The Week - commentary on current events, politics - Column

National Review, Sept 2, 2002

-- With a serial murderer on the loose somewhere in his state, LoLouisiana governor Mike Foster offered women this bit of advice: "You have a right to get a [concealed-] gun permit. . . . If you know how [to use a gun] and you have a situation with some fruitcake running around . . . it sure can save you a lot of grief." As John Lott, author of More Guns, Less Crime, has pointed out time and again, armed resistance is the best defense against a criminal with a gun -- especially for women. Gov. Foster deserves credit for saying it out loud.

-- Anyone who wants to understand what democrats are up against in the ArArab world has only to consider the case of Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a professor of sociology at the American University in Cairo, and recognized internationally for his work. Educated in Indiana, he acquired U.S. citizenship. His brainchild is the Ibn Khaldun Center in Cairo, a think tank promoting free and fair elections, and human rights in general, for the Christian Coptic minority as well as for Muslims. For these purposes, the European Union gave his center a grant of $250,000. In a special security court, the 63-year-old Ibrahim has now been sentenced to seven years' imprisonment for wrongfully accepting foreign funding and "tarnishing Egypt's image abroad." The simple truth is that his open outlook displeases President Hosni Mubarak. The judges didn't even wait for the defense team to finish its submission. Gordon Gray, the U.S. charge d'affaires in Cairo, expressed "disappointment and concern." Was that all he could find to say about this outrage committed against a fellow citizen? Asked about Egypt -- as well as Saudi Arabia -- administration officials have said, over and over, "They've done everything we've asked them to." Okay: How about asking them to release Saad Ibrahim?

-- Washington was aflutter for a few days over a briefing to the PePentagon's Defense Policy Board that condemned Saudi Arabia for being "active at every level of the terror chain." Which is what Clintonites used to call "old news." An analyst from RAND advocated an ultimatum to the Saudis to cease support for terrorism or face U.S. action on its oil fields. In itself, the briefing wasn't that significant -- the Defense Policy Board doesn't, despite its name, actually make policy. But that Washington's foreign-policy establishment is willing to entertain such views at all is a sign of how radically the U.S.-Saudi relationship is shifting. (Another, more important one is that the Saudis openly oppose America's chief strategic goal in the region, the removal from power of Saddam Hussein.) The Bush administration distanced itself from the briefing, as it should have. It should not blithely declare new enemies in the Middle East, even as it gets more clear-eyed about a supposed ally that is the world's leading sponsor of Islamic radicalism.

-- Terrorists intending to kill 150 children of missionaries at a scschool in Pakistan were thwarted by locked doors, so they had to content themselves with killing six Pakistanis -- two guards, a receptionist, a cook, a carpenter, and a passerby -- instead. Terrorists did, however, succeed in killing three Pakistani nurses as they left the chapel of a Presbyterian hospital. The attacks are targeted at Christians (a.k.a. infidels), Westerners, and the regime of Pervez Musharraf, which is perceived as truckling to both. The bin Ladenites' ability to engage in wholesale murder has been crimped, but they and their sympathizers will keep trying retail operations. America should help Pakistan stabilize itself, and meanwhile go for the sources.