Steyn on the disappearance of 'Alms for Jihad'

Creeping one way multiculturalism is so normal today that one hardly notices. But Cambridge University Press's ignoble decision to pulp Alms for Jihad and take the extraordinary step of asking libraries around the world to remove it from their shelves, without so much as an effort to defend against libel charges threatened by someone who, on pretty good evidence, is a solid part of the wealthy Saudi funders of jihad and virulent Islamism around the world - well, that is important.

One thing CUP's unseemly-eager surrender especially signals is the direction that this kind of one way multiculturalism takes Britain. An ever more illiberal Britain, gradually shutting down its own liberal institutions through the manipulation by illiberals of the very mechanisms of its liberalism - yet loudly announcing how liberal it is and, as supposed evidence of that liberalism, pointing to the use of its liberal institutions to stifle dissent from its multiculturalism. Remarkable. It really is one's social and cultural constitution-as-suicide pact.

Yet, to be fair to Cambridge University Press, English libel law makes it nearly impossible to fight off a determined billionaire. Each defendent can be picked off separately. On the other hand, there is no evidence that Cambridge UP would have fought back in any case.

Mark Steyn (the full article is worth reading because it gives essential background to the story of jihadist funding.) Here.

***
from:

Mark Steyn
Orange County Register
August 5, 2007

The Vanishing Jihad Exposes

... So why would the Cambridge University Press, one of the most respected publishers on the planet, absolve Khalid bin Mahfouz, his family, his businesses and his charities to a degree that neither (to pluck at random) the U.S., French, Albanian, Swiss and Pakistani governments would be prepared to do?

Because English libel law overwhelmingly favors the plaintiff. And like many other big-shot Saudis, Sheikh Mahfouz has become very adept at using foreign courts to silence American authors – in effect, using distant jurisdictions to nullify the First Amendment. He may be a wronged man, but his use of what the British call "libel chill" is designed not to vindicate his good name but to shut down the discussion, which is why Cambridge University Press made no serious attempt to mount a defense. He's one of the richest men on the planet, and they're an academic publisher with very small profit margins. But, even if you've got a bestseller, your pockets are unlikely to be deep enough: "House Of Saud, House Of Bush" did boffo biz with the anti-Bush crowd in America, but there's no British edition – because Sheikh Mahfouz had indicated he was prepared to spend what it takes to challenge it in court, and Random House decided it wasn't worth it.

We've gotten used to one-way multiculturalism: The world accepts that you can't open an Episcopal or Congregational church in Jeddah or Riyadh, but every week the Saudis can open radical mosques and madrassahs and pro-Saudi think-tanks in London and Toronto and Dearborn, Mich., and Falls Church, Va. And their global reach extends a little further day by day, inch by inch, in the lengthening shadows, as the lights go out one by one around the world.
Suppose you've got a manuscript about the Saudis. Where are you going to shop it? Think Cambridge University Press will be publishing anything anytime soon?

Marianne Faithfull's Broken English (1979) dedicated to ...

Ulrike Meinhof, of the 1970s German terrorist Red Army Faction and Baader-Meinhof Gang? That's what the Wikipedia article on Faithfull says, here. (The Wikipedia entry on Broken English simply says "inspired by.") It is a great album, even so. I happen to prefer the later album, Strange Weather, but there's no getting around the edgy power of Broken English. I've also listened to Faithfull's interpretations of Brecht and Weill, and she is really quite outstanding - a real understanding of the material.

Might success in Iraq benefit the Democrats?

Byron York lays out succinctly the dilemma facing the Democrats as the party-in-opposition (to the executive, at least) in the midst of a war. Here at The Hill:

The Iraq debate that we’ve been watching this year has been about two bets.

After false starts and misplaced hopes in 2004, and 2005, and 2006, George W. Bush is betting his surge strategy will facilitate the political progress that could bring a semblance of stability to Iraq.Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) are betting the surge will fail. It’s as simple as that. If Bush wins his bet, Iraq will be a better place, the Middle East will be a better place, and America will be a safer place.

But Reid and Pelosi lose if Bush wins. Given the position they have staked out for themselves, the best possible outcome is for Gen. David Petraeus to give a downbeat report on the surge when he comes before Congress in September. That would give tremendous momentum to those who want the quickest possible U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. It’s the dilemma of being in the opposition in wartime. By betting so much of their political capital on the issue, Reid and Pelosi have become invested in U.S. failure. A U.S. success would throw a wrench in their plans.

York goes on to say Democrats might have avoided this unfortunate position had they waited to give the surge a chance to show itself for better or worse. And there's this much-noticed Washington Post report of Democrats in Congress worried that we might indeed be winning militarily, here. I have a different question, though.

Democrats have, of course, treated the Iraq war as a replay of Vietnam. Because of their political DNA, perhaps, a congenital inability to comprehend things any other way or see it through any other lens. In that narrative, the role of the opposition is to get the US out by any and all means. And, having got the US out, a grateful electorate will presumably give them its support.

But is this necessarily how it works? Consider the quite stunning reversal of fortune of Churchill and the Tories the very moment WWII ended. An apparently altogether ungrateful electorate promptly turned them out of office, in favor of an agenda of constructing something between the welfare state and straight-out socialism. It wasn't sustainable over the long haul, although it took until 1979 to become overwhelmingly clear. And at the time, the experience of the electorate in the shared sacrifices of total war had taught it something deeply felt - that the sacrifices of war should result in a better peace, including within the nation. The Tories were believed adequate to winning the war, but Labour was better suited to building the peace. Voters were quite unsentimental about it.

What would be the result of, however improbably, a Republican led victory in Iraq, and let's throw in for good measure, the crippling of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Iraq, the death of Bin Laden and his chief aides, the crippling of the Taliban and stability of some sort in Afghanistan, and measurable progress in things like port security, surveillance, and intelligence gathering? It's a thought-experiment - give it some room, thank you very much. Efforts supported, not torn down, by Democrats? What would happen, that is, if the American public came round to feel that its security had been greatly enhanced and that America had largely won its wars? Would it thereby commit long term to the Republicans?

Or would the American public instead - particularly if Democrats could plausibly claim to have been part of the coalition of security success rather than invested in failure - decide that now was the moment to turn away from security and turn to issues on which it might plausibly trust the Democrats more? (This is assuming that the electorate would, over the long term, trust the Democrats more on taxes, social security and retirement, the environment, health care, etc. - it's a thought-experiment, give it some room, thank you very much.) Does anyone think that the American electorate is more sentimental than post-war Britain's?

One might argue, in other words, that the best strategy for Democrats is not to seek to replay Vietnam, but instead to back the Bush administration and work together with the Republicans in favor of a security strategy, including, whether one likes it or not, the war in Iraq, in order to win it on some modest measure of success-as-stability. That might well be the best way for Democrats to neutralize Republicans on the Republican security advantage. It does not mean foregoing the opportunity to say, "This wasn't my idea," or to say, "We told you so," or even to hold out the possiblity that at some point, the war really is lost, even on General Petraeus's criteria.

But it does mean not announcing that the security threat was never real or serious, or that it was merely the Republican boy crying wolf, and that the security risks can be defined away by fiat. And it does mean acknowledging that once in a war, it is better to succeed than to fail, for the country as a whole. And it does mean joining with them, share any success that can be snatched at this late date, and depend upon the fact that the American public has very little patience with past performance and asks automatically, "Yeah, but what have you done for me lately?"

Democratic electoral success in the future thus might be better sustained by the American public visibly seeing not only that Democrats take security seriously, and take it seriously not merely by denying that, yes, Virginia, there are external threats in the world - but even more by success in seeing off those threats. A less threatening world might well electorally favor the Democrats and the issues on which they might better play to the electorate than national security. Ask Churchill, circa 1948.

(Okay, okay, it's a thought experiment, nothing more.)

Mark Steyn on multiculturalism in Britain and the July 7 bombings

From the several columns Mark Steyn wrote two years ago in London's Daily Telegraph following the July 7 London bombings, or, against multiculturalism:

It has been sobering this past week watching some of my "woollier" colleagues (in Vicki Woods's self-designation) gradually awake to the realisation that the real suicide bomb is "multiculturalism". Its remorseless tick-tock, suddenly louder than the ethnic drumming at an anti-globalisation demo, drove poor old Boris Johnson into rampaging around this page last Thursday like some demented late-night karaoke one-man Fiddler on the Roof, stamping his feet and bellowing, "Tradition! Tradition!" Boris's plea for more Britishness was heartfelt and valiant, but I'm not sure I'd bet on it. The London bombers were, to the naked eye, assimilated - they ate fish 'n' chips, played cricket, sported appalling leisurewear. They'd adopted so many trees we couldn't see they lacked the big overarching forest - the essence of identity, of allegiance. As I've said before, you can't assimilate with a nullity - which is what multiculturalism is.

So, if Islamist extremism is the genie you're trying to put back in the bottle, it doesn't help to have smashed the bottle. As the death of the Eurofanatic Ted Heath reminds us, in modern Britain even a "conservative" prime minister thinks nothing of obliterating ancient counties and imposing on the populace fantasy jurisdictions - "Avon", "Clwyd" and (my personal favourite in its evocative neo-Stalinism) "Central Region" - and an alien regulatory regime imported from the failed polities of Europe. The 7/7 murderers are described as "Yorkshiremen", but, of course, there is no Yorkshire: Ted abolished that, too.

Sir Edward's successor, Mr Blair, said on the day of the bombing that terrorists would not be allowed to "change our country or our way of life". Of course not. That's his job - from hunting to Europeanisation. Could you reliably say what aspects of "our way of life" Britain's ruling class, whether pseudo-Labour like Mr Blair or pseudo-Conservative like Sir Ted, wish to preserve? The Notting Hill Carnival? Not enough, alas.

Consider the Bishop of Lichfield, who at Evensong, on the night of the bombings, was at pains to assure his congregants: "Just as the IRA has nothing to do with Christianity, so this kind of terror has nothing to do with any of the world faiths." It's not so much the explicit fatuousness of the assertion so much as the broader message it conveys: we're the defeatist wimps; bomb us and we'll apologise to you. That's why in Britain the Anglican Church is in a death-spiral and Islam is the fastest-growing religion. There's no market for a faith that has no faith in itself. And as the Church goes so goes the state: why introduce identity cards for a nation with no identity?

It was the Prime Minister's wife, you'll recall, who last year won a famous court victory for Shabina Begum, as a result of which schools across the land must now permit students to wear the full "jilbab" - ie, Muslim garb that covers the entire body except the eyes and hands. Ms Booth hailed this as "a victory for all Muslims who wish to preserve their identity and values despite prejudice and bigotry". It seems almost too banal to observe that such an extreme preservation of Miss Begum's Muslim identity must perforce be at the expense of any British identity. Nor, incidentally, is Miss Begum "preserving" any identity: she's of Bangladeshi origin, and her adolescent adoption of the jilbab is a symbol of the Arabisation of South Asian (and African and European) Islam that's at the root of so many problems. It's no more part of her inherited identity than my five-year- old dressing up in his head-to-toe Darth Vader costume, to which at a casual glance it's not dissimilar.

Is it "bigoted" to argue that the jilbab is a barrier to acquiring the common culture necessary to any functioning society? Is it "prejudiced" to suggest that in Britain a Muslim woman ought to reach the same sartorial compromise as, say, a female doctor in Bahrain? Apparently so, according to Cherie Booth.

One of the striking features of the post-9/11 world is the minimal degree of separation between the so-called "extremists" and the establishment: Princess Haifa, wife of the Saudi ambassador to Washington, gives $130,000 to accomplices of the 9/11 terrorists; the head of the group that certifies Muslim chaplains for the US military turns out to be a bagman for terrorists; one of the London bombers gets given a tour of the House of Commons by a Labour MP. The Guardian hires as a "trainee journalist" a member of Hizb ut Tahir, "Britain's most radical Islamic group" (as his own newspaper described them) and in his first column post-7/7 he mocks the idea that anyone could be "shocked" at a group of Yorkshiremen blowing up London: "Second- and third-generation Muslims are without the don't-rock-the-boat attitude that restricted our forefathers. We're much sassier with our opinions, not caring if the boat rocks" - or the bus blows, or the Tube vaporises. Fellow Guardian employee David Foulkes, who was killed in the Edgware Road blast, would no doubt be heartened to know he'd died for the cause of Muslim "sassiness".

But among all these many examples of the multiculti mainstream ushering the extremists from the dark fringe to the centre of western life, there is surely no more emblematic example than that of Shabina Begum, whose victory over the school dress code was achieved with the professional support of both the wife of the Prime Minister who pledges to defend "our way of life" and of Hizb ut Tahir, a group which (according to the German Interior Minister) "supports violence as a means to realise political goals" such as a worldwide caliphate and (according to the BBC) "urges Muslims to kill Jewish people". What does an "extremist" have to do to be too extreme for Cherie Booth or the Guardian?

Oh, well. Back to business as usual. In yesterday's Independent, Dave Brown had a cartoon showing Bush and Blair as terrorists boarding the Tube to Baghdad. Ha-ha. The other day in Thailand, where 800 folks have been killed by Islamists since the start of the year, two Laotian farm workers were beheaded. I suppose that's Bush and Blair's fault, too.

I'd like to think my "woolly liberal" colleague Vicki Woods and the woolly sorta-conservative Boris Johnson represent the majority. If they do, you've got a sporting chance. But in the end Cherie Booth and Dave Brown and the Bishop of Lichfield will get you killed. Best of British, old thing.

Two years later, some observers are hoping that things have shifted in Britain. Senior political figures in Britain have spoken out against full female Muslim coverage garb of precisely the kind in which feminist human rights lawyer Cherie Blair discovered such a smashing victory. Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis - two liberals whose antipathy towards the political orthodoxy of multiculturalism is not in question - have written columns expressing the hope that Jack Straw's position, despite it being widely reviled in Britain itself, represents the hope of a new policy in Britain.

Well, I should like to believe that as much as Hitchens and Amis, but I think it is hoping against hope. I had a conversation with a friend in London a couple of weeks ago, and I remarked to him that knowledgeable friends in Paris view London as the capital of Islamist terrorism, the feeder from Pakistan, and the incubator of terrorism in its deadly combination of liberal protections for terrorism's ideological support groups and multicultural refusal to address an ideology that proposes to use liberalism to dispose of itself. My London friend assured me that the July 7 bombings had been a wakeup call, no more business as usual. Two weeks after my family and I have left London, the attempted car bombings a few blocks from our hotel in Piccadilly. The New York Times, on little evidence except its own wishful narrative, assures us that the doctors involved had been radicalized by the Iraq war: blame it on Bush and Blair.

Steyn remarked in a column back at the time of the New Jersey terror plot that every terrorist plot looks ridiculous if caught in the planning stages. The terrorists look like idiots for thinking they could succeed. Alas, it all looks very different if they do succeed. Had the 9-11 plotters been caught midway through the planning, what would our collective public response have been? God, what morons for thinking they could hijack not just one but four planes and use them as human-filled missiles against the largest buildings in New York. In the event, who were the morons? The most frightening thing about the most recent UK events is how extraordinarily close even some fairly amateur terrorists got to succeeding - concrete barriers at the airport, and someone thankfully observant in Piccadilly. But they got nearly all the way to home plate and were stopped by the frailest of last-stage tactical defenses, not by any kind of coherent counterterrorism strategy. Where were the vaunted domestic intelligence services? Might the mighty strictures of multiculturalism made surveillance rather more difficult than it should have been?

Meanwhile, the strictures of multiculturalism in the United States - the insistence that despite the obvious facts of where Islamist violence incubates, counterterrorism measures can take no account of that fact - lead to a copying of the dumbest of UK measures, the penchant for putting surveillance cameras everywhere. To record the carnage. To indulge the foolish idea that counterterrorism can and should consist of after-the-fact criminal justice, which is all that a video camera recording the action can hope to do, when posted on every possible location in a large city. It can't help you prevent terrorism - it merely announces that you don't intend to try to stop it in advance, but to go after people by sifting through the rubble and body parts afterwards.

Welcome to the world of on-defense, not offense, counterterrorism. If your counterterrorism policy is defensive, domestic, and essentially at-home, then be prepared either for a massive, general invasion of privacy in order to try and catch terrorists after the fact. And it still won't be effective, because the assumption of criminal law is deterrence through after the fact punishment. What does it mean if your terrorists are not deterrable?

24 hours in DC, then back to Paris

This is somewhat mad, I agree, a twenty four hour detour from London to DC and back to Paris. I have been teaching in my law school's Europe program this summer, just having spent a very lovely week in London. The students in this year's program are excellent, attentive despite the obvious distractions of London. I'm here with my wife, daughter, and our niece, a student at BYU who has just announced her engagement. We've done some plays, some museums, all the usual tourist stuff.

In addition, my younger brother is a seventh or so year associate in tax and private equity in London at Debevoise and Plimpton, and we have had a rare chance to hang out with him and his filmmaker wife, in between her filmmaking (and filmmaking money raising trips) to her native Hong Kong. We spent a nice evening at their Islington apartment eating Kit's fabulous duck, a marvelous chocolate-pear tart and listening to the trubo-charged folk-rock of their ukelele band, in which Kit plays one of eight ukeleles and John plays fretless bass guitar and also serves as producer and mixer and recording engineer. The band has been playing weddings and some arts festivals. If you think that ukeleles are just these little twangy things - like I did - you - we - are greatly misinformed.

I also had a chance to have coffee with Anthony Dworkin, an old friend and editor of the Crimes of War Project website. I was legal editor of the original Crimes of War book, under the general editors Roy Gutman and David Rieff, and Anthony, a journalist and writer who has gradually emerged as a leading expert in these areas, is bringing out a second edition of that book in August 2007. A lot has changed - the important areas of emphasis have changed - of course since the first edition in 1998. If you have the first edition, you need the second edition, and if you haven't seen it at all, you should check it out at the end of the summer - it is one of the most handsome books in the area, well written and expertly edited, and with fabulous illustration and design. Anthony is one of the smartest writers in the general area of security, laws of war, etc., and I hope that he puts all the work he has done over the past decade into a book on the general question of American policy and international law.

Alas, John Ryle was in Sudan this week, not London, and Philip Bobbitt was traveling someplace else too.

Meanwhile, I am actually in DC as I write this, not London. Family went on to Paris, and the students went on to Brussels, where I am not teaching. I have returned to DC for a meeting with folks from the Hoover Institution on counterterrorism policy. I then get on a plane and return to Paris tonight, in time to teach on Tuesday. Crazy schedule, yes, but I thought the meeting was a very important one for my work and writing. In Paris - besides the usual tourist things - I plan to go on a special search for French chocolate, admire in the bookstores first editions I can't afford of Blaise Cendrars and Rene Char, and see the exhibit at the National Library on the centenary of the birth of Rene Char. And purchase another copy in French of Leaves of Hypnos, which has somehow disappeared.

On the airplane back to DC, I read and finished a really funny, viciously sweet, British novel by the London writer AA Gill, Starcrossed. It is explicitly a rewrite - a very, very explicit rewrite - of that sappy 90s Julia Roberts-Hugh Grant romantic comedy, Notting Hill, complete with the American superstar Lee Montana ("rear of the year in fourteen countries, darling") and a London bookshop clerk and aspiring poet, John Dart. It is sexually punchy - I'd love to give it to my fourteen year old to show her that I can like chick-lit if done properly (well, in some alternate universe, maybe), but the sex is too lurid and nasty for her, or at least for Daddy to give to her, although not as much so as in AA Gill's also wonderful earlier London comedy of manners, Sap Rising. It's vicious and tellingly bitchy in many of its asides and social observations; Gill is an expert, so far as I can tell as a non-English outsider, at English comedy of manners. Yet in the end, though, despite all Gill's efforts, and the efforts of the reviewers, to show that he is a nasty prick and misanthropic, even misogynist novelist (this novel did win the bad sex award, and with good reason), he is a romantic, indeed a sentimentalist, who can't resist a sweet and happy ending - think The Red and the Black as farce with a happy, Hollywood ending to the battles between Julian and Mathilde. I thought it was both hysterically funny as well as rather wise on the question of romance and celebrity. I was actually moved, to my own surprise, by the way in which Gill wrapped the last third of the novel into a sort of take on Antigone, and ended the book with a speech by the Chorus - maybe it was just too long a plane ride, but I found myself thinking back to that fabulous production of Oedipus Rex at the ART at Harvard a couple of years ago that I saw by accident on a free evening passing through Cambridge MA in 2004. (Ms. Montana is in London because she has rather unwisely decided to show the world that she can do serious, RSC theatre, even cast as Antigone, with interesting results.) I was also taken with the fact that, against considerable odds, Gill himself is still quite in love with the idea of poetry, even contemporary poetry, and literature as actually revelatory of something in the human condition. Anyway, I liked it (interesting - I find myself saying that rather defensively), whereas Notting Hill made me cringe with embarrassment, it was so sappy.

(The earlier book, Sap Rising, elicited squeals of delight in some quarters and howls of protest in others, which made for a remarkable set of jacket reviewer quotes. The Guardian: "Do not buy this book." Evening Standard: "He writes so brilliantly." AN Wilson: "Extremely badly written, hideously and unamusingly obscene." Marie Claire: "A clever, sexy story." New Statesman: "Frightful pile of garbage." ... Well, perhaps the TLS got it exactly right: "This is a dirty book.")

Okay. Off to my meeting and then back to Paris.

(Ps so here's more about Gill, from a Guardian interview, here.)

We're in London, teaching in the WCL summer Europe program

We - Jean-Marie, Renee, and I - arrived in London from DC yesterday. I'm teaching international economic law in London and Paris in WCL's European law summer program. It's a great program - the students get exposure to IBT, EU law, human rights, and environmental law in London, Paris, Brussels, and Geneva. We'll be here for just half of it. I guess you'd call it the classic academic vacation - I work (although, to be sure, not exactly horribly so, and in fact far from it) and family plays. With the covered expenses and an honorarium, we about break even - unless Madame Jean-Marie visists a certain Paris boutique called Agnes B, in which case all bets are off. My niece Tracie is also joining us this trip; she arrives tomorrow. There are about 65 students this year, which is pretty good, I understand. Weather, which had been rainy and cool, has turned sunny and bright with our arrival. Jean-Marie's internal clock adjusts effortlessly with the light - she sleeps when it is dark, and wakes when it is light, no matter where in the world. Renee and I have a much tougher time. I have been doing something radical for me, which is to drink coffee, and I have even been handing cups of espresso and milk to Renee, which is probably wicked and will stunt her growth, except that she stopped growing a while back. Today we are mostly just walking around outside to get adjusted to things. The WCL program puts everyone up in the most fabulously centrally located hotel in London - half a block off of Trafalgar Square, on the way to the Embankment station. Unbelievable location. It is great being here. I brought my camera, but I'm not sure I brought any means of getting the pictures out of the camera and onto the internet. We'll see. My brother and his wife are here in London - he is a lawyer in tax and private equity at Debevoise and Plimpton, and these trips are a great way to see family that is far flung. And I'm looking forward to seeing Anthony Dworkin, editor of the Crimes of War site - it's been a couple of years (!), and some other folks too.

The great Rostropovich, farewell

(See the outstanding review essay by GS Smith in the May 11, 2007 Times Literary Supplement, "Playing With Fire," reviewing Elizabeth Wilson, Mstislav Rostropovich: Cellist, teacher, legend (Faber 2007). Not online anywhere, but should eventually appear in the subscriber only TLS archive.)