CATHY YOUNG WRITES that the NEA got a bum rap over its proposed 9/11 lesson plans. But the response to the criticism seemed to me to reinforce its correctness. Geitner Simmons has the story well-blogged.

COLUMNIST DEROY MURDOCK emails to ask for your help:

WANTED: ONE EYEWITNESS TO HISTORY

by Deroy Murdock

Have you seen this man?

I would like your help in identifying and locating the short-haired young man whose face the Associated Press beamed worldwide last September 11.

(See photo at link or link. )

In an award-winning picture, AP photographer Suzanne Plunkett captured this gentleman running like hell as Two World Trade Center collapsed. Clad in a white shirt and dark tie with his backpack’s straps over his shoulders, he races east on Lower Manhattan’s Fulton Street with a look of sheer horror on his face as a menacing, white debris cloud races up Church Street, one block to the west.

I have wondered since I saw this world-famous image who this guy is, where he was that awful day, what he saw and how he has recovered from that trauma (if he has). Unfortunately, Ms. Plunkett knows neither his name nor whereabouts, nor has either of us ever seen him interviewed.

If you have any contact information or other details on this man, would you please pass along whatever you know? You may e-mail me at

Feel free to forward my request to anyone else who might be able to help. I will write about whatever I learn from this eyewitness to the horror of 9-11.

Best wishes,

Deroy Murdock

Syndicated columnist,

Scripps Howard News Service

Help him out, if you can.

THE MAYOR OF LONDON FEELS SAFER IN NEW YORK. Hey, just be glad it’s not Stockholm.

SADDAM AND THE BOMB: The Indepundit is on the case.

VIRGINIA POSTREL IS BACK and blogging up a storm. We missed you, Virginia!

BERKELEY DOESN’T WANT RED, WHITE AND BLUE at September 11 memorials, because it’s “offensive,” according to the Angry Clam.

MEGAN MCARDLE HAS THE LATEST POLL DATA:

55% of Europeans think that America was “partly to blame” for the Al Quaeda attacks.

In related news, 100% of Americans think that Europe was “entirely to blame” for World Wars I, II, the Holocaust, and Communist atrocities in the former Soviet Union and associated territories. 99.8% of Americans think that “The next time Europeans get themselves in any kind of trouble that requires US intervention, they can k*** my a**”. And 89% of Americans think that “If those same Europeans are against invading Iraq, then it’s time to put Sadaam in a whole world of hurt.”

JONAH GOLDBERG WRITES THAT WAR IS UNDERRATED:

Those who fetishize “stability in the region” really mean the stability of cruelty and tyranny (and those who blame Israel for the attitudes of the Arab street are arguing, in effect, that it would be better to abandon one friendly democracy than to establish 50 of them). A stable, Nazi-run Europe would have been no friend and an unstable but democratizing Middle East would be no foe. After the Gulf War, the signs were there for a U.S.-led transformation of the region, but we turned our backs on those we had encouraged to rise up and embraced, once again, those committed to keeping their subjects down. Until that status quo is crushed and flushed clean by the tide of history, there will always be bin Ladens. Indeed, that is where the moral and realpolitik cases for war intertwine.

The biggest favor the United States ever did to militaristic Japan was to crush it militarily. Our victory ushered in prosperity, democracy, and a productive peace. The Iraqi people would be lucky if we did them the same favor.

I’LL BE ON HUGH HEWITT’S SHOW AT 7:30 EASTERN: Here’s the link for streaming audio.

AIMEE DEEP IS UNDER AN INJUNCTION. The full text is on her blog.

SATELLITE PHOTOS AND THE CASE AGAINST SADDAM: Leonard David has the scoop.

HERE ARE SOME COMMENTS ON RALPH PETERS’ ESSAY, ROLLING BACK RADICAL ISLAM, from InstaPundit’s consulting Islamicist:

Hmmmm… very interesting. I don’t have time to give it the attention it deserves, but here are some stream-of-consciousness comments:

Peters is spot-on when he speaks of the American tendency to over-privilege Arab-centrism in Islam, and he is right that the real center of Islamic thought need not be Arab. But, he seems to discount the role of Arabia and parts of the Middle East as the “holy land” — and this privileges whoever lives in these regions vis-a-vis the wider tenor of the religion. The hajj is a critical example. It has served the Saudis every bit as well as has their oil wealth.

Peters also is a bit quick to over-simplify “Arab” Islam. There are many and significant divisions within the faith amongst Arabs, and these are every bit as important for the future of the religion as are divisions in the wider world. He is too quick to “write off” the region as “lost.” I think the current discontent in Iran is symptomatic of a growing disillusionment with “fundamentalism” elsewhere — but this tendency is squashed by the characteristic lack of civil liberties in the region. I am confident that many mellow or progressive Muslims wish the radicals would shut up, but are just terrified to say so. Often the tensions are between older generations and the archetypical “angry youth.”

This said, I agree with Peters’ basic argument that it is critical not to ignore the wider Islamic world. His description of Indonesia reminds me very much of the dynamics of Islam in West Africa, complete with tensions between nouveau-Wahabis and mellow sufis. Oh, and MTV, since al-Jazira currently competes with “Yo MTV Raps!” in much of West Africa. This reality is representative of a wider theme. To Muslims beyond the Middle East, Arab society, despite Peter’s ondemnations of backwardness, still represents an image of “modernity” — even if that modernity is something of an artificial creation of oil wealth.

Forgive me for sounding overly academic, but Fundamentalists don’t really call as much for a return to the past as they are re-creating the past in the image of their own modernity. The past they describe never existed… Islam often WAS what Peters says it needs to be. This is a struggle over defining the past as well as the future (said the historian).

Indeed, my main beef with Peters is the generally ahistorical bent of his article. His characterization of Islam as “young” seems to miss the point that Christianity is only a few hundred years older. Further, his claim that the West has ignored Islam is only correct from an American standpoint. Goodness knows that the Europeans have been deeply engaged in things Islamic (often from a ‘social engineering’ perspective) for over 100 years. Heck, chopping up the Ottoman Empire and backing the Saudis after WWI was seen as a means of restructuring Islam… and look where that led! The colonial legacy is critical here, in that for most of the world colonialism represents (and delegitimated) much of what is thought of as “Western.”

The critical question, and here I really agree with what I think was Peters’ central point, is that somehow the “West” has to offer the world’s Muslims an alternative to fundamentalism which is both realistic and palatable. Shoring up anti-Muslim dictators is just the sort of temporary fix Peters warns against, and I agree that that is not productive in the long run. Sure didn’t work with the Shah. Indeed, as I have said before, one of the most effective strategies is to let the Fundamentalists have their way. Thirty years of “revolution” in Iran have left the population with a very nasty taste in their mouths. Now they want their MTV.

Yet tempting folks with Britney Spears is only that — temptation. In the long run the West has to help insure that REAL rewards come from westernization. Quasi-colonial style “globalization,” which seeks to maintain most of the world as producers of raw materials and consumers of finished goods simply breeds political corruption and popular anger. Just look at what oil has done to Nigeria (and, heck, the whole Middle East). Some can say “what governments do with the money isn’t our problem — but that would fly in the face of the current evidence, now wouldn’t it? The West really needs to find a way to engage countries economically without engendering massive corruption and inequalities of wealth. This means REAL globalization where the West drops the barriers to products produced elsewhere and stops dumping products like subsidized rice on the rest of the world. Yes, that would mean losing US jobs, at least in the short run. But do we or don’t we believe in free trade and competition?

Here is a thought. There are many types of “capital”. Most people prefer the cash variety, but in its absence they will seize upon other varieties… such as raw power or piety. Fundamentalism (Islamic or otherwise) combines both these elements and thrives where they are more attainable than economic advancement. This is why poverty and corruption are very real contributing factors to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. Obviously the bin Ladens of the world already have financial capital, but they are preying upon the absence of it to spread their ideology and hence their power. Indeed, these guys NEED poverty in order to peddle their wares. To “win” the West has to help spread real economic development — which will both show the advantages of being more Western and also diffuse one of the contributing factors to the spread of fanaticism.

Perhaps one reason Indonesia has so successfully resisted fundamentalism is because the country was on an up swing economically for much of the previous century. If the country continues to face economic decay, however, we might see a change for the worse.

How’s this for a slogan? “Fight Terrorism: Buy Indonesian.” But to work, it has to extend far beyond Indonesia.

So there you are. Any comments?

NO OFFENSE TO ERIC ALTERMAN, but Sweden has not been a “beacon of light” to the world. It collaborated with the Nazis in World War Two, and despite its moralistic posturing in the postWar era was not especially admirable then, either.

Nor, being poorer than Mississippi, but with more crime than America, are they much of a model domestically.

If Sweden is a role model to the United States in anything, it’s how to get good PR despite bad facts. But the way to do that is no secret — just be leftist, which journalists tend to love. Just ask Fidel Castro, who gets astonishingly good press considering that he runs a murderous dictatorship that keeps his people in poverty while he lives in splendor unmatched by any Victorian robber-baron industrialist.

UPDATE: Jason McCullough says that the study is biased against the Swedes. That’s odd, since it was a Swedish study, and I don’t find his argument on the merits persuasive. But read his analysis and decide for yourself.

I HAVEN’T WRITTEN ABOUT Jim Webb’s oped this morning because I’ve been busy with actual work. (Yeah, believe it or not). But thanks to the beauty of the blogosphere, my dilatoriness just means I can link to responses by Tony Adragna and Stephen Green and one of Stephen Green’s readers who have already been discussing this.

And only in a weblog would you hear someone sound even faintly guilty about not responding to an oped by the afternoon of the day it was published!

KAUS TO CRITICS: Neener, neener!

DAVE KOPEL WRITES that the big dailies are ignoring Zimbabwe’s genocide. And Andrew Stuttaford notes at The Corner that reports of Powell being heckled at the Johannesburg summit fail to mention that he was heckled in response to his criticism of Mugabe’s forced-starvation policies. According to this report, “Dissent filled the hall when Mr Powell criticised the government of Zimbabwe for exacerbating the food crisis in that country and pushing ‘millions of people to the brink of starvation.'”

As Stuttaford puts it: “Poor Colin Powell. No one had told him that he was addressing a gathering of fascists.”

PIM FORTUYN’S KILLING is starting to look like more than just the work of a single crazed gunman.

HERE’S THE STORY of how one of SpinSanity’s founders was encouraged to leave his union job for criticizing an article in The Nation by Robert Borosage. Excerpt:

Would Keefer feel free to criticize Wellstone’s political rhetoric? Yes, Keefer answered. Well, that’s a problem, Anderson replied, because that would be a fireable offense. “By that logic,” Keefer complained, “I can’t criticize most or all of the political left.” According to Keefer, Anderson answered, “Yes, that’s true.”

I’m sure that Michael Moore will be all over this example of post-9/11 censorship in America.

AIRLINE SECURITY IS STILL A JOKE. Good thing they weren’t smuggling anything really dangerous, like breast milk or tweezers.

JAMES WOOLSEY WRITES in The New Republic that it’s entirely possible that Saddam is behind Osama bin Laden:

Does it not seem curious that bin Laden issues fatwas, pushes videotapes, quotes poems, and orders his followers to talk loudly and often about his role in attacks on us? Does someone want our focus to be solely on bin Laden’s hard-to-reach self, and not on a senior partner?

Compare Woolsey’s observation with this post from InstaPundit, September 17,2001:

When we discussed this in one of my classes, many students pointed out that the evidence pointing toward Osama bin Laden seemed almost too good, too pat. Boasts in bars the night before, IDs and literature left behind in hotel rooms, etc., etc. Of course, it could be possible that bin Laden is either stupid, or just doesn’t care whether we connect it to him. But consider these other two possibilities: (1) Somebody else is fingering him — perhaps as an involved-but-not-central “cut out” or as a complete bit of misdirection — so that we won’t look past him to the real mastermind; or (2) this is disinformation being fed to the media by our own government to put the real culprits (Iraq or whoever) off guard. Keep your eye on this one.

I think there’s little doubt now that Osama was involved. But that doesn’t mean that he was the sole, or even the prime, mover, and there’s plenty of reason to suspect that he’s not.

UPDATE: From the I’m-an-idiot department. I found this via Lileks, and didn’t notice that the Woolsey piece is from last year, before mine.

The analysis still holds, though.

AIMEE DEEP writes an obituary for Napster. As I said at the time of the decision, I think it was unfair to judge Napster based on its early history — in time, it probably would have become a major distribution tool for independent artists. Which I think is what worried the RIAA most.

And, as I predicted at the time, the suppression of Napster (which with a centralized architecture was something the record industry could have taken over and controlled) has produced many new music-sharing systems with bigger traffic, which are far harder to control.

But, of course, this isn’t really about the well-being even of record companies, but about protecting jobs for people in the record industry who contribute very little to their shareholders, their artists, or their customers. And, so far, the RIAA has done a pretty good job of that. Er, except for the steadily declining CD sales as people boycott them and turn to independent artists and lables, that is.

GETTING A CLUE AT LAST: The FBI has decided that the LAX shooting (two months ago) was an act of terrorism after all. How about that!

(Via The Corner.)

FELICITY BARRINGER is reporting that Lingua Franca may be coming back. I hope so.

THERE’S NOT MUCH SIGN THAT HOMELAND-SECURITY TYPES are trying innovative approaches (or even obvious ones), but Donald Rumsfeld recognizes that we’re fighting a new kind of war and is trying to do something about it. According to this report, he’s doing so successfully.

FBI HIRING: Suman Palit shares a personal experience.

Reader Patrick Hoffman adds:

Read the post about the FBI and its language woes, and the response regarding using DLI as a source of linguists.

Having attended DLI and having learned Persian/Farsi for the Army, I can tell you that the number of persian linguists that DLI educated was small but not insubstantial.

Equally interesting, however, is the fact that given all the government knows about me and my service record, that I doubt any serious attempts to reach me have been made. (Not that I think I’d be much help, since my skills have degraded through lack of practice, and I have a job that pays more than they’re likely to pay.)

Just a thought, but the FBI seems to be rather passive in this regard. Or perhaps just passive/aggressive.

Reader Stan Brown, meanwhile, suggests that the FBI should have a reserve system analogous to the military’s, with retired law enforcement officers, lawyers, etc., that it can call on either for specialized skills (e.g., languages) or to fill chairs doing routine tasks like background checks in an emergency so that ordinary agents can take language lessons, etc.