TO MY MIND, this is a bigger disgrace than the arrest of Father Shanley. And harder for the Church to disassociate itself from — not that it appears to want to. As reader Eric Timmons, who sent the link, says: “This photograph says something about the French and the Vatican. You didn’t see Colin Powell doing this with Arafat, nor will you, I imagine. I also doubt you will see the good Cardinal doing this with Sharon.”

UPDATE: Reader Michael Gaddis writes:

I have a suggested caption for the picture you just posted of Arafat arm-in-arm with the Vatican cardinal:

“But is he a ‘NOTORIOUS’ terrorist?”

RICHARD BROOKHISER says we’re all Jews to the islamists.

CARTERPALOOZA is what Jay Nordlinger calls his festival of negative commentary on Jimmy Carter. Nordlinger’s thesis is that Carter’s wildly overrated even as an ex-President.

I still think my headline of “Fukuyama-a-rama” is better, though.

TOUR O’ THE BLOGS continues with a profile of Bill Quick. Quick rules, and the Tour o’ the blogs feature, which I was a bit skeptical of at first, is actually pretty cool.

SOME FACULTY at Harvard and MIT are calling for divestment from Israel. Naturally, Noam Chomsky is among them.

If I were a student, or a faculty member, at these institutions, I’d be calling for Chomsky’s resignation. Maybe someone should start a petition drive.

MORE ON EUGENICS & GENETIC ENGINEERING: A reader sends this gem:

To tie two recent Instapundit threads together, I don’t see much difference
between anti-cloning and anti-genetic engineering laws on one hand and the old anti-miscegenation laws on the other. In both cases the Law declares that certain types of families and certain types of offspring are Officially Undesirable.

An anti-genetic engineering law is itself a eugenics measure, as much if not more so than as the old anti-miscegenation were. It’s a eugenic measure of the old style, where the State decides what genes and genetic combinations are “good” or “bad” and imposes its decisions with the force of law. An anti-genetic engineering law and an anti-miscegenation law differ only in that the later declares “genetic purity” to be “good” (socially desirable and required by law), while the former declares “genetic naturalness” to be “good.”

This bears repeating: Anti-genetic engineering laws would be no different, in style or motivation, from the eugenics laws of the ’30s. All that would change is the definition of “socially desirable” genetic combinations – “pure” genes in the case of the old laws, and “natural” (or “wild type”) genes in the case of the new ones.

MICKEY KAUS has some sage advice for anti-Le Pen demonstrators.

WEST BANK WAR CRIME: Ralph Peters writes:

A TERRIBLE war crime has been committed in the West Bank. It will have far-reaching and heartbreaking consequences. But it has nothing to do with lies about an imaginary massacre in Jenin. The war crime – committed brazenly before a global audience – is the occupation of the Church of the Nativity, in Bethlehem, by Palestinian terrorists.

Where is the outcry? International law forbids the parties to armed conflict from using churches, as well as hospitals, museums and monuments, for military activities. The Laws of Land Warfare are even stricter.

The United Nations, which is ever quick to condemn Israel, has been silent about this violation, even though the Palestinian actions violate the UN’s own rules. The church is even under UNESCO designation as a protected site.

Yes, Ralph, but don’t you understand? Only Jews and Americans can commit war crimes nowadays. For everyone else, such acts are merely signs of understandable frustration.

ROBERT MUSIL is rather critical of Will Hutton’s book on Europe’s economic superiority vis a vis the United States. So is Howard Owens.

JONATHAN ADLER, writing in The Corner, makes a point about the difference between eugenics and reproductive technologies that’s somewhat different from the one that I make below, but still significant:

Webster’s Collegiate defines eugenics as “a science that deals with the improvement (as by control of human mating) of hereditary qualities of a race or breed.” I think that last phrase is key. Eugenics may not require control of human mating, but it seems to me that the term — and the revulsion it rightly engenders — does require broader racial ambitions (and, I should note, does not require government control). This is not to say that genetic engineering of children by their parents is a good thing — I am not sure whether I accept Bailey’s arguments — only that making decision about one’s own children is fundamentally different from trying to engineer an entire race.

I would agree that eugenics may not necessarily require government control in the abstract — but it always has in the concrete, unless you want to include such things as genetic counseling for Tay-Sachs carriers under the label eugenics, in which case calling something “eugenics” is a long way from proving that it’s evil.

READER GREG DECKER WRITES:

How is genetically engineering humans to be smarter/stronger/prettier different from eugenics?

There’s the obvious difference, in that we’re fabricating humans instead of breeding them, but what’s the moral/socio-political difference? Is eugenics bad simply because fascists used it the last time?

And, if there is none, then please outline your argument defending eugenics, for if genetic engineering and eugenics are equivalent, and you approve of genetic engineering, then you must also approve of eugenics.

Uh, no. Eugenics wasn’t bad because it involved improving the species (though the genetic theories — and applications — of eugenicists were lame enough that it probably wouldn’t have done that anyway). Nor was eugenics bad “because fascists used it the last time.” (At any rate, the fascists got their own ideas from American eugenicists, vigorously supported by Oliver Wendell Holmes).

What was bad about eugenics was that it involved overriding people’s reproductive choices, typically by sterilizing them so that they wouldn’t pass on genes deemed defective. Conflating forced sterilization with voluntary use of reproductive technologies — a common move among opponents of genetic science — is either ignorant, or dishonest.

THE NRA CONVENTION AND GAYS: A kind reader sends the link to this piece from PlanetOut.Com on anti-gay remarks at the NRA convention. That’s the piece I remembered, and now I remember why I waited to post — it wasn’t that compelling and I wanted to see what else came out.

Calling Rosie O’Donnell a “freak” — given gun owners’ general antipathy toward her hysterical antigun views — hardly counts as an anti-lesbian slur, and most of the other reports are equally vague and suspicious. Anyone got anything else on this?

My own experience has been that gun-rights folks, even hardened good-ole-boys types, are tickled, er, pink at groups like the Pink Pistols. And I’ve heard far more race-and-gender-and-sexual preferences from liberal academics than I’ve heard from gun folks.

UPDATE: Reader Eddie Brown writes:

Schlussel addressed this on Howard Stern’s radio show Tuesday.

Schlussel said she called O’Donnell a “freak” not because O’Donnell is gay, but because O’Donnell does “weird” things. Such as telling Diane Sawyer that she has e-mail conversations with people’s multiple personalities, or attacking Tom Selleck for his NRA membership on her show, or stating that gay adoption is advantageous to black children, while she herself adopts white children.

I consider Schlussel to be a very intelligent columnist and at this point am willing to take her at her word. Also, like you, I found the ambiguity of the PlantOut article to be suspect. However, Schlussel has often struck me as someone who makes “edgy”, politically incorrect statements simply for the sake of being politically incorrect. (Even as she was defending herself on Stern’s show, she referred to O’Donnell as a “fat ugly blob” for no reason.)

I think the situation needs either a more objective witness from the convention, or a tape or transcript of the panel Schlussel appeared on, to fully clarify matters.

If you want to hear her interview on Stern, you can play or download an MP3 of it from here…

I agree that I’d like to here more. I’d really like to hear someone from the Pink Pistols who was there address it.

FUKUYAMA-A-RAMA: Now it’s Virginia Postrel raking him over the coals.

BRIAN LINSE WANTS TO KNOW WHEN I’ll criticize Wayne LaPierre for comparing gun-controllers to Osama bin Laden. Right now.

Comparing gun controllers to bin Laden is just silly. He wants to blow Jews up, not disarm them. Here’s a more apt comparison, from Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership.

I meant to post a more serious criticism of some anti-gay comments made by some people attending the NRA conference, but now I can’t find the story I read yesterday, and there’s nothing about it on the Pink Pistols website as far as I can tell, even though I know they had representatives there.

IT’S A FUKUYAMA FEEDING-FRENZY! Take that, Jonah! Josh Chafetz at OxBlog says this:

On foreign policy, he says that September 11 “was a reminder to Americans of why government exists, and why it has to tax citizens and spend money to promote collective interests. It was only the government, and not the market or individuals, that could be depended on to send firemen into buildings, or to fight terrorists, or to screen passengers at airports.” Well, yes. But most libertarians recognize the need for limited government, which includes things like police and the military. Virginia Postrel and Brink Lindsey — two libertarian luminaries — have been relentless in their attacks on anti-war libertarians. And the problem with airport security was not that the screeners weren’t government officials, but rather that federal guidelines about what was okay to take aboard flights didn’t prohibit box cutters. No one ever thought that box cutters would be used to hijack a plane. So government screeners wouldn’t have made a bit of difference.

But what Fukuyama is really interested in is cloning. He’s not even interested in talking about therapeutic cloning. No, he goes right for the big one: reproductive cloning. He tries to present a non-theological argument against reproductive cloning. Here it is: “Children do not ask to be born, of course, but it is a stretch to assume the informed consent of a child to be born deaf, or a clone, or genetically redesigned in a risky experiment.” This is a cheap rhetorical trick: he sandwiches being born “a clone” in between being born deaf and having risky procedures carried out on you. Let’s put aside the risk involved in reproductive cloning because Fukuyama’s argument isn’t that cloning is too risky right now — it’s that it should never be allowed, ever, regardless of any advances in medical technology. In other words, for Fukuyama, being born a healthy clone is the equivalent of being born deaf or forcibly undergoing a risky experiment.

What? Why on earth would this possibly be? Because you’d know that there was someone else wandering around out there with the same DNA as you? Does Fukuyama think that identical twins suffer from a disability akin to deafness?

It gets even better.

EUGENE VOLOKH has a reply to Fukuyama’s piece, too. It’s characteristically polite, and destructive.

EURO-ANTISEMITISM UPDATE: George Will has a good column on the subject today. Also check out this piece in The Times, which warns Europeans that they really don’t grasp just how bad they look to Americans.

FUKUYAMA PILE-ON: Brink Lindsey calls Fukuyama’s oped a “smear,” dissects its bogus logic, and concludes:

So if opposition to the cloning ban is a libertarian-left plot, how does Fukuyama explain Orrin Hatch and Arlen Specter? Furthermore, Fukuyama sneakily conflates the cloning controversy and the broader issue of genetic engineering. But on that broader issue, the political alignment is totally different from what Fukuyama suggests. The fact is that most conservatives oppose cloning strictly on pro-life grounds; they have none of Fukuyama’s general hostility to medical progress.

In reality, it’s Fukuyama — not libertarian opponents of the proposed cloning ban — who is in the grips of a “radical dogma.” Fukuyama, having proclaimed the end of history, wants to keep history under arrest by throttling scientific and medical progress. He speaks for an emerging coalition of neocon and Luddite left intellectuals – but are such views really in line with the broad currents of conservative or liberal opinion? I don’t think so. I was speaking recently with someone very prominent in conservative circles, and I asked him if he would oppose genetic engineering to improve intelligence, looks, etc. if it didn’t involve destroying embryos any more than current in vitro fertilization techniques. “Of course not,” he replied. “The essence of human nature is the desire to improve your condition. You can’t oppose that.” But Fukuyama does — in the name of defending an imaginary, static “human nature,” he sets himself against the essential dynamism that defines our humanity.

Yes.