I’m here, as promised. I’m starting out by catching up on the past couple days of Instapundit, and the consistently good stuff that Glenn finds and links to. I’ll be listening to today’s Penn Jillette Show later, via the podcast, and I’ve got “Building on Ground Zero” and the first episode of “The Path to 9/11” on the TiVo. So much good stuff to read already, I’m hoping I can manage to leave some time to do a little writing myself.
Meghan Cox Gurdon:
The cruelty and implacability of the Islamic terrorists has made ordinary life seem fragile not in such a way that you appreciate each passing golden moment, but in a way that jolts you awake at night with strangled thoughts of whether everything you know and love will be taken away. But worse is finding that in this situation where, like our grandparents, we do face an obvious, common, and determined enemy, there is such self-loathing amongst our countrymen. When I hear people phoning C-SPAN to explain that 9/11 was an “inside job” by the Bush administration, or that the United States is to blame for “stirring up a hornet’s nest,” when the swarm was already upon us, it seems to me that national unity is impossible. Of all September 11th’s grim legacies, this seems to me the saddest.
Yes indeed.
James Lileks:
If 9/11 had really changed us, there’d be a 150-story building on the site of the World Trade Center today. It would have a classical memorial in the plaza with allegorical figures representing Sorrow and Resolve, and a fountain watched over by stern stone eagles. Instead there’s a pit, and arguments over the usual muted dolorous abstraction approved by the National Association of Grief Counselors. The Empire State Building took 18 months to build. During the Depression. We could do that again, but we don’t. And we don’t seem interested in asking why.
Mark Steyn:
In theory, if you’d wanted to construct an enemy least likely to appeal to the progressive Left, wife-beating gay-bashing theocrats would surely be it. But Islamism turned out to be the ne plus ultra of multiculti diversity-celebration — for what more demonstrates the boundlessness of one’s “tolerance” than by tolerating the intolerant. The Europeans’ fetishization of the Palestinians — whereby the more depraved the suicide bombers are the more brutalized they must have been by the Israelis — has, in effect, been globalized.
Also courtesy of Glenn, moving articles by Michael Ledeen, Ed Cone, and Kenneth Anderson.
More coming here soon I hope.
I’m taking a day off from work next Monday, and plan to spend the day reading blog editorials and memorial posts as I’ve done in recent years, reflecting, thinking, and hopefully also writing a bit here.
I’ve been finding much insightful discussion and commentary on Pajamas Media’s excellent Blog Week in Review podcast (one of three podcasts I currently listen to regularly, together with the Glenn and Helen Show and Penn Jillette Show), and am looking forward to listening to the September 8th edition, whose topic is the fifth anniversary of the September 11th, 2001 attacks. I’m also currently midway through watching last year’s Discovery Channel documentary “The Flight That Fought Back,” which I hope to finish later today.
It is vitally important to me that we take the intent and consequences of the September 11th, 2001 attacks seriously, and summon all the will we have to work for the survival and health of this magnificent, precious civilization of ours. I must say I feel deeply worried about our evident lack of cultural confidence, by our seeming desire to believe the seductive idea that there is no danger, and by the attacks’ apparent lack of impact on certain Americans’ scornful, derisive, and to me seemingly suicidal pre-9/11 rhetoric toward contemporary American culture and Western civilization.
What Bill Whittle said on the subject in January goes for me: “When it comes to cultural suicide, I’m aginn’ it.” We seem to be gazing pathetically at our navels when we ought to be clapping like furies. I only hope that we will come to realize what’s gone wrong in time to reverse this worrisome state of affairs.
Best wishes folks. More again soon.
This story has been deservedly getting a good deal of attention lately. Thirty-nine-year-old Iranian-American success story Anousheh Ansari, who with her family sponsored the Ansari X-Prize competition that Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne team won in 2004, is about to become the world’s first female space tourist on September 18th — something it’s exceedingly unlikely she’d ever have been able to achieve in her native Iran, due not only to technical and economic limitations, but to cultural restrictions on the choices available to women as well.
The front page of the X-Prize Foundation website says Ansari will be blogging the experience from space.
Good for her, I say, and good for this new era of space travel that we’ve begun to see unfold. Three cheers for freedom, science, and the human spirit of adventure!
UPDATE 9-16: Anousheh’s weblog can be found at http://spaceblog.xprize.org.
A deeply-bowed, indebted tip of the hat to Instapundit for pointing this article out. It is without a doubt one of the best pieces of work I have had the good fortune of reading in a long while, and I’m so glad not to have missed it. By all means, please do “read the whole thing” as Glenn suggests!
IN Tehran in June, several thousand people held a peaceful demonstration calling for legal changes that would give a woman’s testimony in court equal value to a man’s. The demonstrators, most of them women, were attacked with tear gas and beaten with batons by men and women from Iran’s State Security Forces, according to Amnesty International.
Iranian women may not travel without their husband’s permission but they are allowed to wield a truncheon against other women.
Do you think women in Western countries marched in solidarity with the Iranian women demonstrators? Of course not. Do you think there are posters and graffiti at universities condemning the Iranian President? Of course not. You know, without needing to go there, that any graffiti at universities will be condemning George W. Bush, not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. (I concede Bush is easier to spell.)
You know, before you get there, that at the Melbourne Writers Festival starting this weekend the principal hate figures are going to be Bush and John Howard. You know there will be many sympathetic references to David Hicks but probably none to Ashraf Kolhari, an Iranian mother of four who has been in jail for five years for allegedly having sex outside marriage and, until last week, who was under sentence of death by stoning.
Thank goddess, as they used to say: a few Western feminists have begun to wonder why women who once marched for women’s rights are marching alongside people who would take away even the most basic of those rights.
It has bothered me for a long while now that Western feminists seem to have been largely and conspicuously silent on issues of women’s rights in the Muslim world, and on the subject of precious advances in that arena that have been made and ought to continue to be made in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. Ironically, such feminists have often chosen to instead focus their ire on the very country and culture whose efforts have made most of those recent liberating advances possible. It does seem to me that Western feminism has taken a passive and obedient back seat to multiculturalism’s demand that we pander to notions of cultural equivalence, which I find has worrisome implications for women elsewhere in the world and for the future success of freedom at large. I sincerely hope we’ll start to hear more from corageous, independent-minded feminists like Pamela.
Bill Whittle is back at the presses again with latest essays, “Rafts” and “The Web of Trust”. As usual, I found both to be stirring and right on target. I’m greatly looking forward to watching his new book project, “An American Civilization”, take shape.
Glenn and Helen have another great podcast interview/discussion up with Austin Bay and Jim Dunnigan. Springing off from the recent news regarding the British terror busts and Israel-Lebanon/Hezbollah conflict, they discuss data gathering technology and the balance between privacy concerns vs. antiterrorism efforts, cycles of Islamic fundamentalism, and prospects for the region. Truly great stuff, as always seems to be the case when they get Jim and Austin on the show. Don’t miss it!
Things finally having let up a bit in my work life, it looks like I may actually be able to set aside some time to start blogging here again. — I certainly hope so! After starting this project a little over a year ago, I’ve still got plenty of ideas queued up and ready to write about, and have been looking forward to getting back to it. I don’t have a particular schedule in mind yet, but will try to start writing and posting again as I can find moments in which to do so. I’ve been enjoying lots of good reading and listening material lately, so may start with a bit of “linkblogging”. Stay tuned!
