The sweeping Republican victories in the midterm elections have yielded the customary progressive analysis: Americans are not just fearful and irrational, they are angry and downright dangerous as well. And as everybody knows, when non-progressives get mad—when they suffer a mass temper tantrum, or vote their hatreds, or lash out against some unidentified “other”—the long dark night of national shame ensues. Already, responsible observers, recognized experts, and prominent newspaper columnists are publicly worried about being targeted by right-wing crazies, whipped into an ideological frenzy by the fire-breathing rhetoric of Fox News, Rep. Michele Bachmann, or the Wall Street Journal (take your pick).
The trouble with this scenario is that it is not only patently untrue, but it has never been true. Yes, The Scrapbook is aware that the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, harbored grievances against the federal government; and to some progressive minds, the pro-life movement is indistinguishable from the handful of terrorists who have attacked abortion clinics or shot physicians. But the sad truth is that most political violence in the United States—from the campus bombings, burnings, and killings of the 1960s and ’70s to the European-style rioting at IMF/World Bank meetings—has its origins on the left. Lest we forget, the man who shot John F. Kennedy was a committed Marxist and an -officer of his local chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. The man who shot Robert Kennedy was a Palestinian exile who targeted Kennedy because of his support for Israel.
This basic fact of modern political life is nowhere more evident at the moment than in Europe. Two countries are enduring political violence at the moment—France and Great Britain—and it is not being perpetrated by conservatives, free-marketers, or supporters of the war on terror. In France, students and labor unions have sought to shut down the country and paralyze Paris because the center-right Sarkozy government has proposed to raise the French retirement age from 60 to 62. And London was the scene last week of a mob attack on an office block that contains the headquarters of the Conservative party. The grievance? A government proposal to lower teaching budgets as part of its austerity program, and to raise tuition fees for university students to about $14,000 per year.
The student march in London was largely peaceful and, we are told, not intended to be violent. But a radical element within the company of marchers was determined to be violent—and were they ever: The glass front of the Millbank Tower was shattered, hundreds of rioters swarmed into the building, vandalized the interior, and held sway on the roof, dropping heavy projectiles onto a knot of outnumbered policemen. The rioters, in the aftermath, were pleased with what they had accomplished: Government policies justify violence, several explained, and one Cambridge undergraduate commented that since nobody had been killed, and only property was stolen or destroyed, no real harm was done.
Let us hope that this will concentrate minds on the left in Britain—and perhaps in France—and cause them to worry less about their democratically elected governments’ attempts to put their fiscal house in order and more about what’s brewing within their own ranks. And the same goes for their progressive brethren in America.
Lost in Translation
Last week the Washington Post reported that 17 Northern Virginia residents “had excitedly prepared for the hajj, the pilgrimage that is sacred to devout Muslims,” by hiring a California travel agency to arrange their tickets and get visas for their passports. The package, however, scheduled for overnight delivery to the Dar AlNoor mosque in Manassas, never arrived. It turned out that it wasn’t lost, as UPS initially claimed, but had been seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. “We cooperate with government agencies on security matters,” explained a UPS spokesman. Given the recently thwarted terrorist plot originating in Yemen and targeting Chicago synagogues that had sought to use UPS and Federal Express as delivery mechanisms for explosive devices, it is hardly surprising that express mail services are on a higher state of alert.
While some observers, like CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper, wondered if this wasn’t an instance where authorities had profiled Muslims, it is worth remembering that after the Yemen plot the FBI warned that American mosques, as well as synagogues and churches, were possible targets.
At any rate, the package eventually reached its intended destination, but only after “all but one of the travelers had missed their flight.” At this point, the customs agency again intervened, this time to buy $34,000 worth of replacement tickets to ensure the Northern Virginians got to Mecca in time for the hajj.
It is obvious why this emotional rollercoaster of a story would be of interest to a Muslim majority audience in a place like Egypt, where it was picked up by the website Al-Youm al-Sabaa—which strangely forgot to translate the happy ending. Instead, the headline read: “Enmity to Islam prevents 17 Americans from the hajj.”
The ensuing readers’ comments appended to the story were predictable. “Where are the rights of Muslims in America?” Others were more lamentable: “UPS is a Jewish company and the principal container with all the letters and packages of the Arabs is in Tel Aviv.”
It’s not clear why a news organization, especially one like Al-Youm al-Sabaa that describes itself as liberal, would change the entire point of a feel-good story about the United States and Islam, but it does not augur well for soft power.
Happy Birthday, ‘City Journal’
A tip of The Scrapbook’s homburg to our friends at the Manhattan Institute, whose handsome and influential quarterly, City Journal, is celebrating its 20th anniversary this week.
City Journal is perhaps best known for having done the intellectual spadework that enabled Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s successful reclamation of a great American metropolis. More than that, the journal came along at a time when the idea of city life had become synonymous with crime, homelessness, rioting, and decay to insist that through creative policy -making, courageous political leadership, and sound governance our cities could again become cradles of civilization and urbanity.
For that and much amusement and edification along the way, we congratulate editor Brian C. Anderson, his predecessor Myron Magnet, and the many talented writers who have graced the pages of City -Journal. Check them out, if you don’t already subscribe, at www.city-journal.org, and raise a glass to their next 20 years.
[img nocaption float="center" width="480" height="640" render="<%photoRenderType%>"]2187[/img]
Celebrating Conquest
The SCRAPBOOK is glad to report that Robert Conquest, the heroic poet, diplomat, and historian who now works at the Hoover Institution, has been awarded the 2010 -Truman-Reagan Medal by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. Conquest’s books on the crimes of Soviet Communism remain authoritative: The Nation Killers (about -Stalin’s ethnic cleansing), The Harvest of Sorrow (about Stalin’s war on his own peasantry in the early 1930s), and The Great Terror (about Stalin’s purges and show trials).
Conquest is also an underrated poet and an underrated aphorist. (Conquest’s First Law: “Everybody is reactionary on subjects he knows about.”) It is worth remembering that even his magisterial histories were long underrated, too. They were ignored. They were sneered at as exaggerations by some of Conquest’s less informed fellow-traveling colleagues.
According to Conquest’s friend, the late novelist Kingsley Amis, shortly after the Berlin Wall fell, one of Conquest’s editors suggested bringing out a new edition of The Great Terror, although he confessed to being uneasy about the title and asked Conquest if he would consider changing it.
“Well, perhaps I Told You So, You F—ing Fools,” Conquest replied.
Sentences We Didn’t Finish
"Other than perhaps the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, there were few places as despondent on election night as the Manhattan offices of the - Nation, the 146-year-old journal of fiery leftist opinion. A group of about 15 writers, editors and interns sat around a conference table and watched the results as they drowned their sorrows in bottles of Trader Joe’s red wine. Even the friendly voices on MSNBC proved little solace . . . ” ( New York Times, -November 8).
Correction
A rueful thank you to the many sportsmen among our readers who wrote to point out that, luckily for Harry Whittington, Dick Cheney’s .28-gauge shotgun was loaded with birdshot, not buckshot as we mistakenly wrote (“The Captain Ahabs of the Washington Post,” October 16).