Brian Leiter is the Joseph D. Jamail Centennial Chair in Law, Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Law & Philosophy Program at the University of Texas at Austin. Professor Leiter advocates a Darwinian materialist vision of the world from his weblog, The Leiter Reports. Professor Leiter is also the author of The Philosophical Gourmet Report, which is a respected ranking of graduate philosophy programs in academia.
Hunter Baker reports in this NRO article, Professor Leiter recently criticized Harvard Law Review and Harvard law student Lawrence VanDyke for giving Baylor professor Francis Beckwith‘s new book, “Law, Darwinism, & Public Education,” a positive review in the January 2004 issue of the Harvard Law Review. In the following passage, Professor Leiter accuses Mr. VanDyke of “scholarly fraud”, which Mr. Baker reasonably interprets as an indictment if the student reviewer were ever to seek an academic position after finishing his education at Harvard:

The author of this incompetent book note . . . is one Lawrence VanDyke, a student editor of the Review. Mr. VanDyke may yet have a fine career as a lawyer, but I trust he has no intention of entering law teaching: scholarly fraud is, I fear, an inauspicious beginning for an aspiring law teacher. And let none of the many law professors who are readers of this site be mistaken: Mr. VanDyke has perpetrated a scholarly fraud, one that may have political and pedagogical consequences.

Mr. VanDyke is not backing off of his positive review despite Professor Leiter’s criticism:

He defends the substance of his book note and charges that Leiter’s attack represents “an effort to make sure all students recognize that if they step outside the bounds of Leiter’s orthodoxy, their careers will be in serious jeopardy.” He adds, “This is pretty amazing considering my book note actually talks about the ‘hostility and censorship of the evolutionary establishment.’ If anything, Mr. Leiter acts as if it his goal to prove me correct.”

Mr. Baker closes his NRO article with the following observation:

Unless he gets his temper under control, Brian Leiter won’t continue to have the influence in the academy he currently enjoys. Threatening the career of a young law student because he dared to differ is a sorry spectacle. Let’s hope a chastened Leiter will get a lesson in freedom of inquiry and expression from his fellows and then will be man enough to apologize to the promising student whose destruction he proposed.

Subsequently, Professor Leiter has penned responses on his blog to criticism over his attack on Harvard Law Review and Mr. VanDyke, which can be reviewed here and here. To his credit, Professor Leiter’s responses are well-prepared and contain many good links to the scientific basis for the theory of evolution, the lack of which is his main criticism of the Intelligent Design theory espoused by Professor Beckwith and others.
Thanks to Logos for the pointer to Mr. Baker’s article.

David Warren has another compelling article, this time on Spanish capitulation to the Islamic fascists who are apparently responsible for the March 11th bombing that killed over 200 immediately before the Spanish national elections. The entire article is a well worth reading, but here are a couple of tidbits:

Analysis and homily must converge in what I have to say today. There is no ambiguity in what has happened in Spain. The rotten heart of Europe has been exposed. The best comparison one can make is to Europe in 1940, when the entire continent had capitulated to Nazism and fascism, leaving Britain alone to fight. It thus came to be known as “Churchill’s war”, rather than “Hitler’s war”, only to revert when the Allies had won it, and a generation of Europeans, who had not lifted a finger, decided retrospectively that they had been in the Resistance.

A good question might be asked of the Bush administration, in light of the Spanish election. It was articulated by an American friend yesterday: “Before we waste another drop of blood trying to create democracies in the Middle East, shouldn’t we reflect a bit on how easily democracy in Spain was subverted by terrorists?”
One must not, under the present circumstances, sound an uncertain trumpet. All men of goodwill, regardless of nation, are fighting the Jihadists in Afghanistan and Iraq, as we fought the Nazis in Italy and France; and if the Americans must fight them alone, so be it. Then as now we made a lot of blather about “democracy”. But screw democracy, we are fighting an enemy of civilization, an embodiment of real evil. There is no compromise with such an enemy, no capitulation to him, no way to avoid casualties, no easy way out. We defeat him, or he defeats us.
We do not retreat because our allies are cowards. We continue to fight, for ourselves, for our children, and for their children.

This Austin American-Statesmen article follows up on an incident that occurred last month at the University of Texas Law School, as reported in this earlier post. The U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) officials said they would provide refresher training for all U.S. Army intelligence personnel as a result of their investigation after a Feb. 4 conference entitled “Islam and the Law: A Question of Sexism” at the UT Law School. INSCOM has concluded that military intelligence agents acted inappropriately when they requested a roster of people attending a conference on Islamic law at the University of Texas. Army investigators had not decided whether any of the agents or the commander involved would be reprimanded or disciplined.

This Wall Street Journal ($) article describes the Kerry Campaign’s health care finance plan. The entire article is well worth reading, and includes the following summary of the plan:

Mr. Kerry has vowed to restore higher tax rates for those earning more than $200,000 a year, yielding about $300 billion in revenue over the next decade. Sweeping estate-tax changes and corporate subsidies are two more targets. But he also is betting — some say unrealistically — that his emphasis on better information technology and disease-management practices ultimately will yield big long-term savings.

. . .He also proposes to have Washington step in to reinsure high-cost patients, and thereby reduce premiums charged to private companies and their workers.

It already makes a striking contrast with Mr. Clinton’s more controlling attempt to revamp the nation’s health-care system 10 years earlier. At the time, nothing less than universal coverage was the president’s goal, which forced the party into a set of employer mandates and cost caps that provoked huge resistance in the small-business community.
By comparison, Mr. Kerry chooses two core social principles: caring for poor children and better sharing the cost of the sickest patients. He never attempts to achieve universal coverage and devotes huge sums to help those trying to keep what they already have.

This NY Post article is the first that I have seen that points out that there were exactly 911 days between the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and the latest bombing attacks in Madrid.
Meanwhile, the Iberian Notes blog has a helpful list of evidence that points to either the ETA or Al Qaeda being the perpetrator of the Madrid attack.

Occam’s Toothbrush points us to this Jerusalem Post interview with Princeton University Professor Emeritus Bernard Lewis, America’s preeminent expert on Middle East affairs (author of “What Went Wrong“), in which Professor Lewis comments on the present situation in Iraq:

Are you in favor of immediate elections in Iraq?
I don’t want us to repeat what happened in Algeria, where elections quickly devolved into a massacre. We need to tread very carefully. Elections have to stabilize Iraq, not upset it. Otherwise, countries like Iran and other Middle Eastern dictatorships have an interest in seeing to it that democracy never takes root. Much of the funding and organizational support for terrorist groups comes from Iran.
Do you have faith that, in spite of everything, democracy will prevail?
Saddam Hussein, a Ba’athist-minority dictator, was nourished by Nazism first and then by communism, both European totalitarian ideologies. If anything, the risk of not succeeding in dismantling these fragile Middle Eastern dictatorships today lies more in the history of the rapport between the Muslim and the Western worlds than it does in Muslim roots. Islam, which has been weak for two centuries, has always sought backing to help it fight the enemy – Western democracy. First it supported the Axis against the Allies, then the communists against the US: two disasters. Today it is seeking the protection of Europe against the US, which it sees as its principal enemy. And Europe is facing a difficult debate between those who want to accept that role and those who don’t. Please, I have no intention of comparing Europe to Nazi Germany or the USSR, I’m only talking about the position in which the Arab world is trying to put the old continent.

Via Instapundit, Ed Lasky, a contributor to The American Thinker, posits in this article that Saudi Arabia has launched an undeclared war on President Bush in an effort to sabotage the long term success of America?s war on Islamic fascism. Mr. Lasky points out that President Bush has fundamentally altered the previous cozy relationship between the Saudi Royal Family and the Bush Family:

The terror attacks convinced George W. Bush that America?s approach to the Middle East needed to be drastically changed, to ensure America?s safety. His campaign to oust the Taliban from theocratic rule in Afghanistan and his defeat of Saddam Hussein sent a message to the Saudis that ?business as usual? was a thing of the past. In calling for liberalism throughout the Arab world and for the acceptance of other religions, Bush challenged the support structure of the Saudi royal family, whose legitimacy is predicated on their role as defender of Islam?s holy sites and propagator of the faith.
Much more importantly, in severing the ties that once bound, Bush II has declared that the ties of filial duty, which both animate and constrain the dynamics of the Saudi royal family, do not matter so much in his family. Not anymore, at least, no matter what the former appearances. In doing so, George Bush has become an apostate to the Saudis. It is not merely a matter of interests, but rather an issue of deep principle, fundamentally linked to their own way of life, and to their survival.
From the vantage point of the Saudis, Bush II is not just unreliable, but also a danger. He is a self-identified born-again Christian, and is closely allied with the religious wing of the Republican Party. In a theocratic nation which forbids the practice of Christianity, a leader linked to rival religion is anathema. In their eyes (as well as those of some of President Bush?s most ardent opponents) he may seem to be something of a theocrat himself, but from a longstanding historical rival religion.
When the President?s Christian moorings are combined with the exaggerated role that Jewish neo-cons supposedly have in the White House (once again the fevered imaginations of the Saudis bear some resemblance to those of the President?s most extreme domestic antagonists), trouble of the most fundamental sort looms for their regime. All along, the fanatic Wahabbi wing of the clergy has preached that a holy war exists with the West, and that accommodation with the infidels can only be a tactical pause in the eventual all-out war. From their perspective, it is easy to understand why George W. Bush — the Christian ?puppet of the Jews,? and thus the embodiment of Wahabbi nightmares — needs to be removed from office.

Mr. Lasky goes on to predict that the Saudis will attempt to use their power within the OPEC to increase energy prices that would create a lag on the U.S. economy, which would lead to voter disenchantment with President Bush in November. I am not convinced of the economic viability of that theory, but Mr. Lasky’s views on the Saudi Royal Family’s view toward President Bush appear to be on target.

This LA Times piece profiles Texas Republican congressman Joe Barton the new chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Two of the revelations from the article — Rep. Barton is not a “Hollywood-type guy” and he enjoys playing poker.

Today’s Wall Street Journal ($) contains this devastating op-ed by Therese Raphael about the corrupt United Nations‘ “Oil for Food” program that Saddam Hussein and his henchmen used to line their pockets during the final years of Iraq’s fascist regime. The entire article is well worth reading, and concludes as follows:

There is no doubt that the U.N. relief effort in Iraq has been a global scandal. A monstrous dictator was able to turn the Oil-for-Food Program into a cash cow for himself and his inner circle, leaving Iraqis further deprived as he bought influence abroad and acquired the arms and munitions that coalition forces discovered when they invaded Iraq last spring.
A U.N. culture of unaccountability is certainly also to blame. And Security Council members share responsibility for lax oversight, no doubt one reason there is so little appetite for an investigation.
But Saddam’s ability to reap billions for himself, his cronies and those who proved useful to him abroad depended on individuals who were his counterparties. These deserve a full investigation if the U.N.’s credibility is to be restored and its role in Iraq and elsewhere trusted. Especially now, with the U.N. taking a more active role in Iraq, it’s time we knew more about how the Oil-For-Food scandal was allowed to happen.

Following this post here from last week, Daniel Drezner has an excellent blog discussion contending that last week’s attacks on Shiite Muslims reflect that Islamic fascists are becoming more desperate and less powerful.