AND RIGHTLY SO: Ann Salisbury emails this story:

Three Bay Area universities are being monitored for anti-Israel sentiment by a group in Philadelphia that launched a Web site this week.

The site, Campus Watch, plans to keep tabs on campus reaction to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict throughout the United States but has singled out 14 universities for particular scrutiny — including UC Berkeley, San Francisco State University and Stanford University.

It is part of a backlash against perceived anti-Semitism on university campuses that gained strength this week when Harvard University President Lawrence Summers denounced as anti-Semitic a campaign that calls on schools to divest from Israel. The campaign started at UC Berkeley before taking root at campuses around the country.

“It’s important people know what’s going on in the Bay Area, especially at the University of California at Berkeley,” said Chris Silver, who co-chairs the student-sponsored Israel Action Committee at UC Berkeley. “There’s a lot of anti-Semitism that goes on here separate from the massive amount of anti-Israel sentiment that can be found in every department and in every classroom.”

Pro-Palestinian activists say that it’s unfair to call opposition to Israel anti-Semitic, but as Meryl Yourish noted, an awful lot of what’s going on can’t be called anything but anti-Jewish, entirely independent of the Israel issue.

UPDATE: Justin Katz has blogged some comments on Larry Summers’ speech. And here’s a link to the speech itself. Harvard is lucky to have Larry Summers as its President at this important moment in its history. He may yet save its soul from the corrosive forces of hatred and irrationalism, despite the best efforts of some of its students and faculty.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Matthew Yglesias thinks my praise of Larry Summers is unfair to Harvard, which just goes to show that you can’t even say nice things about people without provoking complaint. Meanwhile Boston blogger Jay Fitzgerald says Summers was right to criticize the divestment crowd, “Here’s hoping his courage proves inspiring to all the other academic wimps out there who aren’t standing up to the campus clowns. All the comparisons of Israel/Bush to the Nazis and Hitler are sickening. The divestment crowd is up to its neck in this type of talk.” Fitzgerald’s permalinks aren’t working (suprise; it’s a blogspot site) but he also has quite a few responses to Summers’ critics. Just scroll on. Meanwhile Jacob T. Levy offers some sensible caution regarding Campus Watch.

STEVEN CHAPMAN has some worthwhile historical observations on how Palestinians became “refugees.” I’ve seen this before, but it gets less attention than it ought to.

EUROPEANS BACK ATTACKS ON IRAQ: Porphyrogenitus has a full report. There is one hitch, though.

“ALL PREPAREDNESS IS LOCAL:” Nice post on bioterror defense from Ross at The Bloviator. And scroll down for more on this subject.

Sigh. Just another of the many first-rate blogs out there that I don’t visit often enough. I try, God knows, but there are so many. I encourage readers to do more than just follow my links. There are a lot over there on the left, but if you go to the pages I link to you’ll find that those folks link to a lot of blogs that I don’t, and a lot of them are great. I’m going to try to update my blogroll sometime soon, but no matter how big I make it it’s not going to list all the blogs worth reading. There are just too many. This is a good thing, you understand, but . . . well, it’s a true embarrassment of riches.

HOW CAN GRAY DAVIS WIN when even Skippy the Bush Kangaroo is putting him down bigtime? Er, by running against Bill Simon, I guess, though the latest report may help to overcome even that huge advantage: California is no longer the “fifth biggest economy in the world,” having been overtaken by the ever-popular nation of France. Skippy isn’t pleased. He got so upset, I thought he might actually use a capital letter or something.

HAS SAN FRANCISCO BECOME America’s shrewish ex-wife? Joanne Jacobs has found someone who thinks so.

MORE EVIDENCE OF DROPPED BALLS at the FBI:

Two weeks before the Sept. 11 terrorism attacks, a desperate FBI agent begged his superiors to launch an aggressive hunt for one of the men who would participate in the suicide hijackings, warning that “someday someone will die” because his request was denied, according to testimony before a congressional panel yesterday.

The New York special agent, testifying behind a screen to protect his identity, choked back tears as he described how he asked his Washington superiors on Aug. 29, 2001, to allow his office to join the search for Khalid Almihdhar, who would later help commandeer the aircraft that slammed into the Pentagon.

But lawyers in the FBI’s National Security Law Unit refused. They said information obtained through intelligence channels — that Almihdhar was an al Qaeda associate who had recently reentered the United States — could not legally be used to launch a criminal investigation.

“Someday someone will die — and [legal] wall or not — the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain ‘problems,’ ” the agent responded in a blistering e-mail to headquarters. “Let’s hope the National Security Law Unit will stand behind their decisions then, especially since the biggest threat to us now, UBL [Osama bin Laden], is getting the most ‘protection.’ “. . .

On Sept. 11, after the World Trade Center was struck, the FBI agent and his colleagues received the passenger manifests from the four fatal flights. Yesterday he told the panel that he yelled angrily: “This is the same Almihdhar we’ve been talking about for three months!”

His supervisor, trying to reassure him and the others, answered back: “We did everything by the book.”

It’s time to fix these problems.

UPDATE: PowerLine says I’m wrong about this, and that the real story was bad laws, not FBI screwups. That, however, seems to be the Bureau’s spin, not the truth. At least, this Senate report says that the FBI misunderstood the applicable law:

In the Moussaoui case, the report found, F.B.I. counterterrorism specialists and the bureau’s lawyers were so ignorant of federal surveillance laws that they did not understand that they had ample evidence to press for a warrant to search the belongings of Mr. Moussaoui, a French national who was arrested weeks before the attacks after arousing the suspicion of instructors at a Minnesota flight school.

Instead, the report found, the F.B.I. supervisors and lawyers aggressively blocked the search warrant sought by desperate field agents in Minnesota who believed last August that they might have a terrorist on their hands who might use a commercial airplane as a weapon.

Of course, this could just be Congressional spin, but I doubt it.

PEOPLE IN NEED OF A CLUE: This bus driver felt threatened and responded, well, inappropriately:

A Prince George’s County school bus driver who “felt threatened” by a disabled mother and her 8-pound puppy left a busload of special-needs children at a police station twice last week while he sought a restraining order against the woman.

Bus driver Lawrence Ware complained that Linda Stiggers Yancy of Riverdale Park stepped onto the special-needs bus to inquire about an incident in which her 14-year-old son, Gregory, had been bullied by another student on the bus.

Mrs. Yancy, who has spinal problems and walks with the assistance of a cane, was holding her papillon puppy, Joey, in her arms.

The bus driver’s explanation: “I felt threatened.”

That has the ring of one of those P.C. excuses: “I felt uncomfortable,” or “I felt diminished and unappreciated,” etc., etc. It’s enough to make me wish for a return to an era when people were a bit less concerned with how they “felt.”

Or at least to an era when a man would have been embarrassed to say he felt threatened by a disabled woman with an eight-pound dog.

RAIDS ON AL QAEDA in Yemen seem to be underway.

I DON’T KNOW HOW I MISSED THIS: Hundreds Show Up for Anti-Hussein Rally:

DETROIT– About 500 Arab men marched around the McNamara Federal Building Wednesday to voice their anger at Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and to show their support for the United States.

The demonstrators, most of whom were of Iraqi descent, carried signs and banners denouncing Hussein, Local 4 reported. The marchers shouted “down, down Saddam,” and “Saddam is a fascist,” and made other derogatory remarks against the Iraqi leader.

Many in the group have family in Iraq and are calling for Hussein’s ouster, Local 4 reported. The demonstrators favored U.S. military action against Iraq to put an end to the current regime, according to the station.

One of the participants told Local 4 that he and other demonstrators were worried about Hussein using chemical weapons against the Iraqi people.

(Via GreatestJeneration).

MATT WELCH says that Vaclav Havel is Tony Blair east:

with a sharper moral authority and a stronger taste for drink. Quietly, he has had more influence on American foreign policy this last decade than any politician between Bonn and Moscow.

Plus he’s just a cool guy. Heck, he knows Matt Welch (er, sorta-kinda, secondhand), and that’s enough to make you pretty damned cool. Oh, and scroll up on Welch’s page for some information about our rather heavy-handed role (along with the EU) in the Slovakian elections next door.

A KIND WORD FOR AIR SECURITY: The Knoxville security was polite, efficient, and reasonably quick — well, not really quick, but they’ve just switched over to being a TSA operation and they used me for training, which was fine as I got there early. (But Knoxville was always polite (it’s the South), efficient (they were retired cops), and quick.) My flights were on time, not too crowded, and smooth. So no complaints.

Since I do complain about air security from time to time, I thought it only fair to mention that experience. We’ll see how I do on the trip back.

HOW AL QAEDA IS LIKE THE KLAN: Interesting observation by James Durbin:

The Klan, primarily made up of poor whites, did not have the military power to do what it wanted, so it attempted through intimidation and terror to drive out what is saw as contaminants to their culture.

Can you think of another group of people that attempts to use terrorism to intimidate and drive out what they see as cultural contaminants?

They talk about the sexual depravity of their enemies. They point to God and claim this is their religious duty to destroy the enemy. They liken the enemy to monkeys and pigs. They claim to be protecting their women. They whip mobs into a frenzy with their rhetoric. They have wealthy leaders who recruit members from the poorest parts of society. They claim their enemies are subhuman, and have no compuction about killing them.

Can you think of a better comparison in history for Al Qaeda than the Ku Klux Klan?

Indeed.

UPDATE: This post by Damian Penny calls some of the parallel into question (the rich leaders / poor followers part). And it’s true that Al Qaeda seems to have recruited from the middle and upper classes.

Damian is also continuing his one-man war on Salon with this “fact-checking” of Joe Conason.

“YOU KNOW,” emails a reader, “when I get arrested and charged with joining an international terrorist conspiracy, that’s what I’m going to tell the judge:“

BUFFALO, Sept.19 — A lawyer for a Lackawanna man described his client today as a loyal American who went to Pakistan seeking religious training and through his own naiveté wound up spending a few weeks in an al Qaeda terror camp in Afghanistan.

I caught a couple of these lawyers on CNN in the airport earlier today, and I have to say they were mightily unconvincing. It sounded like a Saturday Night Live parody almost.

Could these guys be as innocent as they say? Sure. My reactions may be as much a reaction to their lawyers’ performance as to the evidence. But the story’s pretty implausible and, really, just how naive did you have to be, even before 9/11, to think that this was going to be just religious training? Implausibly naive, I think. And the rest of the story isn’t a lot better:

For instance, prosecutors noted that Mosed, who is nearly indigent, spent $89,000 at a Canadian casino. But Abdel Shafal, a cousin, said that a wide circle of family and friends in Lackawanna use the same cards so they can earn free meals and points at the casino.

Sorry — I’m just not buying this.

UPDATE: A couple of readers say the casino theory isn’t as dumb as I suggest. Here’s what one sent:

My only comment is that it is remotely possible that Mosed and his extended family did spend that much money in casinos if they were sharing the cards. I’m assuming that the cards in reference are the frequent user cards given out by various casinos. They work by issuing free meals or rooms for every x number of dollars spent at the casino. I have been on gambling trips with my friends where we used other peoples cards and the casino was not too picky about whose card was being used. After all the money is still being spent in that one casino. Also it is not clear to me how you launder money by spending it in a casino. Were they going to say that whatever money they had left over was winnings? Any large amounts won in a casino are usually recorded by the casino for tax puposes when playing the slots. Explaining that your money was won playing cards or Roulette doesn’t seem like a great way of laundering money since there is no false paper trail.

Neither casinos nor money-laundering are areas of special expertise (I don’t gamble; it’ just doesn’t seem like fun to me). But okay, if you say so. Another reader explains that immigrant communities often have a variety of non-standard financial transactions going on without any evildoing being involved. That I believe — and I wouldn’t think much of arresting someone just because of the casino thing. But when it’s the casino thing in combination with all these other things, well, at some point it just gets hard to believe.

But, as I say, they could be innocent. If they are, though (or from their perspective, even if they’re not), they need more convincing lawyers.

UPDATE: Stephen Green sets it to music.

THE “REPUBLICAN GUARD” may not be loyal, says this report. Interesting. Well, I wouldn’t be. . . .

THE YALE LAW JOURNAL (well, actually its Managing Editor) emailed to say that they’re going to start putting articles on the web because of the tremendous response to James Lindgren’s article on Michael Bellesiles’ Arming America. I think that’s great.

I’m sure that most law review articles won’t get nearly so much attention — Lindgren’s piece has been downloaded almost 91,000 times off this server, and I’m sure it’s gotten a lot of downloads elsewhere now that it’s up on several other sites. Lindgren had a timely and thorough analysis on a very controversial subject. But I do think that there’s a lot more interest by laypeople in legal scholarship generally than most of us in the academy realize. My review of Clay Conrad’s book on jury nullification, for example, has only been downloaded 3211 times. But that’s still about the same as the Yale Law Journal’s dead-tree circulation.

I hope that other schools and journals will follow Yale’s lead. Law Reviews are supposed to be, in part, a public service and the Web allows them to reach far more people than previously, and at very little cost.

BILL QUICK HAS SOME PUNGENT ADVICE for AIDS activists. Well, some of them, anyway.

I’M ENSCONCED IN A HOTEL ROOM which happily has highspeed internet access. (Of course, I’m thinking: “No wireless?”). Except I’m not actually “ensconced,” since I won’t be here all that much. Posting will be light for the next couple of days, but I won’t be entirely absent.

OKAY, I’M GOING TO BED. POSTING WILL RESUME WHENEVER I get the chance. In the meantime, read this suggestion for a statue commemorating the United Nations.

THIS PROBABLY ISN’T MY LAST POST, BUT IT MIGHT BE, depending on how much other work I get done tonight. I’m off to a conference tomorrow. I plan to log in remotely, but that’ll depend on, well, being able to.

“TUMBLING WOMAN,” SAYS C.D. HARRIS, is “pretty damned good art.”

SASHA CASTEL has a new URL and a new blog design. Drop by with a casserole or a pie to help her get settled in.

CHARLES MURTAUGH has some observations on contemporary philosophy.

STEVEN DEN BESTE has responded to his critics. I haven’t kept up on this debate, though I’ve gotten a lot of email about it (including some from Hesiod Theogeny who seems to be into it with everyone today.)

UPDATE: Nick Denton says that Den Beste and Tom Friedman are on the same page.

I’VE USED ABOUT 60GB of bandwidth so far this month. That’s especially high since Stacy Tabb designed this page to be extra-lean that way. Good thing I’ve got an unlimited-bandwidth setup.