ANOTHER SFSU UPDATE: Reader Eric Mitchell sends a link to this story from 1997, which includes this interesting quote from SFSU President Tom Corrigan:

“San Francisco State is considered the most anti-Semitic campus in the nation,” Corrigan said at his ‘State of the University’ address to the faculty Aug. 25, when he also openly wondered why faculty did not speak out against a controversial speech made by black speaker Khallid Muhammad on campus last spring.

In SF State recent history, racial and ethnic conflict among students has often focused around complicated conflicts involving the Jewish community here and abroad.

In 1994, members of the Pan Afrikan Student Union tried to stop riot police and university officials from removing a Malcolm X mural that depicted dollar signs over an Israeli flag and a burning U.S. flag.

In 1996, Palestinian-heritage students and other students empathetic to their causes protested against a separate Jewish state and physically disrupted students involved in the Israeli Caravan, a traveling celebration of Jewish culture. There was also a peaceful protest during last spring’s Caravan visit that was closely watched by university officials.

Last April, some members of PASU unfurled a banner that depicted an Israeli flag with a swastika in the center of the Star of David. The group was protesting the Israel government’s alleged role in training Peruvian troops who eventually stormed the Japanese ambassador’s home in Lima, ending a 126-day hostage crisis.

Last May, PASU invited black speaker and founder of the New Black Panther Party, Khallid Muhammad, to make a speech entitled, “Who is Pimping the World?” The group’s price of admission was $7 for student and $15 for “Zionist, Uncle Toms and other white supremacist.” In response, a handful of student government leaders expressed concern that members of PASU were spreading words of hate and violence.

Sounds like they’ve had a long-standing problem. So why didn’t they do anything?

SFSU UPDATE: Meryl Yourish, who owns this story, has more information at her site, including a response to someone who claims the story was overplayed — but presents as evidence an article from a newsletter that seems to track the Zoloth email pretty closely, except for a bit of weasel-worded stuff from a University PR guy. She also has SFSU President Tom Corrigan’s email address, and another letter from San Francisco Hillel supporting the original account, and saying that SFSU has been a hostile environment for Jewish students for quite some time, and that SFSU failed to follow its own guidelines on how to handle student misbehavior.

READER FRANK NATOLI says I’ve been too hard on the FBI and the intelligence community:

Has anyone [yet] pointed out that obtaining a piece of intelligence is only step #1? And that separating the “correct” intel from the “incorrect” is not only step #2 but often the tough part?

U.S. military intel knew they had lost track of six Jap carriers in late November 1941, and for days afterward all six maintained scrupulous radio silence. In retrospect, ah-hah, that should have tipped FDR, Kimmel, Short et al that the Akagi, Kaga, Hiryu, Soryu, Zuikaku and Shokaku were crossing the North Pacific enroute to Hawaii and the “Day of Infamy”. Right?

Wrong. Because, as Gordon Prange makes very clear in “At Dawn We Slept”, there was a relative avalanche of other intel that indicated that Jap objectives were to the south, to the Dutch East Indies and their oil. There was no divine guidance to direct us to ignore the rational intel and focus instead on the irrational.

And so it probably is with the FBI memo on possible WTC attacks. Would Senator Daschle and Representative Gephardt kindly articulate how this one memo was to be separated from the relative infinity of other memos?

Well, maybe. But what offends me — as I keep repeating — isn’t so much the failure to prevent the attacks. That may well have been impossible, even if they’d had extraordinarily good intelligence. What offends me is the constant repetition (I heard Condi Rice say this just yesterday) that no one could have imagined the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. That’s not only absurd, it’s an insult to our intelligence.

READER PHILIPPE RAMOFF writes from France, and he’s very offended by my post (below) about the BoycottFrance.Com website. He also sends a link to this story in which Woody Allen compares the filmmakers’ boycott of Cannes to Nazi methods, which he apparently feels bolsters his case. I’m unimpressed. Allen isn’t boycotting Cannes because, frankly, his career is not at a point where he can afford to boycott Cannes. He’s hoping for a comeback. Allen’s odious comparison does him no credit, to put it mildly, nor is Allen generally regarded as a source of moral leadership.

Ramoff also asks: “And, maybe you may explain some day, which collective sin made us, french, mourning for your forgiveness?” Well, there’s a topic the Blogosphere could work on all day. But it’s the consistent practice of siding with terrorists (at least so long as they don’t strike French citizens), the denunciations of American policy, and Americans, as “simplistic,” the tolerance of Islamic extremism, synagogue burning, and antisemitism, the description of Israel as a “shitty little country,” etc., at least for a start, that have people interested in boycotting France. The BoycottFrance.Com site has more information.

As I mentioned in my post, France may actually be coming around. I’m hopeful, but then I’m a well-known optimist.

HASHEMITE RESTORATION UPDATE:

But if Jordan were fully to join the effort to topple Saddam, the prize could be tempting — and could also answer the question of who replaces Saddam. Until his assassination in 1958, the Hashemite King Faisal II was the head of state of Iraq. King Hussein of Jordan, father of the current King Abdullah, was Faisal’s cousin, and the heir to the Iraqi throne, Sharif Ali, lives conveniently in London. The return of a constitutional monarchy to Iraq could be a plausible replacement for Saddam Hussein — and how could the Arab world object to the return of the Hashemite dynasty, direct descendants of the prophet Muhammed?

Oh, I’m sure they’ll find something to object to. But this idea has advanced well beyond the blogosphere, where it made its first appearance.

EUGENE VOLOKH asks what people would say if schools had affirmative action for Catholics and Pentecostals in the name of achieving religious diversity.

MATTHEW YGLESIAS reports on his mugging in Amsterdam. And Matt Welch chimes in on its resemblance to New York in the 1980s. I expect that Europe will see a lot more Giulianization, despite the efforts of aging Dinkinses and Lindsays to hold on.

MICKEY KAUS has more information on how the welfare reform debate is going. Hillary is a centrist in this debate. Uh oh.

And try to ignore the annoying Qwest ad that takes up half your screen.

VIRGINIA POSTREL has an update on the Franklin Society petition, and the anti-cloning bill.

READER MIKE HADLEY sends this link to suggest that things are as bad for black students at Harvard as for Jewish students at SFSU. Read it and see if you agree.

BELLESILES UPDATE: Still more problems with the evidence Bellesiles claims to have relied on:

The documents in question are Vermont court records from the late 18th century. The key passage appears on page 353 of “Arming America”: “During Vermont’s frontier period, from 1760 to 1790, there were five reported murders (excluding those deaths in the American Revolution), and three of those were politically motivated.” The endnote for this finding refers the reader to Superior Court records at the county courthouse in Rutland, Vermont. But as Ohio State University historian Randolph Roth has pointed out (and the court clerk in Rutland has confirmed), the volumes for 1782 to 1790 are not in the Rutland court’s holdings. Furthermore, the Superior Court did not exist before 1778, when Vermont became a state, so it has no records for the period 1760 to 1777.

UPDATE: This isn’t quite right. Vermont became an “independent republic” in 1777, but didn’t become an actual state until later. Thanks to reader Steve White for pointing that out. I should have noticed it myself.

VODKAPUNDIT IS BACK.

“WHAT IS it that makes anti-Americanism, alone among ugly political fanaticisms, respectable?” Bret Stephens looks at the roots of anti-Americanism (and observes, shrewdly, that anti-Americanism is most of what passes for Leftist thought these days). Noam Chomsky is mentioned.

PATRICK NIELSEN HAYDEN says Ken Layne is “slightly unhinged.” Slightly?

WHAT’S A JEW TO DO? asks Dawn Olsen. Um, lust after Chuck Finley, apparently.

BILL QUICK TAKES ON ALL COMERS in a multidirectional debunking of the claim that Bush only recently made up the “war, recession, or emergency” exception to the balanced-budget goal.

The SpinSanity guys invited me to link to their piece, but I replied that I seemed to remember that he had said this during the campaign. Unless I’ve just been brainwashed.

BOYCOTTFRANCE.COM is a site devoted to, well, you know. The French may be in the process of becoming a bit less odious thanks to the recent election and the wake-up call provided by the Pakistani bombing. But I’m not ready to forgive ’em just yet. (Via DodgeBlog).

DR. FRANK’S ALIEN WIFE: Sounds like a series on the WB, but it’s for real.

WHY TAP DOESN’T SUCK NOW: I wonder if they’ll have a quote from me on their site soon — “TAP doesn’t suck anymore” — Glenn Reynolds? Well, probably not. But a reader writes with an explanation for the phenomenon I identified below:

There is one reason, and only one reason, for the success of The American Prospect online: Chris Mooney became the editor. It was the approach that he brought to TAP that ushered in the blog and the new non-sleep inducing articles. If I had Bill Moyers’ e-mail address, I’d tell ask him to put Mooney in charge of the whole thing.

PS: The old TAP didn’t completely suck. The political coverage was… bad and the opinion columns were easily ignored, but the criticism – movie, music, book and otherwise – has always been good.

I almost never even looked at TAP until the past few months, and in fact one of the few articles I’d read before then was one by Chris Mooney. So maybe this is true. Pay him more! Er, or at least don’t lay him off. . . .

20/20 HINDSIGHT: Rand Simberg thinks that people — I guess that would include me have been too hard on the FBI, etc.

UPDATE: Actually, on rereading this, I don’t think he really disagrees with what I’ve been saying:

Was this even avoidable? In theory, yes. I wasn’t really surprised when it happened. When the first plane hit, I was wondering if it was deliberate, and if so, how it could be pulled off. I ran through the possibilities in my mind, and the only one that made sense was a hijacking. When the second plane hit, the thought jelled–clearly that was what happened. Was it unthinkable? Not to me. The WTC had already been targeted by these nutballs. We had already seen a plane taken down by a suicidal pilot (in the Egypt Air case). So why not?

But in practice, it probably couldn’t have been prevented, even had the dots been properly connected. We were simply culturally unable to deal with it until we had the bucket of ice water splashed in our collective face last September.

He’s absolutely right about this last. Even if we’d known, what could we have done? Started questioning suspicious Arab-looking young men at airports? Hell, we’re not even doing that now. Get passengers to resist? That would have been a good idea (it was probably always a good idea) but would people have changed their behavior from sheeplike to lionlike without the examples of the WTC and Pentagon on fire — and of Flight 93? Doubtful. Put sky marshals on the planes? Again, we’ve barely started to do that now. Invaded Afghanistan? Who would have gone for that?

HERE’S A LINK to a picture of the blood-libel posters displayed at SFSU. Note that this isn’t anti-Israeli, or anti-Zionist. It’s pure, medieval-style antisemitism, involving children said to be “slaughtered in accordance with Jewish rites.”

What would SFSU have already done by now to any group that displayed similarly offensive posters about black people? Or Muslims?

Don’t misunderstand me — I don’t think that such posters should be censored, nor that this one should. But I think the people who run universities don’t generally share my commitment to free speech. And because they don’t, it’s fair to call them to account when they display an attitude of selective laissez faire.

FUKUYAMA SHOWS HIS COLORS: I’ve been reading Bob Zubrin’s book Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization and here’s a great quote:

In 1997, Scientific American writer James Horgan published a more interesting best-seller entitled The End of Science, in which he held that all the really big discoveries to be made in science already have been made, and thus the enterprise of scientific discovery must soon grind to a halt. (The day after I finished reading Horgan’s book in February 1998, a group of astronomers announced that they had found a fifth fundamental force in nature.) In his book, Horgan interviewed Fukuyama and asked him what he thought of those who doubt we have reached the end of human history. “They must be space travel buffs,” Fukuyama replied in derision. Indeed.

Yes, that’s our Frank.

I’VE NOTICED that I’m linking to a lot of stuff from The American Prospect lately, which I used to almost never do. Why is this? I think it’s because TAP (or at least its online version) doesn’t suck anymore. A lot of people have been saying they should keep the blog if the magazine folds. Why not try to keep the online magazine if the print mag folds? Their “online exclusive” articles, in my experience, are the best ones anyway.

THE DUTCH ELECTIONS won’t make that big a difference, says this article by Sasha Polakow-Suransky , because the EU runs everything anyway.

ED LAZARUS writes on FindLaw that he disagrees with Bush & Ashcroft & Olson on the Second Amendment, but that it was perfectly legitimate for them to change their position and endorse the individual rights view.