Morgentaler a mass murderer ? Mama mia !

      Listening to Michael Coren expound on the evils of abortion somehow I am quickly reminded of G.K. Chesterton’s quip that Catholicism is the superior Christian denomination because it admits all forms of faith, even the respectable one.  I find myself in agreement with many views of Michael Coren who is thoughtful and provocative and many times right on the money. When he is not, he is still generally well-informed and even on subjects where he clearly shows strains of obsessive thought, he appears guarded and accessible to dissenting opinion.  Alas, not so on the subject of abortion. Hell hath no fury like Michael on the subject of the murdered unborn. 
 

      On last week’s Rumble, Michael noted the passing of Henry Morgentaler, the pre-eminent abortion advocate in Canada, with the openining line : A monster died this week !  What ?

     One, of course, can have an opinion of Dr.Morgentaler’s chosen mission in life, and disagree profoundly with it.  But whatever the good doctor has done or failed to do, he cannot – intelligently – be accused of killing thousands and hundreds of thousands, directly or indirectly. One can only fall for this kind of rhetoric only if one is completely taken leave of his senses, that is if he or she has any to take leave from to begin with (in Michael’s case, it is granted he does).  If one allows himself to throw any kind of parallel between aborting fetuses and the Holocaust, one is being, or acting,  retarded. It really does take a truckload of ill will or staggering incomprehension to fail to see the ridiculousness of comparing an abortion clinic to an Auschwitz crematorium. 

       In order to have an intelligent conversation with Michael Coren on abortion , he would have to concede a number of important points.  Morgentaler was, first and above all, a competent gynecologist. Whatever else one may say about him he wasn’t some crazy hack on the wrong side of tracks in a Philadelphia shanty-town running a butcher shop. I have never found anything on Morgentaler that would put in question his commitment and ability to provide medically sound and safe termination of pregnancy.  It is a well known fact about him that he disapproved of late-term abortions, and quipped himself that he was not aborting babies but fetuses.  In case anyone does not understand the hyperbole in the saying:  a fetus becomes a baby when it is viable, i.e. can survive outside of the womb. This would be the third trimester.  But, anything beyond twelve weeks is generally considered late-pregnancy and responsible gynecologists would refuse to perform an abortion past that marker except for serious medical issues of the mother or the fetus.

      Second, whatever judgmental posture one likes to strike regarding women who get themselves pregnant without wanting to, there they are. And whatever one may want to say on the virtues of carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term, it will never be a popular choice with most women.  It has always been so and always will be.  There are powerful psychological and sociological reasons for this.  A pregnancy is either wanted or unwanted. There are rarely situations where the expectant mother is indifferent to her motherhood-to-be.  Ergo, there will always be demand for abortions – whether the church and self-appointed moralists approve or not.  Nowhere is the futility of ‘pro-life’ legislative mania better demonstrated than in Morgentaler’s native Poland, post-communism.  The country has estimated 200,000 illegal abortions performed annually. 

      So, the practical choice in the issue is whether the state will protect women’s health and lives or turn away from them by giving them options they will not take. What irks me most about the ‘pro-life’ posturing is its nasty, coercive nature. It is not a plea for life, a voice to give life a chance, to consider the option of letting nature take its course.  Rather, its advocates  intimidate through barbarous accusations of murder, and display dumb fascination with surgical gore (of late abortions, which as I have said are by and large practiced only in cases of medical emergencies). The persuasion methods rely on hatred and visceral disgust, not thoughtful and balanced view of the complex medical and moral issues associated with human reproduction. 

       In this respect, Michael Coren would do well to read a bit of his Church history. He will find that the Aristotelian view of ensoulment held well into the age of Enlightment. The original Decretist canon law (12^th century) stated he is not a murderer who brings about abortion before the soul is in the body.^[ Thomas Aquinas considered abortion a grave sin against nature but stipulated: this sin, although grave and to be reckoned among misdeeds and against nature...is something less than homicide... nor is such to be judged irregular (ie. subject to excommunication) unless one procures the abortion of an already formed fetus.^[  Now of course the ‘modern church’ holds an action against human fetus at any moment after conception as a cause for immediate excommunication from the body of Christ.  Again, surprising as it may seem to Michael Coren, the current Canon Law (1398) would have first gained firm legal standing with a papal encyclical of Pius IX. In 1869 (Apostolicae Sedis moderationi) which had done away with the distinction of aborting quickened (ensouled) fetus  from one not yet in the protected stage.  Despite the assurances of the Catholic Encyclopedia (1907) that Catholic teachings admit no doubt on the subject, it was not until its own time that the doctrine of  individual life on conception  gained foothold. It is something of a sad irony that this doctrinal switch had taken place against the background of advancement in antiseptic surgery allowing relative safety of medical abortions, which distinguished them from back-alley butchery, which it seems have always been an option for women, everywhere. 

      Some people believe naively that this new Catholic teaching is in tune with the development of science. Well, it is not.  The question when an individual human life begins will not be resolved with a microscope.  That the moment of conception is an important biological fact is not denied but the ancients and intelligent moderns had always intuitive grasp of a process of formation of individual life in the uterus from potentiality to actuality.  Regardless of their cosmological certainties. This grasp makes it possible to weigh choices – and words – carefully.  And it is this grasp and the goodwill inherent in it that makes one’s faith the precious kind, which one day soon perhaps will be re-admitted in the superior Christian denomination.

(Incidentally, this would not be the first time the sane voices in the Church were right on some issue for the venerable body only to lapse into nonsense at a later date. The eminent Church theorist Thomas Aquinas quoted above for his enlightened view on intrauterine life, appears to have also believed , as many did in his day and age, that sexual intercourse between women and the devil was a real deal.   However, the Canon Episcopi, three centuries earlier, and  considered authoritative well after Thomas, declared confidently that the belief in the reality of witchcraft was a sign of apostasy:  Whosoever therefore believes that anything can be made, or that any creature can be changed to better or worse, or be transformed into another species or similitude, except by creator himself who made everything and through who all things were made, is beyond doubt an infidel.  In Witchcraft in the Middle Ages, Jeffrey Burton Russell, Cornell U., 1972 p.77)

 

A Prayer for a Butchered Poet

        I remember my amazement at my enormity of my ignorance of Islam when I started to read on the subject after 9/11. Not only did I know nothing but as the new ideas about the world I live in started to get molded in my head I realized the absolute silliness of my previous world-view, the bizarre cacoon of nonsense that I believe was the true reflection of the Maker’s design of the universe.  The feeling of utter dismay at one’s own the pathetic grasp of issues and one’s  own set of beliefs in the light of new discoveries, I am told is a sign of intellectual agility. I am happy to report that I have marvelled at my own ignorance ever since I can remember.

          The first book I picked up after the architectural decapitation of Manhattan was Dilip Hiro’s Holy Wars: the rise of Islamic fundamentalism.  Very useful book in its own right but at the time it had the added wow effect of a guide in a new grasp of things.  Among the things which sort of left an indelible mark on me was an anecdote from the Salman Rushdie debates in the Muslim world. It appears that the al-Azhar scholars initially denounced Khomeini’s fatwa on the author of Satanic Verses as un-Islamic. He shut them up with a single reference to an incident in the Sirah, the biography of the Prophet that most Muslims consider sacred.  Khomeini silenced his critics with a simple proposition: if Muhammad himself sent his followers to kill the poet who mocked the Messenger of God who are you to tell me I am not the follower of his teachings. There were no further protests from the scholars in Cairo.

           Here is an abridged version of the killing of Kaab bin al-Ashraf as recounted in the Muslim holy book. 

   After being sent on their way by the Prophet with the words ‘Go in God’s name: O God help them!’, the assassins joined Kaab in his house:  …’then Abu Naila said, ‘would you like to walk with us to Shi’b al-‘Ajuz, so that we can talk for the rest of the night ?’. ‘If you like’, [Kaab]  answered, so they went off walking together; and after a time Abu Naila ran his hand through his hair. Then he smelt his hand and said, ‘I have never smelt a scent finer than this’. They walked on farther and he did the same so that Kaab suspected no evil (!). Then after a space, he did the third time, and cried: ‘Smite the enemy of God !’.  So they smote him, and their swords clashed over him with no effect. ..Maslama said ‘I remembered my dagger when I saw that our swords were useless, and I seized it.  Meanwhile the enemy of God had made such a noise that every fort around us was showing a light. I thrust it into the lower part of his body, then I bore down on it until I reached his genitals, and the enemy of God fell to the ground…..We…brought him to the apostle at the end of the night. We saluted him as he stood praying, and he came to us, and we told him that we killed the enemy of God. He spat upon our comrade’s wounds and he and we returned to our families. Our attack upon God’s enemy cast terror among the Jews, and there was no Jew in Medina who did not fear for his life.

            Terry Glavin (Ottawa Citizen, Moral Illiterates weigh in on Woolwich, May 24, 2013) is evidently not in the habit of marvelling at his own ignorance. It looks more like he prefers to bask in his moral superiority over people whose world-view is even more abysmally ignorant than his own.  He sizes Woolwich butchers the type ‘of a lunatic who thinks he is a Muslim’, and opines that the view that terrorism is a payback for the West’s perceived misdeeds in places like Iraq and Afghanistan is not the view of the mosques but ‘rubbish coming from the mouths of moral illiterates’.

           Glavin’s view, insofar as it even qualifies as opinion and not familiar posing, has all the marks of popular idiocies supplied by the chattering classes who have little grasp of world history and cultures.  As a rule, they replace an intelligent, balanced view of the society which nurtured them with a mushy feel-good happy-go-lucky Babylon that would be the best of possible worlds but for a few  misguided fools and reactionary miscreants.  This is the halothane view of multiculturalism as featured in Little Mosque on the Prarie where all conflicts stem from misunderstandings, and all misunderstandings are ours of them.  Plots are simple and solutions to them obvious.  In this world view there is no open hostility to democracy and advocacy of sharia, no no-go ghettos in London, Luton or the West Midlands, or Malmo, where this ‘future’ blueprint for world-wide Khalifah is being prototyped today. There is no denial of legal equality of women with men. In this Weltanschauung there are at the worst ‘some imams in some dinghy mosques’ but no Saudi-trained clerics in hundreds of Saudi built, hyper-modern opulent mosques in America and Europe arguing only about the tactics in defeating the great Satan. In this world view there may be ‘dingbat backstreet ayatollahs’ but no real ayatollahs busy building nuclear weapons.   There are moral defectives spouting ‘co-called West fighting the so-called Muslim World’ trying the make an issue of ‘deranged losers’ in Boston and ‘cretins with Sarf London accents’ in Woolwich.   But assuredly there is no disembowelled Jewish poet in the biography of their prophet which gives their homicidial manias sanction and the assurance that they are fighting the enemies of God.

             Glavin, is evidently not living in the invader's territory where you can be beaten up for smoking during Ramadan or maimed simply because you are a gay in a pub. The social realities of London's Tower Hamlets are strangely at odds with his fantasy of the Muslim ‘mainstream’. Perhaps he does not even realize that projecting a mainstream into the Muslim social reality of ummah, is as silly as believing that Lenin’s policy of democratic centralism was a pledge to democracy.  The parallel is very apropos given the scorn of both the bolsheviks and  Islamist theocrats have for the views of common people. Mainstream can only function in a political culture that respects and cherishes human commonality and values its corrective function. Sure, Islam in the past had enlightened rulers. But there was never in the ‘so-called Muslim world’ anything even remotely aniticipating democracy of the ‘so-called West’.  This is what fundamentally separates us.  (If you want a shining example of the difference in mentality consider the Sunni legal maxim that sixty years of tyranny are better than one day of anarchy, across Jefferson’s view that the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.)

      Of course it makes no sense to lay siege to random mosques seeking condemnation and pledges of civic  loyalty from “whichever hapless imam happens to answer to doorbell”.  But notice the poverty of options in the supposition.  It is as if British intelligence did not know who the preachers of hatred in the Muslim communities are. But they do know. So does Terry Glavin. The babble about Muslim mainstream is just a spiel he and the other lefty media twits deploy to divert attention from a growing social problem which does not fit their narrative and they think will go away if you only stick your head into sand a little deeper.
      
       No-one wants to harass ‘harmlessly devout’ Muslims who came to the West to better themselves, and to give their children the chance to live in a saner society. No-one except unmedicated psychos.  It is not Muslims who accept the basic structure of  Western society (and are prepared to tolerate its faults) that the common folk is leery about.  Everyone who listens to ordinary Brits in pubs knows that.  Evidently it would not be the elitist narcissists with their heavily censored view of Islamic realities. 

The Art of Defending a Psycho Killer

       

Of course I don’t know that Dellen Millard is a psycho killer. He has not been tried and convicted of anything. Yet.  Under normal circumstances, it would be unfair to an accused in a case of a revolting  murder to proffer labels to describe him.  But under normal circumstances the unravelling of the investigation into Bosma killing it is not.  The case looks nothing short of bizarre, given that the accused stays silent while his lawyer, Deepak Paradkar, talks awful lot.  Just yesterday, he is reported as saying that he might seek a change of venue when the trial starts in the Superior Court in light of the case publicity which he deems prejudicial to his client.

    There has been TMK  nothing that has appeared in the mainstream media that was in any way intended to harm Millard. What has come out may have been damaging to his defense and of course the press has an obligation to report on such curious coincidences as the suspicious death of Dellen’s father (suicide, reportedly by a shot to his eye) , and the disappearance of a young woman whose last recorded cell-phone call was to the former child aviator prodigy. The latter case gets even more tangled with the latest revelation that her vanishing coincides in time with Millard’s purchase of an incinerator to dispose of dead farm animals. It is also a fact that he owns no livestock.  The emerging picture is beginning to look pretty damning to Dellen Millard.  But that’s no-one’s fault. 

      By contrast, it is Deepak Paradkar who seems well schooled in overstatement and diversions.  In his first appearance as Millard’s counsel before Bosma’s body was found, he declared his client ‘100% not guilty’ of the charges of abduction and theft and added gratuitously that his client was ‘completely in shock’ by the allegations.  Then the charred remains of Bosma were found on Millard’s property.  ‘He is extremely concerned by the escalation of the charges’, Paradkar offered as a way of denying his client knew the ride ended in a homicide.  There is something distinctly unreal about the lawyer’s perception of the situation his client finds himself in.  He described his involvement with Millard  as ‘the highest calling [to defend cases such as this]’ but he seems to be  at a loss to answer the simplest and most natural question put to him after the court appearance on May 15: ‘How did he get himself in this situation then ?  Answer went like this:  ’Gentlemen like him…. and [with] his background , ….don’t know how he would end up ….with other individuals who may or may not be involved in this…’ (Watch the linked clip at ~3:20. Precious !) .

    Obviously, Paradkar either does not understand the gravity the setting or is determined to stonewall the process to hell like the late lamentable Johnnie Cochran.  Neither speaks well of him as a professional.  First, if Millard does not make a full disclosure to him, he should drop the case.  And there is some question as to whether this is what is happening.  If he as a lawyer decides to speak publicly of his client’s innocence he should know the answer to the question: ‘How did an intelligent, unassuming gentleman from a good family who is something of a philosopher get acquainted with the company of degenerate killers ?’  Millard has to tell him that or he can’t defend the charges.  He cannot hedge absurdly on  the point of Millard’s knowing the identity of Tim Bosma’s killer.

     Paradkar’s other mistake is to believe that his talking helps to dispel the misgivings people have  about his client’s silence.  Someone who is innocent of the crime he is charged with but nonetheless has some undeniable connection to it would talk to the police. It is as unnatural not to talk in a situation like this as it is for someone intent on blowing his brains out to do it through an eye-socket.   To say that Millard remains silent for fear that he may ‘inadvertently’ reveal something that could be used against him will not sit well no matter what.  It would have sufficed to state that his client has the right to remain silent and leave it at that.  This of course is nothing compared with the poor judgment Paradkar showed by insinuating there is a ‘framing aspect’ in the case against his client.  Gross ! He should be censured by the bar.  No, the only person creating trouble for Dellen Millard’s defense, over and above of what he has apparently done himself, has been his attorney.

The picture in the inset is a profile from Steam gaming site believed to be Millard.

Of Mouse Traps and Public Men

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Conrad Black doesn’t get the big issue in the Wright-Duffy scandal and sees it as a media witch hunt. But I am.  Funny thing that: I used to take some heavy hits for defending Black with my lefty friends at the time of his troubles saying in effect that the case against him was a civil and not a criminal matter, and that the dossier against had a political odour –  in the Chicago of latter days one gets judged (evidently even in criminal matters) on whether one’s ‘values’  are those of the Second City. It is that which decides whether you can open a fried-chicken fast food joint, or whether you spend a few years in the joint.  My big point in Black’s defense was that one cannot apply standards of public conduct to Black merely because he has a public profile. He held no public office (in the US) and had no-one to answer to in financial dealings than to his investors and business partners if these did not involve defrauding public at large.  What he was convicted of might have looked bad but it was not a job for a prosecutor. Surprisingly, given the passions that Conrad Black stirs among complete strangers, I was able to make some headway with people who were able to grasp the issue of the requisites in public versus private conduct. 

Now, it seems Conrad Black himself has some difficulty deciding what is public business and what is not. In today’s National Post (18/5/2013), he calls for the end of harassment of Nigel Wright and Mike Duffy. He writes in operatic strokes of pen that it is an instance of unusual loyalty and generosity to a friend, but is not so unusual that it should be mistaken as a dishonest act between honest men.  Really ?  Is that what that was ?  Or is it just a sigh of Conrad Black realizing there is a Wright missing among his friends ?

 The problem is,  honesty or dishonesty, loyalty, generosity and friendship do not enter into the debate here.  Nigel Wright is a Chief of Staff in the Prime Minister’s Office;  Mike Duffy is a Canadian Senator.  Both are public figures who answer to the public for financial dealings they make in (and out of) their respective office.  If Mr Duffy admits to charging Canadian public for his senatorial expenses improperly and intimates he has repaid the excess claims, it is certainly big news item if it turns out he settled his debt with money that was not his and which he was obligated to declare as a senator.  If Mr Wright sends a cheque to a sitting member of the Senate it raises essentially unanswerable questions of the quid pro quo in the exchange – and again much as I would like to grant that it was an unselfish act of loyalty and friendship – I am not stupid to be put to sleep by self-interested babble even as artful as Conrad Black's.  The fact of the matter is that Mr Wright put himself in a position of conflict of interest and the only honourable recourse open to him is to resign to protect the integrity of the PMO.  Only then the charity to his friends will carry with it no risk of being mistaken for something else. 

So I am disappointed by Conrad Black’s take on this sordid little affair.  Going after the two gentlemen is not a way for ‘great nations’ to destroy ‘their public men with mouse traps ’ as he would have it.  It is simply insisting that public men keep their public nose clean.  I don't think anyone, least of all a journalist, should take an issue with that.

Beslan Comes to Boston

Ever noticed the difficulty the media has naming people and things connected to the Boston bombings and generally get anything right in that story ?   I guess the first prize for inanity in the non-stop twaddle the MSM delivered on Boston must go to Wolf Blitzer who described Dzhokar’s flight, running over his brother with a car and a hide-and-seek with the cops as an ordeal.  Close second:  has anyone (other than the news pros) not noticed that Zubeidat Tsarnayeva, the killers’ mother, is an emotionally unstable psycho and a classical portrait of enabler, someone whose judgmental posturing coupled with manifest sociopathic tendencies would be enough to explain her sons finally going nuts ?   And again, I find it interesting that no one in the chase for an improbable Armenian convert to Islam who poisoned Tamerlan’s (see my previous blog) sound mind, cares to observe the extraordinary contempt the Islamic people of the Caucasus hold the Armenians (for their alleged sycophantic and servile nature), and the utter improbability that ethnic Chechens (as perhaps the most warlike people in Caucasus) would take cues from an Armenian – in anything, let alone religious fervour !    

       But my focus in this blog is on the meaning of the strange overuse of the geographic term “Russia” in the reports. Both The New York Times and Washington Post now refer to the capital of Dagestan as Makhachkala, Russia a marked departure with the previous convention in mentioning the region's capital. The major networks refer in unison to the whereabouts of Anzor and Zubeidat as Russia, even though they inhabit the part of Russia that the US foreign policy considers land in which the Russians keep the natives in bondage.   It is as though Novosti and Pravda started to refer to San Juan as USA in connection to hypothetical bombing in Rostov in which Puerto Rican secessionists – for whom Russia was known to have a great deal of sympathy – were implicated.  Surely, this sudden misnaming would be seen as a veiled finger pointed at the US, especially if among the news US was being criticized for not cooperating with Russia as much as Russia would want.  Of course, the overt and covert criticism of Russia’s stance on terrorism that regularly crops up, is the ultimate irony of the Boston tragedy. 

    That in the journalistic equivalent of a hunt for Sasquatch, the importance of  Putin’s statement on Boston would be buried among tall tales about Misha that the relatives are spinning is of course to be expected.  For the US media to admit the US policy toward Russia after the fall of the Soviets is mostly wrong-headed, and at times plain stupid, is as unthinkable as the Moscow editorials in the early eighties admitting that Brezhnev’s politburo was brain-dead.  Of course, Putin is spinning his own yarn but the fact remains he has pacified the Caucasus to a degree which would have not been possible under Yeltsin.  He has been criticized in the West as being heavy-handed. But has he ?  Has anyone actually looked at the way  Russia under Putin has been behaving in North Caucasus ?  And if so, who would be – from the US security point of view – the optimal dominant power in that region ?  US NATO ally Turkey under Erdogan ?  Ahmanidejad and Khamenei ?   Saudi Arabia via the Wahhabi colonies there ?   See what I mean by stupid ?   

    Being a Czech ex-pat I have no illusions about the Russians. But I know enough of Russia, its history and political culture to know that the colossus rarely offers the kind of stability and prospects, civility and realpolitik, that it has been in the last decade under the dynamic duo. There are some significant opportunities that Russia today has to offer in bolstering US security.  All the US has to do is to acknowledge Russia’s legitimate interests and understand where they intersect with their own.  Unfortunately, this perspective has never quite made it past the Cold War view of Russia as a dangerous usurper and a jail of nations (which it was under Soviets but is not any longer, at least not for the moment).  And it is not just the mainstream media or the academics who see themselves in the old war-horse  Zbig Brzezinski (who sees Putin as a Mussolini wannabe). 

       An alternative view of Russia seems to be missing also in the writings of thoughtful critics and people usually immune to popular nonsense.  Surprising that even someone as bright as Daniel Pipes, whose father was an eminent scholar of Russia to boot, does not seem to grasp the opportunity that the Boston bombing presents to Kerry and Obama, in finally – at long last - resetting, the bilateral relations with Moscow as advocated by one of the most knowledgeable people in the US foreign policy business, the former US ambassador to Moscow, George F.Kennan.  For Pipes the Boston tragedy should lead to outlawing burqas and niqabs in the US. Not a bad idea but I do not see a meaningful connection there.  Nor am I particularly impressed by Daniel’s next item on his blog, Education by Murder. My beef with it is not on the analysis side; I am convinced that he is correct in assessing the Islamic danger. It’s on the practical approaches and measures that I see him as coming up short.  It’s the lack of focus and as a result of coherent policy which besets the thinking about Islam,  sadly in both,  the White House and the conservative think tanks.  The  mujehaddin heros the US supported in Afghanistan against the Soviets and in Bosnia against the Serbs, re-appeared as  attackers on US soil unleashing insane mayhem on 9/11.  Is there any wonder that the Caucasian highlanders with a dream of a Caucasian emirate that the US eggs on against the Russians, would eventually appear in the US to do a demo of the insane mayhem that has become all but synonymous in Russia with the name Chechen ? 

    In the drool and drivel that the media has dished on the Boston tragedy,  The Truth About Chechen Threat op ed at the CNN website from early last week summarizes neatly the idiotic posturing that only encourages people and ideologies who wish to destroy the US.  The piece struggles with facts in the most horrendous way:  Shaefer writes – much in the same manner that Zubeidat Tsarnaeva speaks – that ‘the once secular, democratic Chechen independence movement is all but gone..’.  When was there a ‘secular, democratic Chechen independence movement ?’, may I ask.  Pray, it would not be like the secular, democratic movement known as the Arab Spring !  The fact of the matter is that In 1991 Dzhokhar Dudayev, a Dr Strangelove with an idee fixe to nuke Russia's cities, staged a coup and declared himself without any silly pretense of elections, the president of independent Ichkeria. Almost immediately the Islamic theme entered the post-Soviet Chechen politics, and the former Soviet general was attacked by the competing warlords for his lack of islamic fervour.  It is also not true that Chechnya was de-facto independent from Russia in 1996-1999.  In reality, Moscow signed a deal with the separatists in early 1997 under which Russia would withdraw its armed forces and let the locals run their internal affairs, in return – specifically – for Chechnya to remain in the Russian federation and subject to its laws.  The ink was not yet dry on the agreement when Sharia shootings and dismemberments began throughout Chechnya in violation of the treaty. The Russians looked the other way. They kept looking the other way when president Mashkadov proclaimed Sharia the law of the land in 1999. The only felt impelled to go in the second time in response to several bombings (with casualties in the hundreds !) and to Basayev's, Raduyev's and al-Khattab's horde attempting to annex Dagestan.  Shaefer admits that Putin’s 1999 campaign was brilliant but calls it brutal.  Well, it was not brutal or ham-handed as Pavel Grachev’s assaults on Grozny in 1995-96.  Actually, the second war is most remembered in Caucasus for the siege of Gudermes and the expulsion of the islamist warlords from there. It has been described as the battle for the hearts and minds even by people who don't like Russians.  Putin won over even some warlords and prominent political figures who fought against the Russians previously, notably Akhmad Kadyrov, Chechnya’s mufti and later president (assassinated by the Wahhabi allied Islamists in 2004).   

    Schaefer long-term historical memory is also faulty.  Stalin did deport the majority of Chechens from the region after the war in one of his nasty ethnic cleansing edicts. But he did not erase Chechnya from the map as it has never existed, as Schaefer claims. The Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic (established in 1936) continued to exist through the repression.  Shaefer predictably fails to mention the big picture  that overshadowed Russia’s invading in the region in the 18^th and 19^th century.  Turkey is not mentioned by the diligent truther , yet it was Russia’s struggle with the Ottomans for the hegemony in the region - and that above all other causes - that shaped Russia’s political and cultural view of the Caucasus.  The expulsion of the Circassians, Turkey’s allies in the region, is of course regrettable and a dark chapter of Russia’s history. But it needs to be understood in the context of the times and gauged against the brutality of the Ottomans against the Armenians and the Balkan Slavs.   It is a sad irony, that one of the great conquering hero of the early Caucasian campaign, general  Yermolov , was himself a rebel in his youth and a liberal supporter of constitutional monarchy. He and two of Russia’s great poets, Pushkin and Lermontov, believed in Russia’s mission in Caucasus, because they believed civilization must conquer barbarity. Even if Russia was not the model of civilization itself, its intelligentsia has always understood the importance of its window on Europe.   

Shaefer complains about Putin’s success in rebranding the Chechen separatist fighters as terrorists.  He admits that this was not without merit, and mentions a headline grabbing incident at a school in Beslan.  My jaw drops when I read vacuous babble of this kind. If Mr Schaefer can talk himself through the visceral disgust that should grip anyone confronted by the bestiality of the attack on the elementary school in North Ossetia, he deserves nothing but contempt. There is absolutely nothing – no cause under the sun - that can justify assaults on innocent humanity going about the business of living.  And that is the message of Beslan and Boston, if 9/11 did not deliver the message.   

To the New York Congressman Peter King: Instead of criticizing the Russians for what they should have done it would be better to adopt this simple and doable security policy: If you get the names of terrorists that the Bear watches, trust, they bear watching !
 

What's In A Couple of Names ?

      I suppose, completely gratuitously, I admit, that if two brothers in the deep South coming from a family with known connections to Aryan brotherhood beehives were to commit some racist outrage, no-one would be fooled by their front, if they had the wherewithal to keep one up.  Especially no one would be fooled  if their names were Siegfried and Adolf.  Their names would immediately give them up,  and the act itself would provide the clue to their names and vice versa.  The media talking heads would not twist themselves into knots in front of cameras agonizing over our lack of understanding of their motives. They would have a simple explanation: these guys were white supremacists. And everyone would understand what that meant instantly. Even those who take cues from Wolf Blitzer (who opined on camera that the 24-hour hunt last week must have been an 'ordeal' to Dzhokar). After all, the brothers were called Siegfried and Adolf. 

       Of course, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar are not names that most Americans, even the ones with degrees from a genuine university, would be able to connect to anything.  History is bunk in America, especially  history of people who are not Americans. (‘No history, no bullshit’, as Richard Holbrooke used to say to Milosevic in Dayton when the latter thought that a couple of drinks might soften the US Undersecretary’s view of the origin of ethnic tensions on the Drina).  And yet the question persists: why would any Chechen living in exile in Central Asia would want to name his first-born son after  the greatest mass murderer that part of the world has ever known ?   Evidently, papa Tsarnaev who pretends in front of  cameras that his two sons  were ‘framed’ for the Boston bombings, had his reasons for giving his son a name which is not really a name.  Tamerlane was the man who went from fighting as a mercenary hailing from a minor tribe to becoming a  ruler of an empire that stretched from the Volga and the Black Sea to Xinjiang in China.  His real name was Timur, which is fairly common among Turkic people. Tamerlane (russified as Тамерлан, or Tamerlan)  originated as a nickname for the great ruler, Timur the Lame.   Why would anyone want to give his healthy baby son a name that had physical disability in it ?  Any ideas ?   

      Dzhokhar explains it.  Anyone in born in Chechnya (or to Chechens abroad) between 1990-1996 named that way can be rightfully suspected of owing his prenom to  his mom or dad’s fascination with the self-styled president of the Republic of Ichkeria ( as Chechnya is known locally), the one time Soviet general in the strategic bomber command,  Dzhokhar Dudayev.  What distinguished him among the ambitious new breed of post-Soviet politicians seeking freedom from Moscow, was not as much his hostile animus to Russia (this was in many places part of the necessary political credentials).  It was two things which were relatively unique.  Chechnya introduced a pattern of destabilization in the region which alarmed the Kremlin as it threatened its strategic interests, to wit,  securing its energy supply routes from the Caspian basin. Far from consolidating his power, Dudayev soon faced implacable internal opposition.  Because of the mass exit of technical and managerial resources who were non-Chechen, the economy was fast becoming derelict and was being replaced by large scale criminal enterprise. The decline soon reached catastrophic proportions. On top of this, since the breakoff, Dudayev’s Ichkeria had become the breeding ground for Islamic militancy with open threats to spread jihad to the neighbouring regions in Caucasus and beyond.   Dhzokhar Dudayev was a flamboyant figure with a penchant for heated rhetoric, repeatedly threatening the burn Russian cities to the ground.  This feature endeared him to the hard core of a traditional warlike culture of Chechen highlander tribes. His fanaticism was reassuring both to many of the locals and to the mujehaddin who started to drift into Chechnya after the Russians pulled out of Afghanistan.   Dudayev of course did not burn down any Russian cities. (Though he did have his underlink, by the name of Basayev, bury a dirty nuclear canister in a Moscow park, the only such terrorist attack on the planet to date !) When his Tsarnaev namesake was still in diapers, a Russian missile caught with him as he was barking orders on his cell phone.  A fatal mistake in his plan for world domination ? Contempt for his adversaries coupled with lack of understanding of surveillance technology !   Hmmm….

Elena Kagan Playing Silly Buggers

Justice Kagan, had something up her sleeve for Charles J. Cooper, the lawyer defending Proposition 8 in the Supreme Court last week. She said to him: “It seems as though your principal argument is that same-sex and opposite -- opposite-sex couples are not similarly situated because opposite-sex couples can procreate, same-sex couples cannot, and the State's principal interest in marriage is in regulating procreation. Is that basically correct?”   

“Your Honor, that's the essential thrust of our position, yes”, replied Mr Cooper .   “Well, suppose a State said, Mr. Cooper, suppose a State said that”, Kagan attacked, “Because we think that the focus of marriage really should be on procreation, we are not going to give marriage licenses anymore to any couple where both people are over the age of 55. Would that be constitutional?”.  To which  Mr Cooper truthfully replied, “No, Your Honor, it would not be constitutional

         Those of us who have followed the debates over gay marriage for some time  know intimately this ploy.  You say, yes, of course, marriage is an institution to regulate human procreation, one recognizing the unique role of the union of two members of opposite sex in establishing and enlarging human kinship.  But - the answer goes - if that were true than the state would also , to be fair and equitable, have to refuse to marry hetero couples which are known to be infertile, either because of age or a medical condition of one or both partners.  This is deemed to take care of the objection to gay marriage, in certain quarters, especially among those not in the habit to think too deeply about things.
 
        The problem of course is that this is a very weak argument based solely on the equality of procreative incapacity, regardless whether it's cause is a medical condition or partner's sexual identity.  The proposition stands or falls on the suggestion that medical incapacity to procreate in heterosexual  couples is by virtue of effect equivalent to lack of issue in same-sex couples. But that is most certainly an illogical way to argue.   On this test, one ahould be able to be married to a reclining chair.   

     That this motion is defective becomes instantly clear  when one considers the obverse situation, i.e. one in which both partners are procreatively healthy.   There of course, the reproductive inequality of the two types of relationships comes out clearly.  While heterosexual couples can procreate within the bond of marriage, exclusive of  the involvement of a third party (as required in monogamous marriage in Western society)  the same sex couples cannot and must - if they wish to claim parenthood - enter into contractual partnerships with outsiders to the marriage bond. 

The competent jurist would then have to answer the poignant questions of the state's  interest in the institution or semantics of marriage.  It seems absurd the think that the fathers of the Constitution would have thought of the opportunity to overcome natural reproductive defects and age limits in married couples as a pressing command to redefine the procreative union and biological kinship in favour of a legislated definition that seeks to obfuscate the natural basis of human families. Does the fact that infertile couples may adopt children in any way invalidate the finding that all children are born in a genetical join of a man and a woman.  Judge Scalia's question when it became unconstitutional to exclude gay people from the institution of marriage is very much at the cutting edge here.   

Does the state have then  any interest in recognizing marriage as a type of relationship capable of producing offspring exclusively within the union (, regardless of actual outcome) ?   Does the state have any interest in promoting the idea that children (if they are born) are born to biological parents who are married to each other? Does the state have any interest in promoting the idea that those parents care for their offspring ?  Does it benefit the state for the children to know and acknowledge both parents and their kinship ties ?  Have any of the answers to these questions substantially changed since 'We, the people' went out of the printer's office ?  I think not. 

Having said that I emphatically underwrite same-sex unions being recognized and registered as civil partnerships with rights of inheritance, proxy and tax benefits analogous to married couples.  That too is common sense to me.  It is just that we cannot change who we are and where we come from. The idea that somehow we can redefine our nature and invent for ourseves bonds that describe who we are as humans is as naive in its intent as it will be disastrous in its effects.