Monthly Archives: October 2002

Islam Should Not Be a Sacred Cow

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National Review Online’s Rod Dreher has a pretty damning piece about the state of campus tolerance toward differing views. A couple scholars who have documented the repression of Christians in Islamic states was invited to speak at Georgetown, but the frank discussion of the issue was apparently too much for anyone to handle. Even the group that sponsored the scholars disavowed her speech.

Two Jewish student leaders who sponsored the event wrote a bizarre letter to the Georgetown student newspaper complaing that the speakers made “no effort to make a clear distinction between pure, harmonious Islam, and the acts of a few who falsely claim to act in the name of Islam.”

One of the scholars, Bat Yeor, had an excellent retort to this absurd posture,

This is pure nonsense. When one studies the Inquisition or the Crusades, one does not feel obliged to make a clear distinction between ‘pure’ Christianity and those historical events. In a university, the examination of several analyses of history should be encouraged. The Muslim view is exclusively religion-based, and proceeds from the assumption that there is only one valid interpretation of history: the Islamic one. No criticism of jihad is accepted because it is a just war according to Muslim dogma.

This attitude imposes the worst law of dhimmitude on non-Muslims: the refusal of their evidence. The historical testimony of the millions of human victims of jihad is rejected on its face by this doctrinal attitude.

Dhimmitude, by the way, is Yeor’s term for the system of repression that Islamic sharia law directs at non-Muslims. Under sharia, non-Muslims may not testify against Muslims, may face blasphemy charges for teaching their religion (as happens in Pakistan), and are part of a two-classed legal system analogous to the two-tiered system that Jim Crow laws created for whites and blacks in the United States.

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Damned If You Do. Rod Dreher, National Review Online, October 29, 2002.

Paul Wellstone’s Memorial Service . . . Er, Political Rally

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First Paul Wellstone’s family were reportedly upset at comments being made by Republicans about Walter Mondale over the weekend, but then they go and turn his memorial service into a three hour political rally. Could they make up their minds in Minnesota?

The Minnesota Star Tribune reports that Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura and his wife, along with Trent Lott, walked out during one of the more heated “if you loved Paul, vote for his replacement speeches.”

The oddest report, however, has to be that Lott and another Republican were jeered when their faces were shown on large television monitors at the memorial service. I’ve seen a lot of things at funerals and memorial services, but this is the first time I’ve ever heard of jeering.

I thought former Minnesota Republican representative captured the flair of the event best when he said, “The DFL clearly intends to exploit Wellstone’s memory totally, completely and shamelessly for political gain. To them, Wellstone’s death, apparently, was just another campaign event.”

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Republicans decry service as partisan. Kavita Kumar, Dane Smith and Patricia Lopez, Minnesota Star Tribune, October 30, 2002.

Journalists and Racial Profiling

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I’ve been reading a lot of comments ever since the sniper suspects were arrested about the failure of criminal profilers and, specifically, the implicit — and in some cases explicit — pre-arrest claims that the sniper(s) were almost certainly a white male.

Some commentators — Phil Donahue comes to mind — were particularly egregious in erroneously characterizing the sniper(s) as a priori white. The reality, of course, is that African Americans make up more than 40 percent of those who have committed sniper-style attacks in the United States.

On the other hand, sometimes the argument against such nonsense is pushed way past the breaking point, such as in this article cited by John O’Sullivan which Glenn Reynolds quotes from on his site,

Thus, when the journalists fear a story might inflame white racism, a Muslim terrorist like the LAX shooter perhaps, they play it down. When a story might challenge white racism, a Tim McVeigh maybe, they play it up. So when the sniper was still an unknown quantity, it was second nature to seize on anything–even racial profiling–to suggest that he was another Tim McVeigh rather than another Muhammad Hadayat.

It is absurd to suggest that the reason McVeigh’s crime received so much more coverage than Hadayat’s was because McVeigh was white and Hadayat was not. The last time I checked, McVeigh managed to pull off the single largest terrorist attack on American soil before 9/11 and in the process murdered 168 people, including 19 children. Moreover, McVeigh was part of a small conspiracy who carefully planned the Oklahoma City bombing.

Hadayat’s murder of two and injuring of four people at the LAX El Al Terminal was almost certainly an act of political terrorism, but it was of the lone nut variety and resulted in relatively few deaths.

McVeigh’s crimes received more intense coverage because his crimes were far more heinous and deservered much more coverage.

Activists Who Hate McDonald’s More Than Polio

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According to the British Medical Journal, some activists apparently hate McDonald’s more than polio and are angered at UNICEF’s deal with the former to fight the latter.

McDonald’s has an agreement with Unicef in which the international chain restaurant will distribute millions of orange boxes which children in the United States have used the past few years to raise money for UNICEF’s fight against polio. According to UNICEF’s Soraya Bermejo,

Obviously, the extra boxes will greatly increase the funds raised on behalf of children in need around the world. Like all similar Unicef activities, this one will be reviewed once we have allowed it to run its full course.

That’s not enough for activists with the World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action which penned a letter to UNICEF complaining that UNICEF had,

. . . entered into a partnership with a company known worldwide for its aggressive promotion of foods that contribute to ill health and poor nutrition both in industrialized and non-industrialized countries.

Ah yes . . . the fight against polio is far less important than striking a pose against an evil corporation like McDonald’s.

Source:

Unicef comes under attack for Big Mac funding deal. Owen Dyer, British Medical Journal,
26 October 2002, p.923.

If Mugabe Can’t Go to Europe, Europe Will Go To Mugabe

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Yet another example of just how pointless multilateral action with Europe is. As I noted awhile ago, the European Union imposed a travel ban on Zimbabwe officials as punishment for the government’s increasingly authoritarian ways. But they weren’t enforcing it. Zimbabwe officials were being allowed to travel to Europe to attend international conferences.

So the Europeans came up with a two-pronged approach in response to criticism. Apparently they are now going to enforce the ban, but move international conferences to non-European nations.

According to this story in the Daily Telegraph (UK),

EU foreign ministers were supposed to hold a meeting with the Southern African Development Community in Copenhagen on Nov 7 and 8. But several delegations from the 14-nation African bloc hinted that they would boycott the gathering unless the Zimbabwean government was included.

Rather than cancelling the summit – or simply going ahead regardless – the European Union agreed to move the entire meeting to Mozambique’s capital, Maputo, making a mockery of the travel ban. The decision to switch the location is a slap in the face of the European Parliament, which passed a unanimous resolution last month demanding that Mr Mudenge be banned from the meeting.

Appeasment will apparently be the EU’s official pastime.

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EU talks moved so Zimbabwe can attend. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Daily Telegraph (UK), October 24, 2002.

The Perils of Cross-Cultural Statistics

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In an excellent article about the UK’s failed experiment in gun control, Janet Malcolm offer an amazing example of the perils of using statistics as-is from different countries. As we all know, the United States has one of the highest murder rates in the world. The U.S. homicide rate, for example, is almost three time as high as that of Great Britain. Sort of. . . Well, maybe not …

The murder rates of the U.S. and U.K. are also affected by differences in the way each counts homicides. The FBI asks police to list every homicide as murder, even if the case isnÂ’t subsequently prosecuted or proceeds on a lesser charge, making the U.S. numbers as high as possible. By contrast, the English police “massage down” the homicide statistics, tracking each case through the courts and removing it if it is reduced to a lesser charge or determined to be an accident or self-defense, making the English numbers as low as possible.

The same oddity occurs with infant mortality. You’d think that establishing when a person is born and when they die would be fairly straightforward, but in fact the United States records infant mortality statistics in a way that is out of step with the rest of the world and which artificially inflates the U.S. infant mortality rate (the short version is that in the U.S. many premature infants who die shortly after birth are counted in birth and death statistics, whereas in most of the world they are not considered live births).

Or take Reporters Without Borders report which ranks freedom of speech and puts Canada at 5th in the world while the U.S. comes in at 17. The U.S. comes in so low because of the relatively large number (for a Western nation) of reporters who are jailed, almost always because they refuse to reveal a source.

But this is largely an artifact of the United States’ peculiar prior restraint doctrine. In the United States it is almost impossible to for the government to prevent publication of anything in a newspaper. The government can go in later and subpoena a reporter or a person can sue for libel, but the odds of getting a court to enjoin publication is very close to zero except for a few extreme national security issues.

In many Western countries, there is no such limit and there are strict laws that prevent newspapers and broadcast outlets from reporting on certain topics. For example, most of the cases where reporters are jailed for not revealing sources are criminal cases. Most other Western countries, including Canada, place much stricter limits on what can be reported in coverage of criminal cases and don’t run into these sorts of problems.

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Gun ControlÂ’s Twisted Outcome
Restricting firearms has helped make England more crime-ridden than the U.S. Joyce Lee Malcolm, Reason, November 2002.

Reporters Without Borders is publishing the first worldwide press freedom index. Reporters Without Borders, October 2002.

Macro Caching in Conversant

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Macrobyte Resources have added a number of macro caching features in the last 48 hours, including caching the insertQuery macro. This is especially useful to me since I use queries on data fields to build dynamic category pages.

This works great, but as the number of articles found grew larger, the amount of time the insertquery macro took grew longer.

Caching the macro results dramatically improved performance. My Miscellaneous page used to take 9 to 10 seconds to display because it has so many articles. Caching it reduces the display time to about 2.5 seconds — quite an improvement.

Macrobyte has wisely included an option to control how long the macro is cached, and I’m setting it at 12 hours since I don’t update all that often, and I can live with a 12-hour dated category page that loads four times faster than normal.

Jennifer Granholm Redefining Backpedaling

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One of the more amusing aspects of elections is watching one candidate or another say something completely off the wall and then, rather than admit the mistake, try to spin the statement away. Jennifer Granholm, Democratic candidate for governor here in Michigan, is running unintentionally hilarious advertisements trying to save herself from a major blunder.

Earlier this year, Granholm appeared at an NAACP function where she felt it necessary to say, “For the record, I support reparations as well.” Republicans got hold of a videotape of that event and are running “Granholm: Too Liberal for Michigan”-style ads.

Granholm had a number of options in replying to the ads, but has chosen the silliest one — that when she said she supported reparations, she never meant that she supported any sort of economic restitution to the descendants of slaves. She just meant she supports civil rights, expanded opportunities for African Americans, etc., etc.

I.e., she’s either clueless or lying, and either way not very promising. But she’ll likely win because her Republican is just as bad (if not a little worse), and Michigan is still largely a Democratic state.

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Campaign for Governor: Airwaves crackle as race ads burn. Dawson Bell and Chris Christoff, Detroit Free Press, October 19, 2002.