Endorsing the Crusades?

According to The New York Times, the Department of Justice has denied FBI
investigators access to gun ownership records of the 1,200 people detained in
connection with the September 11 attacks. Justice Department spokeswoman Mindy
Tucker clarified:

[The] request was rejected after several senior officials decided
that the law creating the background check system did not permit the use of the
records to investigate individuals.

So let’s get this straight. The FBI can now wiretap your house, read your e-mail,
detain you indefinitely without telling you why, listen in while you consult your
lawyer, and — last but not least — try and convict you without the
inconvenience of a jury. But it can’t find out whether or not you bought a
weapon?

The Times went on to note that the decision was “in keeping with Attorney
General John Ashcroft’s strong support of gun rights and his longstanding
opposition to the government’s use of background check records.” The NRA will be
pleased to hear that some of our rights are still safe.

See The New York Times, “Justice Dept. Bars
Use of Gun Checks in Terror Inquiry“

November 29, 2001 — Endorsing the Crusades?

In “Crusading They Went,” (December 3, 2001) National Review columnist
John Derbyshire unbelievably ponders:

Were the Crusades really such a brazen assault on the integrity of
the Muslim world? Or were they what the fictional Roger de Bodeham believed them
to be: pilgrimages, in which brave men selflessly took it upon themselves to
bring the holy places of Christianity back under Christian rule?

Although Derbyshire doesn’t cite all of his sources — one of which was a fictional novel he read in his youth — he quotes one “Gibbon” extensively. This is presumably Edward Gibbon, an English Enlightenment historian best known for his famous work The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788). From Gibbon’s outdated work, Derbyshire draws the following conclusion:

If we look behind the cruelty, treachery, and folly, and try to
divine what the Crusaders actually said and thought, we see, dimly but
unmistakably, the early flickering light of the modern West, with its ideals of
liberty, justice, and
individual worth.

See “Crusading
They Went” in The National Review.

November 16, 2001 — “Give Us Your Tired, Your Poor. . .Your Western Europeans”

“It’s now nearly a million a year, five times the traditional numbers, mostly people from non-Western countries who don’t share our respect for the rule of law and don’t learn how to speak English.”