Pagent Tangents
July 6th, 2007I’m not a big fan of beauty pagents (it’s nothing personal, I just have no interest in pagents) and I’m not a big fan of “soft” news (it’s nothing personal, it belongs somewhere in the newspaper, but I don’t believe anything pagent-related should be the lead anywhere) but I must say, this caught my attention.
Miss New Jersey says she won’t give in to an anonymous threat that personal photographs of her will be made public if she refuses to relinquish her crown. “It would certainly be easier for me to simply succumb to these unlawful and immoral threats, and quietly disappear,” Amy Polumbo said Thursday at a news conference in Asbury Park. Polumbo’s lawyer, Anthony Caruso, said that starting last week, Polumbo, her family and officials in the Miss New Jersey Education Foundation received packages with pictures of her and the demand that she resign by Friday.
Caruso said the pictures show her with some friends and some may have been photos that she posted years ago on a private Internet site. Did they reveal more skin than a pageant-sanctioned swimsuit? College students behaving badly, perhaps? Caruso would not say. “I don’t think the photos are that bad,” Caruso said. “The people posting this blackmail scheme are trying to make these photos out to be worse than I think they are.” He said he couldn’t comment further because more photos could arrive and change everything.
The 22-year-old Polumbo won the Miss New Jersey competition last month, giving her the right to compete in the next Miss America competition - wherever and whenever it may be held. Miss America Organization officials said they were aware of the situation, but it was up to the New Jersey pageant officials to deal with. The local affiliate did not immediately return a message Thursday from The Associated Press. But Caruso said the state competition officials were on board with her trying to fight back.
I say, Good for Polumbo. It’s good to see someone stand up for themselves and their past with no apologies. I’m sure she must be a little embarrassed, and her chance to ever be Miss America has disappeared, but at the least, she has her dignity, and will be able to say, “I didn’t budge in the face of threats.” (Besides, we’ve all taken pictures, or written letters, or made videos, or left voicemails, that we’d be ashamed of later, something I’d point out if I were her.)
In more important news, al-Zawahiri has released a new message to the world.
Al Qaida’s No. 2 commander appeared on Wednesday in a new video on a website used by Islamist militant groups, urging unity in jehad and calling for the overthrow of “corrupt” Muslim governments in the region. Zawahiri said in the message that the defeat of the West is imminent, and that “the enemy” is trying to forestall the inevitable. “The good omens of the new dawn of victory have begun to loom on the horizon, with Allah’s permission and will,” he said.
The English version of the title posted on the site was The Advice of One Concerned and the video showed the Egyptian cleric Ayman al-Zawahiri wearing a white robe, speaking in Arabic with English sub-titles. The US-based SITE Institute, which monitors Islamist websites, released a transcript that appeared to match the 95-minute video produced by al Qaida’s media arm as-Sahab and monitored on the Internet by Reuters in Dubai. Zawahiri expounded at length in the video on what he calls the corruption of the Saudi Arabian royal family, condemned Palestinian concessions to Israel and criticised the Egyptian government as an ally of the US. The video was edited in a sophisticated way, incorporating clips from al Jazeera, US public television and other international news stations. At one point it invokes evidence from American journalist Bob Woodward’s book on Iraq.
I’m really interested to see what comes of this, and I wish I were a CIA Agent trying to decode the message to see if it’s left any hints for terrorists, as al-Qaeda is known to do. Terrorism is still important, but the American government needs to understand that law enforcement and active security measures are better ways to protect the homeland than, say, recently tweaked but still uninspiring color-coded bulletins.