BUT ENOUGH ABOUT THE WAR . . . Republican gains in popularity since September 11 seem to have driven Democrats into paranoia and despair. At the Florida Democratic convention on April 14, the party’s presidential candidates patted themselves on the back for defying threats and pressure, and for actually criticizing Republicans. Think about it: Democrats willing to zing the other party. Unheard of. Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts insisted there are policy debates “we need to have in this country, but some would rather smother them.” Unafraid, Kerry said it’s time “to remind our Republican friends that the freedom they love to preach about also includes the freedom to disagree and the right to dissent.” Al Gore, too, was fearless–despite the jackboot of Republicans who “vilify honorable men and women who oppose their right-wing domestic agenda and blatantly dishonest budget” and “imply that those who stand up to them are somehow unpatriotic.” Exactly which Republicans vilified those questioning the GOP’s domestic ideas as unpatriotic? Democrats offered no names. In truth, there are issues Democrats just don’t want to talk much about. These happen to be the most critical and significant issues of the day: foreign policy, terrorism, and national security. Now, forget the fact these are important to the nation’s future. Democrats regard them as “Republican issues,” and thus their goal is to say as little as possible about them, while quickly changing the subject to domestic issues on which Democrats poll well. “The strategy all along,” a Democratic adviser told Roll Call, “has been that if you can take the war and taxes off the table, we can have a debate on the issues where we are strongest.” Ah, yes, if, if, if. And if The Scrapbook had some ham we’d be enjoying a ham and cheese sandwich, if we had some cheese. Howard Wolfson, the director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, says House candidates should concentrate on the supposed $243 million tax cut for Enron, which doesn’t actually exist, and Social Security, a perennial scare-the-old-folks issue for Democrats. Oh, yes, there is one foreign policy issue Democrats have talked up, the Middle East. But rather than support Israel’s right of self-defense in pursuing terrorists in the West Bank, Democratic leaders accused President Bush of being “disengaged.” A curious accusation. If anyone gets punished by voters for being “disengaged,” it seems likelier to be the party that wants to take the war “off the table.” THE LIFE EXPECTANCY OF ANTI-ARAFAT PALESTINIANS We’re told ad nauseam, especially by the State Department, that Yasser Arafat is the legitimate and sole representative of the Palestinian people. Given the thugocracy that is the Palestinian Authority, we’re sure that Arafat likes to think that he is. The fact that the U.S. government feels obliged to agree with him has always struck us as one of the most morally dismaying parts of the “peace process.” Especially given the role of lynchings in enforcing political loyalty within the Palestinian territory. These lynchings are not widely reported, and are even less frequently photographed. But according to the Jerusalem Post, there have been “dozens” since the beginning of the current intifada. The Palestinian man pictured here was killed by his fellow Palestinians on April 23 in Hebron, on suspicion of being an informer of Israel. We came across the photo thanks to the new New York Sun, which featured it on one of its inaugural front pages last week–a bold decision given the subject matter of the photo. So let us take this occasion to wish the new paper well. As newspaper readers, we’re believers in the more, the merrier. And since the paper is also intelligent and interesting, the more, the better, in this case. THE FIRST BATTLE OF JENIN British papers have taken the lead in demonizing the urban warfare between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian fighters in Jenin as an Israeli war crime. So perhaps it’s unsurprising that we had to turn to the Jerusalem Post for this fascinating piece of historical context: Jenin’s role as a breeding ground of Palestinian terror dates back to the days of the British Mandate. And the British showed less forbearance than Israel in counterattacking. As Rafael Medoff tells the story in the April 18 Jerusalem Post, “the assassination of a British district commissioner by a Palestinian Arab terrorist in Jenin in the summer of 1938” led British authorities to decide “that ‘a large portion of the town should be blown up’ as punishment. On August 25 of that year, a British convoy brought 4,200 kilos of explosives to Jenin for that purpose. In the Jenin operation and on other occasions, local Arabs were forced to drive ‘mine-sweeping taxis’ ahead of British vehicles in areas where Palestinian Arab terrorists were believed to have planted mines, in order ‘to reduce [British] landmine casualties.'” The details cited by Medoff were in cable traffic to London that the British government declassified 50 years after the events described. As he notes, there were lively “discussions among officials of the Colonial Office concerning the rightness or wrongness of the anti-terror methods used in Palestine. Lord Dufferin remarked: ‘British lives are being lost and I don’t think that we, from the security of Whitehall, can protest squeamishly about measures taken by the men in the frontline.’ Sir John Shuckburgh defended the tactics on the grounds that the British were confronted ‘not with a chivalrous opponent playing the game according to the rules, but with gangsters and murderers.'” Indeed. WHY ARE WE NOT SURPRISED? We always thought suicide doctor Jack Kevorkian was a creepy guy. Currently doing time in prison for murder, Kevorkian has presided over at least one hundred deaths–and most of his victims were not even terminally ill. As Weekly Standard contributor Wesley J. Smith has noted in these pages, Kevorkian’s “Dr. Death” moniker “dates back to his medical-school days, when he would haunt hospital wards at night, staring into dying people’s eyes. He is a fiend because his fondest dream is to slice open living people. He may also be the world’s most clever serial killer, as one media observer once put it, since his victims come to him” (“The Serial Killer As Folk Hero,” July 6/July 13, 1998). And now comes yet another bizarre revelation. In an intriguing article in the Washington Post Magazine entitled “The Art of Evil,” author Marc Fisher talks about the buying and selling of Adolf Hitler’s paintings, along with other Nazi-related propaganda (including a stomach-churning Last Supper scene with the Fuhrer at the center and the inscription, “In the beginning was the Word”). In a quick aside, Fisher notes that Hitleriana dealer Charles Snyder Jr. “won’t identify most of his customers, but euthanasia advocate Jack Kevorkian, ‘Dr. Death,’ was one. Had a nice little Hitler collection there for a while.” Revolting, yes, but hardly surprising.
