Antiwar.com Blog

Editorial Note: For those curious to know a few biographical details about Stephen Schwartz (and see below), here is a great little poem that appeared on a Sufi discussion site around the time of the Kosovo war. All the links are inserted by myself:

WHO IS THIS PERSON?

Who is this person, this man Stephen Schwartz?
a question that’s asked by all manner and sorts

A trade union man who ne’er mastered a trade
Or a man of the sea, who not one voyage made

An agent of anarchy in a radical cell
Merely playing a role for a story to sell

His passions confined to wars already lost
To bleed for beliefs? far too high a cost

With blood still being spilled for poor people’s fate
He chose the Spanish revolt, half-century too late

All ongoing struggles and fighting and killing
Were sidestepped with care by this warrior unwilling

Devoid of real courage and anarchist zest
He waged his revolt from the Cafe Trieste

No explosions nor death, desert heat, jungle rains
Just Latte’s, Biscottis, and hemorroidal pains

Comrade Sandalio walked away from the causes
An insurgent impotent, he obeyed all the lawses

But a new calling leapt from deep in his soul
To pen biographique for whom the bell tolls

At the obituary desk in the heart of the city
Steve’s secret life, just like Walter Mitty

While cutting and pasting details of the dead
To a war-ravaged land his fantasy led

Overnight, so it seems, a New Cause did emerge
Convert to Islam! An irrepressible urge!

Cartoon-like comb-over, ellipsoidal bod
Strange creature indeed, Suleyman ben Ahmad

Fake revolutionary? No, no, not any more
Now a make-believe journalist, bound for the war!

And Steve’s new religion and peaceful dictate
Caused nary a pause in his spreading of hate

We now see the dream of this red diaper boy
To preach war on TV is his true pride and joy

And no hawk so fierce, on the left or the right
As one calling for War once he’s too old to fight

But, balding and bitter, Schwartz did what he can
To wage holy war ‘gainst beloved Islam

Stephen’s Black Book of Bad Men, those who plot and deceive
Was it scripted for Ahmad in old Tel Aviv?

A self-proclaimed Sufi peddling Sharon’s agenda

He tiptoes the high wire as if born a Wallenda

He’s rejected your culture; he’s mocked it for years
Now he calls for your sons to shed blood, sweat and tears

Before waging a war from this charlatan’s teaching
Look up His Own History and what he’s been preaching

And there you will find amidst all of the rubble
A life of Great Causes…

but none worth your trouble.

————–
Mustafa Fazool
California Big Wave Sufi

Many people wrote me about my post yesterday ("Stephen Schwartz, Web Moron") thinking that Mr. Schwartz must have been joking when he demanded we stop linking to his photograph.

I assure you, Stephen Schwartz was not joking. I am including excerpts from the 15 emails he sent me yesterday. Mr. Schwartz went on about a number of subjects (mostly about his mother and how much more important he is than Justin Raimondo) but I am only quoting the sections (and my responses) having to do with our right to link to a publicly-available web page.

Stephen Schwartz: You have no right to misuse a copyrighted photo of me. Remove it from your links forthwith.

Eric Garris: You have no right to use the copyrighted photo of Justin Raimondo you ran on your article. Are you only able to accuse people of things that you are guilty of yourself? It certainly appears that way.

SS: I had nothing to do with the illustration of Dennis Raimondo included on FPM. I am not an officer, editor, board member, or otherwise involved with FPM except as an unpaid contributor. You and Dennis, on the other hand, have full responsibility for what appears on your site. Are you really so stupid as not even to understand this, while dispensing advice on how to use hyperlinks and so forth? If you had a problem with the use of the photo, you should have directed it to Horowitz and FPM, not me. It was a photo taken from your website. I was not consulted about it. The photograph of me is copyrighted and is not used on websites. It is used only by my publisher — a serious mainstream publisher called Random House. It is not your property to misuse, notwithstanding your alleged devotion to property rights. Remove it immediately.

EG: There is no copyright violation, we have not posted it, we are just linking to it. As I explained to your lawyer two years ago, there is no copyright infringement by linking. It IS public because it IS on a Website available to link to. We are just pointing to it.

SS: It is a copyrighted photo, stupid. You cannot use it without permission. It is only on publicity connected with the book and authorized by Random House. I’m copying all of this to them. You need to hire a lawyer. There is copyright involved in linking.

EG: We have not used it, we merely pointed to the Website that anyone on the Internet can look at it. Only an idiot would not understand the difference.

SS: Look at the picture, stupid. It has a world copyright mark on it. THE ATLANTIC used it with permission of the photographer. You cannot derive permission from that use. Invest in a dictionary, or look up copyright on the net, if you can’t afford a call to a lawyer.

EG: We are not using it, we are linking to it. The courts have said that linking is the same as citing something. I don’t need a lawyer, I have consulted with yours.

SS: Western Policy and TCS have my permission to use my picture. You do not. But the matter will be handled.

EG: We did not use the picture. Do you really believe that citations are the same as publishing something?

SS: Your Goebbels-esque attempt to twist language would be funny if it were not so lame. Yeah, I’m not in the game, but I appear on TV and my books are published by mainstream publishers, not as self-published pamphlets. Gosh, you’ve hurt me so bad. This is over. You’ve done me plenty of favors with this; I shouldn’t have complained.

SS (next day, after no further response from me): Playing slippery amateur dialectics with me doesn’t work. The use of the photo without permission is just one issue. Your collective statements, since you are responsible for Dennis’s libels as much as he is, about my marital status and religious status at birth are also at issue. They were made without any knowledge on your part and demonstrate the general pattern of reckless defamation pursued by your little clique of increasingly ignored nobodies. This isn’t a matter of changing the subject. It’s the same subject. You are deliberate liars, fabricators, and publishers of libels.

Greg Jaffe had a piece a few days ago in the War Street Urinal about the new planning document Donald H. Rumsfeld has released, a result of a major review conducted by the Pentagon every four years, and its implications for the future of the US military. The report, according to Jaffe, marks “a significant departure from recent reviews.” How is this report different? Jaffe says

At its heart, the document is driven by the belief that the U.S. is engaged in a continuous global struggle that extends far beyond specific battlegrounds, such as Iraq and Afghanistan. The vision is for a military that is far more proactive, focused on changing the world instead of just responding to conflicts such as a North Korean attack on South Korea, and assuming greater prominence in countries in which the U.S. isn’t at war.

And why would the US military need a greater presence in friendly countries?

The U.S. would seek to deploy these troops far earlier in a looming conflict than they traditionally have been to help a tottering government’s armed forces confront guerrillas before an insurgency is able to take root and build popular support. Officials said the plan envisions many such teams operating around the world.

Get it? Rummy wants the new military of the future to help train storm troopers in countries where the governments are not very popular with their slaves, er I mean subjects. That way destructive revolutions such as, for instance, the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783) will be prevented. At this point the libertarians reading this are no doubt screaming with rage, rightly so. On the positive side, Jaffe notes that this philosophy change will be bad news for the Military Industrial Complex, hurting great American merchants of death such as Lockheed Martin. That might be good news, but my cynical tendencies make me suspicious. Don’t these foreign governments need weapons to keep the people in line?

You know your enemies are getting desperate when they start attacking … your name. Glenn Reynolds snarks:

“Dennis Raimondo? It doesn’t have quite the same ring, does it?”

One could go on in this vein: would you rather read a book by Ayn Rand — or by Alice Rosenbaum? Charles Lutwidge Dodgson — or “Lewis Carroll”? I see nothing wrong with the name Eric Blair, but for reasons of his own the man we know now as George Orwell shed his old name and assumed a new, more adult, more authentic identity. What of it?

To attack a writer because he has a pen-name is akin to accusing him of all sorts of other non-crimes: yes, writers like to change their names. They also like spending inordinate amounts of time alone, sitting at a desk. Odd, but true. So shoot me.

UPDATE: Following the link so helpfully provided by the Insta-snarker, we arrive at one Tim Blair’s blog, where we’re breathlessly informed: “Justin Raimondo is over 50”!

What is this — Logan’s Run?

Just because I don’t write like the young fogeys of today, and I look a decade younger than I actually am — is this really a crime? In Blairworld — where, I’m peremptorily informed, my “real name is Dennis” — the grim answer is apparently yes.

Every time these people open their mouths, they reveal their inner rot, a kind of moral halitosis. Reynolds takes on the Name Question, linking to Blair who takes up the Age Question, who points to Stephen Schwartz’s 3,000 word screed calling me a faggot and a “failed l’homme fatale”!

Today on the Weekend Interview Show I’ll be discussing the red-state fascists and liberventionists with LRC‘s Anthony Gregory in the first hour.
Second hour, the guest will be Tom Barry of the International Relations Center to talk about the neocons and war-monger democrat types.

Update: Show’s over, archives here.

“It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.” – Mark Twain

Expanding on what Eric just said, I would like to lend a hand to good ol’ Schwartz. Since he seems to lack basic Web understanding, here’s a good definition from wikipedia (They have all kinds of evil links there, Schwartz.) Follow that link and read the entire thing very, very carefully. Especially this part;

One can then follow hyperlinks on each page to other documents or even send information back to the server to interact with it. The act of following hyperlinks is often called “surfing” or “browsing” the web. Web pages are often arranged in collections of related material called “web sites.”

Now, Schwartz, repeat after me, anchor hypertext reference equals”universal resource locator” text to display close anchor. If you don’t understand that, you’re not in the game, and you should take Twain’s advice.