A chronicle of high-level USA government
actions in September 2001, at two websites:
Ten
Days in September (WP)
This series is based on interviews with President Bush, Vice President
Cheney and many other key officials inside the administration and out.
The interviews were supplemented by notes of National Security Council
meetings made available to The Washington Post, along with notes taken
by several participants.
Response
to Terror (Austin American Stateman)
This is an eight-part series by The Washington Post describing the
response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks at the highest levels of government.
Coverage of September 11 and
the aftermath:
Fighting
Terrorism: America Retaliates (BG)
Archive stories from the Boston Globe: Tuesday Sept. 11 Sunday
Sept. 16
Attack
on America (Guardian Unlimited)
Special Report with continuing coverage
A two-part article An American
Catholic by Diane Alden @ NewsMax:
new An
American Catholic at Easter
Many in the Church grasped Vatican II (1962) as an opportunity to
turn the church into a trendy adjunct of the 60s counterculture
revolution. At that time serious sin went out the window. Thus, after
a few short years, trendy clerics and theologians and administrators distanced
themselves from notions of what traditional Catholics call mortal
sin. At least in the minds of the liberal theologians and politicizers
of Catholic doctrine, there was almost no accountability for ones
actions, as everything seemed to have a psychological rather than a spiritual
aspect. No sin, no consequences. Everything, all our actions, were not
of our doing. Indeed, at that time much of Catholicism was dumped in favor
of the social gospel. The hard stuff the Founder demands was out or ignored.
Selective interpretation of Christs words erred in favor of His
forgiving and loving side. Meanwhile, many Catholics and hierarchy, along
with progressive theologians, forgot the more difficult and uncompromising
demands He made on humanity. They wanted to ignore His recognition of
evil, punishment, justice and sin as well as the eventual sorting out
of evil from good. In the 60s and 70s, the American Catholic
Church tended toward the idea that Christ was all about love
and nothing about casting into the darkness those who do not obey Gods
laws. It was okay to sin as long as you loved everyone and
meant well. The road to hell was no longer paved with good intentions,
because no one was sure hell really existed. God help anyone who made
value judgments on moral issues or called certain behaviors sinful or
evil. Total tolerance of all kinds of things became more important than
not sinning, even though many of these attitudes and behaviors were in
defiance of what the Catholic Church officially taught. In the 60s
especially, the Catholic Church began to accept as priests and nuns many
men and women who were not so much the followers of Christ as they were
the likely intellectual descendants and proponents of Hegel, Marx, Freud,
Jung, Maslow, Rogers and Antonio Gramsci. It is because of that fact that
the Catholic hierarchy in the U.S. could justify sending pedophile priests
to the shrink as they attempted to find out why those men
did foul deeds to young boys.
new Catholics
in Name Only
In any event, intellectuals inside and outside the Church felt permission
to make use of their radicalism. Most American institutions were not spared
the Hegelian and Marxist orientation. Radicalism became acceptable; meanwhile,
authority and discernment went to hell in a handbasket. In order to accomplish
utopian collectivist ends, Western civilization and its authority in general
were attacked at all levels. In America the excuse may have been the Vietnam
War, civil rights, helping the poor with the disastrous War on Poverty,
or modernizing the Catholic Church. However, what occurred was the destruction
of positive and constructive avenues enhancing individual freedom, increasing
prosperity and faith, and the healthy observation of the laws of God and
man. Self-discipline and self-control and faith were deep-sixed, replaced
by the acceptance of our victim status as we waited for fulfillment from
government programs, materialism, psychology and pop culture. The all-out
assault on authority of the Church and Western civilization in this era,
along with the loss of self-discipline and self-control, led to the subsequent
increase in the power of the state. After the 60s, when authority
in America and in Europe caved to the new intellectual barbarians, the
proponents of the philosophy of collectivism and Marxism filled the gap.
The Catholic Church in America and Europe did not escape that destiny.
Religion, environmentalism, feminism, the civil rights movement, Vatican
II were all overwhelmed as the barbarians crossed the Tiber and no one
was there to stop them. What could have been positive trends in religion
and society, trends which created more freedom and good living, instead
became a cacophony of dissipation and dissolution and collectivism. We
gave up Mozart, Cole Porter, Aaron Copeland, and Rodgers and Hammerstein
for moral chaos, societal dissonance, Britney Spears, Snoop Doggy Dogg,
human rights for animals and trees, and sex with anything that moves,
whether it be animal, vegetable or mineral. Ever on the defensive, the
American Catholic Church just gave in and called absolutely every goofy
unworkable collectivist and leftist idea the social gospel in action.
Meanwhile, many trends destructive to the family and civilization were
now called diversity or inclusivity. No one seems to notice how diversity
and inclusivity are always carried to their most outrageous extremes.
Dung-covered depictions of the Virgin Mary are acceptable, but a religious
masterpiece like the Ten Commandments is not welcome anywhere. In-your-face
sexuality replaced modesty and ended the sensible idea to keep private
things private. From the 60s onward, rather than seeking the stars,
Americans and the West chose to wander in an intellectual and philosophical
garbage-filled desert. That particular wandering in the landfill wilderness
has just about destroyed Western civilization, not to mention the American
Catholic Church.
A three-part part series by Phil Brennan
@ NewsMax on the corruption of Catholic seminaries in the USA:
Anti-Catholic
Experts Fuel Churchs Scandals
Veteran investigative reporter Michael S. Rose has written a frightening
account of the corruption of the Roman Catholic seminary system in the
United States.... According to the Wanderer, a nationally distributed
lay Catholic newspaper, Wicker was rejecting more candidates for the priesthood
than he was approving. But thats just the beginning. An article
by reporter Gregory Flannery, an ex-seminarian himself, revealed: Men
who wish to become Catholic priests in the Archdiocese of Cincinnati are
first assessed by the Worshipful Master of Mt. Washington Masonic Lodge
642. In the May 8, 1991 issue of Mt. Washington Press, a weekly
newspaper, Flannery reported that Wicker was a fallen-away Catholic and
noted that participation in Masonic sects is condemned by the Catholic
Church. Wicker also admitted to being a member of another sect condemned
by the church, the Rosicrucians. When area Catholics complained about
the idea of a Masonic master passing on candidates for the priesthood,
Archbishop Daniel E. Pilarczyk defended him.... NewsMax.com asked Rose
if this nonsense was still going on. Although many seminaries are
getting better, the nonsense is still prolific, he said.
Orthodox candidates are still being turned away in droves, heterosexual
seminarians are still being sent to psychological counseling and booted
from school, while liberal-minded and pro-gay seminarians are given deferential
treatment, put in charge of others, advanced and ordained.
Homosexual
Culture Undercuts Priesthood
Heterosexual students at a number of seminaries were persecuted
by the gay subculture. Reporting homosexual behavior by classmates could
get them expelled, as could resisting homosexual advances. Rose cites
scores of cases of heterosexuals driven out of seminaries because they
refused to accept the gay culture. In Cozzens book, The Changing
Face of the Priesthood, he wrote that there has been a heterosexual
exodus from the priesthood due, Rose notes, in part to the unrestrained
gay subcultures in some seminaries, the resulting overwhelming gay
clergy culture will have an effect on how the laity views the priesthood
and it will have an effect on incoming vocations. Potential candidates
for the priesthood who are heterosexual will be intimidated from joining
an institution where the ethos is primarily that of a gay culture.
Anyone wondering how the church could have got itself in the mess it is
now experiencing need look no further than the pages of Roses extraordinary
book. What we are seeing today are the results of a gay priesthood being
loosed upon parishes all across the nation, where they have abused impressionable
young men they treated as fresh meat to satisfy their unnatural
sexual urgings.
False
Teaching Sabotages Aspiring Priests
Michael S. Rose examines the destructive effect of what he terms
heterodoxy on seminarians struggling to absorb and adhere to the ancient
doctrines of the church, handed down from the Apostles for 2,000 years.
Many faculty members are adverse to teaching what the Church teaches,
and some even find it onerous to hide their disdain for Catholicism,
Rose wrote. The seminarian who arrives on campus expecting to find
faculty and staff who love the Catholic faith and teach what the Church
teaches can be sadly disappointed. Among the students obstacles
to learning the authentic tenets of their faith, Rose reveals, are being
forced to read textbooks written by noted dissenters from Catholic
teachings such as theologians Richard McBrien, Edward Schillebeeckx,
Hans Kung and Charles Curran, who parrot the dogmas of Catholic
dissent. .... Many of the ideas being taught in seminaries today,
Rose wrote, go way beyond the scope of even these mainstream
errors of Modernist doctrine. Aggressive feminist theories often put forth
by religious sisters devoted to liberation theology and various incarnations
of Jungian psychology make it clear that some faculty members who are
entrusted with the formation of future priests do not support the Catholic
priesthood as the Church defines it. In fact they do not support the Church,
her hierarchy, her Eucharist, or her liturgy. Tragically, throughout
the U.S. today, men taught these heretical doctrines are spreading error,
distorting the liturgy, sowing doctrinal confusion and changing the faith
of countless Catholics.
A three-part essay How Contemporary
American Poets are Denaturing the Poem by Joan Houlihan
@ Web Del Sol:
On
the Prosing of Poetry
Before writing was invented, poetry was used to mark special occasions
and strong emotions and to burn the necessary stories the myths
and truths of a culture into the memories of the people. Mnemonic
devices such as sound, rhythm, and heightened, pictorial language, economy
of expression (epigrammatic speech that encodes many meanings
in as few words as possible) and assonance, consonance, alliteration,
parallelism, were the branding irons used for the task. As well, these
devices were incantatory, stirring primal responses to their sound and
rhythm, and creating an atmosphere for the sacred and magical. Although
spoken, poetry was not common; it was instead, a singular kind of speech,
reserved for relaying important or sacred events, ensuring that such events
would be remembered almost in a physical way, in the bodys deep
response to sound, rhythm and imagery. Speaking poetically served a purpose.
Speaking prosaically also served a purpose to negotiate everyday
reality, to speak of those things which were common to all and not worthy
of long remembrance to speak of the world in transit. Our ability
to write did not erase the distinction. It took contemporary American
poets, writing in deliberately flat prose about insignificant personal
events and feelings; and editors, publishers and critics dubbing such
anecdotes and everyday journal entries poems, to erase the
distinction. We have reached the point we are being asked to believe that
a text block, chopped randomly into flat, declarative lines, is a poem.
We are told to kneel and stare at this specimen of dead lines laid out
in its little coffin on the page, and declare it alive. What do we say?
I=N=C=O=H=
E=R=E=N=T
The need for coherence appears to be basic, perhaps even neurological.
Science has proved the human brain strives to find a pattern, an order,
a meaning in chaos. What isnt coherent, we strive to make so. It
satisfies us. Thus, before settling for separate, unconnected pieces,
beautiful as they may be, we will look hard for connections. While shapes
and colors can become untethered from their representation, or meaning,
a poem can only become fully untethered from meaning if it is without
words. This is because the smallest irreducible piece the word
retains meaning, in and out of context. A totally meaningless poem
would logically consist of a blank page. In spite of this difficulty,
some poets do manage to make extremely close approaches to the state of
meaninglessness while still using words.... In order to save us from the
Western capitalist construction called a poem, the Language Poets had
to destroy it. But two other possible reasons for writing Language Poetry
come to mind: [1] The poet cannot succesfully create a coherent poem and
so makes a virtue of his failure. [2] The poet cannot successfully create
a coherent poem and so uses poem-as-pretext for expounding critical theories
something he or she can do, and that, happy coincidence, ensures
an academic career.
The
Argument for Silence: Defining the Poet Peter Principle
The tension between career and vocation
in poetry is nowhere more obvious than in academia where poets take a
sabbatical in order to write poetry, but never take a sabbatical
from writing poetry. I believe that a certain variety of established
poet, perhaps those with a substantial number of books, would benefit
greatly from a poetry sabbatical. There is evidence of a need for poetic
silence all around us. We see it every time we read a denatured poem by
a renowned poet, usually in a renowned publication; evidence that the
enabling editors of such publications have failed in their duty to enforce
last call. For example, poets James Tate, Philip Levine and Mary Oliver
have each produced more than 16 books of poetry. Whatever has driven this
production, it is clear from the trajectory of all three poets that something
must stop it. In all three cases, a windiness, a wordiness, a kind of
poetic logorrhea can be found in their latest work in contrast to the
fire and compression in their early work. Flatlined, barely pulsing, their
latest work is being kept alive by extraordinary means: the artificial
resuscitation of continuous publication.
A two-part article on Economists
& Ecologists by Arnold Kling @ Tech Central Station:
Common
Sense and Sensibility
Economists are not well thought of these days by environmentalists.
Or so it seems from accounts such as a recent Scientific American excerpt
of Edward O. Wilsons book, The Future of Life. He characterizes
economists as narrow, myopic environmental ignoramuses.... Its true
that economists have trouble with the views of many environmentalists.
But this just reflects our frustration with the ecologists use of
the most naive and inappropriate economic models and assumptions in their
forecasts and policy prescriptions. Thats why Bjorn Lomborgs
new book The Skeptical Environmentalist is such a distinctive,
rare, and important work. In addition to sharing the ecologists
concerns about aquifers, sustainability, and global warming, Lomborg accepts
the economists paradigm. By combining economics with ecology, he
comes up with a rational, balanced analysis. Unfortunately, environmentalists
denial of the validity of economic analysis runs through much of their
criticism of Lomborgs work.... Environmentalists tend to assume
a constant relationship between inputs and outputs. If you are going to
produce X tons of grain, then the acreage of land required will be X/y,
where y is the average yield of an acre of land. Economists call this
the fixed-coefficients model, because the relationship between
acreage and grain is governed by the coefficient y. Simply put, this is
not a realistic model. In practice there are always a variety of production
techniques that use different combinations of inputs to produce the same
output. The fixed-coefficients model applies, if at all, only in the very
short run. In the long run, there is substitution and technical change.
Substitution means that producers will vary the inputs used in production,
depending on changes in the cost of various inputs. For example, if land
becomes more expensive, producers will substitute capital, labor, fertilizer,
or other resources in order to utilize the most efficient combination.
The other long-run factor is technical change. As we accumulate knowledge,
we come up with ways to produce more output with fewer resources.
Lomborgs
Lessons
Economists use interest rates to discount future benefits and costs.
Because of discounting, environmental costs that are out in the future
are given less weight than todays economic goods, including todays
environment. Ecologists suspect that economists are being short-sighted,
when in fact we are being rational. The interest rate represents the price
at which the economy can trade off future output for present output. What
discounting says is that tomorrows output is cheap in
todays terms. Undertaking a large expense today to avoid the same
expense tomorrow is inefficient. Ecologists worry that we are consuming
too much now, while depriving future generations of resources and leaving
them with large unpaid environmental bills. Economists, on the other hand,
argue that by investing in science and research we are providing a legacy
of wealth to future generations. The assets that they inherit in the form
of capital and know-how will be much greater than any environmental liabilities.
In The Skeptical Environmentalist, Bjorn Lomborg makes a
strong case against the Kyoto Protocol, which attempts to restrict carbon
dioxide emissions in order to forestall global warming. Even as one who
accepts the thesis of global warming, Lomborg suggests that the Kyoto
Protocol is a bad idea. Lomborg estimates a finite (albeit large) cost
to global warming. Also, because this cost will be borne in the future,
he applies a discount rate. If the present value of the cost of global
warming is finite, then it becomes possible to estimate the benefits of
policies to forestall global warming. Next, it follows that we can compare
benefits to costs. It is on the basis of these cost-benefit comparisons
that Lomborg is able to show that the Kyoto Protocol approach is unwise.
A two-part article @ Salon, by Andrew
OHehir, on J. R. R. Tolkiens Lord of the Rings:
The
book of the century
Its unwise to read The Lord of the Rings as allegory
in any strict sense, but this commonplace personal odyssey, one shared
by millions in the modern age, is strikingly echoed in its plot. Frodo,
the child-size hero, must leave his beloved Shire and travel into Saurons
domain of Mordor, with its slag heaps, its permanent pall of smoke, its
slave-driven industries. When he returns after much danger and difficulty,
he discovers that the malicious wizard Saruman as Shippey points
out, a techno-Utopian who began with good intentions has industrialized
the Shire itself, cutting down its trees, replacing its hobbit-holes with
brick slums and factories and poisoning its rivers. In this regard, then,
The Lord of the Rings belongs to the literature of the Industrial
Revolution, a lament for the destruction of Englands green
and pleasant land that belongs somewhere on the same shelf with
Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence and William Blake. But Tolkien saw something
wilder and stranger in the Sarehole of his childhood, and in himself:
a fading but still tangible connection to the distant, mythic past. If
his Shire hobbits are the West Midlands rural bourgeoisie of 1895 or so,
they have been catapulted backward into a world where they themselves
are the anachronisms, a realm of elves, dwarves (Tolkien insisted on this
nonstandard but ancient plural, although he would have preferred dwarrows),
wizards, dragons, goblins and black sorcerers.
A
curiously very great book
It is not merely the scale of mythic invention or the grand storytelling
that distinguishes it but also its tragic vision, the profound melancholy
mentioned by Lewis. Few if any heroic quests have ever had such a sense
of human frailty and weakness; although Frodo brings the Ring all the
way to the Cracks of Doom where Sauron forged it, in the end he is overcome
by temptation and claims it for his own. He is redeemed only by chance,
or by divine grace, which in Tolkiens world comes to the same thing.
He has shown mercy to the treacherous and miserable Gollum, who becomes
the accidental agent of Frodos and the worlds salvation. But
Frodo, the books ostensible hero, fails in his quest and is left,
like the knight who guards the Holy Grail, with a grievous wound that
can never heal (an Arthurian parallel Shippey has not noticed). Even the
victory wrought by the Rings destruction is a sad affair, in many
respects closer to defeat. Much of the magic and mystery drains out of
Middle-earth after Saurons fall, leaving behind an ordinary, only
slightly prehistoric realm dominated by human beings. Tolkiens most
beloved characters Gandalf, the High-Elves Elrond and Galadriel
and the hobbits Bilbo and Frodo, both of them indelibly marked by the
Ring depart over the western seas to a paradisiacal nowhere that
none of us on this shore will ever see. Tolkien liked to present himself
to friends and readers as a contented fireside hobbit, fond of tobacco,
simple food and late mornings in bed, and there can be no doubt, reading
his letters, that he was immensely gratified by the outpouring of love
and enthusiasm his work engendered. (And immensely irritated by some of
it; when a woman wanted to name her Siamese cats after his characters,
he replied that they were the fauna of Mordor.) But in reality
he was a strange and complicated man who wrote a strange and sad book,
whose complex of meanings we will likely never determine.
A classic two-part article,
by Bernard Lewis, with a recent related essay, in The Atlantic:
The
Roots of Muslim Rage (Part One)
Like every other civilization known to human history, the Muslim
world in its heyday saw itself as the center of truth and enlightenment,
surrounded by infidel barbarians whom it would in due course enlighten
and civilize. But between the different groups of barbarians there was
a crucial difference. The barbarians to the east and the south were polytheists
and idolaters, offering no serious threat and no competition at all to
Islam. In the north and west, in contrast, Muslims from an early date
recognized a genuine rival a competing world religion, a distinctive
civilization inspired by that religion, and an empire that, though much
smaller than theirs, was no less ambitious in its claims and aspirations.
This was the entity known to itself and others as Christendom, a term
that was long almost identical with Europe. The struggle between these
rival systems has now lasted for some fourteen centuries. It began with
the advent of Islam, in the seventh century, and has continued virtually
to the present day. It has consisted of a long series of attacks and counterattacks,
jihads and crusades, conquests and reconquests.... For the past three
hundred years, since the failure of the second Turkish siege of Vienna
in 1683 and the rise of the European colonial empires in Asia and Africa,
Islam has been on the defensive, and the Christian and post-Christian
civilization of Europe and her daughters has brought the whole world,
including Islam, within its orbit.
The
Roots of Muslim Rage (Part Two)
The accusations are familiar. We of the West are accused of sexism,
racism, and imperialism, institutionalized in patriarchy and slavery,
tyranny and exploitation. To these charges, and to others as heinous,
we have no option but to plead guilty not as Americans, nor yet
as Westerners, but simply as human beings, as members of the human race.
In none of these sins are we the only sinners, and in some of them we
are very far from being the worst. The treatment of women in the Western
world, and more generally in Christendom, has always been unequal and
often oppressive, but even at its worst it was rather better than the
rule of polygamy and concubinage that has otherwise been the almost universal
lot of womankind on this planet.... Slavery is today universally denounced
as an offense against humanity, but within living memory it has been practiced
and even defended as a necessary institution, established and regulated
by divine law. The peculiarity of the peculiar institution, as Americans
once called it, lay not in its existence but in its abolition. Westerners
were the first to break the consensus of acceptance and to outlaw slavery,
first at home, then in the other territories they controlled, and finally
wherever in the world they were able to exercise power or influence
in a word, by means of imperialism.
What
Went Wrong?
Muslim modernizers by reform or revolution concentrated
their efforts in three main areas: military, economic, and political.
The results achieved were, to say the least, disappointing. The quest
for victory by updated armies brought a series of humiliating defeats.
The quest for prosperity through development brought in some countries
impoverished and corrupt economies in recurring need of external aid,
in others an unhealthy dependence on a single resource oil. And
even this was discovered, extracted, and put to use by Western ingenuity
and industry, and is doomed, sooner or later, to be exhausted, or, more
probably, superseded, as the international community grows weary of a
fuel that pollutes the land, the sea, and the air wherever it is used
or transported, and that puts the world economy at the mercy of a clique
of capricious autocrats. Worst of all are the political results: the long
quest for freedom has left a string of shabby tyrannies, ranging from
traditional autocracies to dictatorships that are modern only in their
apparatus of repression and indoctrination.... It was bad enough for Muslims
to feel poor and weak after centuries of being rich and strong, to lose
the position of leadership that they had come to regard as their right,
and to be reduced to the role of followers of the West. But the twentieth
century, particularly the second half, brought further humiliation
the awareness that they were no longer even the first among followers
but were falling back in a lengthening line of eager and more successful
Westernizers, notably in East Asia. The rise of Japan had been an encouragement
but also a reproach. The later rise of other Asian economic powers brought
only reproach. The proud heirs of ancient civilizations had gotten used
to hiring Western firms to carry out tasks of which their own contractors
and technicians were apparently incapable. Now Middle Eastern rulers and
businessmen found themselves inviting contractors and technicians from
Korea only recently emerged from Japanese colonial rule
to perform these tasks. Following is bad enough; limping in the rear is
far worse. By all the standards that matter in the modern world
economic development and job creation, literacy, educational and scientific
achievement, political freedom and respect for human rights what
was once a mighty civilization has indeed fallen low.
A three-part article on some current
thinking on the Koran in The Atlantic:
What
is the Koran? (Part 1)
Some of the parchment pages in the Yemeni hoard seemed to date back
to the seventh and eighth centuries A.D., or Islams first two centuries
they were fragments, in other words, of perhaps the oldest Korans
in existence. Whats more, some of these fragments revealed small
but intriguing aberrations from the standard Koranic text. Such aberrations,
though not surprising to textual historians, are troublingly at odds with
the orthodox Muslim belief that the Koran as it has reached us today is
quite simply the perfect, timeless, and unchanging Word of God.
What
is the Koran? (Part 2)
Deviating from the orthodox interpretation of the Koran, says the
Algerian Mohammed Arkoun, a professor emeritus of Islamic thought at the
University of Paris, is a very sensitive business
with major implications. Millions and millions of people refer to
the Koran daily to explain their actions and to justify their aspirations,
Arkoun says. This scale of reference is much larger than it has
ever been before.
What
is the Koran? (Part 3)
Gerd-R. Puin speaks with disdain about the traditional willingness,
on the part of Muslim and Western scholars, to accept the conventional
understanding of the Koran. The Koran claims for itself that it
is mubeen, or clear, he says. But
if you look at it, you will notice that every fifth sentence or so simply
doesnt make sense. Many Muslims and Orientalists will
tell you otherwise, of course, but the fact is that a fifth of the Koranic
text is just incomprehensible. This is what has caused the traditional
anxiety regarding translation. If the Koran is not comprehensible
if it cant even be understood in Arabic then its not
translatable. People fear that. And since the Koran claims repeatedly
to be clear but obviously is not as even speakers of Arabic will
tell you there is a contradiction. Something else must be going
on.
A three-part series Driving
a Wedge in the Boston Globe:
Why
bin Laden plot relied on Saudi hijackers
Senior US officials and Saudi Interior Ministry officials involved
with the investigation into the involvement of Saudi nationals in the
attacks say they now believe bin Ladens Al Qaeda actively sought
out young Saudi volunteers from this region for their jihad.
The investigation is beginning to reveal a picture of how bin Laden, a
native of the Saudi southwest, exploited the young hijackers by playing
off the region's deep tribal affiliations, itseconomic dis-enfranchisement,
anditsown burning brand of Wahhabi fundamentalism which the kingdom's
religious hierarchy fosters in the schools.
Saudi
schools fuel anti-US anger
US diplomats and Saudi specialists say Saudi schools are the foundation
of the broader society in which the House of Saud has for decades tolerated
extremists within the religious hierarchy to set a tone in schools
as well as on national television and radio airways of open bigotry
toward non-Muslims, contempt even for those non-Sunni Muslims from other
branches of the faith such as the Shiite, and of virulent anti-Americanism.
This, US and Saudi observers here say, has been part of an unofficial
deal: The kingdom gave the religious establishment control of the schools
as long as it didnt question the legitimacy of the monarchys
power. The United States went along with this tacit agreement as long
as the oil kept flowing, its troops stayed in the country, and the House
of Saud remained on the throne.
Doubts
are cast on the viability of Saudi monarchy for long term
The House of Saud the 30,000-member ruling family headed
by 3,000 princes has long been so riddled with corruption that
even Crown Prince Abdullah has said the culture of royal excess has to
come to an end. It has ruled over the kingdom with documented human rights
abuses and, as one Western diplomat put it, a form of gender apartheid
for women. Democracy has never been part of the equation. These palace
indulgences have been tolerated by Washington for far too long, critics
say, because of a US policy dependent on Saudi Arabia's vast oil
reserves, Riyadhs purchase of an estimated $4 billion a year worth
of US weapons, and its pivotal role as host to 5,000 American troops.
Since Franklin Delano Roosevelt agreed a half century ago to defend the
kingdom in exchange for ready access to oil, the balance between US interests
and US ideals in Saudi Arabia has always tipped in favor of Washingtons
economic and strategic interests.
A three-part series on Environmentalism
by Diane Alden @ NewsMax:
The
Green Matrix (Part One)
The people who rule the green matrix seek to centrally plan our
lives. They have adopted the same philosophy as those who drove the peasants
off the land in Russia. They are of the same mind as the Red Guard in
China. They are willing to sacrifice science, the truth and freedom, as
well as the well-being of humans and the environment, in order to promote
their utopian vision for the world a vision that considers man
a cancer on the land. Strangely, the term green matrix comes
up in many of their studies, claims and policy papers. But this isnt
a movie. It is the new totalitarian vision.
The
Green Matrix (Part Two): They Blinded Us With Science
The more serious problem, however, is that over the years agencies
have been co-opted by those with a much larger agenda in mind. It is not
just about listing one species and shutting down one or two forests for
public use, i.e., managing federal lands. As the greens say,
Think globally and act locally. That mantra is at the core
and heart of U.S. environmental policy. It is fair to say that in the
Forest Service and Fish and Wildlife Service science got dumped
years ago. It was a process that began in the 70s but received official
imprimatur under Bill Clinton in 1993. At that time, philosophy replaced
science. Conservation biology became the science,
and ecosystem management and precautionary principle
the tools. The end game was to reconnect ecosystems from the
Yukon to Mexico.
The
Green Matrix (Part 3): Weird Science Think Globally
Modern environmentalism has become the best single tool to fulfill
the fondest wishes of the international control freaks and central planners.
It is the new ideological agenda replacing communism and capitalism. It
is, in fact, a lethal mix of both. Alan Caruba of the National Anxiety
Center calls it fascilism. In implementing the various environmental
wish lists, we dont get cleaner air and water. But we do get a new
religion and a new economic system. In addition, the old time religion
is being replaced by a green Zen Buddhism on one hand, and tyranny and
repression on the other. If you follow the logic of ecosystem
management, that is where we're headed as we wend our way through the
holistic approach for the collective good.
|