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The New York Times
January 6, 2008
Seeds of Hate
JIHAD AND JEW-HATRED
Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11.
By Matthias Kuntzel.
Translated by Colin Meade.
180 pp. Telos Press Publishing. $29.95.
One day in Damascus not long ago, I visited the understocked gift shop of the Sheraton Hotel, looking for something to read. There wasn't much: pre-owned Grishams, a hagiography of Hafez al-Assad, an early Bill O'Reilly (go figure) and a paperback copy of ''The International Jew,'' published in 2000 in Beirut. ''The International Jew'' is a collection of columns exposing the putative role of Jews in such fields as international finance, world governance and bootlegging. ''Wherever the seat of power may be, thither they swarm obsequiously,'' the book states. These columns, which are based on the ''Protocols of the Elders of Zion'' -- they are a plagiary of a forgery, in other words -- were first published in Henry Ford's Dearborn Independent more than 80 years ago.
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March 14, 2006
The Ghost of Purim Past
Three years ago, while visiting Tehran, I was introduced to a charmless man named Muhammad Ali Samadi, who, I was told, would parse for me the Iranian theocracy's peculiar understanding of Judaism and Zionism. Mr. Samadi said that Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, held no brief for anti-Semitism. Then, a moment later, he deployed an epidemiological metaphor to explain the role of Jews in history. "There are always infections and diseases in man," he said. "In the world there is an infection called international Jewry."
A year later, Mr. Samadi became the spokesman for the Esteshadion, or Seekers of Martyrdom, a group that has as its mission the training of young Iranians to kill Salman Rushdie, commit acts of suicide terrorism against Americans in Iraq and blow up Jews everywhere.
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August 5, 2004
Protect Sharon From the Right
Not long ago, at a West Bank settlement outpost surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by dyspeptic German shepherds, I attended a joyful event: a brit milah, the circumcision of an eight-day-old boy. This outpost was home to just a handful of families, but more than 100 people came to celebrate with the boy's parents.
Many of the visitors made the rough trek through Arab villages to get to this hill. These young settlers are the avant-garde of radical Jewish nationalism, the flannel-wearing, rifle-carrying children of their parents' mainstream settlements, which they denigrate for their bourgeois affectations--red-tile roof chalets, swimming pools, pizzerias--and their misplaced fealty to the dictates of the government in Jerusalem.
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October 20, 2002
Reverse Engineering
AMERICAN GROUND
Unbuilding the World Trade Center.
By William Langewiesche.
205 pp. New York:
North Point Press/
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $22.
At the very end of William Langewiesche's slim but powerful account of the dismantling of the wreckage of the World Trade Center comes a story that served, at least for me, as an antidote to the overwhelming saccharinity of the recent Sept. 11 commemorations--that great "emotional bath," as one television anchor put it.
Langewiesche tells of a visit he paid this spring to a pier on Newark Bay, to watch, he writes, the heavy structural steel columns of the trade center "being sent away."
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September 17, 2000
New York's Finest
NYPD
A City and Its Police.
By James Lardner
and Thomas Reppetto.
Illustrated. 368 pp. New York:
A John Macrae Book/
Henry Holt & Company. $27.50.
A friend of mine, an ex-New York City police officer, once told me the following story: One night during his rookie year he had given chase to a robbery suspect. The chase led to a stairwell, where the suspect turned on my friend, pummeling and kicking him. My friend managed to subdue the suspect, but not before he was bloodied up good.
The rookie officer brought the handcuffed suspect, who was unhurt and ostentatiously nonchalant about his arrest, to the precinct house, expecting praise, or if not praise--this was the N.Y.P.D. after all--then silent approval for his valiant deed. He did not expect to be met by withering scorn.
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June 25, 2000
Inside Jihad U.: The Education of a Holy Warrior
About two hours east of the Khyber Pass, in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, alongside the Grand Trunk Road, sits a school called the Haqqania madrasa. A madrasa is a Muslim religious seminary, and Haqqania is one of the bigger madrasas in Pakistan: its mosques and classrooms and dormitories are spread over eight weed-covered acres, and the school currently enrolls more than 2,800 students. Tuition, room and board are free; the students are, in the main, drawn from the dire poor, and the madrasa raises its funds from wealthy Pakistanis, as well as from devout, and politically minded, Muslims in the countries of the Persian Gulf.
The students range in age from 8 and 9 to 30, sometimes to 35. The youngest boys spend much of their days seated cross-legged on the floors of airless classrooms, memorizing the Koran. This is a process that takes between six months and three years, and it is made even more difficult than it sounds by the fact that the Koran they study is in the original Arabic. These boys tend to know only Pashto, the language of the Pathan ethnic group that dominates this region of Pakistan, as well as much of nearby Afghanistan. In a typical class, the teachers sit on the floor with the boys, reading to them in Arabic, and the boys repeat what the teachers say. This can go on between four and eight hours each day.
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Where the Political Is Personal
A Little Too Close to God
The Thrills and Panic of a Life in Israel.
By David Horovitz.
311 pp. New York:
Alfred A Knopf. $26.
When I first picked up David Horovitz's "A Little Too Close to God," my first thought was, "Dayenu" (loose translation for those reading the English-only Haggadah: "Enough already"). It is a well-known fact that the People of the Book are in reality the People of the Book Proposal, and so the world has been overly blessed by books that make the following two observations: (1) Israel is filled with Jews! And (2) They're all nuts!
But despite the title, Horovitz gives us an entertaining (if occasionally exasperating and disorganized) memoir of his life as an English immigrant in Israel. What makes "A Little Too Close to God" particularly interesting, however, is the jeremiad embedded in the narrative.
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June 4, 2000
Epidemic Proportions
Q: Several pharmaceutical companies have recently decided to slash the price of antiretroviral drugs for developing countries, most notably Africa. But even with the price cut, a year's supply of drugs still would cost about $1,000--more money than most Africans earn in a year. So is there less to this than meets the eye?
It is true that most Africans with H.I.V. won't have access to the drugs. But not everybody is living below the poverty line. People working in the private sector often have insurance. This is going to benefit tens of thousands of people.
But for the vast majority of Africans, this is only symbolic gesture.
Look, we aren't naive. Ninety to 95 percent of Africans who carry the virus don't even know they are infected. So we've got to work on a lot of very basic issues. This is just one step, but it's important because it's the first time the big pharmaceutical companies accept the principle of equity pricing, that the same product can be sold in a poor market for less than it's sold in a rich market.
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May 21, 2000
A Continent's Chaos
"What is it that Americans call Africa?" asked the president of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo, looking up from his bowl of Rice Krispies. "A basket case?" The president was amused by the idiom, and a smile momentarily crossed his face. It was a bright morning in Abuja, Nigeria's capital, and the presidential peacocks, strutting outside Obasanjo's villa, were screeching in the heat.
Obasanjo, who is a former general, a former political prisoner and, for the past year, the democratically elected president of Africa's biggest country, let the smile fade as he asked: "And why is it a basket case? How did it come to be this basket case?"
We were talking about Sierra Leone. More to the point, we were talking about blame. Whom do we blame for everything that has gone wrong in Sierra Leone? Certainly not Nigeria: Nigeria spent billions of its own dollars, and sacrificed the lives of hundreds of its soldiers, trying to keep the peace.
Could it be the United States?
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April 30, 2000
Diaper Diplomacy
As part of my never-ending and so far entirely fruitless campaign to get high-ranking Clinton administration officials to change my children's diapers, I recently dragooned Jamie Rubin to my baby girl's room in order to teach him a thing or two about the real world.
For those of you not keeping up with the latest shifts in State Department personnel, a primer: Rubin, who was Madeline Albright's assistant secretary of state for public affairs and her close adviser--as well as a C-Span media-briefing sex god--recently gave up his high-powered job and all its high-powered accouterments to follow his wife to London, where he will care for his new baby while his wife works.
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February 6, 2000
Learning How To Be King
"The things is," says His Majesty Abdullah II, the 38-year-old king of Jordan and 43rd-generation direct descendant of the prophet Muhammad, "is that I've become a bit like Elvis."
People see him where he ain't, in other words.
"There are sightings all over the place," he says. Since ascending the Hashemite throne last February, Abdullah has made it a habit to inspect his kingdom in mufti. "The bureaucrats are terrified. It's great."
Today, Elvis is flying to Zarqa, outside of Amman, in one of the Royal Squadron Black Hawk helicopters--like his father, the late King Hussein, he is his own pilot. Once in Zarqa, he will execute a quick costume change and then pay surprise visits to the city's public hospital and to the local offices of the finance ministry.
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January 2, 2000
The Lives They Lived: Mario Puzo, b. 1920
Salvatore (Sammy the Bull) Gravano is dining on the patio of a Ruth's Chris Steakhouse in Phoenix. A cold wind blows in from the desert. The patio is empty. In movies, people get whacked on nights like this. The waiter, whose name tag reads "Sean," recognizes Gravano. Sean avoids our table as much as he can.
Gravano, late of the Gambino crime family, is dining on filet mignon, and calling me a liar. Here is the reason he is calling me a liar: I told him, in the course of a rambling conversation about the "The Godfather," that Mario Puzo wrote the book, and collaborated on the screenplays, without the expert advice of the mob.
"No way," Gravano says. "Somebody had to be helping him."
I ask Gravano why he is so sure about this.
"Because he knew about our life cold," he answers. "He had the whole atmosphere, the way we talked. That wedding scene--I mean, that was so real. I mean, my book isn't a pimple on his book, and I'm in my book."
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December 26, 1999
The Coolest Guy In All of Jersey
Steven Van Zandt, the original white boy funk soul brother, is dressed for lunch pretty much the way he always dresses, which is to say he looks like some kind of purple-paisley snakeskin hippie gypsy pirate. Little Steven thinks his mode of dress may cause problems today, because we will be dining in a Jersey City restaurant called Casa Dante, the sort of place that could hold meetings of the DeCavalcante Crime Family Alumni Association. And, as everybody knows, the mob doesn't much like freaks.
"We're in trouble here," Little Steven says.
"No, we're not," I say.
"I've been kicked out of a lot of places," Little Steven says, as we walk through the door.
This is a kind of acid test, because I'm trying to prove a particular theory of mine, which is that Little Steven is the coolest guy in the entire state of New Jersey.
"You're the coolest guy in the entire state of New Jersey," I say. "They're not going to kick you out."
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October 31, 1999
A Joy Ride With Ralph Nader
The Mercedes Gelaendewagen is the fastest, most expensive and all-around most blazingest sport utility vehicle in the world, and when your faithful correspondent was recently offered the chance to drive one, he jumped at it. This is because your correspondent is most definitely not in league with the self-flagellating, I'm-perfectly-happy-with-my-Corolla-lying, NPR-pledge-week-donating S.U.V.-bashers who have made life unbearable, or at least mildly annoying, for the millions of red-blooded men who cruise the Main Streets of America in S.U.V.'s designed to ford wide rivers and haul sheep and goats.
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October 10, 1999
Microbes on the Move
In late November 1995, while on a reporting trip to the island of Zanzibar, off the coast of East Africa, I was bit repeatedly by mosquitoes. This is not uncommon, and I paid it no mind--I was already suffering from what I believed to have been shigella, a nasty gastrointestinal parasite, and I was feeling miserable anyway.
It wasn't until early December, while hiking in the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest of Uganda, that I began to suffer from a prostrating fever and severe shakes. A short while later, atop a mountain, I fell unconscious. This was an unfortunate place to fall unconscious, for two reasons. One, while unconscious, I was attacked by fire ants. Two, the Ugandan parks service owns no medevac helicopters, so once I awoke--the paroxysm of fever having subsided for the moment--I had to crawl down the mountain with the help of a very kind park official, who told me he would lose his job if I died on him.
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October 3, 1999
Israel's Y2K Problem
Yehuda Etzion, rebel, settler, archterrorist of the Jewish underground, thin like Jesus and hostage to the fever-dream of imminent redemption, parks his car by a rocky switchback on the western slope of the Mount of Olives. He leads me up the incline, to the chalk-colored ground where he comes to pray and to look to the west upon what one day, he believes, will be his. Just below is the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus was betrayed and arrested. Just to the north is Mount Scopus, where the prophet Jeremiah watched the Babylonians burn Jerusalem. Immediately behind us is a house of modern prophecy, home to American evangelical Christians who have come on one-way tickets to the Promised Land. They are here to watch the Parousia, the Second Coming of Christ, and they are here to encourage the Jews to rebuild their Temple, the Throne of David on which the Christ will sit.
On the other side of the ridge, the eastern slope of the mountain drops off into the Judean desert, the caldron of prophecy and hallucination. Even here, on the western slope, the sun beats down on us like a spotlight. We look out before us, to the walled Old City and, at its heart, the 35-acre man-made platform--the Temple Mount to Jews; the Haram al-Sharif, or noble sanctuary, to Muslims--that is the single-most-explosive piece of real estate on the planet. And we look at the building that dominates the platform--the 1,300-year-old Dome of the Rock.
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August 1, 1999
Love Is All Around
Midway through a conversation about his quixotic bid to be the Republican Presidential nominee, Orrin Hatch, the grim-faced Mormon patriarch who serves as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, asked a question no other United States Senator has ever asked. Or, at the very least, has asked me.
The question: "Have you listened to my love songs?"
I had not, in fact, listened to his love songs. I was familiar with his gospel music--he has a new CD out, "Put Your Arms Around the World," featuring Jesse Jackson's daughter Santita--and I have listened to his patriotic songs, including "You Gotta Love This Country." But I had not yet been exposed to his love songs.
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June 20, 1999
The Color of Suspicion
Sgt. Mike Lewis of the Maryland State Police is a bull-necked, megaphone-voiced, highly caffeinated drug warrior who, on this shiny May morning outside of Annapolis, is conceding defeat. The drug war is over, the good guys have lost and he has been cast as a racist. "This is the end, buddy," he says. "I can read the writing on the wall." Lewis is driving his unmarked Crown Victoria down the fast lane of Route 50, looking for bad guys. The back of his neck is burnt by the sun, and he wears his hair flat and short under his regulation Stetson.
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June 13, 1999
Playing With Firearms
"This," Tom Clancy said as he pulled a jet black semiautomatic rifle from his bedroom closet, "is my home defense weapon."
Clancy, who keeps his guns where most men keep their socks, handed over the HK G94 rifle. "If somebody breaks into my house and comes upstairs," he said, "it's going to be a bad career move. You can't miss with this."
This is not true. Shortly, in Clancy's basement shooting range--Clancy keeps a shooting range where most people keep their washers and dryers--I would miss with the HK G94.
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January 31, 1999
The Don Is Done
John J. Gotti, the bloody-minded truck hijacker who led the Gambino crime family to ruination, has a friend in Joseph Castellano, whose father Gotti murdered.
The murder took place in midtown Manhattan on a December evening in 1985, in front of Sparks Steak House, which, owing to the death of Paul Castellano at its threshold, is now a popular tourist destination. John Gotti did not actually shoot Joseph Castellano's father, but he arranged the killing and handpicked the assassins--"button men" is the archaic term for their profession--who did the job. A jury found Gotti guilty in Castellano's murder, and other murders, in 1992.
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October 4, 1998
The Crude Face of Global Capitalism
Azerbaijan is a former soviet republic located in a disagreeable spot just south of Russia and just north of Iran. It is known for nothing except oil, and the smell of that oil is inescapable, even inside the cabin of an arthritic helicopter desperately trying to gain altitude for a trip across the Caspian Sea.
The helicopter, a rusting Soviet Mi-8, seems unable to move forward, which is problematic, because we are already hovering 25 feet above the ground. Our destination, an offshore pumping complex known as Oily Rocks, sits 15 miles away. Azerbaijan Airlines inherited the helicopter from Aeroflot but did not, apparently, inherit spare parts.
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August 16, 1998
Sore Winner
'So," says the Mayor, breaking his silence, "how was the hearing?"
"City Council?" asks the Police Commissioner. "The usual--a battle of wits with unarmed men." The alpha males of the Giuliani administration, seated helter-skelter about the Mayor's office, get a kick out of that one.
Silence again, as the Mayor continues reading. He is sunk low in his chair. Seated to his left is the Police Commissioner, the square-jawed Howard Safir, who sits erect, in the manner of Parris Island. The Mayor's men are jacketless, overweight and at ease. The Commissioner's men appear ready to salute.
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June 21, 1998
Big Tobacco's Endgame
Steven F. Goldstone, the chairman and chief executive officer of one of the four most reviled corporations in America, looks like a man in need of a cigarette. A dismal funk has settled over the Benton Convention Center in Winston-Salem, N.C., which is where his company, RJR Nabisco, is about to open its annual shareholders' meeting. The meeting won't be pleasant for him, but what is these days? It's reefer madness out there--not so much in Winston-Salem, one of the last of the country's pro-tobacco redoubts, but almost everywhere else.
It is perhaps the worst moment in history to be a tobacco C.E.O.
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June 7, 1998
Can I Have That in a Plain Brown Wrapper, Please?
It has been several months since I loosed myself from the choke hold of investment mania, several months since I've had a conversation like this one:
Wife: We need to buy Pampers.
Me: That's a good move--doubling-up on Procter & Gamble isn't a momentum play, but it's long-term growth, a hedge against our exposure in the volatile high-tech area.
Wife: What?
Me: Procter & Gamble. The Cincinnati-based consumer-products giant. Maker of Pampers, Ivory Snow, Tide-- .
Wife: We need Pampers. Actual Pampers.
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February 8, 1998
Jimmy Hoffa's Revenge
On a wind-whipped fall day, a creaking, leaking motor home angles into the parking lot of the V.F.W. hall in Brick Township, N.J., and releases into a knot of waiting teamsters the scion and heir-presumptive of the most notorious labor leader in American history.
"Welcome to Brick, Jimmy!" shouts a barrel-bellied man, and James Phillip Hoffa shouts back, "Thanks, buddy!" and then the cluster of teamsters moves inside the hall, and Jimmy smiles wide, and a wave of applause washes over him. The applause is for his father too, the martyred father who, the mythology says, had this great union stolen from him by the Kennedys, and who had his life stolen from him by the Mob, and whose son is going to redeem this union in his name. Smoke gets in Jimmy's eyes as he inches his way inside, where the air is damp and smells of cigarillos and Wal-Mart cologne and steam tables that keep the hot dogs hot. The teamsters wear black T-shirts and hooded sweatshirts that scream "Hoffa" like a threat, and these 45-year-old white men who drive trucks in the dead of winter and break their backs on loading docks while their bosses plot to hijack all the good jobs to Mexico, they buy up the sweatshirts at Hoffa rallies just like the black teen-agers who bought "X" caps to proclaim their to-hell-with-you militancy. These are freight guys, mainly, drivers and warehousemen, not "Buster Browns," the shorts-wearing package boys--teamsters in brown shorts, can you believe it?--from the U.P.S. wing of the union, which is Ron Carey's wing.
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December 21, 1997
Washington Discovers Christian Persecution
The sour expression on his gray and lined face suggests that His Eminence Lufti Laham, the visiting patriarchal vicar for the Orthodox Melkite Church in Jerusalem, disapproves of Nina Shea--her message, her demeanor, even her presence on the same dais.
Shea is a stone-serious conservative Catholic, the religion expert at the human rights group Freedom House and a leader in the fight against the persecution of Christians overseas. Archbishop Laham represents a group of West Bank Christians who are experiencing growing discrimination from their fundamentalist Muslim neighbors. And yet Laham appears physically pained each time Shea mentions the word "persecution."
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September 14, 1997
From Peace Process To Police Process
The Imam of the sterile, dust-covered west Bank town of Dura is a knife-thin 38-year-old ascetic known to his followers simply as Sheik Nayef. He is a graduate in Sharia (Islamic law) of the University of Jordan, and he is also a leader of Hamas, the Islamic fundamentalist movement. Dura, like Hebron, its neighbor to the west, is the sort of place that accords honor to Palestinian men who choose to end their lives--and the lives of as many Jews as technically feasible--by detonating nail-packed bombs strapped to their bodies.
Sheik Nayef, whose last name is Rajoub, wears the full beard of the Hamas loyalist, and he carries himself with the aloof serenity associated with that archetype of Islamic fundamentalism, the blind cleric. I met him on Aug. 10, the 11th day of the Israeli Army's closure of the West Bank, 11 days after two men in black suits exploded bombs in the center of the Mahane Yehuda market in Jerusalem, killing 14 civilians, and four weeks before three bombs tore through a pedestrian mall in the city. An offshoot of Hamas, calling itself the "Martyrs for Freeing Prisoners," took responsibility for both attacks. I asked Sheik Nayef to tell me what Sharia has to say about suicide bombing.
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July 6, 1997
The Mystery of Janet Reno
In may 1993, the Clinton White House sent Janet Reno to the Senate in order to call for the reinstatement of a law, the independent counsel statute, that Reno's predecessor as Attorney General, the Bush appointee William Barr, had tried enthusiastically to kill. The statute, which allows for the appointment of an independent prosecutor in cases of high-level executive-branch wrongdoing, had long been anathema to Republicans, who felt it was used as a nightstick against them during the Reagan and Bush years. The Democrats, of course, had grown quite fond of the statute, which was drawn up in the wake of Watergate, and hoped to revive it.
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March 16, 1997
Some of Their Best Friends Are Jews
The Rev. O.S. Hawkins is promising me eternal damnation, and we haven't even ordered lunch yet.
It's not his choice: all he can do is lay out my options, and until I accept Jesus, there are no options.
He wishes it were otherwise. "I know how this sounds to your people," he says, "but literally some of my best friends are Jewish."
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January 12, 1997
Breakthrough
IMPURE SCIENCE
AIDS, Activism, and
the Politics of Knowledge.
By Steven Epstein.
466 pp. Berkeley:
University of California Press. $29.95.
At the battleship-sized headquarters of the Food and Drug Administration, Oct. 11, 1988, is still remembered as the day Act Up scaled the walls. More than 1,000 demonstrators, many in Washington to view a display of the AIDS quilt, marched on the building in suburban Rockville, Md., to protest the policies of what Act Up and other radical AIDS groups then called the "Federal Death Administration." The AIDS activists were angered by the slow pace of drug approval; among patient-advocacy groups they were not alone in this view, but they were louder than the others.
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November 3, 1996
Adventures of a Republican Revolutionary
Mark W. Neumann, a freshman Republican Congressman from Janesville, Wis., is a sometimes-mutinous soldier in the army of Newt Gingrich who believes that extremism in the pursuit of deficit reduction is no vice. He also has a tendency to yell at his constituents, which is inadvisable, considering that he rather desperately needs their votes on Tuesday. This penchant of Neumann's is on display during a recent campaign stop at the Sons of Norway lodge in downtown Janesville, a monochromatic American everywhere of a city an hour and a half west of Milwaukee.
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August 4, 1996
Next Target: Nicotine
The medical reports lying on a table in David Kessler's office include only the thinnest detail about the death of George Korizis, a 24-year-old Tufts University graduate and Greek citizen who died alone in his Boston apartment on April 18. But there is a curious aspect to Korizi's case that has interested Kessler, who is the Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and who does not ordinarily pay attention to obscure deaths.
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April 15, 1996
Lifting Liberia Out of Chaos
George Boley stood in a clearing deep in a Liberian rain forest and said that he was misunderstood. "I am not a warlord," he told me in late 1994. "I don't know why they use this term to describe me."
Behind the self-styled chairman of the wildly misnamed Liberian Peace Council stood 80 soldiers. Most were teen-agers, some were as young as 9. All were armed, many were drunk. "These are professional fighting men," he said, without irony.
Mr. Boley, who holds a Ph.D. in educational administration from the University of Akron, is most assuredly a warlord, as are the other Liberian faction leaders who last week drove their country back into chaos.
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Prisoners
