Death of an idealist [Steven Vincent, new details]

Steven Vincent believed Iraqis wanted to live the American dream. His mistake cost him his life, reports Tony Allen-Mills

After 10 years scratching a modest living as a freelance journalist specialising in contemporary art, Steven Vincent was tiring of the incestuous Manhattan gallery scene. In his mid-forties, he felt he should be doing something else with his life — perhaps something more topical, more relevant. He just wasn’t sure what.

Then, like so many other New Yorkers, he awoke on September 11, 2001 to television images of the World Trade Center on fire. He rushed to the roof of his shabby apartment building on Manhattan’s lower east side.

He watched as a second plane flew into the north tower. He was close enough to see people on fire jumping out of windows. In those searing moments, according to his wife, “he turned into a war correspondent”.

There are many Americans who changed their lives as a result of the horrors of Osama Bin Laden’s attacks, but few who chose so dramatic and ultimately deadly an alternative as Vincent, whose murder in southern Iraq last week has cast an unflattering spotlight on the laissez-faire policies of British troops in the region.

Abandoning the cocktail-fuelled happenings of SoHo and Tribeca, Vincent headed for Baghdad a few months after the American invasion of 2003. He picked up a couple of freelance assignments for US magazines and began to build a reputation as a dogged and fearless observer of the religious rivalries bedevilling the post-war reconstruction process.

He wrote a well-received book, In the Red Zone, about his early experiences in Iraq, and returned last April to research a second book on the southern city of Basra, where British forces have long been struggling to preserve a difficult peace. Last Sunday he enjoyed his finest moment as The New York Times published one of his articles.

It was a scathing critique of British policy in Basra, including incendiary claims that local police were carrying out assassinations using a so-called “death car . . . a white Toyota Mark II that glides through the city streets, carrying off-duty police officers in the pay of extremist religious groups to their next assignment”.

Two days later, Vincent was visiting a money-changer with Nooriya Tuaiz, an unusual 31-year-old Iraqi woman who had become both his Basra interpreter and close friend, when a white car with police markings pulled up beside them.

According to witnesses, at least two men in police uniforms grabbed Vincent and Tuaiz and bundled them into the car.

“One said to bystanders, ‘Don’t interfere, we’re the police, this is our duty’,” his wife, Lisa Ramaci, said last week.

The FBI have told her the car then drove to a warehouse district about five minutes away. For the next five hours witnesses reported hearing screams and shouting from one of the buildings.

“They were calling Noor a whore and a pig for associating with an American,” Ramaci said. “They were screaming at Steven that he was an infidel and deserved to die.”

At 11.30pm last Tuesday, police found two bodies less than three miles from the centre of Basra. Vincent was dead, shot three times in the chest. Tuaiz had also been shot in the chest, but miraculously was still alive. She is recovering in a hospital in Kuwait under military guard.

Ramaci, an art restorer specialising in vintage Americana, is in little doubt that her husband’s murder was connected to the publication of the New York Times article. “It just seems odd to me that he writes criticising the Basra police and two days later a police truck with guys in uniform comes along and kills him,” she said. “That’s a little too coincidental to me.”

At the same time, even Ramaci agrees that Vincent may have been courting disaster through his relationship with Tuaiz, an unmarried Muslim. However strictly professional their contacts — and Ramaci is convinced the relationship was innocent — any presumption by local Shi’ite extremists of a sexual liaison would have been tantamount to a death sentence.

In an internet blog Vincent wrote from Basra, he repeatedly railed against what he regarded as the “shackles” on Iraqi women. “It astonishes me, the ways in which Iraqi men control their women with their obsessions on ‘reputation’, ‘honour’ and that all-purpose cudgel, ‘proper Muslim behaviour’,” he wrote.

Yet in many ways the relationship sums up the dilemma facing British troops as they attempt to patch together an exit strategy for Iraq. The passionate, principled but dangerously naive American journalist wanted more than anything else for women like Tuaiz to be free of what he saw as vicious Islamic prejudice.

Vincent believed that Basra, potentially an economic hub as Iraq’s gateway to the Gulf, could become “the next Bahrain, Dubai or, for all we know, Orlando (Florida)”. Instead, he found that the Shi’ite majority in Basra had seized on the arrival of democracy as a chance to impose hardline religious values after years of suppression under Saddam Hussein.

There was no place in Basra for Disney World values, and Vincent blamed the British for turning a blind eye to the advance of corrupt religious fundamentalism.

“Fearing to appear like colonial occupiers, they avoid any hint of ideological indoctrination,” he wrote. “As one British officer put it, ‘the sooner the locals assume their own security, the sooner we go home’.”

BORN in California, Vincent studied English at Berkeley University and eventually hitchhiked his way to New York. “He was from California but he definitely didn’t have that laid-back California personality,” his wife said last week.

Sitting in one of two apartments they bought for $500 in a derelict building in the 1980s, Ramaci smiled softly as she described her husband as “totally wrapped, uptight, obsessive, impatient — but the bravest man I ever met”.

The couple had met in a cinema lobby in 1982, having both slipped out of Mel Gibson’s film Road Warrior for a quick cigarette. They lived together for 10 years before marrying, spending much of that time squatting above the junkie-infested streets of Alphabet City, then one of Manhattan’s most squalid neighbourhoods.

Vincent’s friends remember him as something of a “wild guy” who used to wear his hair to his shoulders — he grew his beard in Iraq — and who loved inventing new cocktails for the frequent parties he threw.

Yet he was also known in the art world as “a natural contrarian”, according to Becky Smith, a gallery-owning friend. Despite his hippie-like lifestyle, he held surprisingly conservative views. He once lived in a squat but liked to wear suits.

“He was an amateur in the 19th-century sense of someone who followed his passions,” said another friend. “He became an art critic because he wanted to be yanked off his feet by a work of art.”

Ann Marlowe, a New York writer who also visited Iraq, described him as “a “complex idealist” who, like George W Bush, wanted the values of western civilisation to take root in Iraq.

Ramaci acknowledged there was a side to her husband that was sometimes infuriating. “He was the most methodical, precise man I’ve ever met. He taught himself Latin. He was teaching himself French. He had this willpower, that whatever he wanted, he did. Stop smoking? He did it cold turkey. Lose weight? No problem.”

When America invaded Iraq, Ramaci added, “he just decided, that was it, he had to go”.

His first trips to Baghdad went smoothly: but 49-year-old Vincent, who dreamt of greater recognition, found it difficult to make an impact in a city then swarming with journalists. He was drawn to Basra partly because there were few other foreigners and he would have the story more or less to himself.

The other factor was Tuaiz. Vincent had met her on his second trip to Iraq, and knew he could not hope to function without a good interpreter. She was willing to work for him in Basra, offering him an entrée to places he could never hope to visit on his own.

Ramaci was worried about her husband’s security. By last April, the afterglow of the Iraqi elections had worn off and the insurgency was in full flood. Most international news organisations had withdrawn most of their staff from Baghdad. “I was not happy,” Ramaci said, “but I knew I couldn’t tell him not to go.”

When Vincent arrived in Basra, he was given a lengthy security briefing by British officials. He embedded himself with British troops for a month to get a feel for the area, and repeatedly assured his wife that he was observing basic security precautions — never walking on the street and varying his routines.

Visiting reporters often encountered him in the dining room of the Marbid hotel, his Basra base, where he would write up his notes on a white Apple laptop. In late June he told Edward Wong of The New York Times that he was “lonely and fatigued”, but that he hoped to stick it out in Basra to see whether Iraq’s parliament would approve a new constitution by its intended deadline of August 15.

As the weeks passed, there were only occasional opportunities for him to sell his work to American publications such as The Christian Science Monitor and the National Review. Most of his energy went into his personal blog, named In the Red Zone after his book.

“For a long time he was bitching and moaning that nobody was reading his blog,” Ramaci said wearily. “Now, of course, he’s got more readers than he can handle.”

Widely reproduced around the world last week, Vincent’s postings chart his growing disillusion with the coalition effort in Iraq. His disdain for Islamic fundamentalism is matched by his anger at the unfettered advance of what he bluntly described as “Islamic thugs”.

In June he wrote from Basra: “Once more I’m reminded that the real agents of Iraq’s fate are not media-friendly issues such as the ‘insurgency’ or the ‘occupation’, or even the upcoming constitutional convention, but subtle, non-documentable social norms that regulate the lives of nearly every person in this country — especially females.”

He went on: “These are the unwritten, unlegislated and unchallengeable ‘social’ and ‘religious’ norms that have an iron grip on the city. Yet back home, you hardly find a public discussion . . . the right is too busy congratulating itself on the progress of Iraqi democracy and the left is obsessed with multicultural relativism and discrediting Bush.”

By July, Vincent was quoting one Iraqi policeman as telling him that 75% of the city’s police force supported Moqtada al-Sadr, the rebel Shi’ite cleric.

“The fact that many, if not most, of Basra’s constabulary harbour primary loyalties to the city’s religious parties is a serious problem,” he wrote. “To the despair of many secular-minded residents, the British are doing a crackerjack job of teaching cadets close-order drills . . . without, however, including basic training in democratic principles. As a result, our Anglo allies may be handing the religious parties spiffy new (recruits) to augment their already well-armed militias.”

Back home in Manhattan, views such as these might inspire lively dinner party debate. In Basra, they amounted to heresy, and Vincent’s probing did not go unnoticed. About a month ago, Ramaci said, a man approached Tuaiz on the street and asked her: “Why are you working with that American journalist who’s asking all the questions?”

Vincent too seemed aware of encroaching menace. He prefaced one posting to his blog: “When you read this, keep in mind that for various reasons — not the least of which were safety concerns — the piece only scratches the surface of what is happening here.”

HE WAS not the only journalist to notice what was going on. It was last January that The Sunday Times first reported that former members of Saddam’s Sunni-dominated Ba’athist party were disappearing and being murdered in Basra. Among those suspected of the crimes were Shi’ite members of a new police intelligence unit, set up with British military blessing.

The British later shut down the unit, but the murders and kidnappings continued. Vincent reported in June that the partner of a businessman he knew had been kidnapped by four men in police cars. “Who is behind many of the assassinations? Ask your local policeman — or on second thought, don’t.”

Although Ramaci believes that The New York Times piece in which he repeated these sentiments may have been the catalyst for Vincent’s murder, that may not be the full story.

According to Ramaci, her husband had not been concerned that publication of the article would jeopardise his safety — indeed, she said he was “thrilled” when she called from New York last Saturday to tell him the piece would appear the next day. It was the last time the couple spoke.

Security sources acknowledged that the Basra police were heavily infiltrated by supporters of al-Sadr but doubted that any would be checking the internet for Vincent’s English-language articles. “It’s easy to conclude that he was executed by police, but if the police were going to do it, they would surely have done it another way,” said one former British soldier who worked in Basra last year.

Another source added that the street snatch was almost too brazen to be true, and may easily have been the work of criminal or other elements hoping that police would be blamed.

All of these security sources commented that whatever Vincent may have written was unlikely to have offended local sensitivities as much as his relationship with Tuaiz. “This was an honour code killing,” declared the former soldier. He was referring to the Islamic practice of punishment in cases where a family’s honour has been soiled by supposedly inappropriate sexual behaviour.

“He was conducting himself with his interpreter in a manner that would have attracted attention in any Islamic country, let alone here,” added a senior official.

In one of his blog entries, Vincent writes of one man’s angry reaction when Tuaiz, given the pseudonym Layla, took off her abaya, a long Islamic robe, and sat in a coffee shop in long-sleeved blouse and jeans.

“He’s staring at us with the blank, malevolently stupid glare I’ve encountered so often,” Vincent wrote. “‘You have a problem,’ I snap . . . by now, I’m thinking, ‘What would happen if I punched this guy?’” Layla defused the tension by putting her abaya back on.

Once again, Vincent’s quixotic gallantry appears desperately out of touch with the realities of Shi’ite-controlled Iraq. Picking a fight in a public place over an unmarried Muslim woman’s attire appears next to suicidal for an American journalist trying to keep a low profile.

Ramaci remains convinced that the relationship was platonic. “She could have been killed if she had an affair, so I’m not worried about that,” she said. At the same time, she added, her husband had told her that Tuaiz had a “reputation” in Basra. She had apparently been secretly engaged to an older man who died; when her brothers found out they beat her.

“When Steven started hanging out with her she would take him all over the place, asking probing questions,” Ramaci said. “And then he published the op-ed piece. All of that was a tinderbox.”

Whoever killed Vincent — and for whatever reason — Ramaci is convinced that al-Sadr’s followers were behind the murder. “My personal opinion is that he pissed off Sadr’s men somehow,” she said. “The thing Steven said to me that scared me the most is that whenever he went to meet with Sadr’s men there was a palpable air of menace — even though Sadr claims he had nothing to do with the death.”

Nor do the circumstances of Vincent’s death change the questions he raised about British military policy in Basra. Are we doing the right thing by turning our backs on a fundamentalist takeover? Should we be trying harder to create a fair and free Iraq — especially for women such as Tuaiz?

British officers have long been painfully aware of the excesses committed under their noses. It rankles many of them to be handing over the country to the Islamic extremist likes of al-Sadr.

At the same time, as senior officials never tire of pointing out, it is ultimately Iraq’s responsibility — not London’s or Washington’s — to decide how its fledgling democracy will work. If people vote for al-Sadr, as they seem certain to do by the busload, it is hardly the job of a British soldier to suggest they do otherwise.

As one British officer put it: “We are in Basra at the consent of the Iraqi people, but that consent is fragile. If we start pushing our weight around, we would quickly become the enemy, and we can’t afford that.”

British policy is geared towards an exit strategy, and if Britain is ever to be able to withdraw, he argued, it must allow Iraqi security forces to stand on their own feet, however shaky or bloodstained. If Britain adopted a more heavy-handed approach with the security forces it is training, our troops could be stuck there for decades.

Vincent complained in his op-ed article that the British were failing to provide psychological as well as physical training.

“In my time with (the Brits) not once did I see an instructor explain such basics of democracy as the politically neutral role of the police in a civil society. Nor did I see anyone question the alarming number of religious posters on the walls of Basran police stations.”

He added: “When I asked British troops if their security strategy included measures to encourage (police) cadets to identify with the national government, rather than their neighbourhood mosque, I received polite shrugs: not our job, mate.”

A western diplomat who worked in Iraq until recently said there was a fundamental difference of opinion between the US and British military over how best to run Basra.

“The Americans saw Sadr as a threat and were unwilling to tolerate him for the sake of a quiet life. The Americans wanted to take him on; the British didn’t.”

The price the British have paid for comparative calm in Basra — as opposed to the mayhem of Baghdad and the Sunni triangle — is that Sadr’s men have achieved a de facto takeover, more or less by stealth.

“It is absolutely clear that Sadr infiltrates every walk of public life,” the diplomat said. “He dominates the police. What we, the British, have produced is a very flawed security force.”

IS IT too late for the Brits to get tough? Sack the police force (again) and start rebuilding from scratch with proper vetting of potential Islamic renegades? The task doesn’t even bear thinking about.

Many regional experts believe the real mistakes occurred early on, when Saddam’s security apparatus was scrapped instead of being moulded into something new. For now, though, there is no stomach in London for anything other than compromise.

“In the end you have to be pragmatic,” the diplomat said. “Sadr has a hold and you have to come to some form of political accommodation with him.”

Vincent belonged to that wing of American idealists who believed that the fall of Baghdad might ignite a democratic process that would usher in genuine personal freedoms. Instead, in Basra at least, one form of oppression may soon be giving way to another.

For Lisa Ramaci, three important tasks remain. She must arrange her husband’s funeral, once his body is returned to New York. She also hopes to write the book Vincent could not complete.

“The FBI has all his material and they are going to release it to me. If he’s left me enough material I will finish it. I want to call it Basra: The Final Journey of Steven Vincent.”

She also would like to help Tuaiz move to America. She has contacted the state department about obtaining the necessary visa. “She is getting better, but they can’t put her back on the streets of Basra,” Ramaci said. “She’d be a dead woman.”

I assume your comments are meant to be sarcastic, as Mr. Vincent is said to have been somewhat conservative and has written for the National Review.

Muti-culturism is creeping into the American military also, as Steven Vincent relates in his blog In the Red Zone. Here are excerpts from a story about an US Air Force Captain and his encounter with Steve and his interpretor.

I'd wanted to introduce Layla to the Gary Cooper side of America, and I felt I'd succeeded. Instead of the evasive, over-subtle, windy Iraqi, fond of theory and abstraction, here was a to-the-point Yank, rolling up his sleeves with a can-do spirit of fair play and doing good. "I want to have a positive effect on this country's future," the Captain averred. "For example, whenever I learn of a contracting firm run by women, I put it at the top of my list for businesses I want to consider for future projects." I felt proud of my countryman; you couldn't ask for a more sincere guy.....

Oh boy. Maa salaama Gary Cooper, as Layla and I gave our man a quick tutorial about the militant Shiites who have transformed once free-wheeling Basra into something resembling Savonarola's Florence....The Captain seemed taken aback, having, as most Westerners--especially the troops stationed here--little idea of what goes on in the city. "I'll have to take this into consideration..." scratching his head, "I certainly hope none of these contracts are going to the wrong people." Collecting himself, "But should we really get involved in choosing one political group over another?" the Captain countered. "I mean, I've always believed that we shouldn't project American values onto other cultures--that we should let them be. Who is to say we are right and they are wrong?" [Steve] And there it was, the familiar Cultural-Values-Are-Relative argument, surprising though it was to hear it from a military man. But Layla would have none of it. "No, believe me!" she exclaimed, sitting forward on her stool. "These religious parties are wrong! Look at them, their corruption, their incompetence, their stupidity! Look at the way they treat women! How can you say you cannot judge them? Why shouldn't your [sic] apply your own cultural values?"

Read the whole gripping story at Steven Vincent's blog. May he rest in peace, Amen.

AROLINE B. GLICK, THE JERUSALEM POST
Aug. 4, 2005

With all the mayhem in Israel today it is difficult to step back and take note of a terrible crime that happens elsewhere. But Tuesday evening a terrible crime was committed elsewhere and it is worthy of our attention because its perpetrators are our enemies and their victim was our friend.

On Tuesday evening freelance American journalist Steven Vincent was kidnapped and murdered in Basra. Vincent, who in pre-September 11 America earned his living as an art critic, set out to fight this war after he watched the Twin Towers explode from his rooftop in the East Village in Manhattan. And Tuesday he gave his life in the fight.

Vincent did not join the army. He took up his pen and he went to Iraq in the wake of the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime by the US-led coalition in the spring of 2003. No one sent him there. He heard the call to battle from his rooftop that terrible morning and he answered it in the only way he knew. He became a chronicler of post-Saddam Iraq.

I never met Vincent, but I developed a deep respect for him by following his dispatches, which would show up in various US newspapers fairly often over the past two years. His writing was a rare mix of descriptive prose, reasoned analysis and passion that made you seek out his latest story and feel a tinge of regret when you finish the last sentence. You always wanted to read more when you read him.

What came through clearly in his writings is that Vincent grasped that the global jihad, as it manifested itself in New York and Washington on September 11 and as it manifests itself on a daily basis in Iraq and indeed throughout the world, is rooted not in terrorism but in culture and religion. And the only way for the US and the rest of the free world to emerge victorious in this war is to expose and destroy the cultural base that spurs millions of Muslims throughout the world to kill and destroy and to support killing and destruction in the name of Islam.

In an article in the National Review published in December 2004, Vincent railed against the media for referring to the terrorists in Iraq, whose handiwork he saw up close, as "guerrillas" and "resistance forces." In his words, "[T]oday we suffer for our lack of clarity in this war. Unwilling to call our enemies fascists, afraid to condemn the brutal aspects of Iraqi and Arab culture, we have allowed the narrative to slip out of our control. Truth is made, not found, in Iraq. Gradually, in the war of ideas, the US became the evil occupier, opposing the legitimate wishes of an indigenous 'resistance'."

In June Vincent returned to Iraq to write a book about Basra. As the British military authorities look on indifferently, Basra, which was once the cosmopolitan center of Iraq, has since the January elections come under the control of radical Shi?ites who are closely allied with Iran and Hizbullah. In Sunday's New York Times, Vincent published an op-ed where he described this transformation and quoted an officer in the British-trained Basra police force who said that 75 percent of the force is loyal to Muqtada e-Sadr, the Iranian- and Hizbullah-backed terrorist chief who sparked the Shi?ite terror onslaught in southern Iraq in April 2004. Vincent also reported that the police, in the pay of extremist clerics, use their guns and vehicles at night to execute people accused of ties to the Ba?ath party. Hundreds have been murdered in this fashion.

According to witness reports of his abduction, Vincent was kidnapped by uniformed police officers who carted him away in their vehicle. If these reports are correct it would mean that Vincent was murdered for exposing the fact that the British military has trained and equipped a jihadi death squad which has taken over Basra and which will kill anyone who endangers their position and power.

IN MANY respects, Vincent's murder recalls the murder of Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam last November. Like Vincent, van Gogh was murdered by a jihadi for daring to expose the malevolent face of radical Islam in his documentary Submission. In it, he described the brutal oppression of women under radical Islam. While Vincent exposed the murderous machinations and oppressive culture of Islamic fascists in Iraq, van Gogh described their actions in his hometown. But they were both describing the same phenomenon and for their efforts at shining light on the face of the enemy, they were murdered.

The metaphor of shining a light on the enemy is an apt one. For like bats in a cave, the jihadi enemy prefers to operate in darkness - to obfuscate from us, his targets, his aims and his nature. This he accomplishes by hiding behind terms like "occupation" or "resistance" or "civil liberties" or by carrying out his terrorist operations against unarmed, unwarned civilians rather than face their military forces in battle.

And so, as Frank Gaffney, another warrior scribe, pointed out in the National Review on Thursday, "This may be a war unlike any other we have ever fought, but it is a war. Nothing less than our survival as a free, democratic and secular nation is at stake."

In this war, the enemy fights us in two separate ways. He terrorizes us with violence in order to make us capitulate. And, by hiding behind the ever-sympathetic guise of a victimized minority culture and religious group, he accuses us of the terrible crimes of racism and illiberalism when we dare to point out the fact that preaching jihad is not a simple exercise of free speech, but an act of war.

And that's the rub. In our liberal democracies, we are driven by a foundational belief in the sanctity of the freedom of dissent. But our enemy tramples that sanctity. For it is not dissent he preaches, but war. It is not democratic give-and-take that he is after, but our destruction. And if we wish to survive, we have to recognize the fact that when our cities are transformed into battlegrounds, our countries are at war. Those who call for jihad have nothing in common with those who call for a change in our government's policies, for the promulgation of new laws, or for new elections. Indeed they are their antithesis.

Happily, today, the reality that Vincent and van Gogh grasped immediately is now, in the wake of last month's bombings in London, finally beginning to be confronted by European leaders and societies. In the past week alone, Germany announced plans to deport 37 Islamic religious figures who have preached jihad; France has announced its intention to deport 12 such men, some of whom are to be stripped of their French citizenship; and Italy on Tuesday deported eight Islamic preachers. As French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy put it, it is necessary today to conduct "a wide-scale action of early detection" of people who abet and indoctrinate for jihad. He vowed to expel anyone who violates a French law passed last year which outlaws incitement of "discrimination, hatred or violence" against any group.

For their part, the British, who for years have been the warmest hosts of jihadists in the world, are in the process of promulgating laws that will enable the police to prosecute suspects before they commit attacks. As Home Office Secretary Hazel Blears explained last month, "Anyone who gets or provides training in bomb-making or other terror activities here or overseas can be charged." Another law in the works would make indirectly inciting terrorism with inflammatory statements a criminal offense.

Sadly and absurdly, as Europe finally awakens to the dangers of jihad, Israel is doing everything it can to remain firmly and deeply asleep. On Monday, the Haifa District Court obscenely acquitted Jamal Mahajneh from Umm el-Fahm of charges of accessory to murder and first-degree accessory to sabotage. Mahajneh transported a suicide bomber to the Maxim restaurant in Haifa in October 2003, where she murdered 21 people. Mahajneh was found guilty of the lesser offense of negligent manslaughter. The judges justified their ruling by arguing that they believed that Mahajneh did not know that the Palestinian woman, whom he spirited into Israel in spite of the fact that she lacked an entry permit and dropped off at the crowded restaurant, was a terrorist.

But in 2003, Israel had been at war for three years and its cities had long since been transformed into battlegrounds whose chief victims were its civilians. It was up to Mahajneh to realize that given this reality, there was a distinct possibility that the woman he transported to the restaurant was a terrorist. It was not the prosecution's duty to prove what he was thinking. His actions spoke loudly enough.

As with the judges, so with the media, the police, the cabinet ministers and the state prosecutors. The leadership of Israel is intent on ignoring the reality in which we live. In our topsy-turvy world, terrorists whose goal is the destruction of Israel receive mercy from justices and land, money, guns and legitimacy from the government. At the same time, the patriotic opponents of the government, all of whose actions, whether justified or misguided, are based solely on their desire to ensure the strength and viability of Israel, are castigated as violent adversaries who must be subdued and defeated with the full force of the law.

In Israel we actually already have the laws on the books that the Europeans are now busily legislating, that would enable us to make the necessary distinction between an enemy and a dissenter. What we lack is the political, cultural and legal leadership with the strength of character and vision of Steven Vincent and Theo van Gogh.

This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1123121936375&p=1006953079897

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