Keep It Pithy (9 page)

And for too many years, he did
.

But the debate about the usefulness of harsh interrogation techniques rages on. Have you seen
Zero Dark Thirty
? Brilliant drama, but it is not going to change the minds of those on either side of the argument
.

A very peculiar response to the terrorism on 9/11 crossed into the field of religious controversy
.

If you haven’t heard about a certain required reading list at the University of North Carolina that erred in the interest of “diversity,” you’re going to be shocked, puzzled, or both
.

I was distressed to hear that in the fall of 2002, the administration at UNC was going to require all incoming freshmen to read a book entitled
Approaching the Koran: The Early Revelations
. The book is a sanitized version of Koranic
philosophy, concentrating on lyrical stories and poetic lore. It’s a very interesting book, but there’s no way it should be mandatory reading in any public school.

Just imagine the outcry if any school demanded that students read
Bible Highlights
or
Nice Stuff from the Torah
. I mean, the ACLU would be setting itself on fire in protest—figuratively speaking, of course. But the ACLU was strangely mute when UNC issued its reading list.

So what was
really
going on here? Well, the backlash from 9/11 was hurting many law-abiding Islamic Americans, and the philosophy of “diversity” was taking some hits. So the University of North Carolina decided to set a proactive example and require students to read a book that is favorable to Islam. The intent was good, but it was a direct violation of the separation concept because it required students to learn about the positive aspects of a specific religion while ignoring the negative aspects. That’s religious advocacy, not intellectual discipline. And that’s not allowed in a publicly funded university in the USA.

The force behind the Islamic reading selection was UNC professor Dr. Robert Kirkpatrick. On July 10, 2002, he entered the No Spin Zone on
The O’Reilly Factor
. I’ve condensed some of our debate, but the main points are these:

       
O
’
REILLY
: The problem here is that this is indoctrination of religion.

       
KIRKPATRICK
: No, it has nothing to do with that. It’s a text that studies the poetic structure of the Koran and seeks
to explain why it has such an effect on two billion people in the world.

       
O
’
REILLY
: UNC never gave incoming freshmen a book on the Bible to read.

       
KIRKPATRICK
: We assume that most people coming to the University of North Carolina are already familiar with both the Old and New Testaments.

       
O
’
REILLY
: But if you did do that, there’d be an outcry all over the country.

The professor had no answer for that. Soon after, under pressure from the North Carolina legislature, UNC dropped the book from its required reading list.
Approaching the Koran
became an optional reading assignment, as it should have been all along. I’ll go one step further: If the book was mandatory reading in a theology or history class, I would have had no problem with it. But forcing all incoming freshmen to read any book praising a specific religion does violate the mandate that public universities have to live by in order to receive tax dollars.

There’s an interesting side note to the controversy. As I said, the ACLU was MIA during the UNC brouhaha (I love all those initials). Also, most other media did not cover the story as aggressively as we did. As part of our analysis, we rejected the idea that reading the Koran book would help us get to know the world that the 9/11 killers inhabited.
Number one, I don’t think the revelations of the Prophet Muhammad have anything to do with homicide and terrorism. And second, I reject the argument that you have to digest a book of poetry and religious interpretation in order to “know” your enemy.

I said this to Professor Kirkpatrick: “[As a UNC freshman] I wouldn’t read the book. And if I were going to the university in 1941, I wouldn’t have read
Mein Kampf
either.”

Kirkpatrick asked why. “Because it’s tripe,” I answered.

The next day a number of Muslim websites wrote that I compared the Koran to
Mein Kampf
, the usual vile propaganda some of these sites spew out. What can you do?

Here’s the key question: How can terrorism exist if rational human beings know that murdering innocent women and children is the most cowardly act on earth? The answer is complicated, but, in the end, it comes down to untreatable mental illness. Osama bin Laden and his crew are not discernibly different from Hitler, Mao, or Stalin. Shrinks define them as sociopaths, but that is a clinical term for the hospital or classroom. In the everyday world, these men are simply evil and must be isolated or killed so that innocent people can be protected from their treachery.

But, Lord, there are so many of these barbarians. There are millions of human beings who have killed or will kill people because they believe some god or the führer or whoever has ordered that. If you still resist the idea of active evil
in the world today, just picture the nineteen 9/11 hijackers killing three thousand people for absolutely no reason. Time after time, history has shown us that this kind of murderous conduct is part of the human condition. But still, some on this earth refuse to believe that evil exists and that terrorism is the epitome of it. Getting people to understand that truth is central to the struggle of our times.

Bottom line: Terrorist killers and those who support them are evil. Period.

State of Yourself

“ ’Tis himself!”

—Traditional greeting when a flamboyant
individual enters an Irish pub

SIX

WHAT’S MINE?

Americans Just Want More Stuff, and That’s a Problem

And I’m looking in the mirror here.…

Here’s something that really surprises me: The more stuff I have, the more stuff I want. And so I looked around and saw that everyone else was the same way. It was not until I had a few things that I noticed how this works. The material stuff is addicting!

Remembering my parents, I try to fight against the “stuff addiction.” I refuse to buy jewelry or trinkets. I don’t need expensive toys like Jet Skis or snowblowers. I keep the material things
under control
, and I banish thoughts of them from my brain. Besides, I am very busy. My life doesn’t include window-shopping or paging through mail-order catalogs by the pool or jaunts to compact disc stores or Home Depot. These are all invitations to spend money unnecessarily.…

Greed is the destroyer of success. You cannot be creatively
successful and greedy at the same time. I’m talking about both material and emotional greed here.

Sorry, Wall Streeters. No apologies to you guys
.

(
photo credit 6.1
)

Note to Hillary Clinton
. Why keep coming up with more government programs to give our tax money away, when you could teach us all how to make a fortune on our own? You invested $5,000 with Robert “Red” Bone, a commodities trader later under investigation for allegedly manipulating the market, and got back profits of $73,000 a few days later. Tell us your secret, Hil, and we might vote you senator for life!

Change that offer to “president”?

The
most
ridiculous part of our American system is this: Different rules apply to the rich guys.

It’s not supposed to be that way, right? Our country was designed to be “for the people.”
The
people, not the
rich
people.