Sometimes you have to look at your opponent's propaganda to get a realistic sense of your own side's weaknesses—call it an inoculation against groupthink. A case in point is this Aug. 21 analysis of the recent court ruling on the Bush telephone surveillance program from TCS Daily (for "Technology, Commerce, Society"). For the suppoedly "libertarian" wing of the free-market right, these guys show little outrage at government snooping. But this piece does reveal why the Detroit district court's ruling is ultimately a weak defense of freedom. The note of "optimism" that this piece ends on is worrisome. Emphasis added.

Helicopter-borne Israeli commandos raided a supposed Hezbollah stronhold in the Bekaa Valley Aug. 20 in what Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora called a "naked violation" of the UN-backed truce. Three Hezbollah guerrillas were reportedly killed in a dawn firefight with the Israeli commandos. The Israeli army said it had suffered one dead and two wounded. Israel said the operation aimed to disrupt weapons supplies to Hezbollah from Syria and Iran. Both countries deny arming the group. (Taipei Times, Aug. 20)

Hard to say if this is more bizarre or terrifying. Talk about the banality of evil. What about the evil of banality? From Reuters, Aug. 21:

MUMBAI, India - A new restaurant in India’s financial hub, named after Adolf Hitler and promoted with posters showing the German leader and Nazi swastikas, has infuriated the country’s small Jewish community.

India's pro-secular website "Citizens for Justice and Peace" carries the following story on a July 27 fatwa jointly issued by a Muslim mufti (revered scholar) and a Hindu mahant (temple leader) in response to the Mumbai bombings.

Chief Mufti issues fatwa against terrorism
A mahant from Varanasi and a mufti from Punjab came together on a common platform in Mumbai on Thursday to jointly declare a holy war (jihad) against their respective co-religionists who preach hatred and perpetrate violence against innocent citizens.

The growing repression in China against peasants struggling to keep their lands before the onslaught of "development"—and now against their lawyers—is clearly analogous to peasant struggles raging throughout Latin America. Note the reference to forced sterilizations of peasants in the below story, long a fave tactic against insurgent campesino communities, most recently in southern Mexico. Yet the lefty zines and blogs in the West pay no attention to the Chinese peasant struggle, leaving it to bourgeois organs such as the New York Times. The left in the West seems to fall for the charade that China is still "communist." All of the evidence points to an utterly savage capitalism reigning in the "People's Republic." But the most egregious exponents of the American idiot left go so far as to support the Tiananmen Square massacre as a crackdown on a "counter-revolutionary rebellion." What's really ironic is that these same groups cultivate similar illusions about Islamic fundamentalists like Hezbollah—even as China executes a harsh crackdown on Islamic militants in Uighurstan! From the New York Times, Aug. 18:

Irshad Manji, the notorious "Muslim Refusenik" who supposedly advocates a principled, pluralist and secular Islam, has an op-ed in the Aug. 16 New York Times—where she once again betrays her disturbing flirtation with the very imperialism that fuels the fundamentalist backlash. The maddening thing about her is that she makes some vital points—only to blow her own credibility with obvious double standards. She is correct to call out the silence of (most) Islamic leaders on the Darfur genocide and the mutual Sunni-Shia carnage in Pakistan. But then she blows it by repeating the Dick Cheney line that terrorist attacks cannot be motivated by "foreign policy grievances" because the US hadn't invaded Iraq when 9-11 happened. How can she say this with a straight face while accusing others of "myopia"? There were "foreign policy grievances" galore in September 2001. The two al-Qaeda communiques in the immediate aftermath of the attacks (Oct. 7, 2001, Oct. 9, 2001) both invoked the US troop presence in Saudi Arabia, the Iraq sanctions and Washington's support of Israel. Just because the US has made the situation much worse in the intervening years doesn't mean that there were no "foreign policy grievances" behind 9-11! And however criminal al-Qaeda's tactics and however totalitarian its ideology, these grievances are legitimate—a reality we ignore to our own peril. Indeed, it smells like Manji fails to invoke the Sunni-Shia carnage in Iraq (which is even worse than in Pakistan), because there it is so evidently the fruit of Bush's blundering military adventure...

Lebanese scholar Gilbert Achcar writes via e-mail: "Many of you have certainly seen an interview allegedly done with [Hezbollah leader] Hassan Nasrallah by a Turkish radical left newpsaper... I have enquired about it, and a source in Beirut in close touch with Hezbollah has confirmed to me that it is a forgery." However, Counterpunch has seen fit to keep the evident forgery on its website, despite growing questions about its authenticity (albeit, with a note at the end acknowledging the controversy). The pseudo-interview is interesting because of what it reveals about the willful illusions the radical left cultivates about radical Islam. Here it is:

This July 29 report online at The American Muslim argues that an hisotric peace dialogue between Hamas leaders and Orthodox Israeli rabbis was (by strong implication, consciously) sabotaged by the Lebanon aggression. It also repeats the oft-heard claim that the July 12 abduction of two Israeli soliders which sparked the crisis actually took place on the Lebanese side of the border, contrary to the official story of a cross-border raid by Hezbollah.