindness of Abraham in his dealings with Lot…. And I see, as in a cloud, pictures of the grand phantasmagoria of the Book of Revelation. I enumerate, as they issue, the childish impressions which come crowding out of the pigeon-holes in my brain, in which they have lain almost undisturbed for forty years. I prize them as an evidence that a child of five or six years old, left to his own devices, may be deeply interested in the Bible, and draw sound moral sustenance from it.

That, of course, is the crux of the problem with our secular public schools. They provide no moral sustenance for children in desperate need of it. The schools teach moral relativism and values clarification, which means that each child has to come up with his or her own moral system, a task which has baffled some of the world's greatest atheist philosophers.

Huxley also recognized the literary and historical benefits derived from Bible reading:

And then consider the great historical fact that, for three centuries, this book has been woven into the life of all that is best and noblest in English history.

Cannot that also be said of America, the fact that the Bible has been woven into our history since the days of the Pilgrims and Puritan settlers in New England? They brought that Bible with them to the New World so that they could build a Christian civilization in the North American wilderness. It also led early Americans to become the most literate people on the planet. Huxley wrote:

[The Bible] is written in the noblest and purest English, and abounds in exquisite beauties of mere literary form; and, finally, it forbids the veriest hind who never left his village to be ignorant of the existence of other countries and other civilizations, and of a great past, stretching back to the farthest limits of the oldest nations in the world.

And so, our public schools deprive our children not only of moral sustenance, but of knowledge of the ancient world and ancient civilizations, great Biblical heroes, and the greatest literary treasure in the English language. How can any child read the 23rd Psalm and not know that God is speaking to him or her?

When I was a child in P.S. 62 in New York City back in the 1930s, our principal read the 23rd Psalm at every weekly assembly. That reading made a strong impression on me, and I remembered those words keenly as I served in the Army in World War II. It was all the moral sustenance, all the moral protection I needed. And I came back from that war unscathed.

Samuel L. Blumenfeld is the author of eight books on education

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