EVEN EL AL SECURITY ISN’T PERFECT.

UPDATE: Michiel Visser writes that it’s not even close. (Permalinks not working, blah blah, scroll down, blah blah, Blogger sucks, blah, blah.) His comments:

As someone who went through Tel Aviv airport last Thursday, I have to debunk the myth. Although security is a notch up from your regular airport, I was actually disappointed. The screeners seem to consist of 20-somethings plucked from the Tel Aviv nightlife, and I saw many people who were late for their flights being ushered through a much less secure track. Also, things were so chaotic that it wouldn’t be too difficult to smuggle something through if you’re really determined.

This just reinforces my point that, overall, “security” isn’t the best response to terrorists. Guards are sure to get bored and can’t be the best. Terrorists only have to have one good day; guards have to be good all the time, which is impossible. The best defense against terrorists is to kill them first. The Israelis, contrary to popular belief, haven’t really done that, because we haven’t let ’em. We should start letting them, and we should do it ourselves. That will do more good than any number of searches or metal detectors, and with far less damage to civil liberties at home.

DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH: As the slow response — and continued cases of denial — with regard to the Bellesiles affair illustrate, things have gotten bad enough where academic standards are concerned that even Stanley Fish is sounding like a traditionalist:

One suspects, that is, that the reluctance to act is a principle, not a principle rooted in the right of everyone to a confront his or her accusers in a public hearing, but a principle rooted in something like class prejudice. The idea is that, generally speaking, people like us — people who have degrees and publications and who while away the time by reading French or German poetry in the original — are “naturally” responsible; and even if we occasionally seem to be slighting the job, our reasons, were they plumbed and brought to the surface, would turn out to be good and even noble. We might now and then fail to live up to the letter of our mundane obligations, but even in doing so we would no doubt be hearkening to the higher imperative of the spirit.

True enough, though one would expect to hear this from some curmudgeonly right-winger, not from Stanley Fish. Or maybe his new enthusiasm for academic discipline is just a consequence of his having been a dean for a while. . . .

Think I’m exaggerating about Bellesiles? Read this statement by Columbia University historian Ken Jackson (scroll down) who says, in essence, that the Bancroft Prize shouldn’t be revoked, because even its wrongful award is now just a part of history and thus shouldn’t be changed.

(In a probably unrelated development, Emory President William Chace is stepping down.)

UPDATE: Here, by the way, is something I wrote about academics and accountability last year.

THIS CUNY TENURE DENIAL is creating a stink, since it seems to be based on political views, and perhaps gender. There’s a story in the Chronicle of Higher Education, too, but it’s subscriber-only.

CULTURAL INDICATOR? Watching “The Groove Squad” on TEENick, I notice that a bunch of peace-sign-painting hippies are . . . the bad guys! Hippies never used to be the bad guys. These are definitely bad. And treated as ugly and out of date, which may be worse.

HUGO CHAVEZ HAS USED TROOPS TO SEIZE CONTROL OF POLICE IN CARACAS. Hmm. If Bush and Ashcroft used troops to sieze control of the D.C. police, people would say it was a dictatorship being born. But I expect we’ll hear the usual cavils if I characterize Chavez as a dictator. . . .

Not from Jorge Schmidt, though, who emails:

BBC report omits some important background: Chavez and his allies announced as early as January their intention to take control of the PM. They took a number of steps to that end, including conducting an inventory of the PM’s arsenal, and manufacturing a phony hunger strike by a handful of pro-Chavez officers who invaded the PM’s communications center. This “intervention” is an indispensable step for Chavez if he is to avoid ouster; local and municipal police departments have protected anti-Chavez demonstrators and leaders, and have sufficient firepower and traning to limit the effectiveness of the thuggish Bolivarian Circles. As Mayor Pena declared, “the Government is disarming the police and giving weapons to the violent [Bolivarian] circles.” The timing of this step is also given by the opposition’s decision to soon announce the date of a national strike of indefinite duration.

Stay tuned. This isn’t getting the attention it deserves. El Sur has more, including results of a poll showing that most Venezuelans are unhappy with Chavez.

POSTWATCH WRITES:

I told you guys you’d miss Rep. Bob Barr, the righty Rep. from Georgia who’s still in office only because of the lame-duck session. Well, apparently he’s leading the charge against John Poindexter’s creepy Total Information Awareness strategy and the Cyber Security Enhancement Act.

There’s more.

TIM BLAIR POINTS OUT, well, the sort of thing we’ve come to expect.

UPDATE: Damn Blogger! Follow the first link; it’s currently at the top of his page.

AL QAEDA EXPOSED: Cyberwarrior “Johnathan Galt,” who has been behind some anti-Al Qaeda hacking incidents, now has a page with video clips of Al Qaeda spokespeople and sympathizers telling who the enemy is. I can’t vouch for the authenticity of all of these, but they sure look authentic, and they’re consistent with other things we’ve heard from Al Qaeda and its sympathizers. Note the presence of American and British supporters.

(Via Samizdata).

MERDE IN FRANCE has a French print report (not online) that “when military actions start ‘Baghdad’s residents could take to the streets waving American flags that are being secretly manufactured in the city’s bazars.'”

Interesting, if true. Wonder when we’ll see this reported on Al Jazeera?

UT BLACKFACE UPDATE: Good news, bad news, and a surprise in this account from the Daily Beacon student newspaper. The good news is that, despite some early indications to the contrary, the University isn’t planning any disciplinary action against the fraternity:

While stating that the university condemns the actions of the students involved, Shumaker stressed that the administration would have no authority to punish the offenders. He cited previous federal court rulings that found punishment for such actions to be in violation of the First Amendment.

The bad news is that it’s still being used as an excuse for PC-style maneuvering, with non sequitur demands for a new department of African-American studies (I’m not against that, but I don’t see the connection) and with this remark by President Shumaker:

We must have at UT an atmosphere that is free of violence and discrimination.

True enough, but there never was any violence, just some guys in makeup. If you didn’t know better, you might think that Shumaker had just halted a lynching.

But now for the “surprise.” Here’s my favorite quote, from a student activist who obviously isn’t fully indoctrinated with standard-issue political correctness:

Gray also pressed the president on the decision to not levy any punishment on those involved in the incident.

“The Second Amendment gives us the right to own a gun,” she said. “If the university can prevent the student body from exercising that right while on campus, why can’t it punish people who abuse their First Amendment rights?”

Heh. And a suggestion that the University lower its admission standards for black students so as to increase black enrollment (you know, what’s usually called “affirmative action”) appears to have been shouted down as racist. So even in the midst of a classic PC scandal, the edifice of political correctness is showing some prettty major cracks.

SQUATTING IN BARBRA STREISAND’S WALLET? PunditWatch is up!

JEFF COOPER POINTS OUT another reason to be skeptical of the latest alleged bin Laden audiotape: someone who knows Osama pretty well says it isn’t him.

The varous “leaks” from official sources saying that the tape is probably authentic are almost enough to make me endorse the conspiracy theories floated earlier, that the U.S. government has reasons to pretend that Osama is still alive even if it knows otherwise. After all, there was no obvious reason for the Administration to go public with those, and quite a few obvious reasons not to. Yet leaks like that don’t happen by accident. Say, maybe Tom Daschle is actually part of the disinformation campaign! Poor Tom — he’s not a carping critic, but a misunderstood patriot.

IRANIAN STUDENTS ARE CLAIMING VICTORY:

Students who have staged Iran’s biggest pro-reform protests for three years claimed a victory for freedom of speech Sunday as Iran’s supreme leader ordered a review of the death sentence against a dissident academic.

The week-long student rallies and strikes in support of history lecturer Hashem Aghajari, condemned to hang for blasphemy, had raised political tension at a crucial stage in the power battle between Iran’s reformists and hard-liners. . . .

Students greeted the news as a victory and said they would consider ending mass protests at campuses across the country.

Did Amnesty or Human Rights Watch come loudly to Aghajari’s defense? If so, I missed it.

This earlier post by Allan Prather notes that Khomeini’s grandson joined the protests.

UPDATE: William Sjostrom reports that he can’t find anything from Amnesty. But Brian Jones emails this link to a Human Rights Watch denunciation of the Iranian execution order. Advantage: HRW!

ERIN O’CONNOR HAS SOME FURTHER CRITICISM of Germaine Greer’s latest op-ed, previously addressed by William Sjostrom:

Okay, so the substitutions sometimes cede into nonsense. But that only makes the temper of Greer’s “discourse” that much more clear: hers is a discourse of irrational blame and vitriolic hate, a discourse in which one group is described as wholly superior to another group whose inferiority is treated as natural and right, a discourse that quite literally does not make sense–except, insofar, as it participates in the deliberate nonlogic of demonization. And yet it is printed in one of the world’s most respected papers, the product of one of the twentieth century’s most influential feminists. Its place in that paper speaks to how profoundly respectable hatred of men has become in our enlightened culture, as well as to the role feminism has played in making such hatred a badge of liberal propriety.

The bit about men being malignant tissue says it all. As Greer calls men a cancer on an otherwise healthy female society, so Hitler said that “The Jews are a Cancer on the breast of Germany”; so radical Islamists call Jews a “cancer” on Palestine.

Strong stuff.

UPDATE: A couple of readers have expressed skepticism about the anti-male animus that this post, and some others I’ve put up over the last few days, indicate. (This message from reader Dan Hobby is typical: “Reading Glenn Sacks thoughts on this subject, one word comes to mind: pinhead.”) All I can say to them is, tell it to Doris Lessing:

I find myself increasingly shocked at the unthinking and automatic rubbishing of men which is now so part of our culture that it is hardly even noticed,” the 81-year-old Persian-born writer said yesterday.

“Great things have been achieved through feminism. We now have pretty much equality at least on the pay and opportunities front, though almost nothing has been done on child care, the real liberation.

“We have many wonderful, clever, powerful women everywhere, but what is happening to men? Why did this have to be at the cost of men?

“I was in a class of nine- and 10-year-olds, girls and boys, and this young woman was telling these kids that the reason for wars was the innately violent nature of men.

“You could see the little girls, fat with complacency and conceit while the little boys sat there crumpled, apologising for their existence, thinking this was going to be the pattern of their lives.”

Lessing said the teacher tried to “catch my eye, thinking I would approve of this rubbish”.

She added: “This kind of thing is happening in schools all over the place and no one says a thing.

“It has become a kind of religion that you can’t criticise because then you become a traitor to the great cause, which I am not.

“It is time we began to ask who are these women who continually rubbish men. The most stupid, ill-educated and nasty woman can rubbish the nicest, kindest and most intelligent man and no one protests.

“Men seem to be so cowed that they can’t fight back, and it is time they did.”

You can disagree with this if you like — though, frankly, I think doing so is a confession of utter blindness to reality — but quit telling me that this is some creation of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. It’s not, and you only diminish your credibility by pretending (or, more embarrassingly, actually believing) otherwise.

ANOTHER UPDATE: It’s not new, either. Here’s an interview on the subject from 1994, with Camille Paglia and Christina Hoff Sommers. And, for that matter, Betty Friedan wrote about “female chauvinist boors” in McCall’s back in 1972, though I can’t find a copy of that essay online. And still people seem inclined to pretend that the problem doesn’t exist.

ALLAN PRATHER HAS MORE on Iranian student demonstrations, here, and here. And here is a piece by Michael Ledeen from last week.

Things seem to be coming to a head in Iran. Let’s hope they break our way.

TOM FRIEDMAN IS CHANNELING JIM BENNETT in this column on NATO:

In fact, I imagine after this round of expansion that when you call NATO headquarters in Brussels, a recording will answer that will go something like this: “Hello. You have reached NATO. Dial 1 if you want help consolidating your democracy. Dial 2 if you need minesweeping. Dial 3 if you need anti-chemical warfare trucks. If you need to fight a real war, please stay on the line and an English-speaking operator will assist you.”

Hmm. Expanding Anglosphericism? But here’s my favorite passage:

There is one scene that really sums it up. It involves a U.S. F-15 jet fighter that is ordered to take out a Taliban truck caravan. The F-15’s co-pilot bombardier is a woman. Mr. Bowden, who had access to the communications between pilots, describes how the bombardier locates the truck caravan, and with her laser guidance system directs a 500-pound bomb into the lead truck. As the caravan is vaporized, the F-15 pilot shouts down at the Taliban — as if they could hear him from 20,000 feet — “You have just been killed by a girl.”

Let’s send that one out on Al-Jazeera.

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION IS TAKING ON GREEDY BUSINESSES by launching an antitrust investigation of the New Times L.A. takeover. Lots of possibilities for this kind of thing in the media field, where price-fixing and anticompetitive practices are rife, and have long gone unpoliced.

HERE’S AN EXAMPLE OF FRENCH MILITARY COOPERATION that isn’t getting much attention. I think the French prefer it that way. Though most of the basing and infrastructure involved here is French, the story barely indicates it.

WHY COLLEGES ARE SHORT ON MALES: It’s a “hostile environment” for men:

However, there is another, unacknowledged reason why some males don’t go to college—rampant anti-male feminism has made college campuses a place where many males feel unwanted and unwelcome. To use a feminist term, our universities have become “hostile environments” for young men.

There are some first-person accounts.

UPDATE: Reader Melissa Davis writes:

I agree with the young man who wrote this piece. Women who witness this sort of hostility should try and speak up in defense of the men who are its target. I tried every now and then in college, but it was hard. But we owe it to them. Kind men stood have stood up for women in similarly hostile situations in the past. Perhaps not enough of them did. Maybe at some point parity will be reached. I can dream, can’t I?

Don’t give up.

I JUST GOT AN EMAIL saying that there will be big student protests at Isfahan University in Iran tomorrow morning. No link yet. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Here’s a link to a story on these protests generally.

THREE MEN, BELIEVED TO BE FROM TUNISIA OR MOROCCO, have been arrested for plotting to release cyanide in the London Underground.

THE INTERNATIONAL SENTINEL is Carla Passino’s blog. It takes a somewhat more Euro-sympathetic line than InstaPundit, but (or perhaps “thus”) is well worth your attention.

A RELIGION OF PEACE, from Hanah Metchis.

UPDATE: Justin Katz writes that Metchis’ passage is sufficiently out of context that it gives a false impression. So does P.J. Hinton.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Sasha Volokh has more.

SOME PEOPLE WILL PROBABLY COMPLAIN ABOUT THIS PROGRAM, but it seems sensible enough to me:

WASHINGTON, Nov. 16 — The Bush administration has begun to monitor Iraqis in the United States in an effort to identify potential domestic terrorist threats posed by sympathizers of the Baghdad regime, senior government officials said.

The previously undisclosed intelligence program involves tracking thousands of Iraqi citizens and Iraqi-Americans with dual citizenship who are attending American universities or working at private corporations, and who might pose a risk in the event of a United States-led war against Iraq, officials said.

If we go to war, these people will be enemy aliens (in fact, in light of the Congressional declaration, in a sense they already are). Keeping tabs on enemy aliens is normal for wartime. I suspect that this was deliberately leaked, as a way of discouraging untoward activity.

UPDATE: And here’s more evidence that it’s justified.

CLAYTON CRAMER blogs a report from the American Society of Criminology, where he was on two panels.