BLOOD LIBEL II In last week’s issue, The Scrapbook printed extended excerpts from an astounding essay published in the March 10 edition of the Saudi newspaper Al-Riyadh. That essay, written by a faculty member at King Faisal University, purported to detail the precise recipe and technique Jewish people employ in the preparation of pastries necessary for the Purim holiday. The Jews, Dr. Umayma Ahmad Al-Jalahma explained, slaughter adolescent Christians and Muslims, drain the blood from their bodies even while they’re dying, and sprinkle that blood right into the dough. Now the Los Angeles Times reports that last Tuesday–not coincidentally, we hope, 24 hours after The Scrapbook item in question had hit the newsstands–Al-Riyadh’s editor, Turki Al Sudairy, repudiated Dr. Al-Jalahma’s anti-Semitic filth and apologized for running it. Al Sudairy claimed the essay had slipped through the cracks, and that he had become aware of it only after his Washington, D.C., bureau chief phoned him up long-distance to express concern. He now says Al-Jalahma’s piece was “unfit for publishing,” “unacceptable,” “silly,” and “untrue.” Which is okay, one supposes, so far as it goes. The Scrapbook cannot help noticing, however, the reason why editor Al Sudairy seems to think Dr. Al-Jalahma missed the mark. “Mrs. Jalahma failed to realize . . . that Jews anywhere in the world are one thing, while those belonging to the Zionism movement who are eradicating Palestinians is a completely different thing,” he says. “In Israel itself, there are moderate Jews–and it is unacceptable that our differences with specimens like that of Sharon should be the incentive to generalize our hatred toward all Jews.” Got that? It’s all right to say Jews kill Christian and Muslim children and consume their blood, so long as you make clear you’re only talking about Jewish “specimens” like the prime minister of Israel. THE NEWS ON IRAQ In his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee last Tuesday, CIA director George Tenet had some rather remarkable things to say about links between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime. “Baghdad has a long history of supporting terrorism, altering its targets to reflect changing priorities and goals. It has also had contacts with al Qaeda,” Tenet explained. “Their ties may be limited by divergent ideologies, but the two sides’ mutual antipathy toward the United States and the Saudi royal family suggests that tactical cooperation between them is possible.” Or maybe more than possible: “There is no doubt that there have been [Iraqi] contacts and linkages to the al Qaeda organization,” Tenet told the senators. “As to where we are in September 11th, the jury’s out. . . . It would be a mistake to dismiss the possibility of state sponsorship, whether Iranian or Iraqi, and we’ll see where the evidence takes us.” “Where the evidence is taking us” becomes clearer by the day. Tenet said all this just days after the New Yorker published Jeffrey Goldberg’s blockbuster article on Saddam’s ongoing atrocities against Iraq’s Kurdish population. Among other things, Goldberg offered evidence that Ansar al-Islam, a Muslim terrorist group operating in Kurdish territory, is jointly controlled by Hussein and al Qaeda operatives; that its members–Arabs and an extremist fringe of Kurds–have trained in Osama bin Laden’s camps; that some al Qaeda members fleeing Afghanistan have escaped to border areas controlled by Ansar; and that in 1992, Egyptian Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s top aide, made a long visit to Baghdad, where he met with Saddam and other top Iraqi officials. Given the splash Goldberg’s article made, you’d think that an official statement from Tenet tending to corroborate its findings would be front-page news. But you’d be wrong. Two days after running a stand-alone article summarizing the New Yorker report, the Washington Post published a page-one story on Tenet’s Senate appearance that somehow neglected even to mention the CIA director’s conclusions regarding links between Iraq and al Qaeda. The New York Times demonstrated still weirder editorial judgment, burying the briefest of quotes from Tenet’s testimony in a largely unrelated story about U.S. efforts to determine whether al Qaeda had acquired chemical or biological weapons. Whatever happened to “all the news that’s fit to print”? CHOP TILL YOU DROP Gathering inexorable force over the course of thirty years, the movement to banish references to American Indians–sorry, Native Americans–from the names of sports teams seems poised for final victory. As Sports Illustrated pointed out last week, “Since 1969, when Oklahoma disavowed its mascot Little Red (a student wearing a war bonnet, buckskin costume, and moccasins), more than 600 school teams and minor league professional clubs have dropped nicknames deemed offensive by Native American groups.” So wouldn’t it be funny, under the circumstances, if it turned out that actual Native Americans don’t care a whit about the issue? Which is the clear implication of another recent report in Sports Illustrated. In its March 4 issue, the magazine published the results of a poll taken among 351 American Indians by S.I. staff and the Peter Harris Research Group. Turns out a solid majority of respondents had no problem with names like the Chicago Blackhawks, the Atlanta Braves, and the Kansas City Chiefs. Asked specifically if they were offended by the perpetually controversial name of Washington’s NFL football franchise, the Redskins, 75 percent of survey respondents said no (among those living on reservations, the number is slightly lower, at 62 percent). Only 29 percent (40 percent on reservations) thought the team’s name should change. And when asked whether professional teams should generally stop using Indian nicknames, mascots, and symbols, 83 percent (67 percent on reservations) said no. Politically correct activists, however, are still on the warpath and brush off the poll numbers as insignificant. “There are happy campers on every plantation,” Suzan Harjo of the Morning Star Institute, an Indian-rights organization, has now told Sports Illustrated. According to S.L. Price, a writer for S.I., other critics look at the poll as “evidence that Native Americans’ self-esteem has fallen so low that they don’t even know when they’re being insulted.” The Scrapbook would prefer to give our Native American brethren a bit more credit than that. Perhaps Leigh Kuwanwisiwma, director of the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office in Arizona, puts it best. “I take the middle ground,” he tells Sports Illustrated. “I don’t see anything wrong with Indian nicknames as long as they’re not meant to be derogatory. Some tribal schools on Arizona reservations use Indian nicknames themselves. The Phoenix Indian High School’s newspaper is The Redskin. I don’t mind the tomahawk chop. It’s all in good fun. This is sports, after all. In my living room, I’ll be watching a Braves game and occasionally do the chop.” Chop on, brother. Raising the Bar Many Weekly Standard contributors–many times, in many pages of this magazine–have complained that modern, general-interest journalism does a miserably poor job reporting on law and lawyers. So we are pleased to call our readers’ attention to a new magazine specifically designed to redress this defect. Legal Affairs, a bimonthly publication of Yale Law School edited by Lincoln Caplan and intended for a general audience, is just out with its inaugural (May/June 2002) issue. It looks awfully good. Subscription information will be available soon at www.legalaffairs.com.
