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-- In a Middle East-wide poll, a full 18 percent of Arabs said they accepted that Arabs -- not the Mossad, say -- had perpetrated the attacks of Sept. 11. Well, at least it's in double digits.

-- The murder of journalist Daniel Pearl was notable for its details, and its theatricality. His murderers filmed him being forced to declare that he was a Jew, and themselves slitting his throat and displaying his severed head. The hatred of Jews is blatant; since Pearl was an American reporter for the Wall Street Journal, there was also an implicit equation in their minds of the United States with Judaism. The ritual elements of the murder remind us that at the heart of this conflict is the perversion of a religion. The terrorists' ritual worships murder, and promises more murder to come. In addition, the filming takes us back, beyond the horrors of the last century, to those of the French revolution. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn often made the point in these pages that the French revolutionaries, unlike even the Nazis and the Communists, committed most of their murders in broad daylight, displaying the heads and body parts of their victims in celebratory rituals of solidarity. Now the world of Islamo-fascism revives their gory glee. As those monsters perished, so will these, if we see to it.

-- Conservative Bill Simon Jr. won the Republican primary to take on California governor Gray Davis in November. He beat former Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan, who had been favored. But Riordan ran a lousy campaign. He was passionless, gaffe-prone, and insulting to conservatives. Davis was able to pummel him with ads that raised questions about his trustworthiness -- one, for example, noted that he had flip-flopped on abortion. Riordan's defeat should retire the idea that he was the strongest potential Republican candidate against Davis: To be strong, he would have had to be able to get Republicans to vote for him. Davis now thinks he has a weak opponent in Simon, who has never held elective office. But Simon could be a formidable contender, so long as he doesn't let his primary victory go to his head. He didn't win so much as Riordan lost. If he exploits Davis's weaknesses, perhaps the same dynamic will work in his favor this fall.

-- There are times when the national interest demands that the government offer something other than brutal honesty about its activities and intentions. Prior to the Gulf War, the Pentagon released information suggesting it would launch an amphibious assault against Iraqi forces rather than the ground attack it actually employed, with the specific aim of deceiving Saddam Hussein. The war on terrorism surely will require similar measures, but one tool the military had hoped to use, the Office of Strategic Influence, won't be around to assist. Created in November, the OSI would have helped the Pentagon conduct information warfare. When internal documents suggested that it also might plant wholly false stories with foreign journalists to affect public opinion in other countries, however, the OSI suffered a deathblow to its credibility. Top officers stressed that they would never lie, but the damage was done. Donald Rumsfeld terminated the office. That move may have been a political necessity, but it does not obviate a military one to keep on confusing and frustrating our enemies.

-- Condoleezza Rice accepted an "Image Award" from the NAACP -- gave a very nice speech, as usual. One can see the graciousness in accepting such an award -- any award -- but one can also see that such an acceptance enhances the respectability of an organization that has shown itself unworthy of respect. The NAACP, in addition to making itself militantly racialist, has taken on some of the characteristics of a hate group, as when it ran ads across the country in the 2000 election basically calling George W. Bush a party to a lynching. Rice might have done some good if she had said, "Thanks for thinking of me, but, based on who you have become, stick it, please." But then, it's hard for her to win: A "black-themed" comic strip called The Boondocks rapped the NAACP for honoring a Republican official at all.

-- The two Democratic candidates for governor of Texas, Dan Morales and Tony Sanchez, both trace their ancestry to Mexico, though both were raised in the Lone Star State. Recently they have been playing an unsightly game of more- Hispanic-than-thou. Sanchez wanted to hold two debates with Morales, one in English and the other in Spanish. Morales retorted that he would answer questions in that second debate both in English and in Spanish. Sanchez's camp thereupon put it about that Morales was less than confident of his fluency in Spanish. Morales then accused Sanchez of wishing to divide Texans by language. (And, reported the New York Times, "even appeared to be indirectly appealing to voters suspicious of the use of Spanish." Can there really be such bigoted voters? Imagine!) When the debate finally came off, bigot-friendly Mr. Morales translated his Spanish answers into English because "the vast majority of the citizens of our state speak English." This, averred Mr. Sanchez, was "a slap in the face" to Hispanics. Every one of whom, as Sr. Sanchez sees it, would presumably prefer to remain trapped in a linguistic ghetto away from the mainstream of America's economic and political life, rather than assimilate to the nation's majority culture.

-- While declaring that free trade is "a cornerstone" of his agenda, President Bush announced new taxes on imported steel. These "temporary safeguards" come on top of the protectionist policies that already apply to 80 percent of imports. Bush's stated justification for these policies is that other countries subsidize their steel industries, encouraging overproduction and driving global prices down. American protectionism and subsidies over the years have, of course, had precisely the same effects. Rather than give the industry "an opportunity to adjust," as Bush says, the new aid will simply keep more inefficient producers in business. It will also hurt industries that use steel, which employ far more Americans than the steel producers do. It will make it harder for Bush to get other countries to form trade pacts with us, and may even inspire them to impose retaliatory tariffs against us. Bush was under a lot of pressure, since agitation for tariffs was coming from such key states as West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. (The tariffs are set to expire right after the next presidential election.) But one might have hoped that a president with sky-high approval ratings would look after the interests of the nation as a whole.

-- Congressional Republicans are eager to pass a bill giving senior citizens a guarantee that their Social Security benefits will never be cut. On retirement, people would get certificates from the secretary of the Treasury promising them a certain monthly benefit plus a cost-of-living adjustment. According to proponents, this certificate would establish a "property right" in Social Security benefits. In fact, the "guarantee" could not be made legally binding, since a future Congress would always be able to change the law; the only value of the certificates would be to raise the political cost of cutting benefits even higher than it already is. The point of Social Security reform, however, is to replace the promises of politicians with the true security that comes from personal ownership of real assets. The certificate idea is a defensive gimmick. Republicans should drop it and make the case for reform.

-- Two groups are running ad campaigns to persuade wavering senators to support a ban on all human cloning. The National Right to Life Committee is targeting Republican Orrin Hatch of Utah, while a new group called Stop Human Cloning -- whose chairman is our friend Bill Kristol -- aims its ads at the Democratic senators of North Dakota and Georgia, two of whom are up for reelection. The other side of the debate in the Senate wants to let human embryos be cloned so long as they are used for medical or research purposes and then destroyed. What that approach has going for it is the support of the biotech industry, of many people with illnesses that cloning might ameliorate, and of pro-abortion ideologues who cannot tolerate the notion that the law might protect any class of embryonic human beings -- no matter how created -- from destruction. What works in favor of a complete ban is the revulsion, rooted in sound moral argument, that most Americans feel about this sort of human experimentation. Which is why an ad campaign that takes the issue to the public is a good idea.