Lee Smith, in Slate (July 1, 2004):

Following the recent beheadings of Americans and other foreigners in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, the U.S. press turned to various experts to identify a precedent in the Quran or Islamic history for this kind of gory murder."Beheadings are not mentioned in the Koran at all," Imam Muhammad Adam El-Sheikh, co-founder and chief cleric at the Dar Al Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Va., toldUSA Today. Yvonne Haddad, a professor at the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University agreed, tellingNew York Newsday,"There is absolutely nothing in Islam that justifies cutting off a person's head."

If reporters bothered to open up a copy of the Quran, say, N.J. Dawood's Penguin Classics translation, they'd find at least two relevant passages:

God revealed His will to the angels, saying:"I shall be with you. Give courage to the believers. I shall cast terror into the hearts of the infidels. Strike off their heads, strike off the very tips of their fingers." (Sura 8, Verse 12)

"When you meet the unbelievers in the battlefield strike off their heads." (Sura 47, Verse 4)

For anyone, Muslim or non-Muslim, who wants to put some distance between contemporary jihadist practice and the beliefs of ordinary Muslims, there are a range of arguments that might attenuate the force of these passages. For instance, it could be argued that these excerpts need to be put into context; they don't literally mean what they seem to say; or that they're the product of a particular historical moment, now passed. What's more, some might say that beheading is not really Islamic at all but is in fact an unfortunate holdover from pre-Islamic times, when the warring tribes on the Arabian peninsula decapitated their rivals and left them unburied in the field for predators to devour.

Some commentators claim that centuries ago beheading was simply the easiest way to kill people. That's not quite accurate. Even the old Arabs knew it was a spectacularly vicious way to send people to their deaths, so savage that sometimes the executioner would pay the consequences for his murderous zeal. In fact, there's a famous story in pre-Islamic literature about a decapitated head having its revenge. Shanfara was a great warrior who boasted that he would slay 100 of his enemies. After he had killed 99, he was struck down in battle, decapitated, and his head tossed away. When one of Shanfara's enemies passed by and kicked his skull, the man injured himself and eventually died from the wound. So, even in death, Shanfara had his hundred....

L. John VanTil, in the NewsItem.com (June 19 2004):

In recent days many Americans were deeply moved by the week-long farewell ceremony in honor of President Ronald Reagan. Among the many tributes were frequent references to his vision for America. Numerous speakers, including Vice President Cheney and Supreme Court Justice O’Connor, specifically referred to, and even quoted, John Winthrop’s lay-sermon on board the Arbella in 1630 as the prime example of President Reagan’s vision for America. Winthrop challenged his fellow settlers to work hard, to do the right thing and to carry out the purpose of their mission as they settled in New England. And why? Because, he said, “we shall be as a city upon a hill,” continuing with the observation that all the world would be watching to see how they did in their little experiment in America, ready to mock them if they failed. The networks replayed President Reagan’s delivery of this quotation many times during the week and numerous pundits cited the line as well. Every one of the dozens who quoted or commented on Winthrop’s phrase during the memorial events referred to him as a “Pilgrim” leader.

In the interest of historical accuracy it must be pointed out that John Winthrop was not a Pilgrim and that stating so on any decent history test would result in points being lost. Well, then, who was Winthrop if not a Pilgrim? It is no small point to state that he was, in fact, a Puritan and that Pilgrims and Puritans were not the same settlers at all. And, it must be said that Pilgrims are admired by Americans, even admired in some history texts, while queries about Puritans generally result in a frown and a negative opinion.

The Pilgrims were a small band of dissenters who decided that with the arrival of King James from Scotland to occupy the English throne, upon the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, they had to leave England to worship as they saw fit. They first moved in 1606-1607 to Holland, which had freedom of religion. By 1620 they decided that they would be better off in America and so it was that after a stopover in England, they sailed for America in the Mayflower, arriving late in the fall. Their principal leader was William Bradford, who later wrote an account of their early days in his famous “Of Plymouth Plantation.” A singular characteristic of the Pilgrims was their separatism — they thought pure worship could occur only when separated from the Church of England.

The Puritans, on the other hand, were a very large group of people who decided to settle in America in 1628, sending an advance party that year under the direction of Governor John Endicott. A year and a half later, another contingent set sail — some 700 people at once — under the leadership of a new Governor, John Winthrop. In the next few years over 20,000 people came to the Bay Colony under the Puritan banner. Winthrop’s famous lay-sermon, which included the phrase “we shall be as a city on a hill,” was uttered near the end of this voyage in 1630. Winthrop was Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, as it was called, for most of the next decade, ruling with a firm hand. It was from this colony that America received the flavor of Puritanism, not from the small band of Pilgrims who landed a decade before Winthrop in another corner of what would later become the Bay State.

If Winthrop was not a Pilgrim, how did it happen that he came to be called one by President Reagan and then by dozens who quoted him or quoted Winthrop from their own experience during the memorial ceremonies? The likely answer to this question involves a long-standing erroneous reputation of the Puritans.

During the first half of the twentieth century, history textbooks that commented on Puritans and Puritanism had a decidedly negative tone in their interpretation. This negative tone probably arose from the writer’s personal dislike for the strict Christian views held by the Puritans, but that is a topic beyond the scope of this piece. Puritanism has been rehabilitated by an outstanding group of Harvard and Yale historians beginning with the work of Samuel E. Morison in the 1930s(“The Builders of the Bay Colony”), continuing with major works by Perry Miller (“The New England Mind”) and Yale historian Edmond S. Morgan (“The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop”). Their students and their students’ students have carried on this restoration of Puritanism, therein creating an accurate picture of it. Indeed, I would count my own “Liberty of Conscience: The History of a Puritan Idea” as a chapter in this reconstruction of Puritanism. In brief, it is clear that Puritans were generally witty, educated, hard working, and devout Christians. They certainly were not prudes as Edmond Morgan has pointed out....

Constructing a Counterfeit History of Jerusalem In"The Muslim Claim to Jerusalem," I focused on the intermittent and mostly instrumental Muslim interest in Jerusalem ("Politics, not religious sensibility, has fueled the Muslim attachment to Jerusalem for nearly fourteen centuries") and at the end of the long article included a section titled"Dubious claims" where I listed four historically doubtful claims promoting the Islamic claim to Jerusalem (the Islamic connection to Jerusalem is older than the Jewish; the Qur'an mentions Jerusalem; Muhammad actually visited Jerusalem; and Jerusalem has no importance to Jews).

In a stunning update and extension, Yitzhak Reiter has written a study of the first and last of these dubious claims for the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, a summary of which by Nadav Shragai is published today in Ha'aretz. He traces the development of a new Palestinian argument about Jerusalem, the main themes of which are that"the Arabs ruled Jerusalem thousands of years before the children of Israel" and"a denial and negation of the Jewish-Zionist narrative." The audacity of this specious presentation make the head spin. Here are a few, taken from the Shragai account:

Jonathan Schell, in www.tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute (April 21, 2004):

Halfway through Tim Russert's hour-long interview with Democratic presidential nominee Senator John Kerry on April 18, there was an exchange that revealed in microcosm some of the fundamental unspoken rules of American politics in our day. Russert played a clip from Kerry's 1971 appearance on Meet the Press following his testimony as a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. A longhaired Kerry, in uniform, was seen saying that he stood by the essence of his testimony, in which he had said that veterans had admitted that they had"raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power." He added that under the Geneva Conventions such acts were war crimes.

Russert did not play the tape to congratulate Kerry for his truth-telling. On the contrary, he was clearly calling him on the carpet. He even suggested that"a lot" of Kerry's allegations had been discredited. In fact, every word that Kerry spoke then has been shown to be true in an abundance of testimony. Even now, new revelations pour out. For example, the Toledo Blade just won the Pulitzer Prize for unearthing the story of an army company that went on a seven-month rampage in Vietnam, routinely killing peasants, burning villages, cutting off the ears of corpses. Troops in the field can hardly engage in such conduct over a period of months without the knowledge and at least tacit approval of higher authority.

Kerry answered warily. He began by trying to make light of the clip."Where did all that dark hair go? -- that's a big question for me," he joked. He went on to say that although some of his language had been"excessive," he was still proud of the stand he had taken. His predicament is worth pondering. The powers that be, with the approval of mainstream opinion, had sent him into a misbegotten war whose awful reality they covered up. When he helped uncover it, it was not they but he who was punished. In short, by sending young men into an atrocious, mistaken war, they created a truth so distasteful to the public that its disclosure, by discrediting the discloser, keeps them in power.

Stephanie Simon, in the LAT (March 30, 2004):

When they pushed up the Missouri River into the wilds of America on a spring day in 1804, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark commanded a keelboat groaning with supplies: gunpowder, muskets and brass kettles, beads and mirrors to trade with the Indians, compasses and chronometers to map a path into the unknown.

In 1997, as the bicentennial of that bold departure approached, historian Carolyn Gilman decided to find out what had happened to that inventory.

She had no idea what she was getting herself into.

It took Lewis and Clark 28 months to make their way from St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean and back. It took Gilman seven years to track down the few dozen artifacts she can be certain accompanied them.

Thanks to the remarkable journals the explorers kept, scholars can recount each day of the expedition in intimate detail: what the men ate, where they hiked, what they saw, who suffered diarrhea, who pitched with insomnia, who stole whiskey from the commanders' stash.

But the objects that the Corps of Discovery used, traded and collected during that epic trek have been subjected to far less scrutiny.

Dozens of museums from Massachusetts to Oregon display artifacts that have been billed, over the years, as expedition originals: an air gun that could fire 22 rounds, a buffalo-skin robe painted with fierce warriors, silver peace medals handed out to tribal chiefs.

Until Gilman started her project, however, no one had attempted a comprehensive catalog of Lewis and Clark memorabilia — or tried to separate the authentic from the fraudulent. No one had tried to figure out, piece by piece, what happened to the scientific specimens, the supplies and the Native American curiosities the explorers brought back to this frontier town in September 1806.

"This was one huge detective story," said Robert Archibald, who is directing three years of tributes to the expedition as president of the National Council of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial.

Working mostly alone, sometimes with a researcher, Gilman finished her sleuthing just in time to mount a museum exhibition for this year's commemorations. "Lewis & Clark: The National Bicentennial Exhibition" opened in January here at the Missouri History Museum and will tour over the next two years to Philadelphia, Denver, Portland, Ore., and Washington, D.C....

Why did it matter if this iron battle ax was the precise one the explorers forged in the icy bleakness of what is now North Dakota to trade with the Mandan Indians for corn? Why was it important to know if this brass spyglass was the very one Lewis put to his eye in a sun-streaked valley, straining to see whether the approaching warriors were friend or foe?

Gilman answered her doubts with this: She had a duty to set the record straight.

"Museums deal in the authentic," she said. "That's what sets us apart from theme parks and those restaurants that put old-timey stuff on the walls."

From the "Notebook" in the New Republic (March 18, 2004):

For months, the Bush administration has insisted it never said the threat from Iraq was imminent. So we were gratified to see Donald Rumsfeld stumble and fall when confronted by Bob Schieffer and Thomas Friedman on "Face the Nation" this Sunday. In response to a straightforward question--Schieffer asked, "If [Iraq] did not have these weapons of mass destruction, though, ... why then did they pose an immediate threat to us, to this country?"--Rumsfeld said:

Well, you're the--you and a few other critics are the only people I've heard use the phrase 'immediate threat.' I didn't. The president didn't. And it's become kind of folklore that that's--that's what's happened. ... If you have any citations, I'd like to see 'em.

Then, like a gift from the Gods of Nexis, Friedman produced such a citation:

Friedman: We have one here. It says "some have argued that the nu"--this is you speaking--"that the nuclear threat from Iraq is not imminent, that Saddam is at least five to seven years away from having nuclear weapons. I would not be so certain."

Rumsfeld: And--and--

Friedman: It was close to imminent.

Rumsfeld: Well, I've--I've tried to be precise, and I've tried to be accurate. I'm s--suppose I've--

Friedman: "No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world than the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq."

Rumsfeld: Mm-hmm. It--my view of--of the situation was that he--he had--we--we believe, the best intelligence that we had and other countries had and that--that we believed and we still do not know--we will know.

Perhaps that will put the "imminence" debate to rest--once and for all.

It is also a fact that many Haitians resisted the American intervention, which was ostensibly initiated to stop European powers from invading the island-nation to collect millions of dollars in debts.

But did Franklin Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the navy, write the constitution we imposed on Haiti? FDR hmself claimed he did in a speech during the 1920 presidential election when he was running for vice president. It wasn't true. He lied.

But the myth endures and continues to trip up the unknowing. GlobalSecurity.org makes the mistake of falling for the FDR myth in its otherwise sound review of the history of the American occupation of Haiti. So does the Los Angeles Times in its March 4, 2004 account of the history of Haiti:

The Americans who landed in 1915 ended up staying 19 years and ruling Haiti by means of a military government. In the provinces, Marine Corps commanders served as administrators. In the capital, the legislature was dissolved after its members declined to adopt a constitution reportedly written by Franklin D. Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the Navy.

To its credit the paper hedged through the use of the word"reportedly." But that's just short-hand for a journalist who isn't sure what to think. In this case we know. FDR didn't write that constitution. Check any FDR biography. His false claims about Haiti are always used to demonstrate his extraordinary capacity for prevarication.

Lawyer John H. Hinderaker, on his blog, Powerline (Feb. 28, 2004):

[Slandering Republican presidents.] It's the New York Times' favorite pastime. But Abraham Lincoln ? Alas, not even Lincoln is exempt from the Times' overriding editorial imperative.

Today's Corrections section includes this item:

A Washington Talk article on Feb. 10 about the role of politicians in shaping military campaigns during wartime referred incorrectly to Abraham Lincoln's influence on the decision to seize Atlanta during the Civil War. He approved an overall plan by Gen. Ulysses S. Grant for defeating the Confederate armies; he did not specifically order Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman to take Atlanta. (General Sherman ultimately made the decision after the Army of Tennessee — which General Grant had told him to defeat — retreated to Atlanta.)

The corrected article, which appeared on Feb. 10, was an analysis of a comment made by President Bush in his interview with Tim Russert to the effect that Vietnam was a"political war." Bush said that he did not want to make military decisions, and that a president should"set the goal and the objective and allow the military to come up with the plans to achieve that objective."

The theme of the original article was that President Bush's view was naive, and all wars are political. Its concluding point was about the Civil War:

It is a widely held view in Washington that the decision to go to war conformed to the election season at home. If true, Mr. Bush would hardly be the first to have waged war around re-election.

During the Civil War, President Lincoln, who had little military expertise, proved to be an anxious meddler in his generals' strategy. By 1864, an election year, he had grown frustrated with what he saw as dithering by some of his generals. That summer, he ordered General Sherman to take Atlanta.

This is really an astonishing error, which betrays an almost complete ignorance of both Lincoln and the Civil War. Lincoln was no military tactician, and he knew it. But it is an important part of his greatness that he understood the strategic situation better, and earlier, than almost anyone in the North. Lincoln knew that the Union would prevail if only its generals would fight battles. The North didn't necessarily have to win--although losses were of course dispiriting to morale--but it did have to fight. The key fact, Lincoln understood, was that the North could replace its losses, but the South, ultimately, could not. This painful arithmetic was, to Lincoln, the essence of the conflict. That is why he valued Grant from the beginning. When some wanted to cashier Grant early in the war, Lincoln said:"I cannot spare this man. He fights."

During the first two years of the war, Lincoln was forced to interfere far more than he wanted to in military matters, especially in the east, because he could not get his generals to see the overriding importance of taking the war relentlessly to the enemy. But by the spring of 1864, Grant had been given command of all Union armies, and for the first time, under his direction, all of the forces in the field worked together in a coordinated manner to maximize the pressure on the Confederacy.

Here is how Grant, in his Personal Memoirs , describes his meeting with Lincoln after he assumed command:

In my first interview with Mr. Lincoln alone he stated to me that he had never professed to be a military man or to know how campaigns should be conducted, and never wanted to interfere in them: but that procrastination on the part of commanders, and the pressure from the people at the North and Congress, which was always with him, forced him into issuing his series of"Military Orders"--one, two, three, etc. He did not know but they were all wrong, and did know that some of them were. All he wanted or had ever wanted was some one who would take the responsibility and act, and call on him for all the assistance needed, pledging himself to use all the power of the government in rendering such assistance. Assuring him that I would do the best I could with the means at hand, and avoid as far as possible annoying him or the War Department, our first interview ended.

A bit later Grant adds:

[Stanton] and General Halleck both cautioned me against giving the President my plans of campaign, saying that he was so kind-hearted, so averse to refusing anything asked of him, that some friend would be sure to get from him all he knew. I should have said that in our interview the President told me that he did not want to know what I proposed to do. But he submitted a plan of campaign of his own which he wanted me to hear and then do as I pleased about. He brought out a map of Virginia on which he had evidently marked every position occupied by the Federal and Confederate armies up to that time. He pointed out on the map two streams which empty into the Potomac, and suggested that the army might be moved on boats and landed between the mouths of these streams. We would then have the Potomac to bring our supplies, and the tributaries would protect our flanks while we moved out. I listened respectfully, but did not suggest that the same streams would protect Lee's flanks while he was shutting us up.

I did not communicate my plans to the President, nor did I to the Secretary of War or to General Halleck.

Sherman, who commanded the Military Division of the Mississippi, was a close friend of Grant and enjoyed his complete confidence. On April 4, 1864, Grant sent a confidential letter to Sherman outlining his plan of campaign. His instructions to Sherman, in their entirety, were as follows:

You I propose to move against Johnston's army, to break it up and to get into the interior of the enemy's country as far as you can, inflicting all the damage you can against their war resources.

I do not propose to lay down for you a plan of campaign, but simply lay down the work it is desirable to have done and leave you free to execute it in your own way. Submit to me, however, as early as you can, your plan of operations.

Grant was the father of modern warfare, and one of his principles was that the overriding objective of the Union armies was not to capture territory or cities, but rather to destroy the Confederate armies, for as long as those armies remained in the field, the rebellion would continue. Thus, in his memoirs, Sherman writes:

Neither Atlanta, nor Augusta, nor Savannah, was the objective, but the"army of Jos. Johnston," go where it might.

So for the Times to write that Lincoln"ordered General Sherman to take Atlanta" because 1864 was"an election year" was absurd, and would be recognized as absurd by onyone with the barest knowledge of Lincoln or of the Civil War. I suppose, if Lincoln had the power to simply"order" his generals to capture cities, for political purposes, he would have"ordered" Grant to take Richmond in 1864, too.

It is true, of course, that politics always plays a part in war. In a democracy, it is necessary and right that the course of a war should, ultimately, be not just influenced but determined by politics. In the case of the Civil War, the great danger to the Union was that the Northern public would grow weary of the conflict and give up. By 1864, many in the North were beginning to think that the war was hopeless, and the Democratic Party adopted a defeatist platform, urging that the war be abandoned and the South be allowed to secede with the institution of slavery intact. The capture of Atlanta, along with other victories in the field that year, convinced most Northerners that the end was in sight and ensured Lincoln's re-election. For the Times to twist this well-known narrative into a cynical political ploy by President Lincoln--in the Times' words,"meddling" by a President with"little military expertise" who"waged war around re-election"--is contemptible.

As for President Bush, he seems to have the relationship between civilian command and military expertise exactly right. The country's civilian leadership sets the goals, sets the priorities, gives the military men the resources they need to do the job, and relies on military professionals to figure out how to get the job done. Just like Lincoln, once he had the right commanders in place.

Walter V. Robinson, in the Boston Globe (Feb. 28, 2004):

Questions remain about President Bush's long-ago service in the Texas Air National Guard. But the basic outline of his Guard service is not in dispute: After a year in flight school, Bush spent five months learning how to fly an F-102 fighter-interceptor and then 22 months as a part-time pilot. He stopped flying in April 1972 -- 30 months before his formal commitment would normally have ended.

Nonetheless, the biography of Bush on the US State Department's website credits him with almost six years in the F-102's cockpit -- two years on active duty flying the plane and nearly four more years of part-time service as an F-102 pilot. The websites of at least five American embassies -- those in Germany, Italy, Pakistan, Vietnam, and South Korea -- use the identical language, even though Bush spent barely two years flying the airplane. ...

The State Department site -- http://usinfo.state.gov/products/

pubs/presbush/bio -- says that before Bush graduated from Yale in 1968,"he went to the offices of the Texas Air National Guard at Ellington Air Force Base outside Houston to sign up for pilot training. One motivation, he said, was to learn to fly, as his father had done during World War II." It continues:"George W. was commissioned as a second lieutenant and spent two years on active duty, flying F-102 fighter interceptors. For almost four years after that, he was on a part-time status, flying occasional missions to help the Air National Guard keep two of its F-102s on round-the-clock alert."

Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, asked yesterday about that language, said:"It does not reflect the facts of his service. It will be corrected."