WILL SALETAN:

Bin Laden’s whole game plan is to turn the people of the democratic world against their governments. He thinks democracies are weak because their people, who are more easily frightened than their governments, can bring those governments down. He doesn’t understand that this flexibility—and this trust—are why democracies will live, while he will die. Many of us didn’t vote for Bush’s government or Blair’s. But we’re loyal to them, in part because we were given a voice in choosing them. And if we don’t like our governments, we can vote them out. We can’t vote out terrorists. We can only kill them.

Eugene Volokh responds: “Can, should, and will. As they say, except for defeating the Nazis and the Japanese, killing the rapists or murderers who are attacking you, stopping North Korea from overrunning South Korea, and a few other things, violence never solved anything.”

MICKEY KAUS: Keep Oliver Stone away from 9/11! ” Is Hollywood so out of touch it thinks Stone’s version of 9/11 is what America is clamoring for? After Alexander, at that?”

Hollywood probably is that out of touch with America, which may have something to do with its falling revenues. But hey, the inevitable scene of Jewish office workers staying home will be well received in some other parts of the world. . . .

UPDATE: Roger Simon thinks that foreign box office may indeed be the driver here.

THE TERRORIST ATTACKS IN LONDON seem to have backfired, to judge from the latest poll data.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS AND RON REAGAN: A dialogue. Hitchens makes Ron Reagan looks pretty stupid, though he has a lot of help in that from Reagan.

[LATER: Video here.]

UPDATE: Here’s another discussion, between Hugh Hewitt and Tom Oliphant.

CHARLES JOHNSON EMAILS: “The LGF server’s hard drive bit the dust today, and we’re down for the count… If you could let people know, I’d appreciate it.”

Done! I’ll let you know when he’s back up, too.

HERE’S MORE on the ongoing Canadian government corruption scandals.

THIS SEEMS LIKE GOOD NEWS: “Hiring around the country picked up in June with employers adding 146,000 jobs — helping to push the unemployment rate down to 5 percent, the lowest in nearly four years.”

UPDATE: This news seems pretty good, too:

Rising tax payments and a growing economy may push the U.S. federal deficit down to $325 billion or lower, a 24 percent decline from the previous estimate, the Congressional Budget Office said.

Cool.

TOM FRIEDMAN:

Because there is no obvious target to retaliate against, and because there are not enough police to police every opening in an open society, either the Muslim world begins to really restrain, inhibit and denounce its own extremists – if it turns out that they are behind the London bombings – or the West is going to do it for them. And the West will do it in a rough, crude way – by simply shutting them out, denying them visas and making every Muslim in its midst guilty until proven innocent.

And because I think that would be a disaster, it is essential that the Muslim world wake up to the fact that it has a jihadist death cult in its midst. If it does not fight that death cult, that cancer, within its own body politic, it is going to infect Muslim-Western relations everywhere. Only the Muslim world can root out that death cult. It takes a village. . . .

The Muslim village has been derelict in condemning the madness of jihadist attacks. When Salman Rushdie wrote a controversial novel involving the prophet Muhammad, he was sentenced to death by the leader of Iran. To this day – to this day – no major Muslim cleric or religious body has ever issued a fatwa condemning Osama bin Laden.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Cam Edwards emails that “Friedman is wrong . . . kinda.” He observes:

Back in March, Spanish clerics issued a fatwa against Osama bin Laden. While it’s not a huge group by any stretch of the imagination, it is the largest Muslim group in Spain.

Good point.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Paul Schmidt says Friedman is right:

If there isn’t a Million Muslim March this weekend, if there aren’t crowds of muslims chanting and holding signs, “not in our name”, then doubt as to the existence of moderate muslims will grow, and grow quickly.

I sincerely hope I’m wrong.

I do too. Meanwhile, Dick Aubrey writes about Friedman: “He’s late to the party. We will win the WOT. The question is…will we respect ourselves in the morning?” So far we’re waging the kindest, gentlest war in history. That could change, of course.

Reader Don Hertzmark says that Friedman is behind the curve, and should have been writing this stuff in the 1990s. “Let’s see some of those good British Muslims lead the cops to the bombers’ dens, and then I will believe that something has changed. My really close Muslim friends, mostly Indonesian, are quiet about these things, that is about all you can get. They want the government to repress or jail the Jihad boys, but they do not want to put themselves on the line with their peers, and these are our friends.”

DEFENSETECH NOTES something that had occurred to me: Once again, London’s vast array of surveillance cameras was ineffectual at preventing terrorism:

Londoners are seen on the city’s vast amalgam of surveillance cameras an average of 300 times a day. Which means that the terrorists behind yesterday’s bombings almost certainly knew they’d be caught on tape — and went ahead with their attacks anyway. . . . As the AP, among many others, have noted, “the British capital’s ubiquitous closed-circuit TV cameras may hold the key to determine who was behind Thursday’s series of terrorist strikes.” But as a preventive measure, the 7/7 attacks have shown the spycams to be flimsy, at best.

Yes.

THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF THE RECIPES IS UP — and there’s still time to pick one and go shopping for dinner.

BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS: I’m much more a science fiction than a fantasy reader, but on John Scalzi’s recommendation I read Naomi Kritzer’s Freedom’s Gate and liked it very much. That led me to order the sequel, Freedom’s Apprentice, which kept me up later than I meant to stay up last night. Pretty good stuff. But then, it was recommended by Scalzi, whose recommendations are usually pretty good.

Kritzer has a blog, too.

JIM DUNNIGAN: “Al Qaeda, and Islamic radicals, would not be a world terrorism problem were it not for global Islamic media, and media coverage that treated the goals of the Islamic radicals with seriousness and respect.”

UPDATE: Reader Joseph Fulvio emails:

Since the ‘insurgency’ is as much about influencing the Western public as it is about destabilizing Iraq, one wonders just how virulent it would be without Al Jazeera and Western media life support. I suspect it would be far less potent absent the breathless, sympathetic ‘reporting’ of each act of barbarism. This notion is dismissed by war critics as ‘blaming the messenger,’ but that doesn’t make it any less true.

What’s interesting to me is that members of the press are exquisitely sensitive to the dangers of being manipulated by our own government, but so much less so in other cases.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Zelda Aronstein emails:

I bet if the media voluntarily stopped showing any pictures of all terror attacks, that the terror would stop. Thus ending the GWOT without a shot.

This policy would be NO DIFFERENT than how they cover folks who run on to baseball fields: they do NOT show them on TV; they ignore them.

Would the media ever put peace above their ratings/profits? Never.

Sadly, that’s probably right.

DEREK CATSAM REPORTS FROM OXFORD: The Brits are looking pretty imperturbable.

TOM MAGUIRE: “Just say ‘no’ to Novak?”

GLOBAL VOICES surveys some reactions to the London bombings from Muslim bloggers.

STEM CELL RESEARCH: Signposts and Roadblocks, from the New England Journal of Medicine.

IT WAS BURIED in all of yesterday’s events, but this column by Max Boot on aid to Africa deserves not to be ignored:

In the last 50 years, $2.3 trillion has been spent to help poor countries. Yet Africans’ income and life expectancy have gone down, not up, during that period, while South Korea, Singapore and other Asian nations that received little if any assistance have moved from African-level poverty to European-level prosperity thanks to their superior economic policies.

Economists who have studied aid projects have found numerous reasons for the failures. In many instances, money was siphoned off by corrupt officials. Even when funds did reach the intended beneficiaries, the money often distorted local markets for goods and labor, creating inflation that drove local businesses out of business. . . .

Oddly enough, Sachs ignores the most obvious obstacle to Africa’s escape from the “poverty trap,” what his pal Bob Geldof has accurately described as “corruption and thuggery.” (This was also Sachs’ blind spot when he tried to reform the Russian economy in the 1990s.) Yet not even Sir Bob has offered any plausible ideas for addressing these deep-rooted woes.

Africans continue to be tormented not by the G-8, as anti-poverty campaigners imply, but by their own politicos, including Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, who is abetting genocide in Darfur, and Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, who is turning his once-prosperous country into a famine-plagued basket case. Unless it’s linked to specific “good governance” benchmarks (as with the new U.S. Millennium Challenge Account), more aid risks subsidizing dysfunctional regimes.

Any real solution to Africa’s problems must focus on the root causes of poverty — mainly misgovernment. Instead of pouring billions more down the same old rat holes, maybe the Live 8 crew should promote a more innovative approach: Use the G-8’s jillions 2 hire mercenaries 4 the overthrow of the 6 most thuggish regimes in Africa. That would do more to help ordinary Africans than any number of musical extravaganzas.

Perhaps the next concert should be called Liber8.

JAMES JOYNER LOOKS AT CALLS FOR APPEASEMENT, while Lee Harris looks at blood feuds. He neglects the obvious way to put them to a stop, though.

WILLIAM SJOSTROM notes the transformation of Paul Krugman from pro-choice to anti-choice.