Campus Conservative Publications

A cool article by John Johnson in today's Los Angeles Times:

More than a dozen earnest college students gathered in the marshy meadowland of rural North Carolina recently to plot the overthrow of campus liberalism.

Their weapon of choice? The newspaper.

"People complain about the media," said Joshua Mercer, the pink-cheeked director of the seminar held at the Jesse Helms Center in the heart of chicken-growing country. "Our philosophy is, 'Be the media.'" ....

(Thanks, John.)

In illustration, see this article in the Cal Patriot today:

UC Berkeley administrators ignored reports yesterday that a campus Middle Eastern studies program has accepted significant funds from groups and individuals linked to terrorism by the US State Department.

The Center for Middle Eastern Studies runs two programs whose stated missions are to increase “understanding of Islam and of Muslim peoples and cultures in the United States and around the world.” But those programs are funded by a Saudi businessman and a member of the Saudi royal family who the State Department maintains are responsible for funneling money to groups that sponsor terrorism....

Here's a particularly delicious paragraph:

“(The programs) are run by faculty committees with absolutely no obligation to, or oversight from, the donors in question,” Gottreich said, adding that the center also receives funding from the Diller Family Jewish Studies and Israeli Visiting Scholars Program. Helen Diller, benefactor of the program, has not been linked to terrorism.

(Thanks, Kathryn.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Wed. 05/07/03 09:49:47 PM
Categorized as Political.

Jill Nelson is Still a Psychotic, Left-Wing Extremist, Race-Baiting, America-Hating Marxoid

Vide.

Mark Shea hits the nail on the head:

Puhleeze. Somebody needs to put her in an arena with Wayne "Bush Might be AntiChrist" Madsen and they can compete to see who can lose the most body fluids via sweating, foaming, crying and wetting themselves in panic. Everytime Lefties are deprived of power for any length of time at all, they start jonesing for it and get these sorts of D.T.s and hallucinations of an imminent totalitarian dawn.

See my Hating America First and Always.

P.S. I do not use the term "psychotic" merely to insult. I honestly think that this woman — who surely leads a life of convenience, comfort, luxury, and privilege that even most Americans only dream about — is nuts.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Wed. 05/07/03 08:57:15 PM
Categorized as Social/Cultural.

"I Loathe America, and What It Has Done to the Rest of the World"

She's one really sick puppy, but Margaret Drabble's honesty in the London Telegraph, May 8, is actually refreshing. If Hollywood's Vacuumheads would be this honest, I might not hold them in so much contempt.

I knew that the wave of anti-Americanism that would swell up after the Iraq war would make me feel ill. And it has. It has made me much, much more ill than I had expected.

My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me, like a disease. It rises up in my throat like acid reflux, that fashionable American sickness. I now loathe the United States and what it has done to Iraq and the rest of the helpless world....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Wed. 05/07/03 08:39:33 PM
Categorized as International.

"The Great and Enduring Heresy of Mohammed"

In which Hilaire Belloc is revealed as something of a prophet.

The current issue of This Rock has a condensed version of a chapter from Hilaire Belloc's book The Great Heresies:

.... It has always seemed to me possible, and even probable, that there would be a resurrection of Islam and that our sons or our grandsons would see the renewal of that tremendous struggle between the Christian culture and what has been for more than a thousand years its greatest opponent.

Why this conviction should have arisen in the minds of certain observers and travellers, such as myself, I will now consider. It is indeed a vital question, "May not Islam arise again?"

In a sense the question is already answered because Islam has never departed. It still commands the fixed loyalty and unquestioning adhesion of all the millions between the Atlantic and the Indus and further afield throughout scattered communities of further Asia. But I ask the question in the sense "Will not perhaps the temporal power of Islam return and with it the menace of an armed Mohammedan world which will shake off the domination of Europeans — still nominally Christian — and reappear again as the prime enemy of our civilization?" The future always comes as a surprise but political wisdom consists in attempting at least some partial judgment of what that surprise may be. And for my part I cannot but believe that a main unexpected thing of the future is the return of Islam. Since religion is at the root of all political movements and changes and since we have here a very great religion physically paralysed but morally intensely alive, we are in the presence of an unstable equilibrium which cannot remain permanently unstable....

Whatever the cause be, Mohammedanism has survived, and vigorously survived. Missionary effort has had no appreciable effect upon it. It still converts pagan savages wholesale. It even attracts from time to time some European eccentric, who joins its body. But the Mohammedan never becomes a Catholic. No fragment of Islam ever abandons its sacred book, its code of morals, its organized system of prayer, its simple doctrine.

In view of this, anyone with a knowledge of history is bound to ask himself whether we shall not see in the future a revival of Mohammedan political power, and the renewal of the old pressure of Islam upon Christendom....

I say the suggestion that Islam may re-arise sounds fantastic — but this is only because men are always powerfully affected by the immediate past: — one might say that they are blinded by it.

Cultures spring from religions; ultimately the vital force which maintains any culture is its philosophy, its attitude toward the universe; the decay of a religion involves the decay of the culture corresponding to it — we see that most clearly in the breakdown of Christendom today. The bad work begun at the Reformation is bearing its final fruit in the dissolution of our ancestral doctrines — the very structure of our society is dissolving....

There is nothing in the Mohammedan civilization itself which is hostile to the development of scientific knowledge or of mechanical aptitude. I have seen some good artillery work in the hands of Mohammedan students of that arm; I have seen some of the best driving and maintenance of mechanical road transport conducted by Mohammedans. There is nothing inherent to Mohammedanism to make it incapable of modern science and modern war. Indeed the matter is not worth discussing. It should be self-evident to anyone who has seen the Mohammedan culture at work. That culture happens to have fallen back in material applications; there is no reason whatever why it should not learn its new lesson and become our equal in all those temporal things which now alone give us our superiority over it — whereas in Faith we have fallen inferior to it....

The Great Heresies was originally published in 1938; This Rock says the chapter on Islam was written in March 1936.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Wed. 05/07/03 07:00:08 PM
Categorized as Religious.

How Many Other Made-Up Stories Has the New York Times Published?

You have probably heard about the resignation last week of NYT reporter Jayson Blair after it was discovered that he had substantially plagiarized an article from another newspaper.

The Washington City Paper has a lengthy and very interesting article by Erik Wemple and Josh Levin on Blair's coverage of the Beltway Sniper incident in the wake of the arrest of the two suspects. It seems that Blair simply made up some significant aspects of what he reported.

And, while others in the Blogosphere have been speculating that Blair was hired so quickly and retained so long, despite a miserable record of errors, because he is black — which still does not seem unlikely to me — one can gather from the WCP story that Blair is an extraordinary schmoozer (as we would say around here), which may account for his career-tenacity, at least in part.

The story is also a fascinating look at the personal professional rivalry among newspapers. It does not paint a very flattering picture of journalism and journalists.

(Thanks, MM.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Wed. 05/07/03 03:02:09 PM
Categorized as Media.

"Getting It Wrong on Purpose"

Another revealing article by Stephen Hayes at The Weekly Standard today, about NYT's recent treatment of the "Iraq Reconstruction and Development Council (IRDC) -- a group of 150 Iraqi exiles working with the Pentagon":

.... This supposedly "under close wraps" program that the Pentagon was "guarded" about was featured on network television on the April 1 edition of "Sixty Minutes II." A few days before that, on March 28, 2003, key members of the group (in fairness, they were only identified as Iraqi-Americans, not as IRDC big-wigs, per se) were made available at a press conference at The National Press Club.

Jehl quotes two Iraqi-Americans critical of the Pentagon program. There may be others. Some of the Iraqi-Americans I've interviewed over the past several months have expressed frustrations with the project. But those who complain are in a small minority. And much of their criticism concerns the fact that the program isn't larger -- they believe they can make valuable contributions but haven't yet been asked to join the effort....

As you probably know, Faithful Reader, the motto of the New York Times is All the news that's fit to print. Many have pointed out that it would be more accurate if it were All the news that's fit to slant. The title of Hayes' article might be even better: Getting It Wrong on Purpose.

(Thanks, MM.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Wed. 05/07/03 11:29:44 AM
Categorized as Media.

USCCB Official Calls for Elimination of Police and Prosecutors and Prisons

Okay. I made that up. But, he's close.

Gerry Powers, "director of the Office of International Justice and Peace at the US Conference of Catholic Bishops", has been quoted comparing America's War Against Terrorism to... get this... the reign of the vicious and maniacal Roman emperor Caligula:

Post September 11 2001 jitters are leading the US to embrace a formula of instilling fear of the United States as a protection from catastrophic attacks that echoes the philosophy of the brutal Roman emperor Caligula, acording to the director of the Office of International Justice and Peace at the US Conference of Catholic Bishops....

He said: "While a doctrine of preventive war may derive in part from an ethic of responsibility - to protect ourselves and the world from catastrophic attacks - it also has elements of an ethic of fear." ....

"Let them hate us if they will, provided only that they fear us," he said, chacterising the new phenomenon.

Powers was speaking at a colloquium on the ethical issues of pre-emptive war hosted last week by Wesley Theological Seminary and its Churches' Centre for Theology and Public Policy.

"That formula might work for the New York Yankees, but it did not work for the Romans and it will not work for us," Powers said. "It will not work because it creates a cycle of fear that fuels a cycle of violence."

Why can't the USCCB hire more people who sound like they work for the successors to the Apostles rather than for the Democratic National Committee? (I suppose one answer to my question could be that the USCCB seems quite often to be effectively a subcommittee of the DNC.) Is that really too much to ask?

Christopher Johnson has an excellent reply at Midwest Conservative Journal, the lynchpin of which is Romans 13:1-4. I will add that the fear of police and prosecution and imprisonment is what keeps a lot of people from committing crimes, no? Is it somehow wrong to instill fear in the criminal element to keep them from doing harm?

One mustn't assume too much from brief quotations in a media report of what somebody said. Perhaps the article left out how Powers put the blame for this situation squarely where it belongs: with Muslims who deliberately murdered 3,000 innocent unsuspecting Americans, and who had come from a culture in which instilling fear by acts of terrorism aimed at innocent unsuspecting civilians is but a tactic in a strategy to get what they want, anyway they can.

Do you think it's very likely that Powers did that? Do you think it's even a factor in how he thinks about this?

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Wed. 05/07/03 09:56:57 AM
Categorized as Most Notable & Religious.