The Week - Column

National Review, Nov 19, 2001

--At a big Madison Square Garden event, Hillary was booed, Bill was cheered. Win some, lose some.

-- Will the Arab street hate us for fighting in Afghanistan during Ramadan? Sure-but they will hate us for not fighting too. The cry about the sanctity of Ramadan is the dishonest mouth-warfare of the inflamed. Muhammed fought during Ramadan in 624. In 1973, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel during Ramadan, which also coincided with Yom Kippur-a twofer. In 1982, Iran launched "Operation Ramadan," an attack on Iraq. If one is willing to take lives in battle, then the cause must be of sufficient gravity to excuse relatively trivial profanations; or one has no good cause, in which case fighting on holidays only underlines the transgression. If the enemy turns mosques into arsenals, then they become legitimate targets, for the same reason. In World War II, the Allies fought a pitched battle for the Abbey of Monte Cassino, which was reduced to rubble. The Nazis lost then, even as their heirs will lose now, whatever the calendar says.

-- Here is the face of the enemy. Six armed and bearded men stormed St. Dominic's Roman Catholic church in Bahawalpur, Pakistan, while it was being used by a Protestant congregation. They killed the Muslim cop who was guarding the door. They killed the minister. They killed women and children. One of the assailants emptied his automatic rifle into a heap of the wounded, to make the work of murder more perfect. The logic of the assault was evidently that America is a majority-Christian nation, therefore Pakistani Christians, who are less than 3 percent of that population, are fair game for the pious jihadist. That's as logical as killing thousands of Americans for the crime of going to work on a Tuesday. Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with His heel.

-- Pretty much every day, terrorists gun down or blow up Israelis. The victims may be families in a pizzeria, four women out shopping, or a cabinet minister breakfasting in a hotel. So the Israelis go in hot pursuit after the killers, and by all accounts they're catching up with quite a number of them. We are making every effort to stop terrorists from killing more of us, too, and we're planning to catch as many as we can. But just as we are moving into terrorist country, here comes the State Department to pressure the Israelis to move out of terrorist country. The argument seems to be that the Israelis are giving offense to Muslims, and mustn't. We are no doubt giving offense too. What else are you expected to give in the process of defending yourself against murder? There will be times when our interests and Israel's diverge, of course, but terror is one and indivisible. It's absurd that we go after terrorists but try to inhibit Israel from doing so. The State Department might consider a refresher course in logic. And one in common humanity, too.

-- Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill said that parts of the House Republicans' tax bill were "show business" since they would probably not get enacted at the end of the day. O'Neill later semi-retracted the remark, but there was truth in what he said. The House Republicans know that not every pro-growth provision in their bill will become law. They passed an ambitious bill in the expectation that by doing so they would exert a positive influence on the bill that finally gets signed. One would think the Bush administration, too, would be trying to win as good a stimulus package as possible. But that would require it to have a secretary of the Treasury whose time is not occupied by cleaning up after his own gaffes.

-- The Republican candidates for governor in Virginia and New Jersey, Mark Earley and Bret Schundler, are both trailing in the polls. Earley's campaign got off to a late start, letting Democrat Mark Warner slickly repackage himself as a moderate. Schundler has suffered from the weak support of the Republican establishment and the state's understandable inattention to the race. Both men have endured the usual biased and incompetent press coverage. But they deserve to win. Earley and Schundler have been steadfast champions of conservative policy ideas, and both would do better by their states than their opponents, particularly when it comes to taxes and education. We'll be rooting for them on November 6.

-- As New York City prepares to elect Rudy Giuliani's successor, the horror of September 11 has drained much of the air of vanity from tyro Michael Bloomberg's campaign on the Republican line. A billionaire could find easier things to do than labor to take on what will be one of the hardest jobs on earth, and Bloomberg's persistence retroactively redeems his motives. It does not, however, boost his qualifications. He remains a liberal Democrat who switched parties to run for office. Many signs, from a patchwork reconstruction plan to an opportunistic alliance with the black radical sectary Lenora Fulani, show that he is not ready for prime time. His Democratic opponent, Mark Green, is as liberal as they come, a protege of Ramsey Clark and Ralph Nader. But he has spent 30 years in politics and government; he has shown some signs of learning (he is endorsed by Bill Bratton, Giuliani's police commissioner); and the attack may have sobered him. Conservative New Yorkers can't comfortably vote for either man, but they wish the winner, and his stricken constituency, well.