Charlton Heston, jihad sailor, etc.

Farewell, Charlton Heston

THE SCRAPBOOK notes with particular sadness the death last week of Charlton Heston, age 84. We have a proprietary interest in the great actor, since Heston was a faithful subscriber to THE WEEKLY STANDARD and once wrote us a delightful letter to the editor (May 19, 1997), agreeing with our reviewer's pan of a book claiming that somebody else wrote Shakespeare's plays. Most of the letter, though, was an explanation of why actors love the Bard. ("Shakespeare leaps alive in air, in the spoken sound of his words. Only actors really understand this, though audiences sense it subliminally, in performance. .  .  . He created those men and women to live on a stage, seen in light and sudden dark, heard in cries and whispers.")

In his later years Charlton Heston's politics got equal billing with his long and storied career in show business. He was an early and ardent supporter of the civil rights movement, picketing a segregated theater that would not admit black customers to see El Cid (1961) and, as he liked to remember, standing on the podium behind Martin Luther King when he delivered his "I have a dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial.

Later, as a defender of free speech, he was a caustic critic of political correctness ("tyranny with manners") and for several years served as president, and public face and voice, of the National Rifle Association. Like another famous actor with an interest in politics, Heston was a fair and fearless chief executive of the Screen Actors Guild.

Above all, Heston was an actor, with a craftsman's devotion to his work and an artist's dedication to public performance. He began his career on the New York stage but, in the early 1950s, found fame in Hollywood. Hardly anyone thinks of Moses anymore without picturing Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments (1956) and he won the Academy Award for Best Actor in Ben-Hur. For many years he specialized in epics-- El Cid (1961), The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965), Khartoum (1966), Julius Caesar (1970)--character roles-- Planet of the Apes (1968), The Omega Man (1971), Airport 1975 (1974)--and even a cult classic or two ( Soylent Green, 1973). But our particular favorite is Touch of Evil (1958) where, under Orson Welles's direction, Heston played a Mexican narcotics agent in a battle of wills with a malevolent sheriff (played by Welles) in a scruffy border town. Touch of Evil neatly combined Heston's understated skills as a player with his emphatic physical presence in a film noir masterpiece.

The last of the old-style movie stars, Charlton Heston kept on acting--on stage, in movies, on television, even doing voice-overs--practically up to the end, and professional success never spoiled the character of a man whose personal decency and loyalty to principle were his signature roles.

Beware Sailors Named 'Jihad'

Last week in London, FBI director Robert Mueller mentioned a case that caught our eye: the strange story of Hassan Abu-jihaad. Abu-jihaad was convicted by a federal jury in early March of providing material support to terrorists and disclosing classified national defense information while he was a U.S. Navy sailor serving on the USS Benfold, in the Persian Gulf.

Hassan Abu-jihaad didn't always go by that name. He was born Paul R. Hall and he lived in Phoenix and worked for UPS until the mid-'90s. Then, in 1997, Hall converted to Islam, took the name Abu-jihaad ("father of Holy War"), and, eight months later, joined the Navy. In January 1998, the Navy granted him a secret security clearance and for the next four years he was stationed on the guided-missile destroyer Benfold, where he served as a signalman. In 2000, Abu-jihaad began communicating with an extremist website in London, Azzam Publications, using both his private Hotmail account and his Navy dot-mil email.

He praised Osama bin Laden and cheered the bombing of the USS Cole. Shortly after that October 2000 attack, he began passing information about his battle group's movements and pointing out weaknesses that could be exploited. In one particularly chilling email, he described the group's formation during a planned trip through the Strait of Hormuz and noted that they would be particularly vulnerable to "a small craft with RPG"--rocket-propelled grenades.

But that's not the most disturbing part of the case. What's most troubling is that Abu-jihaad was honorably discharged in 2002. (He went back to work for UPS in Phoenix and began planning land-based terrorist attacks with another Muslim friend.) And no one in the U.S. government would have been the wiser were it not for British law enforcement. While investigating a terror suspect in 2003, the Brits stumbled upon a computer disk that mentioned Abu-jihaad. They passed it on to the FBI and only then did the pursuit of Abu-jihaad begin. He could spend up to 25 years in federal prison.

Give This Man Another Pulitzer

Sure, he already has two. But there are few reporters more deserving than the New York Times's former Baghdad bureau chief John F. Burns, who spent five years covering Iraq before he was transferred to London. His long experience in war-torn countries has given Burns keen insight on the stakes in Iraq as well as America's global responsibilities. Here he was on Charlie Rose the other day:

The United States and its predominant economic, political, and military power in the world have been the single greatest force for stability in the world, such as it is now, certainly since the Second World War. If the outcome in Iraq were to destroy the credibility of American power, to destroy America's willingness to use its power in the world; to achieve good; to fight back against totalitarianism, authoritarianism, gross human rights abuses. .  .  . It would be a very dark day.

Couldn't have said it better ourselves.

Holy Courvoisier, Batman!

Understatement of the week: "When you're having dinner with customers, it's normal to have a drink."

--U.S. Postal Service spokesman Gerry McKiernan responding to a Government Accountability Office report which revealed postmen had spent $13,500 in government funds at a 2006 dinner at a Ruth's Chris Steak House in Orlando, Florida, that included, according to the report, more than "200 appetizers and over $3,000 of alcohol, including more than 40 bottles of wine costing more than $50 each and brand-name liquor such as Courvoisier, Belvedere and Johnny Walker Gold."

Congratulations, Michael Ramirez!

Speaking of well-deserved Pulitzers: In an event of surpassing rarity, the board has given a leading conservative his due, for the second time. We refer to Michael Ramirez of Investor's Business Daily, whose superlative political cartooning was recognized by the Pulitzer board in 1994, and again this year. Ramirez's work, which was justly recognized for its "detailed artistry," appears frequently in these pages. Two tips of THE SCRAPBOOK homburg to Michael.