The New Criterion

The Drudge Report today features two stories that seem to be plucked from some April Fool’s Day evening edition. The first is that Osama bin Laden--more likely some poor-quality CG rendering of same--has offered us a truce. The second is that Jacques Chirac has threatened to use nuclear weapons in retaliation against any state that commits a terrorist attack on France. Will we ever stop laughing?

Well, yes. Take a look at one story and see how it makes the other one possible. Buried near the bottom of the Reuters piece about French anti-terror policy is the following: "Despite its strong opposition to the U.S.-led war in Iraq, France remains a target for Islamist militants because of its intelligence links with the United States and Britain."

Somebody--one "Elizabeth Pineau"--was actually willing to sign her name to this bit of breathtaking, willful stupidity. Someone else was actually willing to publish it. Reuters is actively perpetuating the notion that being spared the wrath of al Qaeda is a reasonable and just reward for opposing the U.S.’s democratic mission . . . now, if only we could just sever those "intelligence links"!

Is it any wonder, then, that "bin Laden" is offering us a truce he doesn’t want--one we’d never accept in a million years, anyway? In "Muslims: integration or separatism?," David Pryce-Jones’s contribution to our February number, he writes:

Islamist fellow-traveling springs from a very contemporary cocktail of emotions, irrationalities, and fear: from the potential accusation of Islamophobia; from anti-Americanism; from self-hatred; from deep-seated compulsion to salvage something from the break-up of multiculturalism; and finally from some fluid sense that if extremist Muslims mean what they say, it is only a cost-free insurance policy to side with them.

(UPDATE: A related story includes a photo of bin Laden from the AP wire: "Exiled Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden is seen in this April 1998 file photo in Afghanistan." Readers, can you come up with a more ludicrous caption? E-mail it to letters [at] newcriterion [dot] com, and I’ll post the best ones here.)