SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2010 KATHLEEN PARKER
A letter to Muslims: Let’s all be tolerant
deeply embarrassed by current events in my country. First, let me say that I am not representing anyone. I can’t claim to speak for anyone but myself, though I am certain that many others feel as I do. I want to address the contro- versy over the proposed Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero and the so-called pastor in Florida who had been threatening to burn a Koran. I’ll begin with the easier of the
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two: Please ignore Pastor Terry Jones. I wish we had. He may live in the United States. He may have a building with a cross on it and call it a church. And he may know 50 or so people who care what he says, but he’s nobody. His threat to burn a Koran was a desperate at- tempt to get attention and nothing more. Anyone can call himself a pastor, but there’s a reason Jones leads such a tiny congregation. We have a long tradition in this country of letting people speak their thoughts in public, but we don’t take many of them very seriously. We laugh at characters like Jones but figure it’s better to let fools reveal them- selves in the light of day than to let them fester in the dark. I know this is hard to under- stand. We have trouble with it sometimes, too. Freedom is a messy affair, and sometimes peo- ple get their feelings hurt but we think the trade-off is worth the aggravation. What we hope you understand is
that most Americans were ap- palled by Jones’s proposal, too. Many of us would like for him to crawl back under his rock and stay there, never to be heard from again. Alas, our laws do not forbid stupidity. A few decades ago, Jones would be standing on a fruit crate on a street corner, where children would point at him and be scolded by their parents: “It’s not nice to make fun of crazy people.” Today, thanks to the miracle of mass com- munication, he can command a broad, if undeserved, audience. What our laws do not require, of course, is that we give him our at- tention, and that’s where we have
DAVID S. BRODER
JFK’s winning stand against bigotry
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ifty years ago today, John Kennedy gave one of the best political speeches I ever heard, a plea for religious toler- ance that has strange pertinence now when a little-known minister had been threatening to burn cop- ies of the Koran to strike a blow against Muslims. The notion of using the anniver-
sary of Sept. 11, 2001, to condemn the religion of those who attacked the World Trade Center has been criticized by President Obama and by leaders of every faith. That it found a home anywhere in this land suggests the persis- tence of the prejudice that was the subject of Kennedy’s talk — an eve- ning that remains as vivid in my memory as any from the first presidential campaign I covered. Kennedy had been working his
way around the battleground states outside the East, starting on Labor Day in Michigan and then down the West Coast from Seattle and Portland through the Central Valley of California to Los Angeles, then east to Phoenix and into Texas. The reception had been satisfac-
tory, but the reports reaching the campaign were disquieting. Back east, Norman Vincent Peale, the Protestant minister and best-sell- ing author whose following rivaled Billy Graham’s, had formed an alli- ance of other church leaders who were raising hostile questions about the young Roman Catholic candidate. Across the South, and in many other rural areas, Protes- tants weren’t waiting for answers before signaling that Kennedy was unacceptable as an occupant of the White House. There was nothing covert about the campaign. The National Con- ference of Citizens for Religious Freedom, Peale’s group, addressed an open letter to the candidate: “Is it reasonable to assume that a Ro- man Catholic president would be able to withstand altogether the determined efforts of the hier- archy of his church to gain further funds and favors for its schools and institutions and otherwise breach the wall of separation of church and state?” As we traveled, word spread that Kennedy had de- cided to take the issue head-on,
rather than let it fester and doom him to follow Al Smith, the first Catholic nominated for president, to defeat. So Kennedy had accept- ed an invitation to appear before the Greater Houston Ministerial Association for a televised speech and question-and-answer session on Sept. 12. Ted Sorensen, Kennedy’s
speechwriter, started working on the formal remarks and, as he told Theodore White, the campaign chronicler, did so with the belief that the hour ahead could deter- mine the election. The ministers, in their Sunday best, were seated in the ballroom of the Rice Hotel when Kennedy arrived. He made a point of walk- ing up through the assembly by himself — one man facing what- ever was about to come. In words that have often been quoted as defining the American tradition of religious liberty, Ken- nedy uttered two crisp paragraphs, beginning, “I believe in an Amer- ica where the separation of church and state is absolute,” and con- cluding, “where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.” Then came the rheto- ric, including the reminder that “side by side with Bowie and Crockett died Fuentes, and McCaf- ferty, and Bailey, and Badillo, and Carey, but no one knows whether they were Catholics or not. For there was no religious test” at the Alamo. In the question period, Kennedy
sported a look of bemused puzzle- ment as the ministers quoted from the Catholic Encyclopedia, his body language conveying that this trip was outside his normal world. But he never lost his cool, and he assured them he found none of the questioning “unfair or unreason- able.” He left to applause. At the end, Peter Lisagor of the
Chicago Daily News turned to a knot of other reporters and said, “If the editors of this country were smart, they’d pull every reporter covering Kennedy tonight off him for the rest of the campaign. You can’t have watched this and still say you’re neutral.” I thought he was right.
davidbroder@washpost.com
ear Muslim World, I am writing you today as an American citizen who is
failed each other and ourselves. As amember of the news media, I am sorry that we handed him a mega- phone, and I apologize. Please be patient. In a few days, he will be forgotten.
Of more pressing concern, and less easily resolved, is the contro- versy in this country about the proposed Islamic cultural center in Manhattan. I understand the sensitivity, as I’m sure many of you do. When we were attacked by ter- rorists nine years ago, our hearts were broken. They still are. Nevertheless, we don’t hold all
Muslims responsible for what hap- pened any more than all Christians should be held responsible for what Pastor Jones has been saying. Muslims also died when the World Trade Center towers collapsed. To say that an Islamic center can’t be built near Ground Zero is to say that all Muslims are to blame. I don’t think that most Americans believe this, even though a major- ity now say that they would prefer the center be built elsewhere. This can’t be explained rational- ly because this is purely an emo- tional response. Obviously, Mus- lims have the same right to wor- ship when and where they please, just as any other group in America. The same rules of tolerance that al- low a Florida pastor to preach his message also allow Muslims to preach theirs. We may never be able to agree on some things. That is life. But let us all agree to some terms. Let’s agree not to tolerate hatred — toward Muslims, Jews, Christians, atheists or any others. Let’s agree not to use inflammatory language. Let’s agree to call out and con- demn those who would incite riot, whether it’s an imam who orders the death of a cartoonist or the preacher who wants to burn an- other man’s holy book. Let’s agree that sometimes we will disagree but that none of this makes any sense if worshiping the creator means we must destroy each other in the process. Anyone who believes in God can’t also be- lieve that his divine plan included his creation’s mutual destruction. Peace be upon us all. Or as we
say around here, God bless. Sincerely, An American
kathleenparker@washpost.com
KLMNO
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A25 GEORGE F. WILL
Obama’s clunker economics
ERIK DE CASTRO/REUTERS
An Afghan Border Police officer frisks a villager in Helmand province Wednesday. DAVID IGNATIUS
Afghan hearts and minds A
visitor to U.S. military bases in Af- ghanistan sees lots of PowerPoint slides that purport to show progress is being made, despite setbacks. But two studies deepened my worries that the cur- rent strategy, without adjustments, will not achieve its goal of transferring responsibili- ty to the Afghan government starting next July. These reports are important because
they go to the central premise — namely, that Afghan security forces and governance institutions can be improved in time to make a gradual handover work. Looking at the studies, I scratch my head and wonder whether, as in the old joke about the Maine farmer who is asked for directions, the cor- rect answer about our ambitious Afghani- stan itinerary may be: “You can’t get there from here.” If that’s so — if there are basic weaknesses in plans for governance and training — then President Obama and his commanders should make adjustments be- fore it’s too late. Let’s start with governance: It was dis-
turbing, to put it mildly, to watch President Hamid Karzai in Kabul baldly dismissing corruption allegations on the very day depositors were fleeing a partly family- owned bank with a history of dubious loans. His critics were bandits, Karzai said indignantly, and he likened the arrest of an allegedly corrupt palace official to “Soviet” tactics. I don’t remember even Presidents Ngo Dinh Diem and Nguyen Van Thieu in South Vietnam being quite so cavalier about criti- cism. But such is the power of weakness: Af- ghanistan is so precarious that Karzai ap- parently assumes the United States has no alternative but to stick with him. One study, shared with the military, shows how our alliance with the Karzai government undermines efforts to stabilize Kandahar and Helmand provinces, the two key battlegrounds. The study summarized polling interviews done in June among 552 men in those two provinces by the Interna- tional Council on Security and Develop- ment and its president, Norine MacDonald. The numbers, while not strictly scientific, are a catalog of bad news: Seventy percent of those surveyed said that Afghan govern- ment officials in their area are making mon- ey from drug trafficking; 64 percent said that these local officials are linked to the in- surgency; 74 percent worry about feeding their families. Is the U.S.-led coalition helping fix these
THE PLUM LINE
Excerpts from Greg Sargent’s blog on domestic politics and debate on the Hill:
voices.washingtonpost.com/plum-line
Is Obama backing Elizabeth Warren?
Is President Obama finally set to nominate
Elizabeth Warren as his key Wall Street con- sumer cop? He strongly hinted as much at his news conference Friday, and the move would throw a big bone to liberals who passionately support her and want to see Obama take a stand on something they care about. The left has mounted a campaign to get War- ren appointed as head of the newly created Con- sumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is central to the success of one of Obama’s main achievements, Wall Street reform, on the grounds that she’s a highly qualified, very ag- gressive advocate. Obama was careful to say that no decisions
have been made. But he indicated that an an- nouncement is coming, and if you read between the lines of what he said, it sure sounded like a strong hint that he’s leaning toward picking her: “The idea for this agency was Elizabeth War-
ren’s. She’s a dear friend of mine. She’s some- body I’ve known since I was in law school. And I have been in conversations with her. She is a tremendous advocate for this idea. This is a big task, standing up this entire agency. So I’ll have an announcement soon about how we’re going to move forward. “I have had conversations with Elizabeth over these last couple of months. But I’m not going to make an official announcement until it’s ready.” Obama slightly emphasized the word “offi-
cial,” suggesting the possibility that making it official is all that remains. The White House de- clined to comment when I asked whether Oba- ma was leaning in her direction, beyond saying that an announcement is coming. But this is the strongest endorsement of Warren that Obama has yet offered in public. Given the passions she’s unleashed, and the symbolic importance she’s taken on for liberals, it would be a surprisingly tone-deaf move if Obama dangled this out there, only to pull away the football and spark more anger and outrage on the left. At a minimum, if he doesn’t appoint her after this, it will set up the left for another round of anger and disappointment.
problems of bad governance? Not according to these residents of Helmand and Kanda- har: 68 percent said that NATO forces aren’t protecting the local population; 70 percent said that military operations in their area are bad for the Afghan people; in Marja, where the United States conducted its bal- lyhooed campaign in February to install “government in a box,” a stunning 99 per- cent said that such military operations are bad.
Summary: The harder the U.S. military
fights to shore up Karzai’s government in these key areas of the south, the more un- popular it seems to be. This problem must be fixed, somehow. (I asked Gen. David Pe- traeus, the U.S. commander, about this study; he said that he was aware of it but noted the small sample size.)
A second study highlighted the other big
“tent pole” in the U.S. strategy — the plan to rapidly create a 306,000-member Afghan national army and police. The numbers came from Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, who recently took over the training mission in Kabul.
Caldwell noted that last September, at a time commanders were touting the training strategy, the Afghan army was shrinking be- cause of attrition. Caldwell has raised the pay, especially for the notoriously corrupt police, so they now make roughly as much as Taliban fighters. Partly as a result, attri- tion fell among the so-called “ANCOP” na- tional police from an annualized rate of about 100 percent last December to roughly 25 percent in March. But the rate bounced back to nearly 50 percent in July. Attrition is so high, says Caldwell, partly because the operating tempo is so intense. It’s a vicious cycle: The national police fight far from home, often in units that have been cobbled together; they get demoralized and quit; more recruits are rushed in to fill the gaps and sent off on faraway missions; they get frustrated and quit, and so on. Caldwell says he wants to “professionalize” the force, but in a country with more than 70 percent illiteracy, that’s the work of a generation. An interim review of the Afghanistan
strategy is scheduled for December: The White House wants “fine-tuning, rather than changing the channel.” Fair enough, so long as officials end up with a clear and pragmatic picture of where they’re going. “Hard is not hopeless,” as Petraeus likes
to say, but a strategy shouldn’t be immov- able, either.
davidignatius@washpost.com A dubious battle for
ain, when Churchill said of the pilots fighting the Luftwaffe: Never “was so much owed by so many to so few.” Looking ahead with trepidation, Americans are thinking: Never have so many of us owed so much. Actually, they owed slightly more when the recession began, when household consumer debt was $2.6 trillion. The painful but necessary process of deleveraging is proceeding slowly: Such debt has been reduced only to $2.4 trillion. Add to that the facts that the recession has reduced household wealth by $10 trillion and that only 25 percent of Americans ex- pect their incomes to improve next year. So they are not spending, and companies, having given the economy a temporary boost last year by rebuild- ing inventories, are worried. Hence, rather than hiring, companies are sitting on cash reserves much larger than the size of last year’s $862 billion stimulus. Democrats who say that another stimulus is necessary for job creation but who dare not utter the word “stim- ulus” are sending three depressing messages: The $862 billion stimulus did not work; the public so loathes the word that another stimulus will not happen; therefore prosperity is not “just around the corner,” as Herbert Hoover supposedly said (but did not). Consumers and businesses are re- sponding to those messages by heed- ing Polonius’s advice in “Hamlet”: “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” Hoover — against whom Democrats, those fountains of fresh ideas, have been campaigning for 78 years — is again being invoked as a terrible warn- ing about the wages of sin. Sin is un- derstood by liberals as government austerity, which is understood as exist- ing levels of government spending, whatever they are, whenever. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner recently said that Germans favoring reduced rather than increased state spending sound- ed “a little bit like Hoover.” Well. Real per capita federal expenditures almost doubled between 1929, Hoo- ver’s first year as president, and 1932, his last. David Kennedy, in “Freedom from Fear,” the volume in the Oxford history of the American people that deals with the Depression, writes of Hoover: “He nearly doubled federal public works expenditures in three years. Thanks to his prodding, the net stim- ulating effect of federal, state and local fiscal policy was larger in 1931 than in any subsequent year of the decade.” Barack Obama has self-nullifying plans for stimulating the small-busi- ness sector that creates most new jobs. He has just endorsed tax relief for such businesses but opposes extension of the Bush tax cuts for high-income fil- ers, who include small businesses with 48 percent of that sector’s earnings. The stance of other Democrats seems to be that the Bush cuts were wicked in conception, reckless in execution — and should be largely, and perhaps en- tirely, extended.
L Does this increase anyone’s confi-
dence? About as much as noting the one-year anniversary of the end of an- other of the administration’s brain- storms. The used-car market is an important mechanism for redistributing wealth to low-income persons: The price of a car drops when it is driven out of the dealership, but much of its transporta- tion value remains when it enters the used-car market. Unfortunately for low-income people, the average price of a three-year-old automobile has in- creased more than 10 percent since last summer. This is largely because the Car Allowance Rebate System, aka “Cash for Clunkers,” which ended in August 2009, cut the supply of used cars.
Cash for Clunkers provided up to $4,500 to persons who traded in a car in order to purchase a new car with better gas mileage, but it stipulated that the used car had to be scrapped. The Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby reports that a study by
Edmunds.com shows that all but 125,000 of the 700,000 cars sold during the clunkers program would have been bought even if no subsidy had been available. If this is so, each incremental sale cost taxpayers $24,000. Even on environmental grounds the
program was, Jacoby argues, “an exor- bitant dud”: The reduction in carbon dioxide from removing older cars from the road cost, according to research at the University of California at Davis, $237 a ton (the international market prices carbon emissions credits at about $20 a ton) and the new higher- mileage cars mean a reduction of car- bon dioxide emissions of less than what Americans emit every hour. Obama is desperately urging con- sumers and investors to have confi- dence in his understanding of eco- nomics. They may, however, remember his characteristic certitude that “cash for clunkers” was “successful beyond anybody’s imagination.”
georgewill@washpost.com
ooking back with pride, the Brit- ish are commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Brit-
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