Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

This week marks the seventh anniversary of the murder of our son, former Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. My wife Ruth and I wonder: Would Danny have believed that today's world emerged after his tragedy?

The answer does not come easily. Danny was an optimist, a true believer in the goodness of mankind. Yet he was also a realist, and would not let idealism bend the harshness of facts.

Neither he, nor the millions who were shocked by his murder, could have possibly predicted that seven years later his abductor, Omar Saeed Sheikh, according to several South Asian reports, would be planning terror acts from the safety of a Pakistani jail. Or that his murderer, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, now in Guantánamo, would proudly boast of his murder in a military tribunal in March 2007 to the cheers of sympathetic jihadi supporters. . . .

No. Those around the world who mourned for Danny in 2002 genuinely hoped that Danny's murder would be a turning point in the history of man's inhumanity to man, and that the targeting of innocents to transmit political messages would quickly become, like slavery and human sacrifice, an embarrassing relic of a bygone era.

But somehow, barbarism, often cloaked in the language of "resistance," has gained acceptance in the most elite circles of our society. The words "war on terror" cannot be uttered today without fear of offense. Civilized society, so it seems, is so numbed by violence that it has lost its gift to be disgusted by evil.

[T]he clearest endorsement of terror as a legitimate instrument of political bargaining came from former President Jimmy Carter. . . Acts of terror, according to Mr. Carter, are no longer taboo, but effective tools for terrorists to address perceived injustices.

Mr. Carter's logic has become the dominant paradigm in rationalizing terror.

-- JUDEA PEARL

A fundamental reason why our intelligence agencies, military leaders and (above all) Washington pols can't understand Afghanistan is that they don't recognize that we're dealing with alien life-forms.

Oh, the strange-minded aliens in question resemble us physically. We share a few common needs: We and the aliens are oxygen breathers who require food and water at frequent intervals. Our body casings feel heat or cold. We’re divided into two sexes (more or less). And we're mortal.

But that's about where the similarities end, analytically speaking.

-- RALPH PETERS

Ralph Peters somehow always manages to outdo himself. Not satisfied with being staggeringly wrong throughout the presidential campaign on Obama's foreign policy, among other things, Peters now aspires to fit every last stereotype of militaristic imperialists, according to whom our rebel subjects are not merely misguided, backward or even simply evil, but are actually not really human.

Yes, if there's one thing the last eight years have shown it is that Washington politicians are prone to too many fits of respecting our enemies' humanity! So many times we have had to plead with them: please treat Arabs and Afghans like alien beings! But would they listen to us? No! Their dedication to human dignity knew no bounds. Their tender concern for the "body casings" of enemy combatants was so great that you could easily confuse the subjects for human beings if you weren't careful. Fortunately Peters is here to remind us that we are not really dehumanizing our enemies with propaganda and unjust treatment, since they are not really human in the first place. Where would we be without Peters' keen insights?

-- DANIEL LARISON

Former Vice President Dick Cheney warned that there is a "high probability" that terrorists will attempt a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack in coming years, and said he fears the Obama administration's policies will make it more likely the attempt will succeed.

In an interview with Politico, Cheney unyieldingly defended the Bush administration’s support for the Guantánamo Bay prison and coercive interrogation of terrorism suspects.

And he asserted that President Obama will either backtrack on his stated intentions to end those policies or put the country at risk in ways more severe than most Americans -- and, he charged, many members of Obama's own team -- understand.

-- POLITICO