This Week on the Web (April 28 – May 4)

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Quote of the Week:

The West's survival requires that we wake up and recognize the true character of the enemy we face. We are involved in a clash with a culture that has little regard for the Western values that hold the sanctity of human life dear. Terrorists specifically target civilian populations. It makes no difference to them whether their victims are babies, women or children. In fighting the war on terrorism, the West goes to considerable lengths, often risking the lives of our troops, to avoid civilian casualties. The West has the means, but not the will, to utterly destroy terrorists and countries that give them sanction. I hate to think of what the terrorists might do to give us the will.

- Walter Williams

Audio of the Week:

Audio of John Lewis's Talk at GMU

The Objective Standard

The audio of John Lewis’s talk “‘No Substitute for Victory’: The Defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism,” which was delivered at George Mason University on April 24, 2007, has been posted to the events page of the TOS website. The audio is free and accessible to all. Click here to listen now.

NEWS

Iranian Walks Out Of Dinner With Condi

CBS News

Iran's foreign minister walked out of a dinner of diplomats where he was seated directly across from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, on the pretext that the female violinist entertaining the gathering was dressed too revealingly.

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Editor’s note: And we’re supposed to be negotiating with these medieval Neanderthals…why, exactly?

COMMENTARY

Kant Stressed Duty, Rand Lauded Reason

Bob Murphy, Richmond Times Dispatch ("Correspondent of the Day" 5/3)

In his column, "Brain Damage: Science Proves That I'm Right and You're Insane, My Friend", A. Barton Hinkle lumps together "Catholic theologians, Ayn Rand's objectivist hordes, and admirers of Immanuel Kant" among those who take a "deontological" approach to ethics. He is mistaken.

A deontological theory of ethics is duty-centered, and duty was a cornerstone of Kant's beliefs. His influence has been seen in most dictatorships - from Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany to modern Venezuela. Kant wrote that it is "necessary to deny reason in order to make room for faith," and in oppressive societies, there is always a duty to have faith in the god of the state.

However, Ayn Rand's philosophy of objectivism has a very different basis, which apparently - according to Hinkle - is embraced by "hordes", in contrast to Kant's "admirers". Rand advocated a morality based on reason as man's only tool of knowledge and his basic means of survival, with man's life as the standard of value. In Rand's words: "To live is his basic act of choice."

Therefore, man's only ethical "duty" is to use the facts of reality both to determine right from wrong and to make the choices that he feels will best guide his life, based on what he values (with government's role to be the protector of individual rights from force). This is in sharp contrast to both deontologism and utilitarianism, neither of which embraces the rights of the individual.

Morality presupposes a choice. Duty leaves no room to choose.

Where are the liberal non-Muslims?

Frank Gaffney, Townhall.com

Since 9/11, many of us have wondered: Where are the moderate Muslims? If they are out there, why are we not hearing more, and getting more help, from them in the fight against our common foe -- the totalitarian Islamists?

In recent weeks in this space, I have chronicled the saga of an effort to answer that question. It took the form of a 52-minute documentary I helped produce for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s “America at a Crossroads” series. The film, entitled “Islam vs. Islamists: Voices from the Muslim Center,” features compelling stories of anti-Islamist Muslims who have had the courage to stand up to co-religionists who are using faith to accomplish political ends.

The documentary makes clear why the moderates are not more in evidence. Observant Muslims who dare to challenge the Islamists over ideological agendas pursued in the name of religion are shown being subjected to ostracism, intense coercion to conform and, in some cases, death threats. As long as these anti-Islamist Muslims are rightly seen as isolated, vulnerable and powerless, it would be foolish to believe that many of their co-religionists will want to emulate them.

[…]

Unfortunately, what has happened to “Islam vs. Islamists” can only compound this perception. The Public Broadcasting Service and its Washington flagship station, WETA, refused to air this film. While a number of explanations have been given for that decision – including demonstrably false claims that the documentary was not submitted on time, was too long, was unfinished, the officially stated reason is that it was: “flawed by incomplete storytelling, a limited focus that does not adequately corroborate the film’s conclusions, and a general lack of attention to the obligation of fairness, which requires that viewers have access to additional context and relevant information about a complex subject.”

In other words, PBS/WETA judged our film to be “unfair” to the “conservative imams” and fellow Islamists shown denouncing, threatening and, in one case, proposing to murder the moderate Muslims we profile. Unless our production team, which included a number of world-class journalists, agreed to change not the “storytelling” but the story, “Islam vs. Islamists” was going to be suppressed.

Interestingly, PBS and WETA were untroubled by the manifest lack of fairness in a film on much the same subject entitled “The Muslim Americans,” produced by Crossroads series host Robert MacNeil. This documentary amounted to a love letter to the Islamists and like-minded organizations in America. It helped legitimate a number of their most prominent spokesmen and agendas, in the process virtually ignoring easily ascertained records of troubling statements, behavior and/or affiliations.

A Loser's History: George Tenet's sniveling, self-justifying new book is a disgrace

Christopher Hitchens, Slate.com

It's difficult to see why George Tenet would be so incautious as to write his own self-justifying apologia, let alone give it the portentous title At the Center of the Storm. There is already a perfectly good pro-Tenet book written by a man who knows how to employ the overworked term storm. Bob Woodward's 2002 effort, Bush at War, was, in many of its aspects, almost dictated by George Tenet.

[…]

So, the only really interesting question is why the president did not fire this vain and useless person on the very first day of the war. Instead, he awarded him a Presidential Medal of Freedom! Tenet is now so self-pitying that he expects us to believe that he was "not at all sure that [he] really wanted to accept" this honor. But it seems that he allowed or persuaded himself to do so, given that the citation didn't mention Iraq. You could imagine that Tenet had never sat directly behind Colin Powell at the United Nations, beaming like an overfed cat, as the secretary of state went through his rather ill-starred presentation. And who cares whether his "slam dunk" vulgarity was misquoted or not? We have better evidence than that.

[…]

In the post-Kuwait-war period, there was little political risk in doing what Tenet had always done and making the worst assumption about anything that Saddam Hussein might even be thinking about. (Who but an abject idiot would ever make a different assumption or grant the Baathists the smallest benefit of the least doubt?) But we forget so soon and so easily. The problem used to be the diametrically opposite one. The whole of our vaunted "intelligence" system completely refused to believe any of the warnings that Saddam Hussein was about to invade and occupy Kuwait in 1990. By the time the menace was taken seriously, the invasion itself was under way. This is why the work of Kenneth Pollack (this time titled The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq) was received with such gravity when it was published in 2002. Pollack had interpreted the signals correctly in 1990—and been ignored—and was arguing that another final round with Saddam was inevitable. His book did more to persuade policy-makers in Washington than anything ever said by Ahmad Chalabi. To revisit these arguments is to be reminded that no thinking person ever felt that the danger posed by a totalitarian and aggressive Iraq was a negligible one. And now comes Tenet, the man who got everything wrong and who ran the agency that couldn't think straight, to ask us to sympathize with his moanings about "Iraq—who, me?"

A highly irritating expression in Washington has it that "hindsight is always 20-20." Would that it were so. History is not a matter of hindsight and is not, in fact, always written by the victors. In this case, a bogus history is being offered by a real loser whose hindsight is cockeyed and who had no foresight at all.

Happy Birthday, Thomas Jefferson

Genevieve LaGreca, George Reisman’s blog

Our rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness are rights to take action; they are not entitlements to the goods and services of others. Jefferson defined liberty as "unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others." This means we may act in our own behalf, for example, to earn money and buy a house, but we may not expect the government to tax others to provide us with a house for free. Life requires productive work and effort to sustain it, a fact that Jefferson considered to be our glory. When his Monticello farm fell on hard times, he began producing nails, and did so proudly because "every honest employment is deemed honorable [in America]…. My new trade of nail-making is to me in this country what an additional title of nobility … [is] in Europe." He scorned the "idleness" of the European aristocracy, calling their courts "the weakest and worst part of mankind." What would he think of our current government's grants and handouts to countless special interest groups, a practice that rewards people for non-effort?

Our right to property means we have the right to keep the things we acquire. Does a rich person have less of a right to property than a poor person? According to Jefferson: "To take from one because it is thought his own industry … has acquired too much, in order to spare others who … have not exercised equal industry and skill is to violate the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it." What would he think of the persistent cries of today's politicians to "tax the rich," thereby depriving them of their property and the pursuit of their happiness?

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Other links

The Ayn Rand Institute

The Objective Standard

Capitalism Magazine

4Commonsense.net

OpinionJournal.com

Junk Science

Activism Humor

The Intellectual Activist

Web Logs

Principles in Practice– Principled commentary on cultural matters and current events from “The Objective Standard”

Cox and Forkum – Political cartoons and commentary

Noodle Food

The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid – Donald Luskin

Dollars and Crosses – CapitalismMagazine.com

Rule of Reason – The Center for the Advancement of Capitalism

4CommonSense

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