Otis Chandler; Publisher Established Los Angeles Times as Respected Voice

By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 28, 2006; Page B07

Otis Chandler, 78, the swashbuckling former publisher of the Los Angeles Times credited with rescuing his family's newspaper from mediocrity and establishing it as a nationally respected media voice, died Feb. 27 at his home in Ojai, Calif. He had Lewy body disease, a degenerative brain disorder.

For much of its early existence, the Los Angeles Times was a profitable laughingstock. Like the Chandler clan, its politics were squarely with the reactionary arm of the Republican Party: pugnaciously anti-union, starkly anti-Communist and gleefully burying important news of Democratic political candidates.

This provoked opinion makers to poke fun. The humorist S.J. Perelman circulated a story of asking a porter for a newspaper during a brief train stop in Albuquerque. "Unfortunately," Perelman said, "the poor man, hard of hearing, brought me the Los Angeles Times." As far away as London, the Economist magazine regarded the Times as "a shoddy sheet of extreme right-wing viewpoint."

In 1960, when he began his 20-year reign as publisher, Mr. Chandler was best known for his athletic diversions, including his once-national ranking as a shot-putter. Tall, blond and rippling with muscles, the 32-year-old resembled a beach nut who had wandered into a corporate boardroom. He did not do much to dispel this image when he reportedly fled an editorial meeting after being handed an urgent message: "Surf's up at 12:30."

Expectations were not high. However, he displayed a remarkable independence that confronted the paper's long-held prejudices. In a key move -- one that fractured family relations -- he agreed to publish a long series about the John Birch Society. He ordered a strong, front-page editorial condemning the group's ultraconservative, sometimes virulent political views.

More than 15,000 subscribers canceled their subscriptions, but the paper made clear its new direction and in time gained hundreds of thousands of readers. Mr. Chandler spoke of the New York Times as his model for excellence.

After the John Birch stories, other series followed about Mexican immigrants and blacks -- articles that would have been unthinkable in previous years. Such progress was only to a point: No black reporter was on the staff through much of the 1960s, leading to lingering frustration over civil rights stories.

Although the paper won a 1966 Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Watts neighborhood race riots in Los Angeles, Mr. Chandler was not always as socially conscious.

According to one story, the black journalist and civil rights activist Louis Lomax met with Mr. Chandler at the time of the riots, and the publisher said he didn't know where Watts is. "Over there, where the smoke is," Lomax said. "That's where Watts is."

On other fronts, Mr. Chandler was far more impressive. Offering big salaries, he lured prize-winning writers from other papers, including Robert Donovan of the New York Herald Tribune, and hired star editorial cartoonists, including Paul Conrad of the Denver Post.

He opened bureaus around the world and created a wire-service partnership with The Washington Post. Knowing it would also aid his own national profile, he made the Times' bureau in Washington one of the largest in staffing.

The editorial budget increased dramatically and, by 1976, circulation had doubled to more than 1 million, according to David Halberstam's media book "The Powers That Be."

"No publisher in America improved a paper so quickly on so grand a scale, took a paper that was marginal in qualities and brought it to excellence as Otis Chandler did," Halberstam wrote.

The Chandler newspaper dynasty dated to the early 1880s, when Harry Chandler and Harrison Gray Otis began to turn a minor publication into a major voice of conservative policy- and king-making. Their concerns were in crushing unions and buying water rights and land.

The Chandlers became one of the foremost families of the West, known for a personal asceticism and sense of civic obligation. Harry Chandler's son was Norman Chandler, also a talented businessman but lacking the ferocity of his father. Norman married Dorothy Buffum, called "Buff," an ambitious daughter of a Long Beach, Calif., dry goods dealer.

Buff Chandler was credited with shaping her son's destiny by strategically sidelining her brother-in-law when it came time to choose a successor to her husband.

Otis Chandler, born in Los Angeles on Nov. 23, 1927, was a strapping figure who captained the track team at Stanford University before graduating in 1950.

Around that time, at Lake Arrowhead, Calif., he met his first wife, Marilyn "Missy" Brant. He later told the Christian Science Monitor: "She saw some large character dive off a water tower into the lake. Nobody had ever jumped or dove from that height before. She asked somebody who . . . was that character. That was me. And we met later that night."

The marriage ended in divorce.

After service in the Air Force during the Korean War, Mr. Chandler began his apprenticeship in the family business and became an assistant to his father.

During his reign as publisher, Mr. Chandler saw the Los Angeles Times receive six Pulitzer Prizes. But his own reputation suffered when the Wall Street Journal revealed his role in the GeoTek investment scam. In contrast, the Times largely hid the story, which involved an oil-and-gas drilling enterprise run by a college friend named Jack Burke.

Burke used Mr. Chandler to find high-profile investors -- including actor Kirk Douglas and Washington Redskins owner Jack Kent Cooke -- but the company was a sham, and most concerned lost millions of dollars. Burke pleaded guilty to making false statements to the Securities and Exchange Commission and served more than a year in prison.

After a three-year SEC investigation, charges were dropped against Mr. Chandler in 1975. However, the physical and emotional toll of the GeoTek affair weighed on him, and old intestinal ailments flared up.

In 1980, shortly before his second marriage, Mr. Chandler announced that he would step down as publisher of the Times. He was succeeded by Tom Johnson, a former publisher of the Dallas Times Herald and the first non-member of the Otis or Chandler families to run the paper in 100 years.

Mr. Chandler held a series of executive positions with the parent company, Times Mirror, which had grown into a $1.4 billion communications giant, but mostly raced muscle cars, collected vintage motorcycles and hunted jaguar and musk ox, the last once trampling him during an outing in northwestern Canada.

Meanwhile, a younger generation of the arch-conservative branch of the Chandler family began taking a more active role in the paper's operations. They helped install bottom-line managers, among them the cereal company executive Mark Willes.

Willes, who had no publishing experience, prompted a staff revolt by seeming to endorse collaboration between advertising and editorial sides of the newspaper. The most vivid example of this was the special Sunday magazine issue celebrating a downtown sports complex in 1999.

Such tangles threw the Otis Chandler era in high relief as a halcyon period. Mr. Chandler appeared a hero to many when he wrote an open letter to the staff criticizing current management, and he said he felt Willes was upending a reputation for the paper that he helped build. He told the New York Times: "I don't want my obituary to read, 'Otis had all these opportunities to be helpful and he just stayed away and said it's not my problem.' "

Soon after, Willes was ousted and the Chicago-based Tribune Co. bought the Times Mirror Co.

Mr. Chandler's survivors include his wife, Bettina Whitaker Chandler, whom he married in 1981; four children from his first marriage; a sister; and 15 grandchildren. A son from his first marriage died of a brain tumor in 2002.

FRANK WAS THE ONLY CHURCH THEY LIKED (via ic):
Did the KGB help plan America’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act? (Gerard Jackson, 20 February 2006, BrookesNews.Com)

[***********************]

Jimmy’s Carter’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was the culmination of a very successful campaign by the Washington-based Marxist-Leninist Institute of Policies Studies and the KGB to permanently cripple America’s intelligence services. To understand how this came about it is necessary to take a brief look at the institute’s America-hating founders.

The IPS was set up in 1963 by Richard Barnet and Marcus Raskin and funded by the pro-Soviet Rubin Foundation. [...]

Unfortunately for the US this pair have been allowed to do incalculable damage to country’s national security agencies. They were responsible for the 1974 Hughes-Ryan Act, piece of legislation that helped cripple intelligence operations by guaranteeing they would be leaked to America’s enemies. (Things haven’t changed much, have they?) But this is exactly what really lay behind the Act.

There are two shared characteristics here: a) those who took measures to cripple intelligence gathering were all Democrats; b) they were all connected by one means or another to the pro-Soviet IPS.

The Project on National Security was an IPS front to attack the CIA. In 1974 the Project was transformed into the CNSS (Center for National Securities Studies). Morton Halperin and Anthony Lake are two influential Democrats who helped launch the CNSS. Moreover, Lake was Senator Frank Church’s legislative aid. Church was also a good friend of the America-hating Richard Barnet and and seemed to share to some degree his anti-American view that the US was the real problem in the world.

In 1975 the CNSS published Abuses of the Intelligence Agencies. This was a brazen piece of Soviet disinformation that was used to influenced the Church and Pike committees and which helped bring FISA into existence. On Barnet’s advice Church employed a number of people from the CIP (Center for International Policy) as key committee staffers.

The CIP was an IPS front that Orlando Letelier was instrumental in forming. Letelier was a KGB agent who, with the full knowledge of Raskin and Barnet, used the IPS’s offices in Washington as his base of operations.

The document was mainly the work of Wilfred Burchett (an Australian journalist and KGB agent) and the traitor Philip Agee. So how could an obvious KGB operation have any influence on a congressional committee? Simple: the Church and Pike Committees used sympathisers and even members of the Institute for Policy Studies as advisers and researchers.

Like Senator Church Pike was deeply influenced by the CNSS’s Abuses of the Intelligence Agencies document. (The influence of this document was greatly assisted by IPS agents working on these committees). The support this classic piece of KGB disinformation received from leftwing politicians and the Nixon-hating media (now the Bush-hating media) resulted in the successful crippling of US intelligence agencies.

The pro-Soviet activities of the IPS were so brazen that Brian Crozier*, co-founder of London’s prestigious Institute for the Study of Conflict, could publicly state that

The IPS is the perfect intellectual front for Soviet activities which would be resisted if they were to originate openly from the KGB.

Yet IPS penetration was so deep in the Democratic Party that when Carter became president he appointed IPS fellow travellers to the White House staff and then more or less gave them carte blanche to further undermine his country’s intelligence structure, which is precisely what they did. Gregory Treverton and David Aaron, both IPS agents and Letelier contacts, crippled covert operations by having over 800 operatives fired. (Guess which foreign intelligence agency that pleased?)

The CNSS and the ACLU, meaning the IPS, basically drafted FISA!

[*******************************]

In fairness, the Soviets likewise funded nearly all of the Left's causes during the Cold War, like the nuclear freeze, and no one's ever called Democratic leaders like John Kerry on it, so ciphers will certainly get a pass.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 26, 2006 08:51 PM

Comments

"Did the KGB help plan America’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act?"

If they didn't, they weren't doing their job.

Posted by: Bob Hawkins at February 26, 2006 10:25 PM

The IPS was exposed as a haven of Soviet apologists a long time ago, by Reader's Digest (IIRC). Lake's connections to the IPS were one reason why he never held a Senate-approved job in the Clinton administration (like CIA director, or Secy. of Defense or State).

Posted by: jim hamlen at February 26, 2006 11:05 PM

I'm not surprised, yet this is astoundimg. How reliable is Brookes News as a source?

Posted by: Genecis at February 26, 2006 11:06 PM

Can't we execute traitors in America any more?

Posted by: obc at February 26, 2006 11:29 PM

Remember, no shooting Democrats in the head until AFTER trial by a military commission.

Posted by: Lou Gots at February 27, 2006 06:48 AM

Any criticism of IPS led to charges of Mcarthyism all the way through the Clinton administration. Obviously, IPS was a Soviet front. What does that say about the Democratic left or the New York Times during that period? Malevolent or just stupid? I'll go for a combination of both although with the emphasis of stupid. Just read Anthony Lewis and Tom Wicker columns from the period.

Posted by: Tom C., Stamford,Ct. at February 27, 2006 07:08 AM

The KGB funded all of this? Hmm, interesting. Oh, well, they still lost so I suppose it was just money down the drain.

Posted by: Mikey at February 27, 2006 07:52 AM

Oriana Fallaci is 75 years old. The renowned Italian journalist lives in hiding because of death threats she received after the publication in 2001 of her book The Rage and the Pride. She is dying of cancer. And now she is going to go on trial for “defaming Islam.”

The complaint comes from Adel Smith, president of the Muslim Union of Italy, who was never charged with defaming Christianity after he referred to a crucifix as a “miniature cadaver” during his 2003 efforts to have depictions of Christ on the Cross removed from Italian schools.[1] He has amassed a reputation as something of a crank after demanding that Christians deny aspects of their faith that offended his Islamic sensibilities: he has called for the destruction of Giovanni da Modena’s fresco The Last Judgment in the 14th-century cathedral of San Petronio in Bologna, Italy, because that priceless expression of Medieval Christianity depicts the Muslim Prophet Muhammad in hell.[2] And in the mother of all frivolous lawsuits, Smith in February 2004 brought suit against Pope John Paul II and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, for offending Islam by expressing in various writings their opinion, utterly unremarkable from two Christian leaders, that Christianity is unique and superior to other religions, including Islam.[3]

[. . .] Fallaci remains defiant: “This trial is not against me. Nor is it a trial brought by a judge in search of publicity. It is a trial aimed at creating a Precedent, the Fallaci Case. I will not deign to honor them with my presence. This lawsuit is unacceptable, unpardonable. To distort a person’s thought, pick at a word here and another there, sew it all together with little dots, is illegitimate. Illicit. Illegal. Criminal. Contrary to every moral and intellectual decency. For shame!”[35]

During a speech in Washington in 2002, Fallaci said: “The hate for the West swells like a fire fed by the wind. The clash between us and them is not a military one. It is a cultural one, a religious one, and the worst is still to come.” The suit against her is just one hint of that terrible denouement.

Keith Lacasse, a Clements ally and candidate for selectman, concurs that the fight isn't over just because of a little parliamentary dirty pool. "Remember what Benjamin Franklin said about democracy: 'Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.'"

Robert Frost said of liberals that they're incapable of taking their own side in a fight.

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Many African leaders have called for further trade liberalization. Referring to the September 2005 summit of leaders at the United Nations, South African president Thabo Mbeki complained that the meeting had not achieved the necessary breakthrough on trade. "How serious is the developed world about this partnership to address this matter of poverty?" he asked. The real question that ought to be on the lips of all those concerned with poverty in Africa is, "How serious are the African governments in addressing the problem of poverty in their own countries?" Not very serious, is the answer, for as long as African governments persist in maintaining import tariffs on foreign goods, the vast majority of Africans will only be able to dream about cheap imports from overseas.

MI5 is facing an internal revolt by officers alarmed about intelligence failures and the lack of resources to fight Islamic terrorism.

To illustrate their concern, agents have leaked more topsecret documents to The Sunday Times because they want a public inquiry into the “missed intelligence” leading up to the July attacks in London.

The hair colour gene MC1R has at least seven variants in Europe and the continent has an unusually wide range of hair and eye shades. In the rest of the world, dark hair and eyes are overwhelmingly dominant.

[. . .] Film star blondes such as Marilyn Monroe, Brigitte Bardot, Sharon Stone and Scarlett Johansson are held up as ideals of feminine allure. However, the future of the blonde is uncertain.

A study by the World Health Organisation found that natural blonds are likely to be extinct within 200 years because there are too few people carrying the blond gene. According to the WHO study, the last natural blond is likely to be born in Finland during 2202.

"A federal judge refused [yesterday] to block next week's scheduled execution of Michael Morales for the 1981 murder of a 17-year-old Lodi girl," the San Francisco Chronicle reports:

[']However, the judge said the state must place someone in the death chamber with medical training to make sure Morales is unconscious during the lethal injection procedure. . . .

[']In today's order, [Judge Jeremy] Fogel said defense lawyers had raised a "substantial question'' about the administration of lethal injection in California. But he said the state's interest in proceeding with an execution for a murder committed 25 years ago could be satisfied without violating Morales' "constitutional right not to be subject to an undue risk of extreme pain.''[']

ProDeathPenalty.com (scroll down) has the background on the man Fogel wants to spare from "an undue risk of extreme pain." In 1981, Morales's cousin, Rick Ortega, had a homosexual relationship with a 17-year-old boy named Randy, who was also dating 17-year-old Terri Winchell. Ortega was jealous:

[']Ortega and Morales conspired to murder Terri as "pay back" for Terri's involvement with Randy. . . . In the weeks before the murder, Ortega set up a ruse to trick Terri into believing that Ortega wanted to make amends and become her friend. Morales "practiced" how he was going to strangle Terri, and told his girlfriend on the day of the murder how he was going to strangle and "hurt" someone.

[']The day of the murder, Ortega tricked Terri into accompanying him and Morales in Ortega's car to a remote area near Lodi, California. There, Morales attacked Terri from behind and attempted to strangle her with his belt. Terri struggled and the belt broke in two. Morales then took out a hammer and began hitting Terri in the head with it. She screamed for Ortega to help and attempted to fight off the attack, ripping her own hair out of her scalp in the struggle.

[']Morales beat Terri into unconsciousness, crushing her skull and leaving 23 identifiable wounds in her skull. Morales took Terri from the car and instructed Ortega to leave and come back later. Ortega left and Morales then dragged Terri face-down across the road and into a vineyard. Morales then raped her while she lay unconscious.

[']Morales then started to leave, but went back and stabbed Terri four times in the chest to make sure she died. Morales then left Terri, calling her "a f---ing bitch," as he walked away. Terri died from both the head and chest wounds.[']

Reports the Chronicle: "Fogel said the execution could proceed if, by the close of business Wednesday, the state provided the name of a person with training and experience in anesthesia to attend the execution. That person would verify that Morales was rendered unconscious by the first of the three chemicals and did not regain consciousness until he was pronounced dead."

Let's hope he doesn't regain consciousness after he's pronounced dead either.

Part of me wants a civil war in Iraq, I want to see burning mosques in every Muslim city. I want the Israelies to push the Palestinians into the sea once and for all. I want all our troops out of that useless country and I want to see Europe start to deport every Muslim in their countries back to the dung heaps they all came from. I want to drop 3rd generation neutron bombs over Goam and Tehran and Mecca during the Hadj(sp check). Another part of me wants to have a democratic Iraq, a truce between Israel and Hamas, an ally in Iran, freedom of religion in all countries and a world where I can travel without fear like it was in the 60's and 70's.

Overlooked back home, Thatcher's legacy seeks haven in the US
From Tom Baldwin in Washington

IN BRITAIN the Tories may be trying to escape the shadow of Baroness Thatcher. But in the United States any right-thinking Conservative, including the three Shadow Cabinet members who arrived here this week — is still seeking to bask in her reflected glory.

David Cameron, the new Tory leader, may be publicly distancing himself from his predecessor, seeking to brand himself the centrist “heir to Blair”. But such is the former Prime Minister’s enduring popularity in America that her political legacy has now been exported across the Atlantic.

Out of all the interesting and intractable differences that may eventually be identified, one in particular remains a hot button like no other: the IQ difference between blacks and whites. What is the present state of our knowledge about it?

[. . .] The most important change in the state of knowledge since the mid-1990s lies in our increased understanding of what has happened to the size of the black-white difference over time. Both the task force and "The Bell Curve" concluded that some narrowing had occurred since the early 1970s. With the advantage of an additional decade of data, we are now able to be more precise: (1) The black-white difference in scores on educational achievement tests has narrowed significantly. (2) The black-white convergence in scores on the most highly "g-loaded" tests--the tests that are the best measures of cognitive ability--has been smaller, and may be unchanged, since the first tests were administered 90 years ago.

[. . .] There is more to be said on both sides of this issue, but nothing conclusive. Until new data become available, you may take your choice. If you are a pessimist, the gap has been unchanged at about one standard deviation. If you are an optimist, the IQ gap has decreased by a few points, but it is still close to one standard deviation. The clear and substantial convergence that occurred in academic tests has at best been but dimly reflected in IQ scores, and at worst not reflected at all.

Whether we are talking about academic achievement or about IQ, are the causes of the black-white difference environmental or genetic? Everyone agrees that environment plays a part. The controversy is about whether biology is also involved.

[. . .] From a theoretical standpoint, the cultural explanations offer fresh ways of looking at the black-white difference at a time when the standard socioeconomic explanations have reached a dead end. From a practical standpoint, however, the cultural explanations point to a cause of the black-white difference that is as impervious to manipulation by social policy as causes rooted in biology. If there is to be a rapid improvement, some form of mass movement with powerful behavioral consequences would have to occur within the black community. Absent that, the best we can hope for is gradual cultural change that is likely to be measured in decades.

This brings us to the state of knowledge about genetic explanations. "There is not much direct evidence on this point," said the American Psychological Association's task force dismissively, "but what little there is fails to support the genetic hypothesis." Actually, there is no direct evidence at all, just a wide variety of indirect evidence, almost all of which the task force chose to ignore.
As it happens, a comprehensive survey of that evidence, and of the objections to it, appeared this past June in the journal Psychology, Public Policy and Law. There, J. Philippe Rushton and Arthur Jensen co-authored a 60-page article titled "Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability." It incorporates studies of East Asians as well as blacks and whites and concludes that the source of the black-white-Asian difference is 50% to 80% genetic. The same issue of the journal includes four commentaries, three of them written by prominent scholars who oppose the idea that any part of the black-white difference is genetic. Thus, in one place, you can examine the strongest arguments that each side in the debate can bring to bear.

Messrs. Rushton and Jensen base their conclusion on 10 categories of evidence that are consistent with a model in which both environment and genes cause the black-white difference and inconsistent with a model that requires no genetic contribution. I will not try to review their argument here, or the critiques of it. All of the contributions can be found on the Internet, and can be understood by readers with a grasp of basic statistical concepts.

For those who consider it important to know what percentage of the IQ difference is genetic, a methodology that would do the job is now available. In the United States, few people classified as black are actually of 100% African descent (the average American black is thought to be about 20% white). To the extent that genes play a role, IQ will vary by racial admixture. In the past, studies that have attempted to test this hypothesis have had no accurate way to measure the degree of admixture, and the results have been accordingly muddy. The recent advances in using genetic markers solve that problem. Take a large sample of racially diverse people, give them a good IQ test, and then use genetic markers to create a variable that no longer classifies people as "white" or "black," but along a continuum. Analyze the variation in IQ scores according to that continuum. The results would be close to dispositive.

None of this is important for social policy, however, where the issue is not the source of the difference but its intractability. Much of the evidence reviewed by Messrs. Rushton and Jensen bears on what we can expect about future changes in the black-white IQ difference. My own thinking on this issue is shaped by the relationship of the difference to a factor I have already mentioned--"g"--and to the developing evidence for g's biological basis.

When you compare black and white mean scores on a battery of subtests, you do not find a uniform set of differences; nor do you find a random assortment. The size of the difference varies systematically by type of subtest. Asked to predict which subtests show the largest difference, most people will think first of ones that have the most cultural content and are the most sensitive to good schooling. But this natural expectation is wrong. Some of the largest differences are found on subtests that have little or no cultural content, such as ones based on abstract designs.
As long ago as 1927, Charles Spearman, the pioneer psychometrician who discovered g, proposed a hypothesis to explain the pattern: the size of the black-white difference would be "most marked in just those [subtests] which are known to be saturated with g." In other words, Spearman conjectured that the black-white difference would be greatest on tests that were the purest measures of intelligence, as opposed to tests of knowledge or memory.

A concrete example illustrates how Spearman's hypothesis works. Two items in the Wechsler and Stanford-Binet IQ tests are known as "forward digit span" and "backward digit span." In the forward version, the subject repeats a random sequence of one-digit numbers given by the examiner, starting with two digits and adding another with each iteration. The subject's score is the number of digits that he can repeat without error on two consecutive trials. Digits-backward works exactly the same way except that the digits must be repeated in the opposite order.

Digits-backward is much more g-loaded than digits-forward. Try it yourself and you will see why. Digits-forward is a straightforward matter of short-term memory. Digits-backward makes your brain work much harder.

The black-white difference in digits-backward is about twice as large as the difference in digits-forward. It is a clean example of an effect that resists cultural explanation. It cannot be explained by differential educational attainment, income or any other socioeconomic factor. Parenting style is irrelevant. Reluctance to "act white" is irrelevant. Motivation is irrelevant. There is no way that any of these variables could systematically encourage black performance in digits-forward while depressing it in digits-backward in the same test at the same time with the same examiner in the same setting.

In 1980, Arthur Jensen began a research program for testing Spearman's hypothesis. In his book "The g Factor" (1998), he summarized the results from 17 independent sets of data, derived from 149 psychometric tests. They consistently supported Spearman's hypothesis. Subsequent work has added still more evidence. Debate continues about what the correlation between g-loadings and the size of the black-white difference means, but the core of Spearman's original conjecture, that a sizable correlation would be found to exist, has been confirmed.

During the same years that Mr. Jensen was investigating Spearman's hypothesis, progress was also being made in understanding g. For decades, psychometricians had tried to make g go away. Confident that intelligence must be more complicated than a single factor, they strove to replace g with measures of uncorrelated mental skills. They thereby made valuable contributions to our understanding of intelligence, which really does manifest itself in different ways and with different profiles, but getting rid of g proved impossible. No matter how the data were analyzed, a single factor kept dominating the results.

By the 1980s, the robustness and value of g as an explanatory construct were broadly accepted among pyschometricians, but little was known about its physiological basis. As of 2005, we know much more. It is now established that g is by far the most heritable component of IQ. A variety of studies have found correlations between g and physiological phenomena such as brain-evoked potentials, brain pH levels, brain glucose metabolism, nerve-conduction velocity and reaction time. Most recently, it has been determined that a highly significant relationship exists between g and the volume of gray matter in specific areas of the frontal cortex, and that the magnitude of the volume is under tight genetic control. In short, we now know that g captures something in the biology of the brain.

So Spearman's basic conjecture was correct--the size of the black-white difference and g-loadings are correlated--and g represents a biologically grounded and highly heritable cognitive resource. When those two observations are put together, a number of characteristics of the black-white difference become predictable, correspond with phenomena we have observed in data, and give us reason to think that not much will change in the years to come.

One implication is that black-white convergence on test scores will be greatest on tests that are least g-loaded. Literacy is the obvious example: People with a wide range of IQs can be taught to read competently, and it is the reading test of the NAEP in which convergence has reached its closest point (0.55 standard deviation in the 1988 test). More broadly, the confirmation of Spearman's hypothesis explains why the convergence that has occurred on academic achievement tests has not been matched on IQ tests.

A related implication is that the source of the black-white difference lies in skills that are hardest to change. Being able to repeat many digits backward has no value in itself. It points to a valuable underlying mental ability, in the same way that percentage of fast-twitch muscle fibers points to an underlying athletic ability. If you were to practice reciting digits backward for a few days, you could increase your score somewhat, just as training can improve your running speed somewhat. But in neither case will you have improved the underlying ability. As far as anyone knows, g itself cannot be coached.

The third implication is that the "Flynn effect" will not close the black-white difference. I am referring here to the secular increase in IQ scores over time, brought to public attention by James Flynn. The Flynn effect has been taken as a reason for thinking that the black-white difference is temporary: If IQ scores are so malleable that they can rise steadily for several decades, why should not the black-white difference be malleable as well?

But as the Flynn effect has been studied over the past decade, the evidence has grown, and now seems persuasive, that the increases in IQ scores do not represent significant increases in g. What the increases do represent--whether increases in specific mental skills or merely increased test sophistication--is still being debated. But if the black-white difference is concentrated in g and if the Flynn effect does not consist of increases in g, the Flynn effect will not do much to close the gap. A 2004 study by Dutch scholars tested this question directly. Examining five large databases, the authors concluded that "the nature of the Flynn effect is qualitatively different from the nature of black-white differences in the United States," and that "the implications of the Flynn effect for black-white differences appear small."

These observations represent my reading of a body of evidence that is incomplete, and they will surely have to be modified as we learn more. But taking the story of the black-white IQ difference as a whole, I submit that we know two facts beyond much doubt. First, the conventional environmental explanation of the black-white difference is inadequate. Poverty, bad schools and racism, which seem such obvious culprits, do not explain it. Insofar as the environment is the cause, it is not the sort of environment we know how to change, and we have tried every practical remedy that anyone has been able to think of. Second, regardless of one's reading of the competing arguments, we are left with an IQ difference that has, at best, narrowed by only a few points over the last century. I can find nothing in the history of this difference, or in what we have learned about its causes over the last ten years, to suggest that any faster change is in our future.

Elites throughout the West are living a lie, basing the futures of their societies on the assumption that all groups of people are equal in all respects. Lie is a strong word, but justified. It is a lie because so many elite politicians who profess to believe it in public do not believe it in private. It is a lie because so many elite scholars choose to ignore what is already known and choose not to inquire into what they suspect. We enable ourselves to continue to live the lie by establishing a taboo against discussion of group differences.

The taboo is not perfect--otherwise, I would not have been able to document this essay--but it is powerful. Witness how few of Harvard's faculty who understood the state of knowledge about sex differences were willing to speak out during the Summers affair. In the public-policy debate, witness the contorted ways in which even the opponents of policies like affirmative action frame their arguments so that no one can accuse them of saying that women are different from men or blacks from whites. Witness the unwillingness of the mainstream media to discuss group differences without assuring readers that the differences will disappear when the world becomes a better place.

The taboo arises from an admirable idealism about human equality. If it did no harm, or if the harm it did were minor, there would be no need to write about it. But taboos have consequences.

The nature of many of the consequences must be a matter of conjecture because people are so fearful of exploring them. Consider an observation furtively voiced by many who interact with civil servants: that government is riddled with people who have been promoted to their level of incompetence because of pressure to have a staff with the correct sex and ethnicity in the correct proportions and positions. Are these just anecdotes? Or should we be worrying about the effects of affirmative action on the quality of government services? It would be helpful to know the answers, but we will not so long as the taboo against talking about group difference prevails.

How much damage has the taboo done to the education of children? Christina Hoff Sommers has argued that willed blindness to the different developmental patterns of boys and girls has led many educators to see boys as aberrational and girls as the norm, with pervasive damage to the way our elementary and secondary schools are run. Is she right? Few have been willing to pursue the issue lest they be required to talk about innate group differences. Similar questions can be asked about the damage done to medical care, whose practitioners have only recently begun to acknowledge the ways in which ethnic groups respond differently to certain drugs.

How much damage has the taboo done to our understanding of America's social problems? The part played by sexism in creating the ratio of males to females on mathematics faculties is not the ratio we observe but what remains after adjustment for male-female differences in high-end mathematical ability. The part played by racism in creating different outcomes in black and white poverty, crime and illegitimacy is not the raw disparity we observe but what remains after controlling for group characteristics. For some outcomes, sex or race differences nearly disappear after a proper analysis is done. For others, a large residual difference remains. In either case, open discussion of group differences would give us a better grasp on where to look for causes and solutions.

What good can come of raising this divisive topic? The honest answer is that no one knows for sure. What we do know is that the taboo has crippled our ability to explore almost any topic that involves the different ways in which groups of people respond to the world around them--which means almost every political, social or economic topic of any complexity.

Thus my modest recommendation, requiring no change in laws or regulations, just a little more gumption. Let us start talking about group differences openly--all sorts of group differences, from the visuospatial skills of men and women to the vivaciousness of Italians and Scots. Let us talk about the nature of the manly versus the womanly virtues. About differences between Russians and Chinese that might affect their adoption of capitalism. About differences between Arabs and Europeans that might affect the assimilation of Arab immigrants into European democracies. About differences between the poor and nonpoor that could inform policy for reducing poverty. [. . .]

But now things get nasty--politically, socially nasty. Forty million changes to the genome in 5 to 8 million years means that overall there has been one "evolutionary event" per couple of months since chimps and people parted company. Evolutionary change does not, in fact, work quite like that; but it is nonetheless the case that evolutionary events--changes to genes, as a result of which those changed genes give the host organism some survival advantage, so that the changed genes spread through the breeding population in succeeding generations--have been occurring all through that 5-to-8-million-year stretch, right down to historic times.

Why is that bad news? Because for the past 1 percent of that span--60,000 years or so, or, to put it another way, half a million or so building-block changes--modern humans have been scattered around the land surface of our planet in groups that have occupied widely different environmental niches, and haven't mixed much with each other. That's why your average Eskimo doesn't look much like your average Australian aborigine. Yes, we have bumped up against the R-word--race. This is the bitter paradox of human genetic studies. In seeking to understand what defines us, we cannot help learning about what divides us. Coming to terms with this paradox will not be easy. The results now emerging from the labs are prompting the first murmurs of a debate that will become loud and rancorous over the next few years.

BOMBSHELL PAPERS

Two papers published in the Sept. 9, 2005, issue of Science illustrate my point. The actual titles of the papers are "Microcephalin, a Gene Regulating Brain Size, Continues to Evolve Adaptively in Humans," and "Ongoing Adaptive Evolution of ASPM, a Brain Size Determinant in Homo sapiens." Since "ASPM" stands for "Abnormal SPindle-like Microcephaly-associated," both these genes have something to do with microcephaly, a congenital infant condition in which the brain fails to develop properly. More precisely, it is defects of these genes that lead to microcephaly. Genes, like celebrities, draw attention to themselves by misbehaving, and it is often from the consequences of their misbehavior that they get their names. The point of these two genes themselves, in their healthy functioning, is to regulate brain size, or brain organization, in ways not yet completely understood.

[. . .] The implication of "strong positive selection" is that these new, variant forms of the genes gave great survival advantages to the humans that bore them. As the researchers say, the exact nature of those advantages is not yet known.

The time spans there--deduced from general, quite well-established principles governing rates of genetic change--are important. Modern humans apparently emerged from Africa around 50,000 to 100,000 years ago, spread over the world, and settled down as mostly inbreeding communities in a variety of environments from arctic tundra to tropical rain forest. Gene variants that showed up after that date would not necessarily spread much beyond their region of origin, and might not spread at all if they conferred survival advantage in one environment but not in another. And in fact, the present-day distribution of these alleles is far from uniform, as the papers in Science show. That second variant is, for instance, almost unknown among Native Americans, which is what you would expect, since the land bridge from Asia to the Americas across the Bering Strait ceased to be passable about 10,000 years ago as the seas rose with the end of the last Ice Age, before the gene variant appeared in Eurasia. More mysteriously, both these variants seem to be scarce in sub- Saharan Africa.

But ... but ... but ... haven't talking heads on TV science programs and in the pages of respectable newspapers been telling us for years that there are absolutely no significant genetic differences whatever between human groups defined by common ancestry? Yes; but you see, they have been lying through their teeth. (A geneticist I spoke to when preparing this article put it more diplomatically: "Statements like that are politically driven.") To be fair, those talking heads have been lying with the best of intentions. Ours is a nation founded on the proposition that all men are created equal. Of course, nobody ever supposed that to mean that we are all equally tall, equally strong, or equally clever; but if different human groups, of different common ancestry, have different frequencies of genes influencing things like, for goodness' sake, brain development, then our cherished national dream of a well-mixed and harmonious meritocracy with all groups equally represented in all niches, at all levels, may be unattainable.

Yet to believe that that undesirable thing is not so-to believe that all genes show up with the same frequencies in all human common-ancestry groups--you have to believe that, to assure the peace of mind of 21st-century American idealists, evolution came to a screeching halt 50,000 years ago. No scientifically literate person believes that, and the results written up in Science last month in any case flatly disprove it, as will the multitude of similar results no doubt soon to follow.

As a political aside, it is worth noticing that Donald Kennedy, the editor-in-chief of Science, is a conventional academic liberal, who has put his name to strongly anti-Bush, pro-Kyoto editorials on global warming. It speaks well to the spirit of true collegiality that still survives in science that these papers, whose implications must be so unwelcome to the egalitarian Left, appeared in Kennedy's magazine. In this context, it should also be noted that Nicholas Wade, science writer at the New York Times, gave reasonably fair coverage to the two papers.

[. . .] DEAL WITH IT

The unhappy thing for the United States is that the problems implicit in results like these are very peculiarly our problems, America's problems. The lead researcher on both those papers is 37-year-old Bruce Lahn, who was born and raised in China. Bruce left that country in 1988, after some unhappy experiences trying to organize democracy protests at his Beijing college. He has now made his peace with the Chinese authorities, and commutes between his chair at the University of Chicago and a well-equipped lab at Sun Yat-sen University in Canton. China is an ethnostate, 92 percent of her people identifying themselves as Han Chinese, and most of the remainder belonging to related East Asian groups. For China, as for other ethnostates like Japan or Finland, these papers in Science are curious and interesting insights into recent human evolution, bearing no emotional content at all. For us Americans, they are two fizzing sticks of dynamite. My guess would be that if Bruce continues along this line of research, he will soon be spending a lot more time in China.

While I believe that results like these out of the human sciences should prompt us to begin some hard thinking about our society, and about what we can reasonably expect social policies to accomplish, I don't think that conservatives should fear these results, or strive to deny them. [. . .]

Some of the truths now beginning to emerge from the human sciences will strike us as very unpleasant indeed. Some of them will force us to hard thinking about our nation, our ideals, and our traditional boundless optimism towards the potentialities of human beings. We have it on good authority, though, that we shall know the truth, and the truth shall make us free. I believe that if we hold fast to faith in that proposition, and trust science to uncover the truth, neither we nor our country will come to any harm.

[. . .] Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? Cosby was filling auditoriums precisely because he has a big mouth, because he was being judgmental. His blunt talk seemed a refreshing tonic to the sense that the standard bromides about the inner city’s troubles weren’t getting blacks very far. Forty years after the War on Poverty began, about 30 percent of black children are still living in poverty. Those children face an even chance of dropping out of high school and, according to economist Thomas Hertz, a 42 percent chance of staying in the lowest income decile—far greater than the 17 percent of whites born at the bottom who stay there. After endless attempts at school reform and a gazillion dollars’ worth of what policymakers call “interventions,” just about everyone realizes—without minimizing the awfulness of ghetto schools—that the problem begins at home and begins early. Yet the assumption among black leaders and poverty experts has long been that you can’t expect uneducated, highly stressed parents, often themselves poorly reared, to do all that much about it. Cosby is saying that they can.

And about that, he is right.

Let’s start with a difficult truth behind Cosby’s rant: 40 years and trillions of government dollars have not given black and white children equal chances. Put aside the question of the public schools for now; the problem begins way before children first go through their shabby doors. Black kids enter school significantly below their white peers in everything from vocabulary to number awareness to self-control. According to a 1998 National Center for Education Statistics survey of kindergarten teachers, black children are much less likely to show persistence in school tasks, to pay close attention in class, or to seem eager to learn new things than are their white counterparts; Hispanic children fall midway in between. As a 2002 book from the liberal Economic Policy Institute, Inequality at the Starting Gate, puts it, “[D]isadvantaged [disproportionately black] children start kindergarten with significantly lower cognitive skills than their more advantaged counterparts.” Dismayingly, the sentence might have come straight from a government commission on poverty, circa 1964—before the War on Poverty had spent a dime.

And what about Head Start, perhaps the best-known War on Poverty campaign, which was supposed “to bring these kids to the starting line equal,” as President Johnson put it at the time? Head Start rested on the reasonable assumption that crucial to fighting poverty was to compensate for what was—or, more to the point, was not—happening at home. If poor kids arrived at school less prepared than their more well-to-do counterparts, well, then, give them more of what those other kids were getting: more stories, building blocks, and puzzles, more talk, more edifying adult attention—as well as good nutrition and health care. Although in retrospect, the first Head Start program in the heady summer of 1965—designed to last all of eight weeks—was wildly unrealistic, the approach still made sense. Poor kids would get a concentrated injection of middle-class child rearing in preschool, and they would start school ready to learn, to achieve at the same rate as their better-off peers, and eventually to live as well as they did.

Except it didn’t work out that way. As a lingering reminder of the hopes and idealism that surrounded the War on Poverty, Head Start, with its annual budget of $6.8 billion, remains a sentimental favorite of the public and of Congress. But the truth is, from the first time they parsed the data, Head Start researchers found that while children sometimes enjoyed immediate gains in IQ and social competence, these improvements tended to fade by the time kids hit third grade. The failed promise of Head Start might best be captured by a visit I made several years ago to a Head Start program in a housing project on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a cheerful and orderly place that would satisfy anyone’s definition of quality child care. As I was leaving, an administrator introduced me to a young woman of 21 or so just arriving with her four-year-old. “This is Sonia,” he said proudly. “She went here when she was a little girl.” Not only had Head Start failed to prevent a poor child from becoming a teen mother, but a Head Start administrator didn’t even seem to think that it was supposed to. For him—and, one suspects, for many teachers and parents—Head Start had come to be nothing more than a nice neighborhood preschool; it wasn’t meant to change lives, and it boasted with institutional pride of what elite private schools and colleges call legacies.

That doesn’t mean preschool has never helped impoverished black children—not by any means. One reason so many are convinced that “Head Start works” is that it is often blurred—sometimes with deliberate fudging by advocates—with several other programs that have had heartening results: the Abecedarian Project at the University of North Carolina and the Perry Preschool in Ypsilanti, Michigan. In 1972, in perhaps the most intensive intervention tried in the United States short of adoption, the Abecedarian Project put 57 very high-risk children into a five-year infant and preschool program, where highly trained teachers worked on what child developmentalists call “fine-motor, language, and social-emotional skills.” When the kids hit age 21, they still showed some gains over a control group: they had better jobs, three times as many of them went to college, and they were half as likely to be teen parents. The graduates of Perry Preschool, a more conventional two-year program, were less likely than the control group to have been placed in special education or to have been arrested, and were more likely to graduate high school, to have higher monthly earnings as adults, and to own homes.

Still, both of these programs were extremely small. Between them, we’re talking a grand total of 115 children, who enjoyed expertly constructed, exquisitely staffed arrangements, unlikely to be replicable on a large scale. Saying that “preschool works” based on these model programs makes as much sense as saying that because NASA successfully launched a mission to Mars, so can JetBlue.

These days, especially given the public’s sticker shock after four decades of government programs, the vast community of child developmentalists and antipoverty advocates—to its credit—has adopted a more sober tone than at any time since the 1960s. As recently as 1988, War on Poverty veteran Lisbeth Schorr trumpeted that success was near, in her book Within Our Reach: “We now know that the education, health, nutrition, and social services and parent support have prevented and ameliorated many of the educational handicaps associated with growing up in poverty,” giving us results that are “measurable and dramatic.” (Perry Preschool is one of the three early-childhood programs she cites.) You’re not going to hear that kind of talk today. “Do You Believe in Magic?” is the half-bitter title of a 2003 article on preschool intervention by Columbia University Teachers College professor Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, one of the titans of early-childhood research. Edward Zigler, a Head Start founder, has urged experts in the field to “become realistic and temper our hopes.” For the bitter truth is that even in the best programs that money can buy, what we’re looking at is not equality but damage control, not a middle-class future but “risk prevention.”

So why have we been able to make so little headway in improving the life chances of poor black children? One reason towers over all others, and it’s the one Cosby was alluding to, however crudely, in his town-hall meetings: poor black parents rear their children very differently from the way middle-class parents do, and even by the time the kids are four years old, the results are extremely hard to change. Academics and poverty mavens know this to be the case, though they try to soften the harshness of its implications. They point out—correctly—that poor parents say they want the same things for their kids that everyone does: a good job, a nice home, and a satisfying family life. They observe that poor parents don’t have the money or the time or the psychological well-being to do a lot of the quasi-educational things that middle-class parents do with their young children, such as going to the circus or buying Legos. They argue that educational deprivation means that the poor don’t know the best child-rearing methods; they have never taken Psych 101, nor have their friends presented them with copies of What to Expect: The Toddler Years at their baby showers.

But these explanations shy away from the one reason that renders others moot: poor parents raise their kids differently, because they see being parents differently. They are not simply middle-class parents manqué; they have their own culture of child rearing, and—not to mince words—that culture is a recipe for more poverty. Without addressing that fact head-on, not much will ever change.

[. . .] The difference between middle-class and low-income child rearing has been captured at its starkest—and most unsettling—by Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley in their 1995 book Meaningful Differences. As War on Poverty foot soldiers with a special interest in language development, Hart and Risley were troubled by the mediocre results of the curriculum they had helped design at the Turner House Preschool in a poor black Kansas City neighborhood. Comparing their subjects with those at a lab school for the children of University of Kansas professors, Hart and Risley found to their dismay that not only did the university kids know more words than the Turner kids, but they learned faster. The gap between upper- and lower-income kids, they concluded, “seemed unalterable by intervention by the time the children were 4 years old.”

[. . .] Knowing that middle-class parents better prepare kids for school, social scientists have designed an array of programs to encourage poor mothers to act more like middle-class mothers. And sometimes the programs have some modest impact. In a recent survey of the literature, Jeanne Brooks-Gunn enumerates studies showing various programs that have increased maternal sensitivity, reduced spanking, “improv[ed] parents’ ability to assist in problem-solving activities,” and taught mothers to ask questions and to initiate conversations about the books they read to their children.

Trouble is, such programs treat the parent not as a human being with a mind, a worldview, and values, but as a subject who performs a set of behaviors. They teach procedural parenting. David Burkam, a co-author of Inequality at the Starting Gate, explains, “The way that we [social scientists] try to make sense of the world is to break the world into small little bits and pieces and try to say which little piece is important.” So they come up with a little piece that seems important, and that, not coincidentally, is directly observable and measurable—like, say, discipline—and they try to find a way to teach a poor mother to reason or give a time-out, rather than spank her child. They design an intervention, and they do the research to see if they have changed a mother’s behavior and improved the child’s situation. If the answer is yes, if there are “positive effects,” the intervention is deemed a success and becomes part of the catalog of programs for improving children’s chances.

But it should be clear by now that being a middle-class—or an upwardly mobile immigrant—mother or father does not mean simply performing a checklist of proper behaviors. It does not mean merely following procedures. It means believing on some intuitive level in the Mission and its larger framework of personal growth and fulfillment. In the case of poor parents, that means having an imagination of a better life, if not for you, then for your kids. That’s what makes the difference.

It is this inner parent, the human being endowed with aspiration, capable of self-betterment and of reaching toward a better future, that Bill Cosby was trying to awaken in his notorious town-hall meetings. Cosby struck many as insufficiently sensitive to the challenges that the inner-city poor face. Perhaps. But the people pouring into his lectures were not looking for sympathy. They were looking for inspiration, a vision of a better self implicit in Cosby’s chastisements. This is a self that procedural parenting ignores.

No one could reasonably expect Cosby’s crusade to change much on its own. But as part of a broader cultural argument from the bully pulpits of government, churches, foundations, and academia, it is essential. It is at that point that interventions—and schooling—can have “positive effects” worth crowing about.

If You Purchased Invisible or Transparent Tape, the Settlement of a Class Action Lawsuit May Affect Your Rights.

A Federal Court authorized this Notice and this website.

A Settlement has been proposed in a class action lawsuit to settle claims of those who purchased (for home or office use and not for resale) invisible and transparent tape manufactured by 3M Company and sold in the United States, such as Scotch® Magic™ tape, Scotch® transparent tape, Highland™ tapes and other invisible and/or transparent tapes.

If the Settlement is approved, 3M will donate $41 million worth of tape and other consumer products to charities throughout the United States. The charities will be able to use the products in carrying out their charitable work or distribute them to other organizations that also serve the needy. The Plaintiffs and 3M agree that it would not be practical to otherwise distribute products to the Class, because of the large size of the Class and because of the small volume of purchases made by most Class Members.

The Settlement resolves a class action lawsuit in federal court. It also resolves a number of similar lawsuits in state courts. Plaintiffs in those lawsuits say that 3M's rebate programs and other sales practices involving its invisible and transparent tape violated antitrust and consumer protection laws and caused Class Members to pay too much for 3M tape. 3M denies that it did anything improper or illegal and denies that its rebate programs and other sales practices led to higher prices. The courts have not made a final decision about the issues in the lawsuits.

You legal rights will be affected whether you act or don't act. You should read the Notice of Proposed Class Action Settlement carefully, as it contains important information about your legal rights and options.

Don’t look, however, for any overt expression of alarm. It is too much to ask of the European Union for now to go on the record supporting the right of Danish free expression or to demand an embargo of Iran as it approaches nuclear autonomy. Instead, expect the European reaction to be far more subtle: the same old public utopian rhetoric, but in the shadows a newfound desire to galvanize against the threat of Islamic fascism.

Here is what we can probably anticipate. First will come a radical departure from past immigration practices. Islam will be praised; the Middle East assured that Europe is tolerant—but very few newcomers from across the Mediterranean let in.

There will be continued public furor over the American efforts in Iraq, but far greater secret efforts to coordinate with the United States—in everything from isolating the Assad regime in Syria to rethinking missile defense. For the past three years the post-colonial Europeans have wished the Americans to learn their imperial lessons by failing in Iraq. Yet it may well be that many in private will now wish us to succeed, if only in the hopes that such Middle East democracies will be less likely in the future to turn loose their mobs to burn European embassies and threaten their citizens.

We won’t see much public condemnation of Hamas, but more likely quiet efforts to pull the plug slowly on subsidies for such terrorists. The Europeans praised Arafat, then learned that he was singularly corrupt. Nothing disturbs a European more than to be swindled and damned as immoral in the process. Subsidies to Jew-hating Hamas terrorists only ensure both.

Europe will still talk about bringing Turkey into the fold of the West, but de facto is horrified at the thought that millions of a religion that empowers so many to go berserk over a few cartoons might soon comprise the most populous nation of Europe. I doubt any European diplomat will invest any political capital at all in restarting in earnest Turkish/European Union talks.

ONLY a year ago it might have provoked angry demonstrations and even a humiliating government retreat, but when Nicolas Sarkozy, the conservative interior minister and presidential hopeful, unveiled radical measures last week to curb immigration there was scarcely a murmur of dissent.

Under the new rules, highly skilled immigrants will be favoured over those coming to France to join family. The government will also have greater powers to expel illegal immigrants. “We no longer want immigration that is inflicted on us,” said Sarkozy, the son of a Hungarian immigrant, whose “zero tolerance” policing and American campaigning techniques have shaken up French politics.

Muslim groups were infuriated, interpreting it as a blow to north Africans in favour of Asian job seekers.

The relatively mild response from the left, however, suggested a change of mood in France, as did the surprisingly muted protests against a government scheme that would make it easier to sack young workers in their first two years in a job: unions had promised a turnout of at least 1m people. It was only a fraction of that.

“French opinion really is changing,” said Nicolas Baverez, an economist and author. “People understand that we must make radical changes if we are to continue to have an influence in the world.”

The extraordinary popularity of Sarkozy — “Sarko” — who is competing with Dominique de Villepin, the aristocratic prime minister, to succeed Jacques Chirac as president next year, is one measure of a revolution already under way in a country often described as allergic to change.

Another factor promoting the shift is France’s recent run of turbulent events, from the rejection of the European Union constitution to the loss of the 2012 Olympics and the rioting that broke out in many French cities late last year.

On one level France seems healthy enough — it has the highest birth rate in Europe — but this does not stop the French being miserable, particularly as they come to accept that their beloved lifestyle may have to change under a more competitive “Anglo-Saxon” economic model. Their suicide rate is three times higher than Britain’s and they are the biggest consumers of anti-depressants in the world.

You do the mathematics. If you want the reality of Europe in a nutshell, walk into a supermarket belonging to the French chain Carrefour. You'll be greeted by a notice in Arabic: "Dear Clients, We express solidarity with the Islamic and Egyptian community. Carrefour doesn't carry Danish products." It's strictly business: they have three Danish customers and a gazillion Muslim ones. Retail sales-wise, they know which way their bread's buttered and it isn't with Lurpak.

Until earlier this month most of us had never heard of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Most were blissfully unaware, too, that the 12 cartoons published in that newspaper on September 30 last year would eventually result in a wave of Muslim protest that would lead to embassies being set on fire, posters being paraded around London with messages inciting terror and several deaths across the Middle East and south Asia. However, this vile and disproportionate reaction could change profoundly the way that British people coexist with the 1.6m Muslim minority in their midst.

It is a hoary old cliché to say that British society is tolerant and forgiving, but by and large it happens to be true. Race relations in Britain have not been perfect but they have until recently been getting better. After the London bombings of July 7 last year, perpetrated by four home-grown Islamic terrorists, there was no significant backlash against Muslims. A stoical hardiness, partially reinforced by years of IRA bombs, was the predominant reaction.

Now, perhaps, we are paying the price of that unthinking tolerance. Amir Tahiri, the eminent Iranian writer, argues in this newspaper today that Britain has become a haven for Islamic political parties and movements that would be banned in much of the Arab world. Only in Britain, and a few other tolerant western countries, have these extremist factions been given the space to spout anti-western hatred.

We should not confuse this with religious tolerance. Mr Tahiri says that Islam in Britain is “a political movement masquerading as a religion”. Mosques are often no more than political clubs. As we saw with Finsbury Park and Abu Hamza, belatedly jailed last week for inciting violence and racial hatred, the consequences of permitting these messages of hate can be deadly.

The public appears to have had enough. A YouGov poll commissioned for this newspaper shows widespread anger over the inflammatory language of those protesting at the cartoons and a distinct hardening of attitudes. No fewer than 86% of people think the cartoon protests were “a gross overreaction”. The offensive placards carried by demonstrators in London, celebrating the July 7 bombings and urging violence against those who insult Islam, rightly outraged many.

Three-quarters believe those who carried them should have been arrested. As it is there was only one arrest — the crack dealer who thought it was a smart idea to dress up as a suicide bomber — and only then because he had broken the terms of his early release from prison.

The public is deeply disillusioned with the way the Establishment appears to appease Islamic extremism. Two-thirds think senior policemen such as Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan commissioner, are too “politically correct” to deal toughly with extremists. Four-fifths think this also applies to Britain’s politicians. They believe politicians were pusillanimous and slow to act and the courts have been too lenient. More than two-thirds believe Hamza should have received a much longer jail sentence than seven years.

This disenchantment has been translated into a profound gloominess about the clash of cultures and civilisations. Most expect relations between British Muslims and the rest of the population to get worse and for attacks on Muslims to increase. Nearly nine out of 10 think there will be more Islamic inspired terror attacks in the UK. Half feel less tolerant to people of other religions. It makes gloomy reading, echoing the hatreds that have emerged even in once tolerant Holland.

Sadly, the pessimism is justified. As our Insight investigation reveals, the preachers of hate are still at work in the areas from which the London bombers were recruited. The politicians and police must take note. Unless they act more swiftly to convict or deport these fanatics, the country faces an alarming future.

How has this radicalisation come about? When Ajami moved from Lebanon to the United States in the 1960s he was more interested in making the most of new cultures than in challenging them. He says that other Muslims moving west at that time felt the same.

“We accepted that we would assimilate and that we could not carry sharia (Islamic law) to the West,” he said. “Our world was more secular. People fled from the fire of the Islamic world; now they bring the fire with them.”

In Kenya police had to fire tear gas to disperse demonstrators marching on the Danish embassy. In Turkey a Catholic priest was shot dead, apparently as a result of the cartoons. Meanwhile, the country’s current hit film tells of an Islamic Rambo tracking down US soldiers in Iraq who are depicted as random killers who use prisoners as organ donors. In the film a Jewish prison doctor scolds soldiers for not bringing back enough Iraqis alive. “I need them intact for their organs,” he says.

Virtually all the English-language coverage of Chirac's speech seized upon just two aspects: a grammatically jumbled set of three sentences seeming to suggest the possibility of a "non-conventional" response to a terrorist attack on French interests and, although Chirac did not mention any potential adversaries by name, what was taken to be an implicit threat to Iran. Chirac was thus cast – incongruously, as will be seen momentarily – in the role of an ally of the US, both in its war on Islamic terrorism as in its discordant relations with Iran's theocratic regime. Never mind that Chirac's apparent threat, as several commentators have pointed out, will only provide the Iranians with a high-profile pretext for continuing their presumptive push for nuclear weapons.

In fact, Chirac only introduced the theme of terrorism into his reflections in order to downplay its importance, thus leading one to wonder whether the otherwise mind-bending suggestion of a nuclear response to a terrorist attack might not have been merely the latest in a series of, as Rosenzweig put it, "presidential slips of the tongue." "The struggle against terrorism is one of our priorities," Chirac said, before adding: "But…just because a new threat appears, it does not make all the other ones disappear." And while Chirac, under the heading of an emerging "regional power," seems indeed to have threatened to pulverize Iran, he also in the very same breath highlighted France's capacity to strike what he called a "major power." Indeed, the continuing potential for conflict with such "major powers" was at least as prominent a theme of Chirac's reflections as terrorism or merely "regional" powers. Chirac allowed that France – "it is true" – is not "at the moment" the object of a "direct" threat from any major power. But he made perfectly clear that, on his assessment, this situation could easily prove ephemeral and was thus no reason to let down one's nuclear guard.

This theme was, however, ignored – seemingly even avoided – in the English-language reports. Thus Chirac said:

We are in a position to inflict damage of all kinds on a major power that would want to attack interests we would regard as vital. Against a regional power, our choice is not between inaction or annihilation. The flexibility and reactivity of our strategic forces would allow us to respond directly against its centers of power, its capacity to act.

And the Washington Post reported:

"Against a regional power, our choice is not between inaction and destruction," Chirac said…, "The flexibility and reaction of our strategic forces allow us to respond directly against the centers of power."

Moreover, Chirac provided all the hints required for his audience to understand the identity of at least one of the "major powers" he had in mind: namely, the United States. Even Chirac's allusion to the threat to peace represented by countries "spreading radical ideas" about a "confrontation of civilizations" will – after years of ideological conditioning associating Samuel Huntington's famous volume of roughly that name with US foreign policy – be more readily understood by Chirac's French public as a reference to George Bush's America than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Iran. More to the point, consider the following passage:

Of course, it is not a foregone conclusion that the relations between the different "poles of power" will sink into hostility in the near future. It is, moreover, in order to meet this danger that we should work toward an international order founded on the rule of law and collective security, toward a more just and more representative order. And that we should encourage all our important partners to make the choice of cooperation rather than that of confrontation. But we are never completely safe: neither from a revolution in the international system, nor from a strategic surprise. All of history teaches us this.

No one conversant with Chirac's neo-Gaullist style of discourse could fail to hear the multiple allusions to the United States in the above. Just who, after all, is this ambiguously "important partner" that France has to encourage – or even "obligate" [engager] – to make the "choice of cooperation rather than confrontation"? The reference to the "poles of power" likewise leaves little room for doubt. "Poles of power" is a programmatic term of neo-Gaullist discourse. According to the latter, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union and hence of the "bipolarity" characterizing the Cold War, the United States remained the single "pole of power" in a "unipolar" [sic] world. It is in order to correct this, in the neo-Gaullist vision of things, perilous situation that an independent European military capability has to be developed, thus rendering the EU itself an alternative "pole of power" to the United States. Not coincidentally, Chirac's speech ends with a plea for the development of just such a unified European military capability, at whose service he pledges to put France's nuclear forces. It is not only Chirac's rhetoric – which, while emphasizing the increasing "imbrication" of the interests of the EU countries, carefully avoids mention of the transatlantic relation – that makes clear the practical implications of this project for NATO. France's recent actions in blocking a planned NATO-EU meeting on anti-terrorism efforts does so as well.

Whereas the "old" American media remained resolutely obtuse to the point of Chirac's speech, evidently the French authorities themselves wanted it to be at least partially understood even by the American public. Thus, France's state-controlled AFP news service (for details of the AFP's relation to the French state, see here and here) issued its own English-language report on the speech. The AFP's helpful title: "Chirac's nuclear warning a signal to the US".

Even Turkey, commonly regarded as the most democratic and pro-American Muslim country, is changing its stance. The hot movie for Turks is titled "Valley of Wolves: Iraq." It depicts American GIs as blood-crazed war criminals. And, as UPI reported, the actor Gary Busey plays a "Jewish-American doctor at Abu Ghraib prison who disembowels innocent Iraqis so their organs can be sold to rich people in New York, London and Tel Aviv." These Turks are our friends?