The Iconoclast

I never thought I would see the day when I would call John Derbyshire naïve, but here it is, July 17^th, 2006. 

John, the whole point of using the analogy of the Cold War is to bring forth the ideological component of this epic (yes indeed, epic) struggle between the forces of Western civilization and the forces of Islam.  Islam has been at war with the entire non-Muslim world ever since its founding 1400 years ago and it has been gradually taking over the world in fits and starts ever since. Look at the Islamic world and all you see are gains, gains, gains, with nation states falling from Indonesia to Somalia as we speak.

The violent jihadis are only the tip of the iceberg. They are not the real threat. The real threat is the belief system of Islam which is diametrically opposed to everything the western world holds to be true. The very nature of reality, the very source of rational thought is at stake.

Yes, you’re right we should emphasize the failure of Islam to provide anything like a decent life for its adherents, but you mustn’t forget, the system of Islam is not based on the individual pursuit of happiness in any way shape or form and so that argument only goes so far. Islam is completely collectivist.

The real threat from Islam is the gradual stifling of thought, and with it, our western culture which is based of freedom of inquiry. The pc thought police are its vanguards, not the jihadis.  

And I hesitate to further point out the damage jihadis can and will do to our nation. It is not trivial. Losing Washington DC, for example, along with the representatives of all branches of our national government, would be a heckuva lot more than a nuisance.

We must understand that in the conflict there can be no middle ground.  This is essential. There can be no compromise. To compromise with Islam is to sell future generations into slavery. Slavery of the worst kind, slavery of thought and slavery of the spirit.

Don’t be naïve, John. Face facts as they are. Islam is on the rise and must be stopped. It must be contained the way communism was contained. It must be pushed back - out of England, out of Europe if possible, and out of America without fail. Seeing the threat as only coming from the jihadis is just wishful thinking.

Snap out of it!

I'm in the middle of reading Melanie Phillips very scary Londonistan.  My wife just emailed me to say the police presence in the subway is greater than any she's ever seen.   Meanwhile, of course, Israel is confronting the power Iran is projecting via rockets into Israel (in advance of what seems to be inevitable jihad nukes).  Luckily for all of us, it's all just a mirage.  Prosperity lasts forever. The West isn't decadent to the point of full collapse.  The Islamists aren't moving in to fill a moral void in England, Spain, France, Germany, Belgium, Norway, Sweden and Italy.  Those aren't mosques in Birmingham.  That isn't a virulent anti-semite with rabid eyes and a pirate hook for a hand getting cozy with the heir to throne of Britain ("defender of the faith").  French cars are known to explode on their own simultaneously in large numbers.  Fallaci isn't really on trial--again. Glad it was only a nightmare.

Readers of The Corner will have noticed some to-ing and fro-ing about whether we are currently in the middle of World War 4 with Norman Podhoretz’s August 2004 essay on this subject much in play.

Well, you know how I hate to be a party pooper, but I think this is all nuts. I do understand that our civilizational confidence is going through a rough patch — that the West is currently indulging itself, in the way that people and civilizations will indulge themselves when they believe they can afford to, in guilty agonizings about our past imperialism, colonialism, slavery, and so on. I am sure these pleasurable guilt-spasms will pass, as all things do pass. In the meantime, just look at us — at our wealth, our power, our capability. And look at them — the jihadis! This is war? Nonsense. This is war on the scale of WW1, WW2, or the Cold War? Nonsense on stilts.

*  *  *  *  *

In WW1, the empires of Britain, France, and Russia went to war against those of Germany, Austria, and Turkey, for a variety of motives on all sides. This was 19th-century Great Power politics come to a head, three great empires against three other great empires in a world-shaking clash of arms, with no ideological or religious principle at stake. Woodrow Wilson’s assertion that it was a war for “democracy” was preposterous: Both Germany and Austria were more democratic than Russia; and in fact, the German and Austrian empires, taken as a whole, were more democratic than the British and French empires, taken as a whole.

In WW2 the militarized dictatorships of Germany and Japan (with some lesser allies) sought to impose their wills on, respectively, Europe and Asia. There was a strong ideological component in Germany’s case (racial destiny, hatred of Bolshevism), and a lesser one in Japan’s (hatred of European colonialism, cultural arrogance), but the other parties were just trying to grab spoils, or save themselves — even Stalin’s Russia, which fought its war largely in a spirit of atavistic nationalism, not Bolshevik evangelism. WW2 was mostly just Great Power politics run amok — another tremendous clash of national arms, fired up with some 19th-century intellectual pathologies.

Read the rest here

That is the issue at hand in this conversation at Gates of Vienna regarding the efficacy of generalizing--specifically about political phenomenon both British and American.

Concludes the Baron:


It's a fascinating medition.  The replies are worth reading as well.

Robert below agrees with Epstein that a friend should not be a therapist:

To get back to Epstein's example of a former friend of his who wanted to discuss his (the friend's) impotence:  What, pray tell, was Epstein supposed to do about it?  At what point did it come up in every conversation they had?  When did it begin to dominate all conversation?  What, then, was lost? 

Well, if it came up at any point in the conversation, doesn't this show that the friendship-therapy was working?

One day I will grow out of this kind of thing. Lord make me mature and sensible. But not yet.

In his appreciation of the extraordinary sociologist Philip Rieff (The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud), who died last week at the age of 83, Richard John Neuhaus states:


Writing before my post on Joseph Epstein's interview in the New York Post, Neuhaus makes more clear what both Epstein and I are driving at: There is a multitude of things friends, out of compassion, can do for each other (as Esmerelda demonstrates in her reply to my post ), but friendship does not require (nor can bear) that friends become each other's psychoanalysts, particularly when they don't have the training.  The inequality such a position creates unalterably changes the relationship.

To get back to Epstein's example of a former friend of his who wanted to discuss his (the friend's) impotence:  What, pray tell, was Epstein supposed to do about it?  At what point did it come up in every conversation they had?  When did it begin to dominate all conversation?  What, then, was lost? 

Such tangled webs of publicly pervasive therapy: One imagines Epstein calling this friend of his and, instead of the customary query "How are you feeling?", asking a more appropriate question, "How are you not feeling?"--a sensitive version of "Hey, bro', still impotent?"

This article will be of interest to UK readers.  US readers will recall that in England and Wales we have 2 layers of lawyers, solicitors and barristers. Generally solicitors are the ones with an office on the High Street who are consulted in the first instance.  A solicitor will instruct a barrister for advice on specialist matters, and to appear in court, particularly the Higher Courts. The Law Society governs solicitors, which is what we are concerned with in this report from The Times.

THE Law Society is investigating the behaviour of lawyers who represent terrorist suspects, after a committee of MPs recently castigated them for what they called their “disgraceful conduct”.

MPs highlighted “reprehensible” conduct by one firm, Arani & Co, which has defended the advice of the Muslim cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri to people not to co-operate with the police.

The MPs, whose comments were expressed in the strongest terms, were particularly angered by the issuing of leaflets by Arani & Co urging members of the public not to co-operate with the police. They say: “It is disgraceful that any lawyer should encourage the public not to co-operate with the police as a matter of course.”

It was for the Law Society to decide if the firm had breached professional standards, they said. “But, given the terrorist threat, we find that conduct particularly reprehensible.” The Law Society Regulation Board has confirmed that it will look into the comments of the MPs and “assess whether an investigation is justified”.

Deputy Police Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke told the committee in evidence: “I do find it strange when, say, we have nine people in custody, eight of whom are represented by the same firm, and they all receive identical advice even though their circumstances are radically different, as I am not sure that each suspect is getting the best advice.”

I looked up the website of the main firm in question.  I have to bear in mind here that when I was young and carefree and contemplating a career in the Department of Light Bulb Changers Solicitors were forbidden to advertise.  There was a Law Society publication called the "Law List" which listed every firm with the details of the solicitors employed, their experience, speciality etc, and the phone book carried their names and numbers as well.  So modern advertisments like "In trouble? Come to Messrs Sue, Grabbit and Run for expert help. On the Market Square only 10 minutes walk from the Rose and Crown " jar on me.  Such is the modern world.

But I was still struck at the boasts of the names of this solicitor's clients, like Abu Hamza al-Masri and plenty more, and how much she has done for these people. 

If you go to the websit of any low key local firm you do not see "We act for Burglar Bill"  or "Retained by Fagin and his gang. A light sentence guaranteed!"  But as I said, such is the modern world.

Here is Norman Podhoretz's original essay  from Sept. 2004, "World War IV:  How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win" — very timely since Norman brilliantly explains Hezbollah's crucial role, going back decades.

In part it's because the Cold War analogy is so perfect that I am dismayed.  Leaving the anti-anti-Communists, there was really no national ambivalence about inquiring into Communist doctrine on the scale that we have today regarding the enemy's belief system.  There wasn't hysteria at the mere suggestion that Marxism could (indeed, would inevitably) lead to Stalinism.  The McCarran Act (which Jim Woolsey has recently reminded us of) enjoyed such popular support in 1950 that Congress overrode Truman's veto to pass it. When Reagan called the Soviets the "Evil Empire" in the 80s, there was tut-tutting in the mainstream media and the hard left, but he was giving voice to a sentiment the country shared.

My sense has always been that this "us versus them" mentality, in which people were happy to be part of "us" and didn't hesitate to acknowledge there was a "them" that was truly dangerous, was key to the perseverence that was so essential to winning the Cold War.  I don't see it today.  Of course we despise and clearly divide ourselves from the ACTIONS of the jihadists.  But we are remarkably uncurious about what they believe and why.  And we want no part any inquiry into the Islamo part of Islamo-fascism.  I wonder how you win an ideological, Cold War-type, epic struggle that way.

Not exactly El Cid Campeador. Aren't you glad the spirit of Zapatero didn't win out during the 500 years it took for the Reconquista? Imagine a fully-islamized Spain. It would look something like Morocco today. No Fray Luis, no Teresa of Avila, no Guillen de Castro, no Cervantes, no Quevedo, no Gongora, no Ortega, no Unamuno, no Guillen. And the Spain that lay claim, and helped civlizationally to fashion, what is now called the Hispanidad, been Muslim, there would have been no Ruben Dario, no Sarmiento, no Bello, no Alfonso Reyes, no Borges, no Octavio Paz, no Mario Vargas Llosa and, come to think of it, probably no Machado de Assis, no Jorge Amado or Clarise Lispector in Brazil (assuming that that like Spain, Portugal had been thoroughly and permanently islamized).

And since painting of most types is forbidden in Islam, no El Greco, no Velazquez, no Goya, no Picasso. La princesa esta triste, you say? Oh, many more than just that princesa.

Without the throwing back of the forces of Islam, Spain would have steadily islamized. As the Christians and Jews converted to Islam to avoid the intolerable pressure of dhimmi status, as their relative numbers decreased steadily, whatever real or phony "convivencia" that could be found (whatever cultural flourishing took place under Muslim rule, always died out after a century or two or three, as the fructifying influence of the indigenous non-Muslims ended, and they were made marginal in their own lands) and is made so much of by the mariarosamenocals of this world, would have ended. Spain, becoming completely islamized, sinking ever more steadily would by now have for many centuries looked just the way -- well, just the way Morocco now looks. Like what you see in Morocco? Impressed with the level of its cultural achievements? Wish that Spain could be more like Morocco, or Morocco more like Spain, or do you love them both because all god's chillun are in your view always exactly the same, and all "cultures" exactly of equal worth and that's all that matters, not the belief-system and what it means.

Had the Reconquista not occured, then Spain today would look like the Maghreb lands before the French arrived for a brief interval of non-Muslim laws, customs, civilization. It would indeed look like Morocco, or perhaps Algeria, or Libya, or Egypt, or Tunisia. Impressed? And if Zapatero and his EU ilk have their way, perhaps not only Spain, but France, and Italy, at the very least, will in several decades begin to look more and more like "the Other" on the oppoosite side of la mer blanche du midi -- the "white sea" of the Mediterranean.

That's what the hopeless, hapless, deux-rivistes want. Some kind of tariq-ramadansih "syncretism." Use your imagination. Look at all the examples of places where Islam arrived. What did it do? What was its effect?

All you are asked to do is to think just a little bit ahead, by learning just a little bit about the past. Not much to ask, considering the stakes.

Only that, and nothing more.

While the Israelis have been delivering warnings well in advance of their attacks on Hezbollah and on Hezbollah-related sites (there have been no attacks on any sites without a Hezbollah connection), one must recognize that neither the Beirut aiport, nor the other two airports, have special terminals marked "Hezbollah" that can be easily identified. Nor do the roads and bridges, linking Hezbollahland in the south to Beirut, or Beirut to Greater Hezbollahland in Syria and thence to Iran in the east, have signs indicating, in the same way that American highways do at toll-booths, that this lane is the "E-Z Lane" and that one is for "Trucks" and so on -- no markings indicating that this bridge, or this particular lane on this particular highway, is the one that Hezbollah uses. Were it so simple, there is no doubt that the Israelis would hit only that lane, only that bridge. They have no desire to make war on others outside of Hezbollah, but on the other hand, those others, Christians, Druse, and Sunni Arabs, and even some non-Hezbollah Shi'a, have had six full years to figure out how to disarm Hezbollah. And even if the excuse once was that "Syrian forces are still here" it has been a year since those Syrian forces left, and still not only did the Lebanese army and govenment not make a move to disarm Hezbollah, but Sa'ad Hariri and Fuad Siniora actually invited Hezbollah to join the government. It is absurd to expect Israel, once the casus belli of the kidnapped soldier occured, not to do everything it can to destroy Hezbollah, and to concentrate Lebanese minds so that once the active hostlilities are over, the same situation occurs, for the next time Israel has to "set back the clock" it may not be for merely 20 years. Either tranquillity on both sides, or tranquillity on neither. It is a simple, understandable, and completely justified demand.

It would be an unendurable paradox if Olmert, who was sinking in popularity before these attacks, were to see his popularity rise skywards because of the effective response of Israel's military (it is the military, with its plans, and the officers and men, and the stoic and brave civilians of Israel, who deserve all the credit, and not Olmert who was forced to allow the army to respond, who could do no other), and exploiting that new populatrity, proceed to draw all the wrong conclusions, and none of the right ones, from the attack by Hamas in the south and the much more deadly and effective ones by Hezbollah in the north. For the wrong lesson is: we can handle this. We have shown it. And now things will be quiet, and we can go back to that Road Map, as Rice ridiculously has suggested, and the Quartet, and some "solution" based on unilateral withdrawal from the "West Bank."

The correct lesson to draw from all this is the great vulnerability of Israel and its citizens. The correct lesson is the need for strategic depth. For now, in the south and in the north it may be necessary to seize and remain in territory that the Israelis once upon a time decided they should relinguish. But the same strategic depth, the same minimal buffer zone, is needed far more all along Israel's eastern border. The natural border, the least vulnerable, the most capable of being guarded, with the least ins-and-outs, is that of the Jordan River. That is all territory to which Israel has a sovereign claim as the sole intended beneficiary of the Mandate for Palestine. The intent, and provisions of that Mandate need to be re-read, reconsulted, re-understood. And the Arab propaganda that has been designed to re-package the Lesser Jihad against Israel as merely a matter of a "nationalist" struggle by the "Palestinian people" (a people invented for this very propaganda effort -- never mind that some of them have convinced themselves that they always were part of this "Palestinian people" even when so many of them are descended from Arabs who arrived during the Mandate period (there were more Arab immigrants than there were Jewish immigrants, even though the whole point of the Mandate was to "facilitate Jewish immigration" and encourage "close Jewish settlement on the land").

The lesson is this: forget the Olmert Plan. Whether or not he remains popular, that popularity should not be translated into a return to his idiotic plan of before, and as for the Arab League, that has just declared the non-existent "Peace Process" dead, that Arab League is absolutely right.

But not in the way it assumes. Time for all concerned, even Bush and Rice, to read about the Treaty of Al-Hudaibiyya. Time to read Majid Khadduri on the law regulating agreements between Muslims and Infidels. Time, in other words, and not only for those trying to "solve" what they so blandly and self-assuredly call the "Palestinian-Israeli conflict" (it isn't that, and it never was), because they never expect to be required to know anything about Islam, and fully expect to pretend that the gorilla in the room, Islam, is not there -- well, that's over. Those days should be over for Israel. They should be over for India. They should be over for Christians in southern Nigeria and Buddhists in southern Thailand. And they should be over for the people in France and Italy, in England and Spain, in Belgium and Denmark and Germany and Holland, even if their benighted E.U. rulers, or their local governments, are still full of those who cannot permit themselves to recognize what is going on, and what is at stake.

A few weeks ago I harrumphed about the use of “may” in a sentence where “might” was required. The offending sentence was from The Telegraph: 

The July 7 London bombings may have been prevented had more resources been made available sooner, an official report into the circumstances leading to the attacks has claimed.

My measured response was as follows:

"Might have", not "may have", you illiterate fool.

The bombings were not prevented. The matter is not in doubt. I may have won the lottery. I don't know yet. I haven't checked my numbers. Had I chosen the right numbers last week, I might have won the lottery. But I didn't. So I didn't. If I had, I might have bought the Telegraph newspaper and sacked the writer of this piece.

I fear that the pedants are fighting a losing battle. Now The Times has also offended. A very interesting article about the closure of Bow Street Magistrates’ Court begins as follows:

HAD it been any other court on any other day, the nonappearance of a certain Mr Bunbury may have passed unnoticed.

"Might have", not "may have". It didn’t pass unnoticed, did it?

However, given that the court in question was none other than Bow Street Magistrates’ Court, where Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years’ hard labour for his lifestyle choice, and that the day was the last in its 271-year history, one suspected that somebody in this bastion of British justice was having a joke.

It was perhaps no coincidence that the absent defendant shared a surname with the Wildean character who exists only off-stage, in frequent ill-health, in The Importance of Being Earnest.

Lucy Bannerman, the writer of this otherwise excellent piece, should know better.

Why should this distinction – an important one, as it affects the meaning of the sentence – be so difficult to grasp? Here’s Charles Moore:

Further light on the difference between ‘may’ and ‘might’ (see Spectator’s Notes, 17 June) comes from my original correspondent, Mr J.D. Tunnicliffe. He writes: ‘One has to bear in mind that might, whatever non-grammarians may think, is either a past or conditional tense and cannot be anything else.’ In a postscript to another recent letter to me he adds, crushingly but correctly, ‘I cannot recall ever finding a misuse of may/might in the writings of Bill Deedes.’ I am relieved to find, though, that I am not alone in having found the subject confusing. The distinguished novelist Philip Pullman has written to me to say, ‘This was something that puzzled me till I got the hang of it.’ ‘The point,’ Mr Pullman goes on, ‘is simply this: “may” means that we’re still uncertain, “might” means that there was uncertainty once, but it has passed.’ He exemplifies the difference: ‘If it hadn’t been for the work of Bletchley Park, Germany might have won the second world war’. If one wrote ‘Germany may have won the second world war’, it would suggest one was unsure whether she did or not. Perhaps, in modern secondary schools, they are unsure about this. History matters.

Perhaps, if Charles Moore and Philip Pullman had problems with it, it is not so obvious after all.

Many things are obvious to other people, but not to me. It is obvious to nearly everyone in our office how to get rid of a paper jam in the photocopier, using the “helpful” diagram displayed. I could not do this if my life depended on it. Other people can, but they can’t use “may” and “might” correctly. If I am ever held hostage by an unhinged photocopier engineer, who orders me to unjam it on pain of death, I will be shot. Were my murder important enough to be reported in The Telegraph or The Times, the story would say:

If she had been able to unjam the photocopier, she may have been spared.

Anyone who cared – probably only a few curmudgeonly pedants – would then be left wondering whether I was still alive. I would be turning in my grave.

Speaking of friendship, the New York Post interviewed  Joseph Epstein, author most recently of  Friendship: An Expose.  I haven't read the book, but it sounds promising, as did his previous tome, the best-selling Snobbery: The American Version, which I also haven't gotten around to, perhaps because I'm not ready to commit.

From the Maureen Callahan's intro to her interview:


I particularly like this exchange:


I fall somewhere on Epstein's side of the divide: I can think of several friendships, my own and that of others, that collapsed when one party regularly began to seek some sort of therapeutic experience from a friend, regularly being the operative word.   For a few years, in fact, it seemed that everybody indulged in this sort of thing.  We thought we were getting somewhere, when in reality we were just getting stuck in the moment. 

This is the line promoted by Muslims the world over: it is the resistance to Islam that causes Muslim violence.  This is true on every level, whether it be speech critical of Islam (mustn't be allowed - causes "conflict and instability"), or an Infidel military response to violent provocation (also causes "confilct and instability"). Peace will only reign when the world surrenders.

Silly man.

WaPo: Bill Miller, the pianist whose light touch set the mood for many of Frank Sinatra's most memorable songs, died July 11 at Montreal General Hospital at the age of 91...

He was best known for his pensive introduction to the torch song "One for My Baby," written by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer. Sinatra recorded the tune in 1958 and sang it in almost every concert until he stopped performing in 1995.

Mr. Miller's unhurried piano line sets the mournful tone for the heartsick ballad, with its haunting opening lyric: "It's quarter to three, there's no one in the place except you and me."...

"He plays undulating chords in the background with a peculiar mixture of empathy and detachment," Robert Cushman wrote in 1998 in the British newspaper the Independent. "He also offers a comment on the song and the man who sings it; he's the man who's heard it all before."

Mr. Miller said he originally improvised the introductory passage while playing the song in a nightclub. Sinatra liked what he heard and asked his arranger, Nelson Riddle, to build the rest of the musical score around the piano part...

[Miller is part of the great tradition of the unassuming musician, the man who exists to contribute to the whole rather than to show off in the egotistical manner of the modern soloist. Their breed still exists. Adieu Bill and thank you for the work you left behind.]

I've been away on family business in Pennsylvania, so I'm trying to catch up here at the Iconoclast.  One of the many posts that caught my attention was Hugh Fitzgerald's Friday piece, What's NPR's Excuse?  It's worth quoting the first two paragraphs:


Is NPR, in fact, national or public?  A creature of Democratic congressmen of yore, it is now, for all intents and purposes Blue State Radio, its top people drawn mostly from the Northeast.  Products of Left-oriented universities, they preach the anti-West, multi-cultural line, but are themselves beholden to the fruits of capitalism and anything but multi-cultural in their own organization's demographics.  That makes them by turns schizoid and cynical.  Kind of a baby BBC by way of the New York Times.

But that's not why I stopped listening to them ages ago; I simply can't take the NPR Voice, which, instead of lulling me into the hypnotic state prerequisite for suggestion, always produces a strangly cloying claustrophopia.  Then, the Kafkaesque nightmare:  These voices are the ones heard on elevator speakers, the elevators that only go down.

Downtown Beirut - story in the Telegraph:

It was perhaps the most elegant exodus in history. Thousands of wealthy, well-dressed Arabs snarled the mountain roads leading to Syria with their Range Rovers and Porsches as they fled Lebanon yesterday.

There were women with expensive coiffures, husbands wearing designer sunglasses and teenagers playing the latest hand-held video games as Lebanon morphed from Arab world summer playground to ghostland...

It was bedlam at the arrivals hall on the Syrian border, as the wave of people leaving Lebanon crashed into the paper-heavy bureaucracy of the socialist Arab republic.

Enterprising Lebanese drivers and fixers were making a mint. What is normally a £30 taxi journey from Beirut became a life-saving exercise for which drivers were charging up to £600.

As the drivers did battle with Syrian immigration, those fleeing Lebanon sat listlessly in the cars, relieved to have made it to the border but careworn about friends and relatives they had left behind.

"The Israelis are destroying everything, we don't know why," said Sohad Aisk, a 29-year-old mother of five. She was crying. "Last night was just terrible for the children. We could not stay."

While the road into Lebanon was almost deserted, the other side was, in many places, bumper to bumper with heavily-laden traffic.

The journey was fraught because Israel airstrikes had cut the main highway connecting Beirut to the Syrian border, where it winds over the Mount Lebanon range. But there was still a way through, using dozens of smaller roads and passes.

Among Lebanese traffic police there was a Blitz spirit as they stood at normally obscure road junctions and guided drivers on less travelled routes that would avoid the bomb craters.

An exclusive report from the Sunday Mirror.  The triumph of new life in adversity.

LANCE Corporal Alan Tudball's world exploded around him when his tank was shelled in Iraq.  Trapped and badly wounded, he was saved only by the courage of his pal, Trooper Chris Finney, who risked his own life to free him as US jets blitzed their patrol in a "friendly fire" attack.  Back home and fighting for his life, Alan's wedding plans were put on hold and his hopes of becoming a dad seemed remote.  But the trauma was forgotten yesterday as Alan, 26, gazed into the eyes of baby son Peter, whose birth on June 17 was the fulfillment of his and wife Claire's dearest wishes.

Chris - now Lance Corporal - Finney, 22, who became the youngest serviceman ever to win the George Cross when he was just 18, said: "The medal is an honour, but at the end of the day it's just a piece of metal. What's more important to me is that Alan is alive and he has become a dad. Alan means a lot to me, he's a really good friend." The affection the couple hold for Chris is obvious, too. "He is simply brilliant, a true mate," Alan said.   "He risked his own life to save me. Without him I wouldn't be here today. He will always be a special uncle to my son."

Alan is now married to Claire with a home on the Wirral, Merseyside, but he still bears the scars of the day his armoured vehicle was destroyed by an American warplane as it led the British advance into Iraq near Basra. . . As he steadily recovered it was the fear that he might not be able to have children that haunted him. . .Alan, who has been medically discharged from the Army, said: "I knew I was suffering from high levels of depleted uranium poisoning caused by the American shells. . . Nature had taken its course. . . Life's now great. I am recovering well and although the baby keeps us awake, I don't mind . .

He and Chris were on patrol in a Scimitar armoured vehicle when two American jets attacked the unit by mistake. Chris managed to haul himself out of the blazing vehicle then noticed pal Alan was trapped screaming in the turret. He dashed back and rescued him, but the jets returned and again blitzed the patrol. Chris threw himself over Alan's body and was hit in the back and legs, while gunner Alan suffered wounds to the head. Recalling that day, Chris said: "Alan means a lot to me, he is a really good friend. I was pulling him free when the plane came back and fired again - I still have some shrapnel in me but I'm fine. It was great to go to Alan and Claire's wedding and now I'm looking forward to seeing Peter."

Friendship like that is a wonderful thing.  Whether between people, or nations, it is to be to be valued, not derided.  

Update, from the BBC - another British casualty in fighting around Basra.

From the BBC 

Endurance swimmer Lewis Gordon Pugh is attempting to become the first person to swim the length of the River Thames.

The 36-year-old lawyer will start out on Monday at Kemble, Gloucestershire, and finish at Southend-on-Sea in Essex. The 203-mile (327km) journey, which is expected to take 15 days, is to raise awareness about climate change.

A shorter swim of the Thames was made in August 2005, when charity fund-raiser Andy Nation swam 147 miles from Lechlade, Gloucs, to Teddington, London, to raise money for the Anthony Nolan Bone Marrow Trust. 

It is actually a tribute to the amount of environmental work that has been done these last 40 years that a swimmer could contemplate getting into the River between Leigh-on-Sea and Teddington at all. When I was a child the effluent was so thick that I once saw a duck walk on the water. Anybody who was pulled out was automatically stomach pumped. Now there are all manner of fish and mammals.  I didn’t see the Thames whale in January, she swam one way as I walked the other, the poor creature’s presence was a mistake and she died during the rescue attempt.  But salmon are common again, and a colony of cormorants at Lambeth Bridge look very well fed.  Seals appear and find their way out again safely and unharmed. You can even see little fish swimming about if you are lucky. The first time I saw a fish in the Thames my husband and I were looking at the Kathleen and May which was moored on the South Bank. It was small and silver and I cried, much to his amazement.

 

But aside from the quality of the water the Thames for much of its length is not a river for swimming. It is much narrower than it was in the past, but since the embankments were built it is deep and the currents and eddies are tremendous, especially around the pinions of the numerous bridges.  What people also forget is that it is tidal from the sea 40 miles east up to Teddington a town about 5 miles west of London. All through the city, as it passes landmarks like the Tower of London and the Houses of Parliament it rises and falls, twice a day about 16 ft. I can walk to work and pass a small beach, I walk back to the station 7 hours later and the water will be within 3 ft of the parapet.

I have read of people successfully swimming across the Thames in central London in years gone by, for a wager. These days it is unwise. This is from a report by the Maritime & Coastguard Agency. The coastguards, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution and the River Police all have a place in the safety on the Thames.

 

Early this morning at just before 1 a.m. an inebriated young woman jumped into the river at the London Eye for a swim across the River Thames. Again she was spotted in her attempt and the full resources of the rescue services available to London Coastguard were mobilised. She was located and rescued by the Tower Pier RNLI inshore lifeboat at Temple Stairs, a full mile down stream of where she had entered the water. The lifeboat crew reported that she was a very lucky lady as the current at the time was running at 3 knots which is a speed almost impossible to swim against by a normal person.

Frank Aubin-Hart of the London Coastguard said: “Both incidents graphically highlight the dangers of the River Thames in Central London which may appear inviting and placid but with strong currents, a fresh/salt water mix giving reduced buoyancy, means that survivability in the river is measured in moments rather than minutes. “

In the industrial part of the Thames, by Rainham and Tilbury, conditions are even more dangerous.  At Rainham the remains of concrete barges that provided a Mulberry harbour for the D-Day landings are only one obstacle. But once he gets that far he will have company in the form of this local diver.                                                          

I am sure Mr Pugh as a sober and seriously trained swimmer has researched this project. He intends to swim in several sessions each day and rest on his boat in between swims. He also has an unusual ability to raise his body temperature almost by will power which scientists think is to do with fluctuating hormone levels, (as any woman of a certain age will know) triggered by the anticipation of the exercise. I hope that he succeeds, and without putting the emergency services to any trouble. Not just because of global warming but to raise awareness that the River Thames should be a greater feature in the lives of those of us who live nearby, with easier access to it for all.

 

But I have been told that swimming the Channel is easier and less dangerous.

 

This is a good site with some lovely pictures of the more picturesque sights along the river. 

London River, oh the London River
All the love I have I'll give her
London River, oh the London River
That's the river for me

By Rod Shearman, sung by Fairport Convention. 

I hope not this line from Genesis -  Selling England by the Pound  

"Old man dies!" The note he left was signed
"Old Father Thames" - it seems he's drowned; 

This is from Jane Austin’s Emma – Mrs Knightly on the subject of Southend -

“We all had our health perfectly well there; never found the least inconvenience from the mud.”

Update of his progress at 22 July 2006 here.

The superb Tiger Hawk blog not only has an analysis of yesterday's spirited debate in the Corner but adds his own realist theory for why democratization is an important part of the strategy for confronting jihadism.  It's very much worth the read and, on balance, I'd say it's pretty much where Cliff May is — which is always a good place to be.

As a critic, I would say this much.  The administration would do well to study this argument. In its haste not to offend Muslims, the administration's rhetoric generally tries to take Islam off the table (the usual thing is to say that 19 terrorists "hijacked" a great religion, etc.).  I've always thought this was a grave tactical error:  it underestimates the jihadists; it suggests that it is not important for us to try to understand what the enemy thinks and believes; and it eliminates the possibility of any examination by which we might be able to develop principles for sorting out those Muslims who are sympathetic to the jihadists.

What I especially like about the Tiger Hawk analysis is that it gives militant Islam its due as a well-developed religio-social system.  It is necessary to do this if we are ever to understand its attraction to those it draws in and assess the chances of democracy (or anything else) as a competing system in the Muslim world. 

The downside, of course, is reality:  the jihadists' system DOES draw on Islamic scripture and is undeniably a creature of Islam.  That hardly means it is necessarily destined to dominate the Islamic world, but it does expose the shallowness of rhetoric that portrays jihadism as a fabrication that has nothing to do with true Islam.  Would understanding this cause many non-Muslims to be troubled by Islam in a way they are not now?  Probably, but nothing is being served by conscious avoidance of important information.

They are unlikely to grace any catwalk or adorn the figures of supermodels, but the latest in Islamic fashions got top billing from Iran's religious authorities yesterday in an exhibition aimed at promoting female modesty and countering the influence of western clothing.

Tehran's Imam Khomeini mosque hosted the country's first Islamic dress fair, in which ankle-length manteaus, or overcoats, and all-covering black chadors supplanted the sexually daring styles favoured by European designers. The 10-day event is being organised by Iran's police force along with the commerce ministry and the state broadcasting corporation, IRIB, to promote the idea of women dressing stylishly in line with the values in the Qur'an. - from this news item

Read Ayaan Hirsi Ali on the nature of this not so much puritanical as qur'anical dress code, and what it means. Then compare what she wrote with the so-called Muslim "feminists" such as Leila Abu-Lughod (of Columbia University -- what did you expect?), celebrating the "portable seclusion" that the burkha provides.

Whenever these "Muslim feminists" sense that Islam itself may be implicated, may be under attack, they beat a quick retreat, rally round Qur'an and Sunnah, and tell us a number of things:

1) There is no misogyny in the texts. If the Infidel audience knows better, then everything from misinterpretation (that "toothpick" idea), to feigned ignorance ("I'll have to check this, I've never heard of the Hadith you quote.") are used to deflect criticism.

2) There may be some apparent misogyny, but Islam represents a great advance, in its treatment of Islam, compared to what was practiced in the time of pre-Islamic Jahiliyya. Muhammad’s first wife was an energetic businesswoman, so how could one claim that Islam sanctions the mistreatment of women? Polygamy makes sense in a world where men die off (yes, come to think of it, it does, and if Muslims are killing every non-Muslim male and seizing the women, then polygamy makes sense, doesn't it?).

3) Aisha wasn't six when Muhammad first saw her. Aisha wasn't nine when he married her. She was nineteen, or eighteen, or nobody knows. Please show me those Hadith you have just quoted -- I've never heard of them. Didn't royal families in Europe give their daughters in dynastic marriage at the age of 12? So what's a few years? That story about Aisha's toys, and her being on the swing -- prove that that is one of the authentic Hadith. Stop talking about Aisha. Put the story in context. Yes, Islam is true for all time, and Muhammad is the Perfect Man for all time, but still -- context. In any case, even if Khomeini happened to reduce the marriageable age of girls to nine, what does that have to do with Muhammad? No, it's just a coincidence -- there you go again, being islamophobic.

4) Women love the burkha. They hate being the cynosure of all eyes. It's such a relief. It's like being in your own little shell, even as you move about in public. What could be better? Don't knock it unless you've tried it. Why shouldn't men insist on this? We all know what men are like, don't we? Beasts. Beasts that must not be aroused. In the privacy of your own home, however, just the way the Infidel secretary takes off her glasses and shakes out her hair and lifts up her skirt in those 1930s screwball comedies, a Muslim woman can take off that burqa and -- va-va-va-voom.

5) So many excuses. So much nonsense to feed the Infidels. So many ways of keeping them off the real scent. So little time.

Occasionally, only occasionally, there is honesty. Recently the BBC had a story about a study by the World Health Organization (or so I remember) on the effect of genital mutilation on mortality rates of women giving birth. On the side of the study was a black African woman. She was opposed by an Egyptian doctor, one Mounir Fawzi, who on the BBC declared the "diminishment" (as he demurely put it) of the female was done in accordance to the Sunnah and the Prophet Muhammad. That struck me, because seldom does one hear, openly expressed by female Muslims, the connection between this practice and anything to do with Islam. The phony Muslim "feminists" - the Leila Ahmads and the Fatima Mernissis and the Leila Abu-Lughods -- always end up defending Islam when they feel it is being linked to a practice that they know cannot be defended. While Leila Abu-Lughod, for example, can defend the imposed burqa as "portable seclusion" (carrying around your own tent, and pitching camp wherever you go), she can't quite find words to soothingly present female genital mutilation as a practice that women themselves desire. So she, and Mernissi, and Ahmad, try to convince Infidels that this has nothing to do with Islam.

Well, Mounir Fawzi happens to be an Egyptian doctor and a man. And he happened to tell the truth -- the truth that Muslims like himself believe that the Sunnah, the practice and example of the Prophet Muhammad, condone or even require this "diminishment."

It was good to have it there, expressed openly, for all those BBC listeners. How rare it is, after all, to have anything like the truth or truths about Islam coming through on the BBC. It will never happen when Israel is involved. It will never happen when America is involved. It will never happen when Muslims in Europe are involved.

But when it is a matter of some world organization condemning mistreatment of women, and when the spokesman for that condemnation is a certifiable third-worlder, a woman and a black African -- then, and perhaps only then -- will a BBC Program permit the truth to emerge. And the truth to emerge from the testimony of an Egyptian male doctor is that he, and many other Muslim males, are convinced, because of what Islam (not the Qur'an, but the Sunnah) teach him is that women's sexuality needs to be reduced, and the way to do that is to "diminish" certain parts of their bodies.

That justification by the Sunnah is not necessary for such a practice: not all those who practice female genital mutilation are Muslims.

But it is sufficient.

In an article in the New Duranty Times last year, Salman Rushdie wrote forcefully about the mistreatment of women in Pakistan (and also manifested some assumptions that he no doubt carries to this day):

IN honor-and-shame cultures like those of India and Pakistan, male honor resides in the sexual probity of women, and the "shaming" of women dishonors all men. So it is that five men of Pakistan's powerful Mastoi tribe were disgracefully acquitted of raping a villager named Mukhtar Mai three years ago. Theirs was an "honor rape," intended to punish a relative of Ms. Mukhtar for having been seen with a Matsoi woman. The acquittals have now been suspended by the Pakistan Supreme Court, and there is finally a chance that this courageous woman may gain some measure of redress for her violation.

Pakistan, however, has little to be proud of. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan says that there were 320 reported rapes in the first nine months of last year, and 350 reported gang rapes in the same period. The number of unreported rapes is believed to be much larger. The victim pressed charges in only one-third of the reported cases, and a mere 39 arrests were made. The use of rape in tribal disputes has become, one might say, normal. And the belief that a raped woman's best recourse is to kill herself remains widespread and deeply ingrained.

This was welcome, but as always with Rushdie, there was something not quite right. His emphasis is on the "cultural" aspects of mistreatment of women. There were in the article phrases about the "shame-and-honor" business that make it seem equally applicable to "Pakistan and India" and -- so the reader may at first understand and never quite clear up (perhaps Rushdie himself cannot quite clear up in his own brain)--that this is an indictment equally of "Muslim" Pakistan and "Hindu" India. He does go on to discuss the mistreatment, specifically, of a Muslim Indian woman by other Muslims, but one is still left with a slight unease that there is here more of the Ebadi-Mernissi-Ahmad "Islam has nothing to do with the mistreatment of women -- it is all a cultural thing."

Women have been mistreated everywhere in the world, for a long time. Sometimes less badly, sometimes worse. In the Western world, slowly but surely, that mistreatment has been constrained, punished, made the object of both legal sanction and societal disapproval. In the subcontinent one can found both Muslim and Hindu women who suffer. But Rushdie would have us believe that these sufferings are from the same kind of "cultural" factors. Are they, in fact? Or is the mistreatment of Hindu women possibly related to the centuries of Muslim rule, Muslim ways, that left their mark? I do not know.

But if one looks in Europe, at the two places where, for a while, Muslims ruled, one finds elements that can be attributed to that rule.

The two "would-that-it-were-so" remarks in Spanish ("Ojala" followed by the subjunctive) and in Italian ("Magari" -- most often now found standing alone) do not appear to have one-word cousins in the languages of other European countries that never endured the inshallah-fatalism of Muslim rule. The daughters of Albion were never introduced to the sisters of Inna.

Similarly, something like the honor-killings -- the crimes of passion, in Sicily, and the distinguishing features of the Mafia, not always to be found in the 'ndrangheta of Calabria, and the camorra of Naples (Doctoral students of Islam, Italy, history, sociology, psychology -- take careful note, for this is a very good topic for a doctoral thesis), can be related to the Muslim footprint, handprint, imprint.

Only someone versed in Hinduism can tell us if the status of Hindu women, in the villages, is a matter of "culture" or a matter of Muslim influence internalized, or a matter of Hindu doctrine.

But there is still something wishy-washy about Rushdie. He just can't face up to Islam as it is. He will never attain to the condition of an Ibn Warraq. He can't go the distance. He can't really read deeply in Islam, or in the history of Islam, and figure out why his own ancestors must have converted from Hinduism to Islam, thus leading him to the rather uneasy condition he finds himself, despite his fame and beautiful Hindu wife, now and forever.

He is one more of those "Muslim-for-identification-purposes-only" Muslims who cannot bring himself, out of fear (quite understandable under the circumstances), to admit that Islam has not been a force for good on those who were forcibly converted, and that it limits artistic expression, scientific inquiry, and in general, stunts mental growth -- as any Total Regulation and Total Explanation of the Universe, based on some texts of the 7th to 9th centuries, is highly likely to be.

The Eurovision Song Contest is no fun anymore. Everyone is self-consciously bad, which, as with bad writing, is not as good as the real thing.

For seriously cheesy singing and dancing, from Andrew Sullivan, via Harry's Place comes:

The Worst Music Video Ever

This is as bad as it could possibly get. And it looks genuine to me.

Update: the tune is quite catchy. What is wrong with me?

The Alawites who rule Syria constitute 12% of the population. Though they make up the officer corps, still -- there are those pesky non-Alawites among the men to worry about. When "real" Muslims massacred 82 Alawite miiltary cadets at a graduation ceremony, as part of an anti-regime, anti-Alawite campaign, Hafez al-Assad surrounded Hama, an Ikhwan center, and told his troops to kill anyone who moved. Twenty thousand were killed.

Tales pater, tales filius? Not quite. Bashir the son is a most myopic ophthalmologist. He may think that as long as he lets Sunnis use Syria as a point of entry into Iraq, to fight the good fight (and any fight that directs Muslim interest and energies away from the Alawites of Syria, disguised as "Ba'athists," is a good fight), and lets Syria be used the other way, as a place through which Iranian weaponry, money, and agents are delivered to Hezbollah in Lebanon. In such a way do the Alawites hope, by giving at the office, to stay in power (and to keep those reliable Armenian drivers and other Christians whom they can trust).

But is this true? What if the Israelis inflict a severe defeat -- not merely severe, but seen as humiliating, to the regime, and the agitation begins. Not the agitation from the would-be Chalabis -- Ghadri et al, or the false "reformers" like Hafez al-Assad's former aide and Vice-President, the Sunni Muslim Kaddam, now from the safety of his French pleasure-dome (bought with the loot his years in office permitted him to accumulate and now allow him to pretend to be a "reformer" when what he really wants is to return to power, this time as Mr. Big). Every Alawite house has a picture of Mary. Every Alawite village is known. Do the Alawites want a blood-bath, or do they want to decide now to retreat into their own Syrian redoubt, and no longer do Iran's bidding, or for that matter the bidding of Sunnis, and decide to preserve themselves, and save their weaponry, for a war within Syria to preserve themselves from the real Muslims?

So far Bashir al-Assad's eagerness to assuage Muslims, both Sunni and Shi'a, outside Syria, appears to have worked. He is still in power. Alawite generals still strut about. But for how long, if their forces are damaged and humiliated by the Israelis? How long did Gamal Abdel Nasser last, after the Six-Day War?

In his words to the Lebanese Prime Minister about calling upon Israel to limit damage, one assumes Bush was just uttering platitudes. He's good at that. And if he expressed a hope that civilian casualties would be kept to a minimum, he would only have been stating what is obvious: that is exactly what the Israelis have been doing. And the targets they have selected are either in Hezbollah-held territory, or meant to lessen Hezbollah's ability to import and move weaponry around (those airports, those bridges) -- and also to pressure Hezbollah, seen correctly by the Christians, the Druse, and the Sunni Muslims as the source of the problem, to finally deal with Hezbollah as they should, collectively, have done long ago.

Anyone who sees the entire picture, whether sitting at Val di Colle d'Elsa, or in Paris, or in the offices of MI5 in London, or in Mumbai, or in Bangkok, and recognizes what is going on around the world, realizes or should realize that the Israelis are not to be chastised but rooted for, urged to keep going and not to stop. For what they are doing now to two of the entirely fungible, interchangeable Muslim terrorist groups, Hamas and Hezbollah, is at least as important as what the Americans did to Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, or whatever tiny benefit has accrued to Infidels from the removal of Saddam Hussein. (No benefits have accrued to Infidels from that ongoing and expensive "Light-Unto-the-Muslim-Nations" business in Iraq).

This is a war. The war has gone on, with long intervals of non-war when the wherewithal was lacking, and the need unperceived, since the beginning of Islam. It is the war of Believers against Infidels. It can, but need not, proceed through qital, combat. Other weapons -- the "money weapon" and "pen, speech" and now the demographic weapon, are all available.

The war continues within lands controlled by Muslims whenever and wherever possible. Muslims control Bangladesh, but they still persecute, still drive out, still murder Hindus. Muslims control Indonesia, but they make war on Christians in the Moluccas, in Sulawesi. They make war, when they can, on Hindus, having driven Hinduism back to its sole redoubt of Bali. They make war in Egypt on the sole remaining Egyptians who have remained true to their pre-Islamic heritage (how many of those "Muslim Arabs" in Egypt are really the descendants of Copts forcibly converted, say, in the 12th or 13th centuries?).

And the war now is being waged, in forms less obvious to those who think of "war" as boots and bombs alone, all over the countries of Western Europe. It may not be obvious, because a war conducted through the instruments of Da'wa and demographic conquest doesn't look like "war," even if the final goal is the same as that of the violent Jihad conducted, for long periods continuously, for long periods intermittently, over 1350 years. The highest point of Muslim expansion was marked in the West by the defeat near Poitiers. This was followed, as the tide of Islam receded, by the 700 years of the Reconquista in Spain. In the East, the high point was marked by the two attacks on Vienna, the last in 1683. But Muslims never ceased, when and where they could, to continue raiding parties up and down the coasts of Christian Europe, or on Christian shipping, until the military response of the Christian victims became too vigorous and effective -- as happened in the early 1800s with the so-called Barbary Pirates.

Now the Israelis, who live in a state of maximum peril, and always will, have been forced, and are being required, to inflict such damage as they can to force the enemy to not be quite so wrongheaded in its interpretation of the withdrawal from north and from south. And a sound defeat is needed -- one that Israel keeps being prevented from achieving. The last time it did so was in 1948, when it received no military aid from outside, and the only thing that prevented the Jews of Israel from taking, as they could and should have, all of Western Palestine, was Ben Gurion's belief that, for practical nation-building reasons, it was best to stop where, and when, they did.

They should be encouraged and cheered.

And after that, every effort should be made to encourage them, as well, to come to their senses about the nature of the war against them, the need not merely to be more powerful than the enemy, but to be obviously so, in order that the Arab and Muslim leaders may invoke Darura -- that doctrine of necessity. For that is the only way, in the end, to keep the peace, if that is the goal, in that part of the Middle East, between the Infidel state of Israel, and all those who are commanded to forever wage war on Infidels in order to spread Islam and to ensure that the conditions for the imposition of Sharia are attained, and Muslims rule everywhere.

We are very pleased to announce Iconoclast contributor Andy McCarthy will be coming to our Nashville rally, Protecting America: Immigration and Terror at Two Rivers Mansion on Sept. 14th.

Andrew C. McCarthy is a former federal prosecutor and a Contributor at National Review Online.  From 1993 through 1996, while an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, he led the prosecution against the jihad organization of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, in which a dozen Islamic militants were convicted of conducting a war of urban terrorism against the United States that included the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and a plot to bomb New York City landmarks.  Mr. McCarthy also made major contributions to the prosecutions of the bombers of the United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the Millennium plot attack Los Angeles International Airport. 

Following the September 11 attacks, Mr. McCarthy supervised the U.S. Attorney's Anti-Terrorism Command Post in New York City, coordinating investigative and preventive efforts with numerous federal and state law enforcement and intelligence agencies.  From 1999 through 2003, he was the Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District's satellite office, responsible for federal law enforcement in six counties north of New York City.

Mr. McCarthy is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Justice Department's highest honors: the Attorney General's Exceptional Service Award (1996) and Distinguished Service Award (1988).  He has served as a Special Assistant to the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and as an Associate Independent Counsel in the investigation of a former cabinet official.  He has also been an Adjunct Professor of Law both at the Fordham University School of Law and at New York Law School. 

He writes extensively on a variety of legal, social and political issues for National Review and Commentary, among other publications, as well as providing commentary for various television and radio broadcasts.