[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.]

What do Islamist terrorists want? The answer should be obvious, but it is not.

A generation ago, terrorists did make clear their wishes. Upon hijacking three airliners in September 1970, for example, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine demanded, with success, the release of Arab terrorists imprisoned in Britain, Switzerland, and West Germany. Upon attacking the B'nai B'rith headquarters and two other Washington, D.C. buildings in 1977, a Hanafi Muslim group demanded the canceling of a feature movie, Mohammad, Messenger of God," $750 (as reimbursement for a fine), the turning over of the five men who had massacred the Hanafi leader's family, plus the killer of Malcolm X.

Such"non-negotiable demands" led to wrenching hostage dramas and attendant policy dilemmas."We will never negotiate with terrorists," the policymakers declared"Give them Hawaii but get my husband back," pleaded the hostages' wives.

Those days are so remote and their terminology so forgotten that even President Bush now speaks of"non-negotiable demands" (in his case, concerning human dignity), forgetting the deadly origins of this phrase.

Most anti-Western terrorist attacks these days are perpetrated without demands being enunciated. Bombs go off, planes get hijacked and crashed into buildings, hotels collapse. The dead are counted. Detectives trace back the perpetrators' identities. Shadowy websites make post-hoc unauthenticated claims.

But the reasons for the violence go unexplained. Analysts, including myself, are left speculating about motives. These can relate to terrorists' personal grievances based in poverty, prejudice, or cultural alienation. Alternately, an intention to change international policy can be seen as a motive: pulling"a Madrid" and getting governments to withdraw their troops from Iraq; convincing Americans to leave Saudi Arabia; ending American support for Israel; pressuring New Delhi to cede control of all Kashmir.

Any of these motives could have contributed to the violence; as London's Daily Telegraph puts it, problems in Iraq and Afghanistan each added"a new pebble to the mountain of grievances that militant fanatics have erected." Yet neither is decisive to giving up one's life for the sake of killing others.

In nearly all cases, the jihadi terrorists have a patently self-evident ambition: to establish a world dominated by Muslims, Islam, and Islamic law, the Shari'a. Or, again to cite the Daily Telegraph, their"real project is the extension of the Islamic territory across the globe, and the establishment of a worldwide ‘caliphate' founded on Shari'a law."

Terrorists openly declare this goal. The Islamists who assassinated Anwar el-Sadat in 1981 decorated their holding cages with banners proclaiming the" caliphate or death." A biography of one of the most influential Islamist thinkers of recent times and an influence on Osama bin Laden, Abdullah Azzam declares that his life"revolved around a single goal, namely the establishment of Allah's Rule on earth" and restoring the caliphate.

Bin Laden himself spoke of ensuring that"the pious caliphate will start from Afghanistan." His chief deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, also dreamed of re-establishing the caliphate, for then, he wrote,"history would make a new turn, God willing, in the opposite direction against the empire of the United States and the world's Jewish government." Another Al-Qaeda leader, Fazlur Rehman Khalil, publishes a magazine that has declared"Due to the blessings of jihad, America's countdown has begun. It will declare defeat soon," to be followed by the creation of a caliphate.

Or, as Mohammed Bouyeri wrote in the note he attached to the corpse of Theo van Gogh, the Dutch filmmaker he had just assassinated,"Islam will be victorious through the blood of martyrs who spread its light in every dark corner of this earth."

Interestingly, van Gogh's murderer was frustrated by the mistaken motives attributed to him, insisting at his trial:"I did what I did purely out of my beliefs. I want you to know that I acted out of conviction and not that I took his life because he was Dutch or because I was Moroccan and felt insulted."

Although terrorists state their jihadi motives loudly and clearly, Westerners and Muslims alike too often fail to hear them. Islamic organizations, Canadian author Irshad Manji observes, pretend that"Islam is an innocent bystander in today's terrorism."

What the terrorists want is abundantly clear. It requires monumental denial not to acknowledge it, but we Westerners have risen to the challenge.

This article is reprinted with permission by Daniel Pipes. This article first appeared in the New York Sun.

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.]

Estimating how many potential terrorists reside in one's country is a highly inexact business, but there's a striking correlation between a British government report recently leaked to London's Times and a new opinion survey commissioned by the Daily Telegraph.

Drawing on unidentified"intelligence," the government report (analyzed by me at"The Next London Bombing") finds as many as 16,000"British Muslims actively engaged in terrorist activity."

Then, using standard survey research methods, the reputable YouGov polling firm interviewed 526 Muslim adults across Great Britain online during July 15-22, weighing the data to reflect the British Muslim population's age, gender, and countries of origin. The survey found that 1 percent of them, or"about 16,000 individuals, declare themselves willing, possibly even eager, to embrace violence" in the effort to bring an end to"decadent and immoral" Western society.

Should their ranks really be so thick, such a huge number of potential terrorists could cause an unprecedented security crisis for Britain, with all the attendant economic, social, political, and cultural ramifications one can imagine.

The YouGov survey contains many other statistics that should interest, if not shock, Britons and other Westerners.

• Muslims who see the 7/7 bombing attacks in London as justified on balance: 6 percent.
• Who feel sympathy for the"feelings and motives" of those who carried out the 7/7 attacks: 24 percent.
• Understand"why some people behave in that way": 56 percent.
• Disagree with Tony Blair's description of the ideology of the London bombers as"perverted and poisonous": 26 percent.
• Feel not loyal towards Britain: 16 percent.
• Agree that"Western society is decadent and immoral and that Muslims should seek to bring it to an end": 32 percent willing to use non-violent means and (as noted above) 1 percent willing to use violence"if necessary." Just 56 percent of Muslims agree with the statement that"Western society may not be perfect but Muslims should live with it and not seek to bring it to an end."
• Agree that"British political leaders don't mean it when they talk about equality. They regard the lives of white British people as more valuable than the lives of British Muslims": 52 percent.
• Dismiss political party leaders as insincere when saying"they respect Islam and want to co-operate with Britain's Muslim communities": 50 percent.
• Doubt that anyone charged with and tried for the 7/7 attacks would receive a fair trial: 44 percent.
• Would not inform on a Muslim religious leader"trying to 'radicalise' young Muslims by preaching hatred against the West": 10 percent.
• Do not think people have a duty to go to the police if they"see something in the community that makes them feel suspicious": 14 percent.
• Believe other Muslims would be reluctant to go to the police"about anything they see that makes them suspicious": 41 percent.
• Would inform the police if they believed they knew about the possible planning of a terrorist attack: 73 percent. (In this case, the Daily Telegraph did not make available the negative percentage.)

Another opinion poll, this one commissioned by Sky News and carried out by Communicate Research (which interviewed 462 UK-based Muslims by telephone) found similar results:

• Muslims who agree with what the London suicide bombers did: 2 percent.
• Who believe there is a Koranic justification for the bombings: 5 percent.
• Disagree with the statement that"Muslim clerics who preach violence against the West are out of touch with mainstream Muslim opinion": 46 percent.
• Think of themselves as Muslim first and British second: 46 percent. Another 42 percent do not differentiate between the identities. A mere 12 percent see themselves as British first and Muslim second.

Comments: (1) It is hard to say which is the most alarming of these many worrisome statistics, but two stand out. That less than three-quarters of Muslims in Britain indicate they would tell the police about an impending terrorist attack raises grave doubts about the Blair government's tactic of getting Muslims to police their own community. That one-third of Muslims do not accept British society and want to end it, presumably to pave the way for an Islamic order, casts comparable doubts on Britain's much-vaunted multicultural ideal.

(2) Even the Telegraph's interpreter of its survey, Professor Anthony King of Essex University, feels compelled to sugar the results, calling them"at once reassuring and disturbing, in some ways even alarming," whatever that means. In several specific instances, he turns hair-raising statistics into cheerful ones (that 73 percent would warn of an impending terrorist attack he deems"impressive"). The newspaper's and the professor's panglossian attitude makes one wonder what might wake the British to the Islamist hell growing in their midst.

Rick Perlsten talks about his new book, The Stock Ticker and the Superjumbo: How the Democrats Can Once Again Become America's Dominant Political Party, with Christopher Hayes; in In These Times (7-21-05):

You have this analogy between Boeing's multi-generational devotion to building the first jumbo jet and the Democratic Party's multi-generational commitment to insuring economic security. How have successive generations of Democrats built on the same project?

Take something like federal aid to education. That was an idea Democrats had ever since the New Deal. It never succeeded for various political reasons, but they just kept at it and by 1965 Lyndon Johnson finally passed the thing. By that time, everyone knew what the Democrats were about: They were the party that supported federal aid for education. Compare that to when the Clintons proposed their health care plan in the early '90s. He ran and won on the idea that he was going to deliver health care to all Americans, and for various complicated reasons he lost that battle. But instead of saying well, this is what the Democrats are about, we're going to stick to it despite the setback, Hillary Clinton very explicitly said: What I learned was that you have to do things in small steps and incrementally. She specifically backed off the marker that the Democrats laid down, that we are the party defined by our pledge to deliver health care to everyone.

I like this term marker. What's it mean?

It's a gambling term. A marker basically is a commitment to pay. In Guys and Dolls, Nathan Detroit would say, "that guy holds my marker." It's something you can't back out of, on pain of getting your knees broken. The marker that Republicans have is that everyone who runs for office has to sign a pledge--it's enforced by their own knee-breaker, Grover Norquist--that on pain of political death they're not going to raise taxes.

My thesis is that a commitment that doesn't waver adds value by the very fact of the commitment. The evidence is that even though the individual initiatives that make up the conservative project poll quite poorly, they've managed to succeed simply because everyone knows what the Republicans stand for. And the most profound exit poll finding in the last election had nothing to do with moral values, it was all the people who said that they disagreed with the Republicans on individual issues, but they voted for George W. Bush anyway because they knew what he stood for.

He'd given them a marker.

Exactly. The world is an uncertain and scary place and there's value just in making credible demonstrations of fortitude. Now the amazing thing about this is that it's a virtuous circle for the Democrats. Not only can we increase the devotion of an electorate that looks at Democrats as piddling and feckless, it just so happens that when you poll the public on what they want, it looks much more like the Democratic agenda than the Republican agenda.

Okay, but if our superjumbo is "Big Government," many Democrats say that plane won't fly anymore. The project is intellectually bankrupt, we need a new one. What do you say to that?

Well, first of all, I'm a historian and the only time Democrats have been able to pull together a new majority and to grow was when they laid down these markers, pledges to ordinary Americans that the government would protect their economic interests.

The other thing is, there's a story about economic history of the recent past that historians will find us strange for not speaking about more often, and that's the stagnation of incomes for ordinary Americans. What could be more contemporary? What could be more timely than programs that address that crying need? Between WWII and the '70s the real incomes of Americans doubled. People who used to have outhouses were able to afford vacation cottages. Well, that's dropped off a cliff. If it makes me an old Democrat to try and restore what the Democrats of the '40s, '50s and '60s accomplished, which was running the country, sue me. I'm an old Democrat.

The most common analysis of why Democrats have strayed from this project--as one New Deal congressman whom you quote says "Freedom Plus Groceries"--points to corporate money. Today's Dems are feeding at the same trough and they can no longer take on the insurance companies, etc. But in the latter half of the book, you provide a fascinating psychological account of why the Democrats strayed from this project, which was sort of born out of the conflict of the '60s.

Yeah. The trauma of the generation of people who are running the Democratic Party was being blindsided by the political failures of left-of-center boldness. If you look at a lot of the most resonant and stalwart centrists and Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) Democrats, for a lot of them, their political coming-of-age was being blindsided by conservatism. For Bill Clinton, it was losing the governorship in 1980. For Joe Lieberman, it was losing a congressional race in 1980. For Evan Bayh, the chair of the DLC, it was seeing his dad lose his Senate seat to Dan Quayle in 1980. But the formative traumas of my generation of Democrats--and I'm 35--have been the failures of left-of-center timidity. So there really is a structural generational battle among Democrats. People of a certain age are terrified that the electorate is going to associate them with the excesses of the '60s, but most voters are too young to remember that stuff. The Republicans keep trying to paint the Democrats as the party of the hippies and punks who burn the flag.

In fact, we just got a new flag-burning amendment.

Yeah, but there's really less juice you can squeeze out of that orange every year....

Gavan McCormack, at the website of Japan Focus (7-17-05):

[Gavan McCormack is professor of social science at International Christian University, Tokyo, the author of Target North Korea: Pushing North Korea to the Brink and a Japan Focus coordinator. ]

On 13 June 2005, the doors of the White House Oval Office opened to admit a young (37 year-old) Korean man named Kang Chol-Hwan, a refugee from North Korea and perhaps the first person from North Korea for the president to meet. Kang was slightly overwhelmed by the warmth of his welcome, not only from President George W. Bush but also Vice-President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Just three days earlier, in the same room, Bush had hosted a visit by South Korean president Roh Moo-Hyun. The welcome for Kang, the refugee, was by all accounts much warmer than that for the head of state, and at forty minutes lasted about as long.

Kang may have been virtually unknown outside Korea prior to his White House reception, but in South Korea he has become a representative of the community of Talpukja, or “those who have fled the North.” He was invited to the White House because Bush had just read his book, co-authored with Pierre Rigoulot, The Aquariums of Pyongyang-Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag (New York, Basic Books, 2001). He so much liked it that he had not only recommended it to his close advisers but told Kang he wanted “all Americans” to read it.

Appearing on Japanese television some weeks after meeting the president, Kang recounted Bush’s question: if the two were to change places, would Kang adopt as basic US policy on North Korea? Kang replied that he thought priority should be given to human rights over nuclear matters since, he said, that was what the people of North Korea most cared about. Bush, he said, responded with enthusiastic agreement. About a month after the White House visit, Kang's call for a hard-line approach to North Korea was featured in the Wall Street Journal (14 July).

It was in itself a trivial episode, but it suggested that, when the Beijing “Six-Sided” talks on North Korea begin again, as now seems likely, in the last week of July, any simple “deal” to exchange North Korean nuclear weapons for guarantees of security and diplomatic and economic normalization will be difficult to negotiate. The president’s enthusiastic welcome for Kang suggests he wants not merely to disarm North Korea but to transform it by the introduction of “democracy” and “human rights;” in short his ultimate goal, as he put it in his State of the Union address in February, is “ending tyranny in our world.”

Kang was born into a well-to-do “Korean-in-Japan” family in Kyoto headed by grandmother, a committed communist, and grandfather, a successful capitalist with some gangster connections who had grown rich in postwar Japan on running something described as a “gambling saloon,” presumably a pachinko parlor, opposite the main railway station. Despite having bartered some of that wealth into education and improved social status, the family was, nevertheless, insecure. Japanese citizens during the imperial period from 1910, Koreans had been deprived of that citizenship in the wake of the war, suddenly becoming foreigners, deprived of various rights, discriminated against.

During the 1960s North Korea looked a more attractive option to some, and a steady flow of such “Koreans in Japan” decided to “return” to it, despite the fact that the family origin for almost all was in South Korea. They “returned,” in other words, to a country they did not know, to join in construction of the North Korean “fatherland” which they imagined as a socialist paradise, free of the misery and discrimination they experienced in Japan. The Kang family packed everything, even their late model Volvo (which at that time indicated quite extraordinary wealth), and sailed for North Korea as part of this movement.

In North Korea, Chol-Hwan’s grandmother became a deputy to the Supreme People’s Assembly. For a time the family retained a great deal of privilege, as well as their Volvo, and lived near the embassy quarter. Chol-Hwan was born in Pyongyang around 1968. His childhood and early boyhood seem to have been happy enough and he writes warmly of his primary school teachers at “The School of the People” in the Pyongyang of the early 1970s. In 1977, however, his capitalist grandfather disappeared, apparently arrested for treason, and shortly afterwards the whole family (with the exception of his mother) was sent to the countryside. Chol-hwan was then 9 years of age. Yodok was to be his home for 10 years.

It was, says Chol-Hwan a little guiltily, “by no means the toughest camp.” Mostly, it accommodated returnees from Japan, while other camps housed “members of landowning families, capitalists, US or South Korean agents, Christians, or members of purged Party circles deemed noxious to the state,” most likely between 150,000 and 200,000 people in all.

Chol-Hwan spent his boyhood at Yodok, first in a school, though one that seemed to practice routine brutality and have few pretences to education, then in various work gangs. His energies were devoted to surviving: stealing food from the camp kitchens or fields, searching out wild berries or hunting and catching snakes, fish, frogs, or rabbits, raising rats to supplement the starvation rations. It was a hard and unrelenting life, occasionally terrifying - he says he witnessed 15 public executions - although there were also times that uplifted his boyish spirit: the encounter with a bear in the mountains, his shared feast with friends on a snake. The wondrous scenery also gave him joy. In his later years in the camp, by then a teenager, he found himself at various times the camp custodian of rabbits, bees, or sheep, and hunter for wild ginseng. His uncle became manager of the camp distillery and seems to have wielded considerable power. Eventually, inexplicably, the family was released, and after some years surviving on his wits, trading on the black market and on moneys sent him from Japan, Chol-Hwan escaped, first to China and then to South Korea.

The story is scarcely a classic but, written more than a decade after his escape, it was one of the first North Korean refugee biographies to be published in the West (first in French, then in English) and it offers a plain, grim, moving story of prison camp life through the eyes of a child and boy. Kang’s co-author, Frenchman Pierre Rigoulet, had been a contributing editor to the Black Book of Communism (first published in France in 1997), and it was perhaps his contribution to tailor Kang’s story so that North Korea is presented as one more example of the monstrous perversion of communism. Kang and Rigoulet make no attempt to locate North Korea in the context of the trauma and tragedy of Korean history, the half century of Japanese colonialism, the externally imposed division, the terrible civil war turned by external intervention into a catastrophe, and the prolonged Cold War that continues on the peninsula to this day.

In South Korea Kang has become a journalists and a severe critic of the South Korean government policy of accommodation (“Sunshine”) towards the North. Late in 2004, he was one of the organizers of an exhibition in Seoul under the title “North Korean Holocaust.” By hosting him just days after his meeting with South Korean president Roh, Bush was sending an unmistakable signal to the government in South Korea. For both Kang and Bush, the Pyongyang regime is evil, there can be no compromise with it, and “sunshine” is tantamount to appeasement.

By an odd coincidence, in the same year of publication of Kang’s book, 2001, another Korean gulag story was published, also in New York. By an even stranger coincidence it too tells the story of a Korean-in-Japan family, also from Kyoto. Its author, however, Suh Sung, endured not 10 but 19 years of horror, in South rather than North Korea, under even worse conditions including torture, before being released just a little after Chol-Hwan, in 1990 (Suh Sung, Unbroken Spirits: Nineteen Years in South Korea’s Gulag, New York, Rowman and Littlefield, 2001). Author Suh, now a professor at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, was convicted on apparently trumped-up political charges in 1971, tortured, and not released from prison till 1990. His book was written a decade later, published first in Japanese and Korean, then in English.

The Kang and Suh families in postwar Kyoto were on opposite sides of a Cold War fence that divided communities in Japan as well as internationally, Kang’s was affiliated with North Korea and Suh’s with South Korea. When Kang arrived in Seoul, which seemed to him the epitome of freedom, Suh was still in his gulag, gaining his release only after the US-supported military regime there was brought to an end by massive popular protest.

The picture presented by Suh of his long imprisonment in South Korea is almost the reverse image of Kang’s picture of North Korea. Where Kang attributed the brutality and oppression of his gulag to “communism,” Suh attributes his to anti-communism. One is blind to the gulags of the South, the other is blind to those of the North; both illuminate the horrors of daily life in their respective gulags, but tell us little of the structure in which both systems evolved.

When Kang Chol-Hwan got to Seoul around 1989 he found freedom, coca-cola - his first swallow was so wonderful that it cured his cold - and a job. South Korea had just gone through a huge transformation (1987) tantamount to a democratic revolution that brought the succession of military dictatorships to an end, yet he seems to have been unaware of it. Suh Sung was still in prison, not released till the following year. Freedom was a fresh shoot in South Korea, but for Kang, enjoying his coke, simply being non- and anti-communist meant being free.

It is unlikely that Suh’s story will find its way on to the presidential bookshelves, and doubtful anyway that President Bush would want to read much of it. Kang’s simplistic tale of good and evil, freedom and communism, much better suits his preconceptions than any complex historical insight into the Korean division. Suh’s book would be much more difficult for him to understand, not only because it tells of political prisons and immense suffering under a US-installed “Free World” regime, but also because the repression described there is now a thing of the past. With the presidential blessing, publishers will no doubt take steps to make Kang’s book available to “all Americans.”

Bush’s understanding of Korea is probably widely shared in Washington. When both houses of Congress unanimously adopted the North Korean Human Rights Law in July 2004, they were thinking along those lines. Under the banner of “human rights” and “democracy,” US propaganda against the North Korean regime is now being stepped up, radio receivers secretly infiltrated into the country, and funding substantially increased for organizations, many of them of a fundamentalist religious hue, to work with refugees, spread the gospel (creating 10,000 underground churches, as the General League of Korean Christians put it as far back as 1997), and undermine the regime.

Kang’s book focuses necessary attention on the North Korean refugee problem. There are basically two approaches to it. The one favored by Kang assumes the impossibility of human rights concerns being addressed under the existing regime and therefore calls for steps designed to maximize the flow of refugees with a view to precipitating an “East German” type regime collapse. This is essentially the view held by the prominent defector, Hwang Jang-Yop, formerly right-hand man of Kim Il Sung and architect of the North Korean “Juche” ideology, who defected to South Korea in 1997 and was welcomed in Washington in 2003 (though not by the White House), and it is the basic view underpinning the Human Rights Law.

For most of those who live in the surrounding region, however, especially the governments in Seoul, Beijing, and Moscow, such a collapse offers the nightmare prospect of millions fleeing on foot or by boat from a disaster zone or becoming dependent on international relief organizations as the economy and society spirals into chaos and die-hard North Korean military groups engage in violent resistance, with or without nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction.

The alternative is to strive to “normalize” North Korea, negotiating to address its security concerns and persuade it to renounce its nuclear ambitions in exchange for diplomatic, political and economic recognition and assistance packages aimed at integrating it within a booming Northeast Asian region. The refugee problem is large, but not of massive proportions: about 6,000 Talpukja in South Korea (where they have proved extremely difficult to assimilate and most live precariously on welfare), and somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 in China, especially Northeast China which is just a river crossing away, where they are treated as illegal immigrants, extremely insecure and liable to arrest and repatriation. Most of these have fled from severe economic conditions, especially famine, that have prevailed in certain parts of the country for a decade, and only a small proportion for political rather than economic reasons (two out of a sample of 63 in a 2004 study by Refugee International).

The North Korean economic collapse of the 1990s occurred for a complex of political, economic and ecological conditions, for only some of which the regime could be held directly responsible, and despite the severe sanctions under which the country still labors the reforms adopted in the last few years seem to have arrested the decline. Most observers believe the transition to market mechanisms is now probably irreversible, although a real revival of the country is impossible so long as sanctions, isolation, and military confrontation with the US, persist.

The preferred solution in this view is precisely the opposite of the Kang, Bush, and Congressional view. It is to depoliticize the humanitarian crisis, to persuade the Chinese government to guarantee the rights of refugees, including by the grant of provisional residence status, and North Korea to guarantee non-punishment of those who wish to return (along the lines of the “Orderly Repatriation Program” under which 72,000 refugees returned to Vietnam between 1990 and 1995), within the frame of a comprehensive settlement of the many North Korea-related problems on the table of the Beijing Conference. [This discussion benefits from reading an unpublished paper by Chung Byung-ho of Hanyang University.] South Korea would, in this view, play the key role, and the aim would be a “soft landing” for North Korea. Reconstruction of the country through the ending of sanctions against it and its admission to international financial and economic cooperation institutions would open the way, first, to solving the basic problem of physical survival, and then those of political and social rights. The Koreans themselves will have to play the central role in this process. The rhetoric of “human rights,” presently strongest among neo-conservative ideologues and fundamentalist Christians in Washington and Seoul, should not be allowed to disguise the likelihood of the disastrous consequences such policies would entail for those it would pretend to aid.

It is good that President Bush has read at least one book on Korea, by a Korean, even if one cannot help wishing he had read two. The one he read can only confirm his simplistic view of the Korean problem, while the one he did not read might have helped him to realize that human rights abuses on the Korean peninsula are rooted at a deeper level than the confrontation between communism and anti-communism, and that the original sin from which half a century and more of militarization, confrontation and denial of human rights have flowed is none other than division itself. The abolition of the gulag in South Korea owed nothing to foreign intervention, and it is likely to be the same for North Korea. What has maintained the dictatorship in the North for so long has been above all the uncompromising hostility of its enemies, allowing the regime to capitalize on national pride and determination to remain independent. Rather than more intervention – to bring about “regime change” – what Korea needs is to be left alone to redress the long-continuing trauma caused by the massive interventions of the past. Since the South-North summit of June 2000, the Korean people have been making substantial progress in precisely this direction.

This article first appeared at Japan Focus and is reprinted with permission.

Juan Cole, a his blog (7-11-05):

The Ariel Sharon government in Israel has announced that it will build a huge wall on someone else's land through Jerusalem, cutting off 55,000 Arabs from the city (they'll have to go through nasty Israeli checkpoints every day to get into their own city!)

This is land theft on a massive scale. Worse, it is theft on a stage of sacred space that affects the sentiments of over a billion people. Whether Westerners like it or not, Jerusalem is considered by Muslims their third holiest city, and Israeli theft of the whole thing drives a lot of them up the wall. A partitioned Jerusalem where the Arab east is connected to the West Bank is the only route to peace. Sharon in his usual aggressive, grabby way, is trying to make that forever an impossibility.

And, folks, this sort of thing, which the Washington Post didn't even notice, may very well get you and me killed. I think what Sharon is doing is morally and politically wrong to begin with. But I sure as hell resent the possibility that I or my family is going to get blown up because of it.

You want to know what causes terrorism? Well, in part it is caused by deviance, by people so warped that they will take innocent lives in a wicked quest to achieve some political or religious goal. In part, terrorists are like bank robbers. Bank robbers desperatedly want to be rich, but for one reason or another think they are very unlikely to get rich through their ordinary activities. Likewise, terrorists, break the law, both moral and civil, to get what they want. In that sense they are criminals, or, as I say, deviants. But they are not motiveless and do not act out of free-floating generalized hatred for the most part. They have a specific goal in mind.

Terrorism is also caused when one country militarily occupies another country. That is, it is the military occupation that provides a lot of terrorists with their goal (i.e. to free their country from foreign military occupation). Chicago political scientist Robert Pape has shown that the vast majority of suicide bombings in the past 30 years have come in response to foreign military occupation (or what the terorists perceived as such). Back in the late 50s and early 60s, the Algerians and the French were locked in such a struggle. The French killed nearly a million Algerians (in a population of 11 million), and the Algerians blew up a lot of French. When the French recognized Algeria as an independent country in 1962, the struggle quickly subsided and by 1963 Algeria wasn't even a big subject in French newspapers.

The Israeli military occupation of Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza from 1967 has caused an enormous amount of terrorism in the world. It hasn't been the only such source by any means. The Tamil Tigers, a group based in Sri Lanka (used to be called Ceylon), blew up Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and engaged in many other terrorist operations in Sri Lanka and India. It is a Marxist group and in some ways pioneered the suicide bombing. Because Sri Lanka and its concerns seeem so remote to most Americans, most people here don't even know about the Tamil Tigers. But if the US went in and militarily occupied the Tamil parts of Sri Lanka, all of a sudden we'd be seeing bombs go off against US targets. I guarantee it. That is not to say it would be right. But it is to say that that is how reality works (reality cannot be simply manufactured in the White House, contrary to what Scooter Libby thinks).

The Israeli Jerusalem Barrier project will have similar effects. It keeps inside itself a major Israeli settlement on Palestinian land that Sharon has recently announced he will greatly expand (probably using American money at least in part).

Because al-Qaeda and its fellow travelers do not speak in the language of Palestinian nationalism, it has been possible for certain quarters to obscure to the US public that they are absolutely manically fixated on the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem. This is what Bin Laden meant way back in the 1990s when he denounced the foreign military occupation of"the three holy cities." Here is what Bin Laden wrote in 1998 when he declared war on the US:

' Third, if the Americans' aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews' petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel's survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula. '

If this is a big part of what is driving the radical Muslim fundamentalists' violence, then Sharon's announcement on Sunday is guaranteed to produce a terrorist strike. If what Sharon is doing were the right thing, morally and politically, then he should do it anyway and we'll just soldier on against the terrorists. But it is wrong in the first place, wrong morally, and wrong in international law and an insult to the United States in completely departing from the roadmap.

How obsessed Bin Laden & company are with what goes on in Palestine is obvious, as I said last week, in the 9/11 commission report:

' According to KSM [Khalid Shaikh Muhammad], Bin Ladin had been urging him to advance the date of the attacks. In 2000, for instance, KSM remembers Bin Ladin pushing him to launch the attacks amid the controversy after then-Israeli opposition party leader Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. KSM claims Bin Ladin told him it would be enough for the hijackers simply to down planes rather than crash them into specific targets. KSM says he resisted the pressure.

KSM claims to have faced similar pressure twice more in 2001.According to him, Bin Ladin wanted the operation carried out on May 12, 2001, seven months to the day after the Cole bombing. KSM adds that the 9/11 attacks had originally been envisioned for May 2001. The second time he was urged to launch the attacks early was in June or July 2001, supposedly after Bin Ladin learned from the media that Sharon would be visiting the White House. On both occasions KSM resisted, asserting that the hijacking teams were not ready. Bin Ladin pressed particularly strongly for the latter date in two letters stressing the need to attack early.The second letter reportedly was delivered by Bin Ladin's son-in-law,Aws al Madani. '

That is why our press and politicians do us an enormous disservice by not putting the Israeli announcement about the Jerusalem Barrier on the front page. This sort of action is a big part of what is driving the terrorists (and of course Sharon himself is a sort of state-backed terrorist anyway). The newspapers and television news departments should be telling us when we are about to be in the cross-fire between the aggressive, expansionist, proto-fascist Likud Coalition and the paranoid, murderous, violent al-Qaeda and its offshoots.

Eisenhower called up DeGaulle and told him to get the hell out of Algeria, on a short timetable, or else. I wish Bush had Eisenhower's spine when it came to dealing with Ariel Sharon.

[Edward Renehan is the author of The Dark Genius of Wall Street.]

This week Judge Barbara Jones slapped Bernard Ebbers with a 25-year sentence for his profiteering at WorldCom. Ebbers is 63 and nurses a heart problem. Therefore his sentence may actually be life. Add to this the separate civil settlement in a case brought by a host of defrauded WorldCom investors which has left Ebbers and his wife, Kristie, stripped of almost all their assets (some $45 million). Harsh though it may seem, in the end this is justice plain and simple. "The harm that Ebbers did was dramatic," says Lawrence Mitchell, a professor at the law school of George Washington University, "and the kind of impact that that behavior has on our financial and economic system is significant."

Some commentators have recently cited Ebbers as a "modern-day robber baron." Furthermore, at least one writer has compared him directly with the most reviled of those Gilded Age gentlemen, Jay Gould. In this regard, as Gould's most recent biographer, I feel compelled to speak up in Jay's defense. Gould (1836 - 1892) was dubbed the "Mephistopheles of Wall Street" in his own day, but he was nevertheless a Boy Scout compared to Ebbers. He was also, I should add, both an Einstein and a business-Charlemagne as compared to Ebbers.

In the unregulated era after the Civil War, when New York State Supreme Court justices could be bought for as little as $100, Gould gained infamy through two audacious bids for financial dominance. During their "war" for control of the Erie Railroad in 1868, Gould and his partners Jim Fisk and Daniel Drew hired scores of judges and legislators to do their bidding, while their nemesis Cornelius Vanderbilt adopted the very same strategy. Later on, after the Erie wars had been won, Gould used the rampantly unprofitable railroad -- already well-known as the "Scarlet Woman of Wall Street" -- as a financial shell for manipulation of stocks and bonds. In this he mimicked nearly every single Erie CEO that had come before him.

One year following the height of the Erie Wars, Gould and Fisk worked in collusion with other parties (including a brother-in-law of President Grant) to corner the market in New York's Gold Exchange. Their bid failed, but triggered the "Black Friday" panic of September 24th, 1869, during which thousands of investors were ruined. The juggernaut of negative press launched in late September of 1869 has yet to stop, as is evidenced by annual "Today in History" blurbs that routinely damn Gould's soul in newspapers nationwide. In Gould's own era, images of ruined men (with their implicit corollary of once-prosperous families demoted to lives of destitution) formed the bedrock for a lasting reputation as a jackal and betrayer....

For the rest of his life, Gould's motives -- which, after all, were simply to make money the same as any other capitalist -- would be suspect. And to him a higher standard of virtue would always be applied. In time, the press and public came to view the petty ruses and gambits regularly employed by a host of Wall Street speculators as despised tools of fraud and monopoly when adopted by Gould. In part this was because of his reputation for treachery, but it was also because Gould used the common tools of the Street in strikingly new ways, putting together previously unimagined and fantastically profitable combinations with a dexterity that spawned frustrated envy on the part of bystanders.

Truth be told, Gould, in the final analysis, was an exemplary, successful, long-term CEO. The highly imaginative, ruthless, and easy-to-vilify manipulator of securities was also a detail-oriented owner of companies: a workaholic who painstakingly consolidated dying firms, transformed them into highly profitable monoliths, and then steered all his concerns through choppy economic seas in the 1880s, leaving an estate conservatively appraised at some $72 million at the time of his death in 1892. In short, Jay Gould was no Bernie Ebbers. Quite the contrary.

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.]

Thanks to the war in Iraq, much of the world sees the British government as resolute and tough and the French one as appeasing and weak. But in another war, the one against terrorism and radical Islam, the reverse is true: France is the most stalwart nation in the West, even more so than America, while Britain is the most hapless.

British-based terrorists have carried out operations in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kenya, Tanzania, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Israel, Morocco, Russia, Spain, and America. Many governments - Jordanian, Egyptian, Moroccan, Spanish, French, and American - have protested London's refusal to shut down its Islamist terrorist infrastructure or extradite wanted operatives. In frustration, Egypt's president Hosni Mubarak publicly denounced Britain for"protecting killers." One American security group has called for Britain to be listed as a terrorism-sponsoring state.

Counterterrorism specialists disdain the British. Roger Cressey calls London"easily the most important jihadist hub in Western Europe." Steven Simon dismisses the British capital as"the Star Wars bar scene" of Islamic radicals. More brutally, an intelligence official said of last week's attacks:"The terrorists have come home. It is payback time for … an irresponsible policy."

While London hosts terrorists, Paris hosts a top-secret counterterrorism center, code-named Alliance Base, the existence of which was recently reported by the Washington Post. At Alliance Base, six major Western governments have since 2002 shared intelligence and run counterterrorism operations - the latter makes the operation unique.

More broadly, President Chirac instructed French intelligence agencies just days after September 11, 2001, to share terrorism data with their American counterparts"as if they were your own service." The cooperation is working: A former acting CIA director, John E. McLaughlin, called the bilateral intelligence tie"one of the best in the world." The British may have a"special relationship" with Washington on Iraq, but the French have one with it in the war on terror.

France accords terrorist suspects fewer rights than any other Western state, permitting interrogation without a lawyer, lengthy pre-trial incarcerations, and evidence acquired under dubious circumstances. Were he a terrorism suspect, the author of Al-Qaida's Jihad in Europe, Evan Kohlmann, says he"would least like to be held under" the French system.

The myriad French-British differences in treatment of radical Islam can be summarized by the example of what Muslim girls may wear to state-funded schools.

Denbigh High School in Luton, 30 miles northwest of London, has a student population that is about 80% Muslim. Years ago, it accommodated the sartorial needs of their faith and heritage, including a female student uniform made up of the Pakistani shalwar kameez trousers, a jerkin top, and hijab head covering. But when a teenager of Bangladeshi origins, Shabina Begum, insisted in 2004 on wearing a jilbab, which covers the entire body except for the face and hands, Denbigh administrators said no.

The dispute ended up in litigation and the Court of Appeal ultimately decided in Ms. Begum's favor. As a result, by law British schools must now accept the jilbab. Not only that, but Prime Minister Blair's wife, Cherie Booth, was Ms. Begum's lawyer at the appellate level. Ms. Booth called the ruling"a victory for all Muslims who wish to preserve their identity and values despite prejudice and bigotry."

By contrast, also in 2004, the French government outlawed the hijab, the Muslim headscarf, from public educational institutions, disregarding ferocious opposition both within France and among Islamists worldwide. In Tehran, protesters shouted"Death to France!" and"Death to Chirac the Zionist!" The Palestinian Authority mufti, Ikrima Sa'id Sabri, declared,"French laws banning the hijab constitute a war against Islam as a religion." The Saudi grand mufti, Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh, called them a human rights infringement. When the"Islamic Army in Iraq" kidnapped two French journalists, it threatened their execution unless the hijab ban was revoked. Paris stood firm.

What lies behind these contrary responses? The British have seemingly lost interest in their heritage while the French hold on to theirs: As the British ban fox hunting, the French ban hijabs. The former embrace multiculturalism, the latter retain a pride in their historic culture. This contrast in matters of identity makes Britain the Western country most vulnerable to the ravages of radical Islam whereas France, for all its political failings, has held onto a sense of self that may yet see it through.

This article is reprinted with permission by Daniel Pipes. This article first appeared in the New York Sun.

Tom Engelhardt, at tomdispatch.com (7-7-05):

[Mr. Engelhardt is the author of The End of Victory Culture and co-editor of History Wars, the Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past.]

Another successful landmark has been reached in our occupation of Iraq: The World Monuments Fund has just placed the country on its list of the Earth's 100 most endangered sites. ("Widespread looting, military occupation, artillery fire, vandalism, and other acts of violence are devastating Iraq, long considered the cradle of human civilization.") This is the first time that the Fund has ever put a whole nation on its list and so represents a singular accomplishment for the Bush administration, which knew not -- and cared less -- what it wrought.

The destruction began as Baghdad fell. Words disappeared instantly. They simply blinked off the screen of Iraqi history, many of them forever. First, there was the looting of the National Museum. That took care of some of the earliest words on clay, including, possibly, cuneiform tablets with missing parts of the epic of Gilgamesh. Soon after, the great libraries and archives of the capital went up in flames and books, letters, government documents, ancient Korans, religious manuscripts, stretching back centuries -- all those things not pressed into clay, or etched on stone, or engraved on metal, just words on that most precious and perishable of all commonplaces, paper -- vanished forever. What we're talking about, of course, is the flesh of history. And it was no less a victim of the American invasion -- of the Bush administration's lack of attention to, its lack of any sense of the value of what Iraq held (other than oil) -- than the Iraqi people. All of this has been, in that grim phrase created by the Pentagon," collateral damage."

Worse yet, the looting of antiquity, words and objects, not only never ended but seems to have accelerated. From well organized gangs of grave robbers to American engineers building bases to American soldiers taking souvenirs, the ancient inheritance not just of Iraqis but of all of us has simply headed south. According to Reuters, more than 1,000 Iraqi objects of antiquity have been confiscated at American airports; priceless cylinder seals are evidently selling on-line at eBay for a few hundred dollars apiece; and this represents just the tiniest fraction of what's gone. The process is not only unending, but in the chaos that is America's Iraq beyond counting or assessing accurately.

This article first appeared on www.tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, a long time editor in publishing, the author of The End of Victory Culture, and a fellow of the Nation Institute.

[Warren Goldstein is a professor and chairman of history at the University of Hartford. He is the author of William Sloane Coffin Jr.: A Holy Impatience (Yale University Press, 2004).]

... A few months ago, a UCC [United Church of Christ] church near where I live was sponsoring a Lenten lecture on liberal Protestantism. My wife, a UCC minister who could not attend, thought it would be good for me to get out of the house and find out what someone else thought for a change. The lecturer, a bright young historian, also married to a minister, professorially explained the origins of the movement in German biblical criticism, continued with a description of the pre-World War I Social Gospel, followed up with the postwar disillusionment and decline, and then simply stopped, observing that liberal Protestantism had been on a downward slope ever since. No Reinhold Niebuhr, no Martin Luther King Jr., no civil-rights or antiwar movement, nothing on the fight for women's rights or gay rights. Far more telling, no members of the audience -- including many senior citizens who had lived through the turmoil of the latter 20th century -- objected to their entire religious lives' being considered unworthy of academic notice. I hope they were being polite, but I suspect that their apathy was a symptom.

Indeed, the liberalism of mainline Protestantism appears to be suffering a fate similar to that of liberalism in today's world of politics. Since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, the leaders of the Democratic Party, once the home of a proud and unapologetic liberalism, have successfully hidden their liberal light under a bushel of apologies and strategies for impersonating Republicans. Now, beaten twice in narrow national elections, apparently by religious conservatives, some Democrats are beginning to remember that moral values have power on the left side of the aisle, too. But instead of relying on their own traditions, they are trying to open a dialogue with evangelicals -- witness Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton urging abortion-rights activists to seek common ground with those who oppose abortion.

Since I'm no political strategist, I have no idea if that will work. I am, though, a historian who has written on William Sloane Coffin Jr. and the liberal tradition he brought to the chaplaincy at Yale University in the 1960s and 1970s, which fired the faith and activism of a generation still very much alive. And so I wonder whether the folks formerly known as liberal Protestants and their colleagues and counterparts among liberal politicians might gain some inspiration from the accomplishments of their own histories before giving up on what they might bring to the future.

Much 20th-century American political history was the history of liberalism. From Progressivism in the early years of the century to the almost 50 years stretching from the inauguration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt through that of Ronald Reagan, political and economic liberalism set the terms of public debate and public policy. It had blind spots and nasty habits, of course, most notably racism and an unfortunate faith in imperial ventures abroad. But when white people did finally begin taking race seriously, and mainstream Americans turned against the war in Vietnam, liberals and progressives led those charges.

What tends to be forgotten is that they did so not just through political parties or movements. The Social Gospel's commitment to improving conditions in society according to Christian principles supported much of early-20th-century Progressive reform; Harry Emerson Fosdick, America's most eminent preacher of the 1930s, began his career as a Social Gospeler who attacked fundamentalism and embraced pacifism. Over the space of five decades, Niebuhr, the most influential American theologian of the 20th century, first defended the working class on religious grounds, then criticized capitalism and what he saw as the timidity of the New Deal, and later inspired a generation of liberal cold warriors. The explosion of theological liberalism and the ecumenical movement after Vatican II (1962-65) provided religious fuel, language, and fervor for the civil-rights and antiwar movements.

Take the Social Gospel, later to be maligned by Niebuhr as naïvely progressive, too trusting in the perfectibility of human beings, too eager to locate the source of sin in social structures rather than the individual. In fact, most of those traits it shared with secular Progressivism, along with a casual belief in Anglo-Saxon superiority, imperial paternalism, Prohibition, and support for the crusade of World War I. But as preached and put into practice by the Congregational minister Washington Gladden, the Baptist Walter Rauschenbusch, and many others, the Social Gospel was no minor movement. A prolific author and champion of the "historical critical" approach to the Bible, Gladden served a parish in Columbus, Ohio, for 30 years, where he spoke out on behalf of workers' rights during a Cleveland streetcar strike in 1886 and actively supported a whole range of Progressive causes, including compulsory arbitration and women's suffrage....

Even in the 1970s, as the wind went out of political liberalism's sails, and in the 1980s, when the "Reagan revolution" made political liberalism into the "L-word" and brought the religious right to public prominence, mainline liberal Protestantism, with important Catholic and Jewish allies, continued to speak out on behalf of the poor at home and the oppressed abroad. As Ronald Reagan rewrote the tax code, slashed social programs, and began the largest peacetime military buildup in U.S. history, it was religious institutions that housed and nurtured liberal dissent. [William Sloane] Coffin, who had gone to Riverside Church as senior minister in 1977, turned Fosdick's flagship into a key international institution of the left. Coffin himself provided articulate leadership and organizational resources for the movement opposing U.S. intervention in Central America, for the rights of gay and lesbian people, for anti-apartheid organizing, and, most of all, for the nuclear-disarmament movement. Without the Riverside Church Disarmament Program, founded by Coffin, it is unlikely that the largest demonstration in American history, on June 12, 1982, would ever have taken place....