SOBRAN'S --
The Real News of the Month

April 2002
Volume 9, No. 4

Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
Subscription Rates.
   Print version: $44.95 per year; $85 for 2 years;
   trial subscription available for $19.95 (5 issues).
   E-mail subscriptions: $39.95 for 1 year ($25 with a
   12-month subscription to the print edition); $65 for
   2 years ($45 with a 2-year subscription to the print
  edition).

Address: SOBRAN'S, P.O. Box 1383, Vienna, VA 22183-1383
Fax: 703-281-6617      Website: www.sobran.com
Publisher's Office: 703-255-2211 or www.griffnews.com
Foreign Subscriptions (print version only): Add $1.25 per
   issue for Canada and Mexico; all other foreign
   countries, add $1.75 per issue.
Credit Card Orders: Call 1-800-513-5053. Allow
   4-6 weeks for delivery of your first issue.



CONTENTS
Features
  -> The Moving Picture
  -> West Meets East, Again
  -> Saturday Night Laughing
Letters to the Editor
Nuggets (plus Exclusives to this edition)
List of Columns Reprinted



FEATURES

The Moving Picture
(page 1)

     As it contemplates expanding the war, the Bush 
administration is also weighing the possibility of using 
nuclear weapons. It reportedly has contingency plans to 
nuke several states, including Russia and Syria (which 
has no nukes). Instead of learning the obvious lessons of 
9/11, the government is redoubling the reckless imperial 
policies that helped provoke 9/11. In doing so it 
endangers the life of every American.

*          *          *

     Another contingency plan: an unconstitutional 
"shadow government," to take power in case the president 
and his successors should be wiped out in a sudden 
attack. Under a decentralized -- i.e., constitutional -- 
government, in which power was properly dispersed, no 
such backup would be necessary.

*          *          *

     Meanwhile, the Middle East boils. Ariel Sharon's 
ingenious peace plan -- to kill Palestinians until they 
cry uncle -- has backfired, getting dozens of Jews killed 
in the space of a few days. George W. Bush and Colin 
Powell, emerging from stupor, have expressed their alarm 
at the carnage. Saudi Arabia's peace plan -- recognition 
for Israel, if it returns to its 1967 borders -- is being 
denounced by Zionists as a sneaky Arab trick, though it 
amounts to what Zionists used to say they wanted.

*          *          *

     The sinister visage of Osama bin Laden has vanished 
from the covers of the newsmagazines; indeed his very 
name has disappeared from the press. We haven't heard 
from him for months, and nobody -- well, no infidel -- 
knows whether he's alive or where he is. A strange 
eclipse, given our recent obsession with him. At first a 
chief goal of the War on Terrorism was to destroy him 
personally. Now it's unclear *what* the goal of the war 
is. It's as if Hitler had been forgotten in the middle of 
World War II.

*          *          *

     And in another blow to our national pride, China has 
announced that it has successfully cloned dozens of human 
embryos since 1999. The genie of Progress is certainly 
out of the bottle. An eerie reminder that in the future, 
Western scientific achievements will be applied by non-
Western people, uninhibited by silly Western moral 
scruples. Maybe we'll soon look back on the twentieth 
century as a period of stable traditions. The new century 
promises to be very, very weird.

*          *          *

     David Brock is back -- yet again. He has now retold 
the story of his disaffection from the conservative 
movement in BLINDED BY THE RIGHT: THE CONSCIENCE OF AN 
EX-CONSERVATIVE, wherein he repents, or re-repents, of 
his days at THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR as the muckraking 
scourge of Anita Hill and Bill Clinton. He says he 
learned that his conservative friends weren't nice 
people, and having said that, he hopes his new liberal 
friends will take him to their bosoms. But he doesn't 
seem to have had a true conversion, because he never 
really had any conservative principles to recant. He's 
just a gossip who has switched sides. His career is just 
one more reminder of the triviality of today's 
conservatism.



West Meets East, Again
(pages 3-5)

     War, once more; or still. It never ends. No peace 
was ever concluded with Iraq after the 1991 war. American 
bombs have destroyed Iraq's water and sewage treatment 
facilities, causing untold (and in this country, largely 
unreported) suffering to the civilian population. Nasty 
business, and illegal under the Geneva Conventions. 
Israel's Amen Corner has been pushing for a new effort to 
topple Saddam Hussein, and it appears that G.W. Bush and 
his team intend to do just that later this year, in time 
for the fall elections.

     What began as a "war on terrorism" is morphing into 
a war to crush Israel's enemies. And naturally so. The 
9/11 attacks would never have occurred except for the 
U.S. Government's Middle East policies, which are pretty 
much dictated by the Jewish-Zionist powers that be in the 
United States. The Zionists boast privately of their 
power, but they don't want the gentiles talking about it. 
Readers of Orwell will recognize the principle of 
Doublethink. The Jewish lobby, like all lobbies, exists 
to promote specific interests that may clash with others' 
interests; yet it resists any assertion of those others' 
interests, or even any admission that Jewish and gentile 
interests may not always be the same. Apparently the 
whole Jewish lobby exerts all its power and influence to 
make sure the United States does what it should do in its 
own interests even if there were no Jews!

     Obviously the truth is very different. The lobby 
strives to cause the U.S. Government to act in ways that 
are directly contrary to the interests -- and the moral 
principles -- of most Americans. We should have learned 
how opposite those interests are on September 11. 
Instead, the result has been to consolidate the American-
Israeli alliance.

     Mark Weber of the Institute for Historical Review 
has said it best: "The truth is that if we held Israel to 
the same standards that we apply to Serbia, Afghanistan, 
and Iraq, U.S. bombers and missiles would be blasting Tel 
Aviv, and we'd be putting Israeli prime minister Sharon 
behind bars for war crimes and crimes against humanity."

     Heaven forbid! Yet it would simplify matters greatly 
if the United States treated Israel as its only enemy, 
instead of taking on all of Israel's enemies as its own. 
From the American standpoint, this alliance is not only 
immoral but wildly irrational. Usually your ally is 
someone you join with against a common enemy; in this 
case, we got the ally first, then we also got its enemies 
in the bargain.

     Furthermore, those enemies have a just grievance: 
Israel itself. The perpetual Zionist complaint is that 
the Arab-Muslim states refuse to recognize Israel's right 
to exist. But setting aside the question of whether any 
state can have a right to exist, Israel's putative right 
is the right of Jews to rule gentiles, to drive them from 
their homes, seize their property, and treat them as 
inferior beings. Is it surprising that the gentiles (who 
in this case happen to be Arabs) are reluctant to concede 
a "right" that consigns them to subjugation? What it 
comes to is that the Jews feel victimized if their 
victims deny them the right to victimize, alias their 
"right to exist." It's that crazy.

     You might think that a rational Zionist would 
understand why the Arabs feel that Zionism means somewhat 
more than Jewish existence, which has been an accepted 
fact for millennia. But most Zionists affect to believe 
that the Arabs, in refusing to concede the legitimacy of 
Jewish hegemony in Palestine, are denying the Jews' very 
right to live at all. According to Zionist propaganda, 
the Arabs -- Semites themselves -- are driven by anti-
Semitism.

     Israel is based on a principle of racial 
discrimination that is illegal in Western countries, not 
only in law but in many aspects of private life. Not only 
is the Western state forbidden to practice such 
discrimination; so are most private enterprises, 
commercial and otherwise. And in the Diaspora, most Jews 
favor anti-discrimination laws -- for the sake of Jews 
who might be discriminated against! Yet the same Jews 
favor a Jewish state in which a new arrival from Moscow 
or New York instantly enjoys privileges denied to Arabs 
whose ancestors have lived in Palestine for countless 
generations.

     And this is the country we are told shares the 
"democratic values" of the United States. Maybe it does, 
if you correctly grasp what "democratic values" really 
means. The innocuous phrase, like "right to exist," seems 
to have hidden implications that most people never 
suspect.

     In truth, Israel is culturally remote from the 
United States. Israel Shahak, a dissident Israeli, 
explains this in his little book JEWISH HISTORY, JEWISH 
RELIGION (Pluto Press). It's one of the most illuminating 
books ever written about Zionism -- and one of the most 
lethal.

     Shahak, who died recently, had been in a German 
concentration camp during World War II, then went to 
Palestine as a Zionist. But he became disillusioned as he 
witnessed similarities between Zionism and Nazism. And he 
traces most of what is wrong with Zionism to the deeply 
rooted contempt for gentiles taught by Talmudic Judaism. 
He quotes one authoritative rabbinical saying: "The best 
of gentiles -- kill him; the best of snakes -- dash out 
its brains." This may not have been meant too literally, 
but it is hardly a summons to universal brotherhood. And 
Israel has been riven by debates over whether it is 
permissible -- *permissible,* mind you -- to save a 
gentile's life on the Sabbath. The Talmud teaches that a 
Jew may not directly murder a gentile, but may lawfully 
cause his death indirectly (as by removing a ladder if he 
is in a deep hole). In practice, Israeli Jews who kill 
Arabs are assured of lenient sentences. And the Arabs 
know this.

     Shahak was a brave and honest man, but I suspect he 
judges Talmudic Judaism too harshly. The point, I think, 
is not that traditional Judaism is evil, but simply that 
it is far more alien to Christianity than most Christians 
dream. The average Christian supposes that a Jew is just 
a Christian who is a bit behind on the news; that he 
reads the Old Testament in the same spirit that a 
Christian does, but hasn't caught up with the New 
Testament yet. But thanks to the vast Talmudic 
commentaries, the Jew's Old Testament is utterly 
different from the Christian's. And after all, Christ 
brought a whole new way of interpreting the Old Testament 
-- one in which, for example, Abraham's willingness to 
sacrifice his son for the Lord prefigures the divine 
sacrifice of the Son on Calvary. This is totally at odds 
with the Jewish conception of the Messiah.

     Most Jews today know next to nothing about the 
Talmud, but Shahak contends that its millennia of 
authority have been a formative influence, particularly 
for contemporary Zionism. Israel is far from the pacific 
Jewish state envisioned by Theodore Herzl, a modern, 
secularized European Jew who would have been appalled by 
Ariel Sharon. Anyone who can mistake Sharon for a Western 
man has much to learn.

     Ethnocentrism is a universal trait, but few peoples 
have taken it as far as the Jews. Even in the ancient 
world they were hated for their alleged misanthropy, 
their aloofness from other races. Today's Jewish leaders 
are actually disturbed by the freedom with which Jews now 
mix with, and even marry, gentiles; some call 
intermarriage a greater threat to Jewish survival than 
the Holocaust. But again, Doublethink prevails: a gentile 
who warned against intermarriage with Jews would be 
condemned by Jews as a bigot.

     Jewish ethnocentrism is acceptable; gentile 
ethnocentrism is not. Jews should be self-centered; 
gentiles should be Jew-centered. All are expected to give 
top priority to Jewish interests, and the twin symbols of 
this Judaeocentrism are the Holocaust and Israel, which 
now dominate American public discourse to a degree that 
would have been astonishing a few decades ago. The 
Catholic Church itself is expected to defer, and even 
adapt its teachings, to Jewish sensibilities.

     Part of the misunderstanding between Jews and 
Western gentiles is due to the peculiar culture of the 
West. Since the ancient Greeks, and especially since the 
High Middle Ages, Western man has developed an 
extraordinary culture of measure. He measures, 
quantifies, classifies, analyzes, seeks order and 
proportion in all things. He has applied this mania for 
measure in mathematics, physics, biology, astronomy, law, 
philosophy, engineering, and a hundred other fields; 
religion itself has become systematized in theology. He 
has even developed an art form -- tragedy -- in which the 
lesson is driven home that hubris or pride, the sin of 
forgetting one's subordinate place in the order of 
things, leads to disaster. The rule of law is a way of 
averting tragic conflict in daily life by assessing rival 
claims; though easily perverted, it remains basic.

     This ability to see even oneself in proportion, an 
antidote to both individual and group pride, is a fragile 
and difficult thing, as the wars and conflicts of the 
West amply demonstrate; but it survives as an ideal. It 
is foreign not only to Judaism but to nearly all non-
Western cultures, in which ethnocentrism is taken for 
granted. The primacy of measure is absent in cultures 
governed by myth, tradition, ceremony, magic, kinship, 
raw self-assertion, and other habits we have come to look 
on as primitive or barbaric, or simply impractical. We 
spend our days keeping records and manufacturing screws, 
and to us all the minutiae of measurement seem natural.

     We forget how peculiar we are, how difficult it is 
for people from other cultures to adapt to our ways. The 
special difficulties of Jewish adaptation are brilliantly 
explored in John Murray Cuddihy's book, THE ORDEAL OF 
CIVILITY: FREUD, MARX, LEVI-STRAUSS, AND THE JEWISH 
STRUGGLE WITH MODERNITY (Basic Books; now out of print). 
In Cuddihy's view, the great Jewish-founded sciences of 
psychoanalysis and Marxism are really reductionist 
ideologies, whose covert purpose is to undercut what 
seemed, to Jewish intellectuals, the hypocrisies of the 
West. If Jews appeared "rude" and "crude" to Western 
gentiles, gentile politeness, "refinement," appeared 
unnatural and phony to Jews. Freud, Marx, and other 
Jewish ideologists sought to debunk and explode gentile 
pretensions, and their ideas were shaped by this mission. 
For Freud, romantic love was "really" nothing but 
disguised lust, just as for Marx capitalism was "really" 
nothing but disguised greed.

     In the same way, resistance to Zionist demands 
becomes "really" nothing but anti-Semitism. That gentiles 
may have their own reasons, including reasons of moral 
principle, for not acceding to Jewish ethnocentrism 
hardly occurs to many Jews. The "real" motive must be a 
hypocritically disguised anti-Semitism.

     A recent article in COMMENTARY magazine virtually 
equated criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. What else 
is new? Everything from fanatical calls for war on Israel 
to a diplomat's private wisecracks about Israel were 
cited as proof of "the return of anti-Semitism." The 
category is broad enough to encompass anything, however 
trivial, that displeases Jews; which is why I've often 
said that an anti-Semite is no longer a man who hates 
Jews, but a man whom Jews hate.

     It's now the duty of gentiles to internalize the 
insatiable Jewish ethnocentrism that has come to the fore 
since the founding of Israel. The fiction that Israel is 
essentially a Western country -- a fiction that has now 
cost us dearly -- might seem hard to sustain during the 
ascendancy of a man like Sharon; but Israel's apologists 
are inexhaustibly resourceful in justifying killing Arabs 
as necessary for Israeli "survival." And Bush seems ready 
to take the propaganda at face value. Whatever qualms he 
may have felt about Sharon have apparently evaporated.

     By Western standards, the Arab-Israeli conflict is 
irrational on both sides. Talmudic Judaism makes 
Mormonism seem like Voltaire; Islam is simpler on the 
surface, but at least equally non-Western at its core. 
There are not two sides in this struggle, but three, the 
third being the American. The trouble is that the U.S. 
Government doesn't represent the American side; it 
behaves, as an Irish politician has remarked, "like a 
puppet of Israel."

     Bush has only a feeble sense of what makes the West 
Western. He is what the Jews call "goyishkopf," "gentile-
headed," i.e., gullible. At least his father understood 
that American and Israeli interests are sharply 
divergent, even if he wasn't quite sure why; the son 
seems to believe sincerely in the democratic bromides on 
which Israeli propaganda relies. If reports are to be 
believed, he has become convinced that the United States 
must resume war on Iraq and dethrone Saddam Hussein.

     If history offers one easy lesson, it's that wars 
are a lot easier to start than they are to finish, and 
that even the most overwhelming victories may produce 
unpredictable and uncontrollable consequences. But 
America has drawn all the wrong lessons from the events 
of September 11 and is now in the grip of its own hubris.

     But maybe the bad news doesn't matter, because there 
is much worse news ahead. In a few decades, given the 
demographic facts of life, America, Europe, and Israel 
will be unrecognizable. What shall it profit a nation to 
win its wars if it lose its identity?



Saturday Night Laughing
(page 6)

     It's painful to watch SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE these 
days. Time was when I enjoyed it so much I'd turn down 
social invitations so I wouldn't miss it; today I don't 
usually bother with it. After a quarter of a century of 
success, the show's decline in recent years has caused 
much comment.

     To me the reason seems simple. In its greatest 
years, roughly the late 1980s, its humor was based on 
great characters. Dana Carvey's Church Lady was probably 
the most popular, but my own favorite was Al Franken's 
Stuart Smalley, the neurotic self-help counselor, who was 
both hilarious and oddly touching as he dispensed jargon-
laden advice while falling to pieces before your eyes -- 
an inspired creation. Chris Farley was also a genius at 
playing hapless and insecure blowhard losers. The rest of 
the cast in those days -- Phil Hartman, Victoria Jackson, 
Kevin Nealon, Jon Lovitz, Tim Meadows, Rob Schneider, 
Ellen Cleghorne, and others -- were nearly as good, and 
the writers (including Franken and Conan O'Brien) were 
brilliant.

     Lorne Michael is still the producer, but he seems 
not to realize the secret of his own success. Today the 
show is rarely funny. Its humor is merely snotty and 
smutty -- mean-spirited. It was always irreverent and 
often off-color, but it also had a saving affection for 
its satirical targets. It used to understand that being 
hip and smart-assed wasn't enough. A fatal smugness has 
ruined the fun. Tim Meadows's Lady's Man promised to be 
one of the funniest routines ever, affecting suavity with 
utter gaucherie, but he soon fizzled into a mere dirty 
joke.

     While Bill Clinton was president, Darrell Hammond's 
mimicry carried the show, because his Clinton -- a sly, 
lecherous con man of hammy hypocrisy -- was another great 
comic character. George W. simply doesn't offer the same 
possibilities, and Clinton's departure from the show may 
be the only reason to deprecate the Twenty-Second 
Amendment.

     Nowadays I rely for my Saturday laughs on Garrison 
Keillor's PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION, an ingeniously updated 
version of the old radio variety show. Keillor has found 
another rich formula, but unlike Michael he hasn't lost 
his touch. Based in St. Paul -- which he insistently 
distinguishes from urbane, upscale Minneapolis -- he has 
carved out a secure niche as America's highbrow rustic.

     The show combines country-folk music with excellent 
formulaic skits. "Lives of the Cowboys" features two 
grizzled cowpokes who still think existentialism is hip; 
"Guy Noir, Private Eye" transfers the hard-boiled 
detective from Chandler's Los Angeles to the Scandinavian 
Midwest; the weekly "News from Lake Wobegon" -- Keillor's 
climactic monologue -- displays the full splendor of 
Lutheran humor, whose very existence, before Keillor, was 
unsuspected. Even as you laugh, you marvel at his 
inexhaustible inventiveness. As a humorist, Mark Twain 
had nothing on this amazing man.

     Keillor is a liberal, but his wit is dry, subtle, 
and gentle, more often at the expense of liberal excess 
than of conservatism. Who ever imagined a liberal 
humorist? Especially one who would make liberals laugh at 
themselves? This is originality indeed. He also has one 
of the finest speaking voices ever heard on radio, deep 
and softly resonant, without the usual flatness of the 
Midwest.

     Keillor can't resist poking fun at the most 
irresistible target the good Lord could possibly have 
given him: Minnesota's governor, Jesse Ventura. It isn't 
all in fun; the two men really feud. Ventura is absurd, 
and he has the power, but in this case, as it happens, he 
is quite right. He asks the very reasonable question: Why 
should the taxpayer be forced to subsidize so successful 
an entertainer as Garrison Keillor?

     On the point at issue, Ventura stands for liberty 
and Keillor for snobbery and serfdom. Ventura won his 
fame and fortune in the lower depths of the private 
sector, professional wrestling, and even as a governor he 
retains something of an independent outlook; Keillor is a 
tycoon of the public sector, and he has no apparent 
qualms about getting rich on the taxes of people less 
affluent than he. Much as I enjoy and admire his talent, 
he is for me a symbol of the arrogance of his class. He's 
also a reminder of how unscrupulously predatory the 
taxing power has become.

     Yet week after week, after several decades in the 
business, Keillor keeps delivering fresh material, 
bringing charm, wit, and variety to a medium that seemed 
to have run out of surprises long ago. He's still doing 
for radio what SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE once did for 
television.



Letter to the Editor
(page 2)

Mr. Sobran -- I am an admirer of your work and faithfully 
read your columns, so please take these comments as the 
friendliest of criticisms. You'll know I am a fan when I 
compare your thoughts to those of Tacitus.

     Tacitus seems to have hated the Roman principate and 
despised its pretense of republican traditions and phony 
deference to the Senate. He records how the emperors used 
constitutional symbols as masks for their lawless 
concentration of power. However, Rome was an empire and 
Tacitus was a citizen and senator who had his duties. So 
despite his abhorence of the emperors, he seems to have 
grudgingly accepted the inevitability of imperial 
domination for Rome in order to avoid constant civil war 
and resist barbarian pressure around the huge perimeter 
of the empire. His practical goals seem to have been to 
hope for good emperors and put up with what he had to, 
while trying to avoid undue personal servility or self-
defeating poses of political independence.

     As I understand your writings, you similarly despise 
the American pretense to traditional constitutional 
forms, when in fact power has been concentrated in the 
central government and its bureaucracy, which have 
erected a stupendous warfare/welfare nation-state. You've 
described yourself as a reactionary utopian, and as such 
and as a social critic you aren't bound by the demands of 
practicality. But as a citizen, isn't your view so 
impractical as to be irrelevant and self-defeating? 
Doesn't the raw fact of the American nation-state, like 
the fact of the Roman Empire, require not just our 
condemnation, but also our efforts to improve it in 
realistic ways and to live in it with as much dignity and 
freedom as possible? It is interesting to read of your 
admiration for the Swiss federation, but how could that 
be of any relevance to us, given the American character, 
the size of our territory and population, and the sweep 
of our present worldwide dominion? When I finish reading 
one of your columns, I agree with what you say, but only 
with regret and resignation. Maybe this is the lot of the 
concerned citizen. Still, it's hateful just to think that 
we, like the Romans, are being "driven by our fates."

     I'm looking forward to your promised book on 
constitutional history; maybe that will make it all clear 
to me. Anyway, many thanks.

Richard L. Kirkpatrick, Esq.
San Francisco, CA 94105-2228



NUGGETS

THE SILENT MAJORITY: To say that we are hated around the 
world is not to suggest that acts of anti-American 
violence are somehow justified. But they should remind us 
that we are also hated by countless people who are too 
moral to take indiscriminate revenge on innocent 
Americans. These are the people who really deserve our 
attention, but don't get much of it. The only critics our 
government acknowledges are those with bombs. (page 2)

THE BIG HE: Wrapping up his investigation at long last, 
special prosecutor Robert Ray, Kenneth Starr's successor 
(I'd nearly forgotten), says the evidence of Bill 
Clinton's perjury in the Paula Jones case warranted 
indictment and would have resulted in conviction. Not 
that it really matters much, but it's always nice to have 
one more nail pounded into the coffin of Clinton's 
reputation. As with Count Dracula, however, the trick 
will be to keep him in that coffin. (page 2)

BAD NEWS: I don't know which I find more distressing, the 
war or the revelations about pedophile priests. But the 
sufferings of the war seem remote; whereas the stories of 
the victims of the perverted priests are heart-
wrenchingly vivid. What an unspeakable thing to do to a 
boy; and because unspeakable, it remained unmentionable. 
For years each boy kept his silence in confusion and 
shame, thinking he was the only one to share the dreadful 
secret of his priest. Now we learn how widespread this 
abomination was, and how systematically concealed by the 
Catholic hierarchy, the only ones with some inkling of 
how common it was. The offenders had the assurance that 
their superiors, if they learned the truth, would treat 
their diabolical betrayal as a mere administrative 
problem. (page 5)

JOKE! JOKE! Richard Lowry of NATIONAL REVIEW says his 
e-mail reveals "lot of sentiment for nuking Mecca." He 
comments: "Mecca seems extreme, of course, but then again 
few people would die and it would send a signal." Later 
he explained that this was just -- heh-heh -- 
"understated sarcasm." When an Arab-American group 
demanded that the magazine apologize and discipline 
Lowry, he quipped: "I'm going to officially slap myself 
on the wrist." Oh, that zany NATIONAL REVIEW humor! Back 
in the 1960s, the mag sold buttons with the merry slogan 
"Nuke the chinks." Maybe these kids don't really want to 
nuke Mecca, but they don't seem to discourage such talk. 
(page 5)

INNOCENTS ABROAD: An American woman and her daughter have 
been killed by a terrorist grenade attack in a church in 
Pakistan. Nothing new here; Americans abroad have been 
targets for years, but now we're starting to notice. We 
can expect more of this, just as we can expect our 
government to keep on making us hated around the world. 
President Bush called the deaths "acts of murder that 
cannot be tolerated by any person of conscience." Do 
tell. And no doubt the perpetrators must be brought to 
justice. (page 8)


Exclusive to the electronic version:

EXTRA! EXTRA! A conservative newspaper in the Big Apple? 
Well, sort of. The NEW YORK SUN is scheduled to commence 
publication on April 18. Its columnists will include 
Peggy Noonan, Richard Brookhiser, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Seth 
Lipsky, and Fred Siegel. If you don't see a pattern here, 
you haven't been taking your daily paranoia pill. Just 
what New York so desperately needs: yet another pro-
Israel paper.

YOU KNOW THE TYPE: I honor genuine piety and charity, but 
some people ought to wear signs warning: "Dangerous when 
religious." For them, piety is a mood that comes and 
goes, and when the "spiritual" impulse strikes them, they 
are capable of feeling justified in behavior they would 
recognize as insufferable in their normal, human moments.

FIRST HURRICANES, NOW THIS: Following a current fashion, 
the London daily LLOYD'S LIST, which has covered the 
shipping industry since 1734, has announced that it will 
now refer to seafaring vessels as "it" rather than "she." 
So passes another sweet old tradition, as Progress 
improves the language by neutering it. Maybe we should 
also refer to feminists as "it." After all, most of them 
are more sexless than any galleon or schooner.


OLD FRIENDS: For those keeping score on the Balkans, the 
Bosnian Muslims befriended by the United States against 
the Serbs and Croats in 1992-95 have now turned anti-
American. "The American government is the enemy of Islam 
everywhere -- and this includes Bosnia," says one 
militant, voicing the popular view. Is anyone learning 
anything yet?



REPRINTED COLUMNS (pages 7-12)

* Genocide and Wisecracks (February 14, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020214.shtml

* Our Chesterton (February 19, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020219.shtml

* Am I "Anti-American"? (February 26, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020226.shtml

* The Duty of Lying (February 28, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020228.shtml

* The Rise of Tax Slavery (March 5, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020305.shtml

* How Might Makes Right (March 7, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020307.shtml

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

All articles are written by Joe Sobran

You may forward this newsletter if you include the 
following subscription and copyright information:

Subscribe to the Sobran E-Package. 
See http://www.sobran.com/e-mail.shtml
or http://www.griffnews.com for details and samples
or call 800-513-5053.

Copyright (c) 2002 by The Vere Company -- www.sobran.com. 
All rights reserved.
Distributed by the Griffin Internet Syndicate 
www.griffnews.com with permission.


[ENDS]