Tolerance fetish

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Here are three small news items from around the world you might have missed:

(1) An unemployed Berlin waitress faces loss of welfare benefits after refusing a job as a prostitute in a legal brothel.

(2) A British court ruled a suspected terrorist from Algeria cannot be detained because jail gives him a "depressive illness."

(3) 17-year old Jeffrey Eden of Charlestown, R.I., has been an awarded an "A" by his teacher and the "Silver Key" in the Rhode Island Scholastic Art Awards for a diorama titled "Bush/Hitler and How History Repeats Itself."

A trio of itsy-bitsy little stories from the foot of Page 27 of your daily paper, if they made it at all. But they're as revealing about the course of the war as anything going on in Iraq.

The Germans, in the bad old days when their preferred field of combat was France rather than Fraulein Helga's government-regulated bondage dungeon, used to talk about "wehrwille" -- war will. America, Britain, Australia and a select few other countries have demonstrated they can just about muster the "war will" on the battlefield. On the broader cultural front, where this war will be won, there's little evidence of any will.

The waitress forced into prostitution by the government pimp is, at one level, merely an example of the unintended consequences that follow every legislative initiative. But at another, it's the logical reductio of the modern secular welfare state. Like all those European utopias John Kerry wants America to be more like, Germany has a permanently high unemployment rate and, as a result, penalizes those who refuse to take available jobs -- like providing "sexual services." The welfare office in Gotha ordered a 23-year-old woman to audition for a job as a "nude model."

As Queen Victoria is said to have advised her daughter on her wedding night, lie back and think of England. Now the welfare office says lie back and think of Germany. And why not? When you cede to the state the responsibility for feeding, clothing, housing you, for your parents' retirement and your own health care, it's hardly surprising they can't see what the big deal is about annexing your sex life as well. If a welfare state were a German S&M club, the government is the S and you're the M. The "security" of welfare is not usually quite such literal bondage, but it always is metaphorically.

When the Germans legalized their whorehouses, they thought it showed how relaxed and enlightened they were. Al Qaeda types take a different line: They think it's a sign the West is decadent and weak and cannot survive. And they have a point: Government forcing women into prostitution is just the latest example of the modern secular state's internal contradictions.

That British court judgment is another. SIAC, the United Kingdom's anti-terrorist court, found in 2003 that the 35-year old Algerian man in question had "actively assisted terrorists who have links to al Qaeda." But he was released from Belmarsh Prison because of his "depressive condition." I would be depressed if I were a terrorist: The Afghan camps are gone, the Great Satan has liberated Iraq, and Osama re-emerges from his three-year sabbatical only to release a floppo "Vote Kerry" video recycling a lot of lame Michael Moore gags. The more Islamists in a depressive condition, the better. Maybe if they get sufficiently depressed, they'll stop being terrorists and become trainee accountants or male hairdressers.