HAPPY FIFTIETH BIRTHDAY TO ALFRED E. NEUMAN — and a lesson for those who claim that they’re being “suppressed” today:

The era was the 1950s, the gray flannel fifties, and Mad magazine, which began publishing early in the decade, was so subversive that the FBI actually investigated it, sometimes sending agents to visit the editors and, in the words of an FBI document, “firmly and severely admonish them.”

Mad’s reaction was to draw funny cartoons of J. Edgar Hoover.

Note to Ted Rall: they were funny cartoons.

MISSING TROOPS IN AFGHANISTAN? This story from the Frontier Post says there are 40. It’s not a tremendously reliable source, and I haven’t seen anything on this elsewhere, but here’s the link for what it’s worth.

MERYL YOURISH reflects on the media’s unwillingness to call the Chechen hostage-takers terrorists:

In my lexicon, guerrilla fighters and rebels are names for the people fighting military forces and choosing military targets. The second you move on to deliberately targeting civilians, you are no longer anything but a terrorist. But hey, what do I know? Here’s the AP description of the scene . . . .

Captors. Gunmen. Hostage-takers. Not terrrorists, though many of them were clad in the latest of bomb-belt fashions. Dozens of their hostages are dead today, many wounded, and these simple “rebels” are described as above.

The terrorists have won the language war. Or is it the multicultis and the PC crowds? Certainly, the newsroom staffs across the globe have succumbed to the mindset of—captives. Why else are they so afraid to call a bloodthirsty killer a terrorist?

When is a terrorist not a terrorist? When the media say so.

Mark my words: this is more likely to breed prejudice and vigilantism than to prevent it.

A PALESTINIAN WOMAN was dragged from her home and killed in an atrocity that probably won’t get much attention because it was conducted by Palestinians.

SPEAKING OF CNN — they’re now calling John Muhammad “John Williams,” in an apparent policy of only calling people by adopted Muslim names when they’re not terrorists. (They don’t call Muhammad Ali “Cassius Clay,” now do they?)

This seems to be part of an overall move to “de-Islamicize” the sniper case. For the authorities, there are two obvious motivations for this. First, if it’s “not terrorism,” then the fact that it happened isn’t a failure of “anti-terrorism.” Second, to the extent that people buy this it makes the anti-American Islamic movement look weaker. For the PC forces of the media, it probably appears necessary to ensure that mobs of peasants with torches and pitchforks won’t set out for the nearest mosque. (Though in fact such distortions make such violence more, not less, likely in my opinion, by breeding distrust of the authorities.)

Anyway, here’s the actual bin Laden fatwa, which clearly encompasses individual acts of terror against America. So the notion that an Islamic terrorist has to be a card-carrying member of Al Qaeda to be a genuine terrorist is absurd under its own terms. Excerpt:

The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies–civilians and military–is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty God, “and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together,” and “fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in God.” . . .

We — with God’s help — call on every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewarded to comply with God’s order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it.

(Emphasis added.) Now this doesn’t tell us the specific motivations of John Muhammad, but it does make clear that claims that people who act without a direct connection to Al Qaeda, or people who also rob liquor stories, can’t be Ladenite terrorists are just, well, wrong.

(Fatwa link via Neal Boortz). NOTE: Reader Haggai Elitzur has sent this 1998 analysis of the Fatwa by Bernard Lewis from Foreign Affairs. Lewis’s translation differs slightly; Elitzur says it’s better, but I’m not in a position to judge. Don’t miss this point in which Lewis notes that that even if most Muslims disagree with this kind of reasoning (and they do) only a few need believe it to create problems. STILL MORE: Aziz Poonawalla emails that it’s not a real fatwa, but a call to hirabah (senseless or stupid war), and sends this link to a discussion on alt.muslim on the subject.

UPDATE: And as people have tried to minimize the Al Qaeda connection to the Bali blast, too, it’s worth remembering that bin Laden threatened Australia last year based on its role in the independence of East Timor.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reid Stott emails this link to the arrest warrant, which uses the name “John Williams.” He adds: ” agree with what you’re saying re: playing down the adopted Muslim name, but it isn’t CNN that’s doing it.” Well, it isn’t just CNN. As I said, the government has an interest in playing down this connection, too.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Jay Caruso responds.

STILL MORE: Then there’s this from The Smoking Gun:

A jovial, laughing John Allen Muhammad can be heard on an official audio recording of the alleged sniper’s appearance last year in Pierce County District Court to formally change his name. In April 2001, Muhammad made a brief appearance before Judge Molly Davis to request that his name be formally changed from John Allen Williams for “religion purposes” (he had converted to Islam years earlier). When Davis granted the name change after only a few perfunctory questions, Muhammad joked, “I feel cheated,” since he was not called on to present witnesses or paperwork or approach the bench. “These are fairly routine,” Davis said.

(Emphasis added). There’s streaming audio of the hearing there, and lots of other links. Reader Allan Gornow, who sends the link, remarks: “Perhaps Ted Turner will provide some decent computers to his news operation so they can access significant information about serious stories.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Bill Herbert says I’ve gone off the deep end on this issue. Well, I was thinking about why this bugs me so much while I was shopping, Lileks-like, at Target. What this reminds me of is the Administration’s absurd claim last year that no one could possibly have foreseen the 9/11 attacks. It may have been true that the failure to prevent the attacks was entirely non-culpable — but the claim that they were utterly unforeseeable was so absurd that it was an insult.

Likewise, it may well turn out that — despite rather a lot of suggestive evidence — the sniper attacks by a guy named Muhammad who said he supported the 9/11 attackers and who seems to have had a lot of money and airplane tickets for a homeless guy will turn out to be pure, garden-variety nuttiness. But that doesn’t change the fact that a lot of people seem to be bending over backward to be sure it looks that way, and that’s why I’m harping on the issue.

LAST UPDATE: Natalie Solent explains what I mean.

APPARENTLY CNN DOESN’T CARE, but the news from Algeria is pretty horrifying:

The Algerian news agency says suspected Islamic extremists have killed 21 people from the same family, including a three-month-old baby. The attack took place in the north-western province of Chlef.

Five other people were reported to be in a serious condition with bullet wounds to the head.

How come this stuff doesn’t get covered?

TARNISHING THE IMAGE OF ISLAM: SKBubba is concerned that some people may get the wrong idea from recent events.

BELLESILES UPDATE: Erin O’Connor worries that Bellesiles isn’t unusual, but is just the tip of the academic-corruption iceberg:

There were peer reviewers who did not do their job when Bellesiles first began publishing his work on early American gun ownership, and there were the editors who chose them. There were editors who ignored the attempts of scholars such as Clayton Cramer to alert them to problems with Bellesiles’ work and there were publishing houses that did not see past the chance to make a buck and a splash. There were prize committees that decorated Bellesiles with top professional honors.

I cannot speak for the quality of Bellesiles’ training, nor do I know any more than anyone else about where in his work methodological carelessness cedes to blatant falsification. But I do know something about what graduate education in the humanities looks like, and I know something, too, about how low on the list of scholarly priorities such non-flashy things as thorough documentation and judicious restraint are. Until we start interrogating our systems of peer review, our patterns of professional reward, and the professional training we do, or don’t do, in our Ph.D. programs, we have not yet begun to address the issues the Bellesiles case raises.

Well, Bellesiles’ behavior was extraordinary — but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t a lot of other problems out there. I agree that peer review is highly overrated as a means of catching fraud. Peer review is pretty good at catching unsound methodologies, but true frauds just fake the data, and peer reviewers don’t double-check those.

UPDATE: Chris Fountain emails that the story isn’t in the print edition of today’s New York Times.

ANOTHER UPDATE: John Bono thinks he knows what’s coming next.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Megan McArdle is offering a prize to the first reader who spots a journalist or academic “making reference to, without irony, Bellesiles work “proving” that early Americans didn’t have a lot of guns.”

Like the bogus Marc Herold study on Afghan civilian casualties, I imagine that Bellesiles’ work will live on. And I’m still waiting for a public retraction on the matter from reviewers like Garry Wills. But I’m not holding my breath. Don’t miss this post from Megan, either.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Megan has a winner. Well, sort of. Personally, I think people should be given at least a few days to update their web pages.

HERE’S AN UPDATE on the Russian hostage rescue, which appears to have gone well, though not quite as well as it appeared late last night. Apparently 67 hostages are dead, out of about 750. Considering that the building (and the terrorists) were wired with suicide explosives, that’s good.

Interestingly, the report claims that the Russians used a sleeping gas to incapacitate people. I’m somewhat skeptical of this, since knockout gases have been the holy grail of nonlethal-weapons research and as far as I know there haven’t been any good ones developed. Then again, it’s not like I follow the field that closely.

We should be grateful that the Russians managed this so well, as it makes a repetition of these tactics less likely.

UPDATE: There’s more coverage here from the Moscow Times, which is spinning this very positively. I think it is positive, but the spin is quite evident.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Perry DeHavilland is very happy with this outcome, and says that in the long run it’s always safer not to give in to terrorist demands — which is, of course, true.

THE NEW SMARTERHARPERSINDEX is up!

Harper’s repeats statistics already discredited in print by Matt Welch, and seems incapable of reading a UN document. In other words, a pretty typical effort.

CNN IS REPORTING that Russian forces are in control of the theater and Chechen leader Barayev is dead. (But he’s been reported dead before more than once — and note the Wahhabi connection.) That’s all at the moment — reports are still rather fragmentary and confused.

UPDATE: Here’s what Reuters has, but it’s pretty skimpy. CNN says approximately 20 dead, but it’s not clear how many are hostages and how many are terrorists.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s a longer story from UPI. And here’s the AP story.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s the latest on what appears to have been a fairly successful antiterrorist rescue mission. And Bill Quick has some thoughts.

THE POST HAS THE SNIPER LETTER up in PDF. Tony Adragna has a link and some comments.

UH-OH. Explosions and gunfire near the theater in Moscow. Meanwhile Damian Penny observes:

So, in the capital of the world’s second leading nuclear power, hundreds of people are being held hostage by terrorists who are almost certainly connected to the people who murdered 3,000 civilians on 9/11. As we speak, the final showdown between security forces and the terrorists may be beginning. And what are the 24-hour news channels showing?

CNN has Connie Chung talking about the sniper. (Look, they got the fucker, alright?) CTV NewsNet is stuck on its CRTC-mandated 15-minute loop. (Top story: the sniper. When I watched it a couple of hours ago, the Moscow hostage-taking was not even mentioned.) And CBC Uselessworld Newsworld, funded by the Canadian taxpayer to provide an alternative to the horrible, shallow, corporate American news networks, is showing a shocking expose of burlesque houses. (A half hour ago, they were showing Fashion File.) Incredible.

Sigh.

WILL THE LAST BLOGGER TO LEAVE SAN FRANCISCO please turn out the lights?

AN, ER, “IMPERIAL ‘MISTING,'” by Misha, of the recent New York Times article on John Muhammad’s rifle.

IT’S NOT ABOUT BELLESILES, but John Rosenberg has a long post on the work of Jon Weiner, best known to readers of InstaPundit as Bellesiles’ last defender in print, who is described as The Nation’s “academic commissar.” Unlike Rosenberg, I never worked at The Nation, and some of this is inside baseball, but there may be some readers who find it interesting.

BARRELFISKING: Rachel Lucas replies to Michael Moore.