The crossword has been compared to coded messages used by the French Resistance in WWII
A Venezuelan crossword writer says he has been questioned by intelligence agents after being accused of hiding a coded assassination message in a puzzle.
Neptali Segovia denies using his crossword in the newspaper Ultimas Noticias to incite the murder of President Hugo Chavez's brother, Adan.
Answers to clues included the words "kill" and "Adan".
The accusation was made by a pro-government television commentator.
Political tension has been rising in Venezuela ahead of October's presidential election and because of uncertainty over the health of President Chavez, who is being treated for cancer.
'Nothing to hide'
Ultimas Noticias said Mr Segovia went voluntarily to the headquarters of Venezuela's intelligence service after agents came looking for him at the newspaper's office in Caracas.
"I went because no-one is more interested in clarifying this than me," the paper quoted him as saying.
"I have nothing to hide because the work I have been doing for 17 years only has a cultural and educational intention," he added.
Mr Segovia said he had denied the accusation and had been treated respectfully.
The accusation against him was made earlier this week by television pundit Miguel Angel Perez Pirela, who presents a programme on the state channel VTV.
He said a team of psychologists and mathematicians had concluded that the Spanish-language crossword contained a coded assassination plot against President Chavez's brother Adan.
"These sorts of messages were used a lot during World War II," he said, comparing it to secret codes used by the French Resistance.
Correspondents say the story has caused widespread amusement, but also highlights an atmosphere of growing political polarisation in Venezuela.
President Chavez and his supporters have frequently accused opposition groups of plotting violence in the run-up to October's presidential election.
The opposition have in turn accused government supporters of planning to hang on to power by force if Mr Chavez loses the election to challenger Henrique Capriles Radonski or is unable to stand because of ill health.
Adan Chavez is governor of Barinas state and has been named as a possible successor to his brother.
Hugo Chavez has said he is determined to beat cancer and win the election, but secrecy about his illness has fuelled persistent rumours that it may be worse than officially admitted.
The Venezuelan president, who has been in power since 1999, has in the past accused his opponents and the US of plotting to assassinate him.
U.S. military embarrassed by Islamophobic lectures
Narayan Lakshman
First it was the Koran-burning pastor Terry Jones, who was in no way connected to the U.S. government.
This week a man deeply embedded in the Obama administration, Virginia-based military instructor Lieutenant Colonel Matthew Dooley, raised the spectre of a disturbing ["disturbing to whom? To the appeasement-minded Indian Narayan Lakshman writing for "The Hindu:" apparently, but not to everyone] American Islamophobic trend once again, when he virtually called for [no, he did not "call for" butr suggested intelligent consideration of various possiblities] a “Hiroshima, Nagasaki” – style “destruction” of the holy Islamic sites of Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia.
Within what Dooley described to his increasingly nervous classroom [how does the writer know that his classroom was "increasingly nervous"? Apparently only a few people complained, though that was enough to trigger the idiotic shutting down of Dooley's effort, which though blunt, was a "useful corrective" to the usual self-deceiving mush, and even salutary] last month as a potential “Counter-Jihad Op Model” for the U.S. he spoke of the need to reach a position where “Saudi Arabia [is] threatened with starvation, Mecca and Medina destroyed [and] Islam is reduced to cult status.”
When several students raised objections and brought the material to the notice of superiors in late April, the Department of Defence (DOD) suspended the course and was also said to have suspended Dooley, although he reportedly still has his job teaching at a city college in Norfolk.
At the time Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ordered the directors of joint military education institutions to examine the scope and content of training and education courses dealing with Islamic extremism “to ensure they are appropriate and in keeping with U.S. values and principles,” according to officials.[which "values and principles"? Truth? The instinct for self-preservation? Or the fearful desire not to offend Muslims, and those who collaborate unthinkingly with them?]
In his talks Dooley also had harsh words for efforts within the U.S. to promote inter-faith harmony. Specifically he addressed the controversial “Ground Zero Mosque” project, called the Cordoba Initiative, asking the class, “Why the name Cordova? Why timed to 10 year anniversary of 9/11?” [and what is wrong with this question?]
Reacting to the now publicly-available text of the lectures, General Dempsey was quoted as saying, “It was just totally objectionable, against our values, and it wasn't academically sound. ... We're pushing back on liberal thought. This was just objectionable, academically irresponsible.” ["We're pushing back on liberal thought"? What does this mean? And why exactly was what Dooley presented "objectionable" and "academically irresponsible"? Detailed objections, not attitudinizing, are required. But none are offered, none even thought necessary to offer.]
While officials admitted that the course had been taught at the staff college since 2004, it was only this week that the details of the class curriculum came to light, with Wired.com’s Danger Room blog obtaining hundreds of pages of course material and reference documents from a source familiar with the contents of the class.
Among the more troubling arguments contained within the lectures, Dooley spent significant time disputing against the presence of a moderate, tolerant mainstream Islam. “We have now come to understand that there is no such thing as ‘moderate Islam,” Dooley noted in his July 2011 presentation.
“It is therefore time for the U.S. to make our true intentions clear. This barbaric ideology will no longer be tolerated. Islam must change or we will facilitate its self-destruction,” he argued.
He also pressed the point that the U.S. was founded under a “Judeo-Christian” ethic of reason, and said to the young recruits in his class, that as professional soldiers their oath forced them to pick a side.
Erick Stakelbeck, CBN’s premier analyst on Terrorism has an upcoming date to speak at Portland State University (PSU) on Monday May 14th. The event is sponsored by the Christians United for Israel (CUFI) campus chapter. The poster for the event has both Israeli and US flags and Stakelbeck’s bio on it. It was found by a Jewish student, as Stakelbeck pointed in his blog post, Anti-Semites Threaten Ahead of My May 14 Speech at Portland State University. This is not Stakelbeck’s first exposure on college campuses to anti-Israel and antisemitic pro-Palestinian activism equating Israeli 'occupation' of the disputed territories with the Nazi genocide that murdered six million Jewish men, women and children. He makes the point that Christians will not remain silent as many did during the Shoah.
He goes to elucidate why this has occurred:
Over the past four years, I've been privileged to give countless similar talks around the country, including many for CUFI. Yet the upcoming Portland State event is the first in which I've actually received a threat in advance: and a viciously anti-Semitic one at that.
PSU's CUFI chapter has put up posters around campus to promote the event, which is open to the public. The posters feature the American and Israeli flags, plus my picture and bio. Well, as you can see vandals defaced the posters, drawing swastikas over the Star of David and scrawling pro-Palestinian slogans.
[ . . .]
This kind of vandalism and anti-Semitic rhetoric has become commonplace on college campuses throughout the country, as has open support for jihadist genocide against the Jews. How bad is it? This bad. Comparing Israel to Nazi Germany due to Israel's supposed oppression of the Palestinians (a "genocide" that is "worse than the Holocaust," as some pro-Palestinian fanatics have told me in the past) is a favorite tactic of radical Islamists and their allies on the radical left. Notice the slogan scrawled on the poster above: "Never again includes Palestinians." The term "never again" is commonly used by Jews as a reminder that the days of pogroms, genocides and forced expulsions are over--thanks in large part to the existence of Israel--and can never be allowed to return. For pro-Palestinian radicals to co-opt it and suggest that Israelis are the equivalent of the greatest Jew-hating machine of all time is not just insensitive and absurd: it's pure evil.
My third thought: who was behind the vandalism? I don't have that answer, but based on history, my best guess is that it was either elements of the radical left or Islamists on campus, or perhaps a combination of both. I've long documented the work of Muslim Brotherhood-tied groups at American universities. And with Portland State offering courses like this, it's not surprising that good little Leftists--who are invariably hostile to Israel--are being produced.
Portland State University administrators and campus police have been notified about the threats and I'm fully expecting that they will launch an investigation and have ample security on hand for Monday night's event. If they do not, and if they allow anti-Semitic radicals to disrupt my speech, run amok during the Q and A or intimidate others in the audience (click here to watch a particularly egregious 2010 example from UC-Irvine) you will surely hear about it in this space come Tuesday morning.
Islamists attempted--and failed--to hijack my last speech for CUFI on a college campus. And if they attempt a repeat at Portland State, they will fail again.
Anti-Semites beware: This is not 1944. Bible-believing Christians will not sit idly by in shameful silence and watch as Jews are threatened, once again, with extinction. As my friends at CUFI so often say, quoting the Book of Isaiah, "For Zion's sake, I will not remain silent." No matter how many threats are thrown our way, we will continue to stand strong and speak the truth with boldness.
Kol Hakavod (outstanding in Hebrew) to Erick and the courageous CUFI chapter at PSU for sponsoring his talk this coming Monday, May 14th.
Vanderbilt University alumnus John Murray published an op-ed in today’s edition of the Wall Street Journal on the furor in Tennessee raised over Governor Bill Haslam’s threat to veto state legislation opposing the university’s announced policies of non-discrimination for student religious groups on campus. The furor was created when it was revealed that the new university policy could force many Christian, Jewish even Muslim groups to go off campus because of the more than $24 million in state aid provided to this elite university in Nashville, nicknamed “the Harvard of the South”.
Haslam’s rationale for abetting cultural relativism at Vanderbilt, originally founded as a Christian institution, is that the legislation passed by both the House and Senate in Tennessee would interfere with the administration of a private university, hence, his veto threat. One Vanderbilt alumnus told us that for campus Christian and Jewish groups to remain on campus, they might have to elect a member of the Muslim Student Association to the board or even the head of these non-Muslim religious student activities as evidence of non-discrimination.
You may recall the University’s reaction to the furor raised by the Muslim chaplain at Vanderbilt Awadh A. Binhazim. He suggested in response to a student query during a program on “what it means to be a Muslim” that Shariah Islamic law condoned death sentences for gays. The exchange was:
"Under Islamic law, is it punishable by death if you are a homosexual?"
The University’s response was to consider Binhazim’s reply as protected speech (an extension of the 1964 US Supreme Court Brandenburg decision):
"No view expressed at a Project Dialogue or similar campus forum should be construed as being endorsed by Vanderbilt. The university is dedicated to the free exchange of ideas. It is the belief of the university community that free discussion of ideas can lead to resolution and reconciliation."
Fast forward to the current debate over the new Vanderbilt policy with regard to non-discrimination in religious student activities. Have we heard from the Vanderbilt Center for the First Amendment on this debate? A review of current press opinion from the First Amendment Center website found nothing on this topic.
Last week, Tennessee legislators sent a message to Vanderbilt University: Religious liberty matters. Large majorities in both houses passed a bill to prohibit the school from interfering in the ability of student groups to select their own leaders and members, define their own doctrines and resolve their own disputes—or Vanderbilt risks losing $24 million in state funding.
The legislation follows Vanderbilt's decision to stop recognizing campus religious organizations that require their leaders to accept certain religious beliefs on which they are founded. The Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Vanderbilt Catholic, Navigators and other groups—ministering to about 1,500 students—would effectively be moved off campus in the name of "nondiscrimination."
Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam has stated that although he opposes Vanderbilt's policy, he plans to veto the bill because it is "inappropriate for government to mandate the policies of a private institution." (Thirty-six members of Congress have urged the university to reconsider, stating that its exemption of fraternities and sororities but not religious groups "suggests hostility on the part of Vanderbilt toward religious student groups.") (Read More)
Moscow: Around 24,000 women were kidnapped and forced into marriage in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan in the past three years, an official report said. The ombudsman's office managed to prevent seven forced marriages in the first three months of 2012.
Last year, acting president Rosa Otunbayeva said 15,000 women are kidnapped and forced into a marriage every year, with many of them later committing suicide. Kyrgyzstan last year observed a national anti-bride-stealing month in November.
About 20 percent of all marriages in Kyrgyzstan are forced, according to rights activist Alexandra Yefrenko. Most marriages of the sort are sealed by Islamist clerics, not civil registrars, she said.
The Parliament has pushed in recent months to make civil registration mandatory for cleric-sanctioned matrimonial unions, effectively outlawing forced marriages. However, the bill was declined in January.
Legislator Asiya Sasykbayeva said at the time that her colleagues were looking to protect polygamy, an Islamic tradition formally banned but defacto present in Kyrgyzstan, EurasiaNet website reported. Many lawmakers have several wives, she said.
Israeli PM Netnayahu anmd DPM Mofaz in new unity government
A tip of the hat to Imre H.
Like a lot of interested Zionists, I woke up in the US Tuesday morning with surprising news from Israel. PM Netanyahu had announced a deal to form a unity government with newly elected head of the Kadima Party, former IDF Chief of Staff, Gen. Shaul Mofaz, an Iranian Jew by birth, as a partner in the new government. Mofaz will become Deputy PM without portfolio in the new unity government. The unity government was approved Wednesday by a vote of 73 to 21 in the Knesset. Until that announcement virtually everyone was expecting Bibi to hold new general elections previously announced for September 4th. The polls generally gave him and Likud a commanding lead. What we didn’t realize was that Bibi had probably begun negotiations with Mofaz on a unity government after his Party leader election victory and the announced retirement from politics of former Kadima leader and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni.
From discussions with seasoned observers of the Israeli political scene, Netanyahu could have won in a walk this coming September, but it still would have left him brokering a ruling coalition with minority parties for a price. This way with Mofaz aboard, he keeps a political opponent close at hand and involved until elections scheduled for October 2013. On the domestic issues, this new coalition will have more than 94 votes in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. It will enable this coalition of a majority of center right parties to undertake some important long overdue changes in laws talked about for decades. Prime most among these is the lifting of the exemption of the waiver from compulsory military service of the extreme orthodox Israel Jews, the Tal law that has rankled many Israeli parents of draft age young men and women. A second priority is to modify Israel’s proportionate voting system that gave representation in the Knesset to an array of splinter parties that has stymied successive governments since the founding of the Jewish nation. Another is the reform of civil marriage and divorce, currently under the provenance of the Chief Rabbinates, the Ashkenazi and Sephardic, under the system inherited from the Turkish Caliphate carried over from the British Palestinian Mandate. That will make many Israeli couples happy because they would not have to elope to Cyprus for a civil marriage or obtain a get from a Beth Din or religious court for a divorce. The related problem is the twilight status of sons and daughters of Russian olim (immigrant) families of mixed or uncertain parentage. That has resulted in a system of IDF conversions, not recognized by the Chief Rabbis. A number of Russian immigrant IDF service personnel killed in action have been deprived from being buried in hallowed consecrated ground, which rankled the Russian community. Then there are issues about continuation of further privatization reforms, as well as grappling with the compartmentalization of Israel’s educational system. Peace overtures to the Palestinian Authority by Netanyahu have been rebuffed. This despite the urging of President Obama and the Quartet. The peace process in the wake of the Arab Spring is virtually moribund for all intents and purposes. Israel is awaiting the results of the May 23rd Presidential elections in Egypt. Those elections are decidedly more Islamist with both Salafist and Muslim Brotherhood candidates discussing ending the cold peace of the 1979 Camp David Accords. That also raises the issue of what the unity government will do regarding the settlements, compounded by recent Supreme Court decisions regarding destruction of illegal settlements. While that is the hope of the unity government the reality will be a high wire act to obtain the required 81 votes to approve these changes. Australian Israeli commentator Isi Leibler gave this assessment in a Yisroel Hayomcolumn:
Of course, the most immediate benefit of this government would be the demonstration of unity conveyed to the world and the message that the government, far from being a right-wing body, speaks in the name of the vast majority of Israelis. The presence of three former Israel Defense Forces chiefs of staff in the cabinet also gives credibility to whatever steps we undertake in relation to the threat of a nuclear Iran, solidifying grassroots support for us in the United States. It would also strengthen our relationship with Diaspora Jews and marginalize those abroad who have the gall to tell us that they know better than ourselves what is good for us.
Conservative commentators in Israel like Caroline Glick in the Jerusalem Postput the immediate focus on Iran. Her considered judgment was that the unity government would have the freedom to decide when and under what circumstances to undertake a possible attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Glick noted:
That if all other options fail, that Israel will be forced to attack Iran’s nuclear installations militarily.
[. . .]
When taken on its merits, the unity deal is an example of a situation in which Netanyahu was presented with an offer he’d be an idiot to refuse. In return for essentially nothing, he built himself the strongest and largest coalition Israel has ever seen. He gave Mofaz nothing but breathing space for a year.
PM Netanyahu’s warned visiting EU Foreign Minister Ashton in Jerusalem this week that Iran was continuing enrichment while these meetings were going on. Ashton will shortly leave for meetings with Iran nuclear envoys and representatives of the UN Security Council Five Permanent Members and Germany (the P5+1) in Baghdad. The likelihood of a possible Iranian nuclear attack scenario may have also prompted Bibi to cut a deal with Kadima’s Mofaz as it would place three former IDF COS in the security cabinet (Barak, Mofaz and Moshe Ya’alon) to assist in addressing the question of the military options. Pulling the trigger on the Iran nuclear attack is complicated by a number of factors reflected in prior analyses by outside experts and national security journalists in Israel like Ronen Bergman. (See our interview with him in the Feb NER.) A further complication would be whether such attacks would necessitate a three front war: Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. The latter two are equipped with tens of thousands of rockets and missiles that could range across all of Israel. While the Iron Dome system demonstrated, at considerable cost per kill, the ability to intercept short range rockets and missiles, there is not a full umbrella of air defense over Israel. This despite Rafael Systems manufacturing units working round the clock. It might take a few years to achieve complete protection of Israel. That was not lost on the US Congress when the House recently voted to authorize upwards of $680 million in funds to expand the Iron Dome System. This act was in defiance of the Obama Defense Department, who wanted Israel to share the drawings for the system as a quid pro quo.
The final consideration of when to attack and using what means is obviously known only to IDF planners. The Netanyahu security cabinet knows that while an attack is complicated, it is not infeasible. However, the issue is at what cost in casualties of young pilots, special ops personnel and civilians in Israel.
Hence, while the international media’s first reaction, upon hearing the announcement of the new unity government, was that Israel was girding its loins for an Iran attack, that prospect is not immediately clear as to when it will occur. One thing for certain, any attack by Israel under this new unity government will have the full support of its people, while it may not have the support of the US. President Obama has made it abundantly clear that such an Israeli attack on Iran would be disruptive to the world’s oil trading markets. Moreover, it could impinge on Obama’s goal to be re-elected on November 6th. With Netanyahu’s masterful unity deal, he has eliminated that uncertainty for Israel. Bibi is now considered by fellow Israelis as HaMelech, The Kingmaker in Hebrew, for accomplishing this. How this will turn out we may shortly see.
The BDS movement can chalk up another minor victory when the Irish folk band Dervish were forced to pull out of a concert in Israel recently after yet another anti-Israel onslaught by the pro-Palestinian (or rather, anti-Israel) Irish Palestinian Solidarity group (IPSC or IPSG) – whom I mentioned in a previous article on antisemitism in Ireland. The Irish Justice Minister, Alan Shatter, is outraged and has accused the group of cyberbullying:
Justice Minister Alan Shatter has launched a blistering attack on the Irish Palestinian Solidarity Group (IPSG), accusing them of “cyberbullying” folk group Dervish who were forced to pull out of a planned concert in Israel after a concerted campaign.
The band cancelled the tour planned for June, citing an “avalanche of negativity” and “venom” directed towards them on social media websites. Dervish singer Cathy Jordan said the band members were not politically minded and were only due to go on the three-date tour at the invitation of an Israeli friend and musician called Avshalom.
Ms Jordan wrote on the band’s Facebook page: “In hindsight, it was very naive of me to think our motives would not be misunderstood and misrepresented.”
No, Ms. Jordan. You were not naive. You are musicians who shouldn’t have to premeditate your motives for going on a concert tour. Politics should not be involved in culture.
The group said they have opted out of the tour because they were unaware there was a cultural boycott in place when they agreed to the performances. In fact, there is no official boycott of Israel and artists are free to play in the country if they wish.
Well said. Bullies like the IPSC make sure that their victims targets do not know the full truth.
Now Mr Shatter, who is Jewish, has delivered a broadside against the band’s critics.
Why the need to mention Mr. Shatter’s religion? Of course, this is a rhetorical question. The newspaper implies that it is his religion which is the sole reason he is defending Israel. No other civilized person could sanction such a defence apparently.
It is safe to say that the Gifford Lectureships are the outstanding series of lectures in their field of study, but it is also safe to say that their field of study is hardly the pre-eminent one that it once was. The series was established by Adam Lord Gifford, a leading jurist in Scotland, with a bequest to four universities to co-sponsor a series of lectures to “promote and diffuse the study of Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term – in other words, the knowledge of God.” The lectures have been delivered annually since 1888, with the exception of years during the Second World War. The four universities are those of Edinburgh, Glasgow, St. Andrews, and Aberdeen.
Many significant books of science and the humanities, including theology, have been based on the texts of these lectures. Recent lectures have been broadcast in part on YouTube. For some time now the Gifford website has been sponsored by the Templeton Fund which tries its level best (without notable success) to reconcile religion and science by directing some of its vast wealth to the men and women and movements who or which try to do so.
The Gifford lecturers are recognized to be the pre-eminent thinkers in their respective fields. The list of the 120 or so speakers includes “household names,” and proof of this is that so many of the speakers are recognized by their last names alone: Arendt, Bohr, Dewey, Frazer, Gilson, Heisenberg, von Hügel, Müller, Murdoch, Niebuhr, Schweitzer, Tillich, Watson, Whitehead, etc.
In that list of “last names,” I did not include James because William James, the philosopher who was a Gifford lecturer, might be confused with his brother Henry James, the novelist who was not. Nor did I include in the high-recognition category the name Sagan, which identifies the celebrated astrophysicist and author Carl Sagan. (I will compare and contrast their contributions in due course.)
It is of passing interest to note that two distinguished Canadian philosophers have lately addressed these Scottish university audiences: Patricia Churchland in 2009 and Charles Taylor in 2010. Churchland is a noted “neurophilosopher” and Taylor is a “communitarian critic” of the modern-day project of liberalism and secularism. I lack the competence to assess Churchland’s many contributions to the nexus of neurology and philosophy, but I find Taylor’s critique of “the secular age” to be suave though largely beside the point.
It is of more-than-passing interest to compare and contrast the Gifford Lectures of William James and Carl Sagan. James delivered his series of talks in 1900-02 in Edinburgh; Sagan delivered his series in Glasgow in 1985. Thus they were heard eighty years apart. The title that James gave his series of lectures is so memorable that once heard it is never forgotten. He called it “Varieties of Religious Experience.” The memorably titled book, a classic in its field, was published in 1902, eight years before his death. The Harvard philosopher and psychologist was a brilliant thinker, a gifted writer, and the co-founder of the theory of Pragmatism. As well, he was the systematizer of his chosen field with “Principles of Psychology” published in 1890.
Carl Sagan bears a famous name for his contributions to the popularization of science, especially astronomy and cosmology, which were featured in his thirteen-part, television series Cosmos in 1980. As well as a distinguished astrophysicist, he served as director of Cornell University’s Laboratory for Planetary Studies. In due course Sagan became a leading spokesperson for “sceptical inquiry.”
His Gifford talks were titled “The Search for Who We Are” but the series was not published under that title but as Varieties of Scientific Experience. Note the substitution of the word “scientific” for the word “religious.” These Gifford lectures were delivered in 1985, Sagan died in 1996, and the book appeared in 2006. The editing, the publication, and perhaps the titling were undertaken by Ann Druyan, the author’s widow and a talented writer and presenter in her own right. In many ways the title is quite appropriate, for it recalls the earlier title of James’s book and it strikes the non-scientific reader that it could be regarded as an updated version of James’s argument, a revisioning of what is essentially a religious-scientific discussion.
James was a psychologist through and through, Sagan an astrophysicist through and through. James peered into the human soul (that is, the innermost nature of man) to find the rationale for the “religious experience.” To accomplish the same end, Sagan peered into the heavens (in the sense of the planets and the galaxies) to find the fundament of the “scientific experience.” One professor explored the depths of man, the other professor the heights of creation. James was a materialist for whom ideas mattered, and the same may be said of Sagan. The fabled “sense of wonder” was common to both men, and they conveyed its excitement when they expatiated on the surprises found in their subjects. James’s book is subtitled “A Study in Human Nature.” Sagan’s book is subtitled “A Personal View of the Search for God” in the same way that his television series Cosmos was subtitled “A Personal Voyage.” What the dual approaches to the mysteries of man’s nature and the nature of the universe is the mind of man.
Much changed in the Western world and its human values between the year 1900 when James delivered his lectures and the year 1985 when Sagan addressed his audience. The term “Natural Theology” fell out of favour and so did the unthinking respect that intellectuals paid to partisan proponents of biblical scholarship. Sagan began his lecture on “The God Hypothesis” with these words:
“The Gifford Lectures are supposed to be on the topic of natural theology. Natural theology has long been understood to mean theological knowledge that can be established by reason and experience and experiment alone. Not by revelation, not by mystical experience, but by reason. And this is, in the long, historical sweep of the human species, a reasonably novel view.”
Sagan found this view laudable, but only up to a point. Thereupon he dismissed all the traditional arguments for the existence of God (or gods) and substituted for them arguments found in Freud’s psychoanalytic theory and Darwin’s natural selection, arguments that account for man’s continued and unthinking belief in a hierarchy of unseen deities or dimensions. He did this in a lecture or chapter titled “The God Hypothesis.”
In the early years of the Twentieth Century, psychologists tackled the problems posed by psychical research and this would have delighted James who, after all, had served as president of both the British and the American Societies for Psychical Research. What had been regarded as the study of “abnormal psychological states” came to be considered the study of “anomalous experiences.” One of the most impressive books in the field of psychical research and parapsychological studies is a posthumously published collection of James’s occasional papers on the subject, both abstract and anecdotal, titled William James on Psychical Research, edited by the psychologist Gardner Murphy and the compiler Robert Ballou. James felt that there were “unknowns” in the field, but that they may be destined to remain “forever unknown.”
It is hard to affirm that there has been any progress in the field of Religious Studies (called Comparative Religion or History of Religion) over the last century, certainly none compared with the advances made in science, notably in physics and in astronomy. The physicist’s description of the sub-atomic world went hand-in-hand with the astronomer’s discovery of the expanding universe. James was willing to give spirit-mediums a try, being impressed with the performances of a Mrs. Piper. Sagan dismissed such performances out of hand, instancing the childish and undirected nature of spirit-communication.
In the wake of the Second World War, the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence began to be considered seriously by scientists like Sagan and his colleague Frank Drake (of the famous Drake Equation which quantifies the variables connected with the possible existence right now of other technological civilizations elsewhere in the universe). During the Cold War, Sagan took a leading position in opposition to the Strategic Defence Initiative (Star Wars) and he discussed in harrowing terms the possibility of Nuclear Winter and the extinction of human life on Earth (with the continued existence of some forms of cockroaches and sulphur-eating worms at the bottom of the seas – a fate that casts in the shade the Christian fundamentalists’ Armageddon). All these matters are discussed by Sagan. James would have known about none of this and might well have been horrified by the way societies were behaving in the second half of the Twentieth Century.
“Forever unknown” was not the position taken by Sagan. For a scientist with both speculative and operative capability, he was surprisingly open to dissident theories and wrote remarkable essays, in Broca’s Brain and elsewhere, that examined the fantasies of Velikovsky and the fancies of ufologists. He appreciated the hold that such ideas have on all of us who live on this “pale blue dot” in our “demon-haunted world.” He had little time for spiritualists and self-styled psychics, claiming that spirit-mediums always assured him that “love is important” and never offered proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem!
James delivered twenty lectures which examined the “religious sentiment,” both personal and institutional, in which he introduced the useful division of mankind into those people who are “once-born” and those who are “twice-born.” The former accept things as simple; the latter regard things as complex. He considered sickness and health with respect to optimism and pessimism of the spirit, the notion of conversion, the ideal of saintliness and its uses, the nature of mysticism, the roles played with respect to religion by philosophy and theology, the characteristics of subconsciousness and higher consciousness … I could go on.
In the twentieth lecture, as well as in the unexpectedly personal Postscript, James offered the reader, if not a “summing up,” then a “personal take” on the subject. For instance, he wrote about the scale of the natural world and the universe:
“What we think of may be enormous – the cosmic times and spaces, for example – whereas the inner state may be the most fugitive and paltry activity of mind. Yet the cosmic objects, so far as the experience yields them, are but ideal pictures of something whose existence we do not inwardly possess but only point at outwardly, while the inner state is our very experience itself; its reality and that of our experience are one.”
In another instance, he wrote about consciously mediating thought and experience:
“A conscious field PLUS its object as felt or thought of PLUS an attitude towards the object PLUS the sense of a self to whom the attitude belongs – such a concrete bit of personal experience may be a small bit, but it is solid bit as long as it lasts; not hollow, not a mere abstract element of experience, such as the “object” is when taken all alone. It is a FULL fact, even though it be an insignificant fact …. “
James concluded with a distinction between “under-belief” and “over-belief,” whereby thoughtful people either minimized or maximized the relevance and importance of their own opinions and sentiments. He then shared with the reader his own “over-belief”:
“The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have a meaning for our lives also; and that although in the main their experiences and those of this world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous at certain points, and higher energies filter in. By being faithful in my own poor measure to this over-belief, I seem to myself to keep more sane and true.”
James justified his optimism and his “over-belief” on the basis that it kept him “more sane and true.” He even named it “the faith-state.” I found myself wondering if Carl Sagan would recognize the claim. After reading “Varieties of Scientific Experience,” I came to the conclusion that Sagan would never have embrace the notion of “over-belief” or “the faith-state.” Instead, he would have espoused the spirit of sceptical, rational, and scientific inquiry. He was assuredly responsive to the spell of mystery and the allure of the unknown, but he staked his claim on the scientific endeavour which is self-correcting and self-affirming.
In his eyes, the sciences and especially the exploration of interplanetary and intergalactic space are stepping-stones towards the goal of the “deprovincializing” of the world’s population through sharing the insights of the biologist into changes over time and the visions of the astronomer across the immensity of space. He does not discuss “worlds of consciousness” but he does find other worlds – in our solar system, our galaxy, and our cosmos. Civilizations vastly in advance of our own may offer mankind precious knowledge, “god-like” levels of knowledge. If such civilizations do not exist (we the living are unlikely ever to know) the human race is all the more precious for its uniqueness. Sagan’s universe is humbling and ennobling: Earth may be a “pale blue dot,” but it is one of “billions and billions” of such dots in the cosmos – an astonishing vision to contrast with James’s probing but humbling question, “What is human life’s chief concern?” If Sagan asked a question it would be, “What is the point of the cosmos?”
To bring to an end this comparison and contrast of the twin approaches to religion and science, disciplines that share so much because both have a human origin, I assumed I would seek out and quote parallel passages from each speaker’s lecture. But the passages did not come so readily to hand. Instead, I will conclude with a recollection of the insightful words of Sigmund Freud. The words comprise the last two sentences of the psychoanalyst’s provocative study of religion called “The Future of an Illusion.” Here are those sentences:
“No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.”
The United Church of Canada got into trouble in 2009 when a small number of anti-Israel activists attempted to hijack the denomination (which boasts half a million members) by convincing its General Council to pass four anti-Israel resolutions, two of which called on the church to boycott products made in Israel.
The background material accompanying one of the non-divestment resolutions suggested that Canadian Members of Parliament were selling out their country to Israeli interests because they accepted free trips to Israel or were themselves Israeli citizens.
The accusation of dual loyalty raised the hackles of the Ottawa Citizen which responded with a scathing editorial that read in part, as follows: “It’s conspicuous that the United Church is not witchhunting South Asian or Muslim MPs to out those who hold dual citizenship. Only Jews constitute an enemy within.”
In the face of criticism like this, which prompted the General Council to repudiate the background materials, the boycott resolutions were defeated.
The contretemps didn’t put an end to the denomination’s focus on Israel, however. Despite the controversy, the church’s General Council established a working group charged with reviewing the denomination’s stance on the Arab-Israeli conflict. In particular, the working group was charged with “entering into conversations as to how to move [the Israelis and the Palestinians] toward reconciliation (including, but not limited to economic boycott).”
The working group has issued its report, which will be discussed at the next meeting of the church’s General Council, scheduled to take place in Ottawa in August. Predictably, the working group is calling on the United Church of Canada to boycott Israeli goods made in the West Bank.
Such boycotts are all the rage these days. The United Methodist Church passed a similar resolution at its recent General Conference in Tampa, Florida and the Presbyterian Church (USA) is considering approving a similar resolution at its upcoming General Assembly scheduled to take place in Pittsburgh in July.
The United Church of Canada’s working group clearly learned some lessons from the mistakes made by the so-called peace activists at the General Conference in 2009. Their report does not traffic in ugly anti-Semitism. It even acknowledges the existence of the “new anti-Semitism” which demonizes the modern state of Israel and says that criticism of the Jewish state needs to be scrutinized closely.
The working group even goes so far as to affirm Israel as a Jewish state.
Oddly enough, however, the working group would have the United Church of Canada apologize for demanding in previous statements that the Palestinians do the same.
On this score, the report is quite explicit. It calls on the church to “[a]cknowledge with deep regret the past policy of calling on Palestinians to acknowledge Israel as a Jewish state.” The working group stated that if the Palestinian Authority were to recognize Israel’s Jewish character, it “could be seen as endorsing discrimination against the Palestinian minority in Israel.”
This passage is one of several instances in which the working group exhibits a fundamental inability to come to grips with the reality of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The conflict is not caused, as the report states, by the occupation, but by the Arab and Muslim refusal to accept Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. Israel’s creation in 1948 is a humiliating violation of the Islamic doctrine demands that Muslims dominate, or eradicate, other religious communities with which it comes into contact.
In light of these beliefs, a Jewish state is an abomination and as a result, Israeli Jews have come to regard the Palestinian refusal to accept Israel’s Jewish character as a sign that the Palestinians are not all that serious about peace.
From AFP MOMBASA, Kenya — A Briton on trial in Kenya accused of a bomb plot was working with the fugitive widow of a British suicide bomber who attacked the London Underground in 2005, prosecutors charged Thursday.
Briton Jermaine Grant and two other suspects were arrested in December in the Kenyan port city after they were found with various chemicals, batteries and switches which prosecutors say they planned to use to make explosives.
Prosecutor Jacob Ondari said Grant, a 29-year-old Muslim convert, was working with fellow Briton Samantha Lewthwaite, whose is on the run over terror plot allegations, and is the widow of London bomber Jermaine Lindsay. "It is our belief that she (Lewthwaite) is connected with Grant and that they were working together... She is believed to be the financier of the whole thing," Ondari said.
Grant has denied the charges.
However, he has pleaded guilty to charges of being in the country illegally and lying about his nationality, for which he was sentenced in December last year to two jail terms of two years, to run concurrently.
The trial will resume on August 15. Grant is charged along with his Kenyan wife, Warda Breik Islam.
When he was 14, [his mother] Betty had a "premonition" that he would become a hairdresser and dragged Sassoon to Adolph Cohen, in Whitechapel, who, to the boy's dismay, waived his usual fee and took him on as an apprentice for free. "So I was shampooing at 14," he sighs. "But I've always thought that had I the opportunity for an education, I would have been an architect. There's no question about it."
A few years later he was leading a double life, washing hair and secretly fighting fascists with the 43 Group, alongside tough ex servicemen such as the war hero Gerry Flamberg ("250 pounds of muscle", he says). Sassoon had experienced antisemitic taunts as a schoolboy, but it was the Holocaust that showed him where these could lead. When Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts regrouped after the war, "there was no question: you had to be one of the 43 Group. I was just one of the young guys that tried to help," he says modestly, "but the fascist party was smashed in the streets - without the help of the police, unfortunately."
Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen and the rest had instilled a Zionist zeal in Betty and many others, and when Israel was formed in1948, Sassoon eagerly joined the Palmach – the elite fighting force of the Haganah paramilitary - to help defend the fledgling state. He wanted to - and did - see action: "I wasn't going over there to sit in an office . . . I thought if we don't fight for a piece of land and make it work, then the whole Holocaust thing was a terrible waste. But this way at least we got a country out of it."
Sassoon might have stayed in Israel but for a telegram from Betty, who had remarried, saying his stepfather had suffered a heart attack, and they needed him to earn money. Hairdressing was all he knew, and reluctantly he returned to the profession that he'd always felt ambivalent towards. "I loved the fact that there was lots of pretty girls coming in and out; I didn't love hair. When I came back, though, I decided to give it my all." Israel had changed him, he says. "The sense of what we'd done gave me an enormous confidence, and I really felt as if I belonged. And, funnily enough, it gave me a feeling of belonging in London, too. Or belonging anywhere: this is our world, that kind of thing."
That confidence would help him to begin revolutionising hairdressing when he opened his first salon on Bond Street in 1954. He envisaged a new kind of styling that moved away from the backcombing, teasing and lacquering to which women's hair had been subjected, and that would be based on architecture. Whereas building design had moved on in exciting ways, hair was stuck in the past. "It had been done beautifully, it all looked very pretty, but we had to get the cut right so that it swung into position, and stayed there," he says.
The cuts became geometric, using bone structure as the underlying foundation. And in Sassoon's brave new world of styling, they lasted and were easy to manage. "A working woman could save a few shillings a week, and then every five weeks she'd come in and we'd cut her hair," he says. "She could shampoo it under the shower, swing it and dry it off or just let it dry by itself. It changed the lives of many young girls who'd never had the opportunity to be styled like that before."
It took 10 years to get the geometric cuts to work efficiently, he says. "But by 1964 half the people were walking around London swinging their heads and the hair would just fall back where we cut it."
Caught up in the creative melting-pot of Sixties London, Sassoon worked like a man possessed. He was "crazy", says one of his former colleagues in the documentary. "He's right," Sassoon laughs.
He could be "pretty strict at times," he admits. "But if you were a hairdresser 50 years ago, people thought you'd either crawled down from the wall or you couldn't get a job in another field. So we had to raise the standard of the way people thought about us as well as raise the standard of how we acted as hairdressers."
Sassoon collaborated on iconic looks with fashion designer Mary Quant, cut actress Nancy Kwan's long black tresses into a geometric bob that took him global when it was photographed by Terence Donovan and published in Vogue, earned $5000 for cutting Mia Farrow's hair for the film Rosemary's Baby in a boxing ring in Hollywood, sensationally created the Five Point geometric cut - "the ultimate in hairdressing as far as I'm concerned" – and went on to start (and then sell) his own hair-product line.
His salon reflected the creative and egalitarian spirit of the '60s. Socialites, actors and working girls happily rubbed shoulders, while he says be benefited from the exchange of ideas that was happening in London at the time between people from different cultures and different creative pursuits. "Suddenly there was just this wonderful meritocracy of people from all walks of life," he says.
Despite the number of movie stars who passed through his doors, or were in his circle of friends, the only times he was ever star-struck were when he met architects. "I had been working on film people for so long, that if they were truly nice, no problem, we were nice in return. But if you got someone that's a bit snotty, we didn't need them. Truly, we didn't. But I got on with most of them fine. Albert Finney was lovely."
As the interview comes to an end, we return briefly to Israel and whether the country today is the one he envisaged in 1948. Sassoon says they had no illusions at the time that "many in the Arab world would be anti-Israel and would like to push you into the sea . . . Now we have a million and a quarter Arabs living in Israel, with all democratic rights. That's really good." On the other hand, Fatah's recent deal with Hamas was "very unforgiving" and has "put peace back", he believes.
Reflecting on himself as a Jew, he says, "in the final analysis, because of all the things I have been through, I feel very humble, in a way, that we produced so many incredible people, and there's only 13 million of us in the world, and we still keep producing.
"Essentially, I just have a certain pride in the tribe."
When the Hon. Geert Wilders was in the US for promotion of his new book, Marked for Death Islam's War Against the West and Me, he had two contrasting interviews while in Washington, DC. One was with Erik Stalebeck of CBN, while the other was with Jamie Weinstein of The Daily Caller. Probably the most informative interview of the two was with premier terrorism analyst, Erik Stakelbeck of CBN. This is by far the most comprehensive Wilders' Washington interviews covering a wide range of his views on Islam, Shariah, Islamization in the West, the economic and social costs of wholesale Muslim immigration in The Netherlands, the daily problems of living with the threats to his life, the totalitarian ideology at the core of doctrinal Islam, his high regard for Israel and its fight against jihadist Islam and disruption of his family life. Wilders views the Muslim Brotherhood as fundamentalists using religiously sanctioned taqiyya to perpetrate a Grand jihad on the Muslim Umma and the West. He discusses why he supports Israel in its fight against Jihadist Islam because of shared democratic and Judeo Christian values. Wilders is critical of President Obama's stands vis a vis outreach to the Muslim ummah and relations with the Muslim Brotherhood. His solutions are defense of free speech, not engaging in moral relativism when it comes to religion, controlling Muslim immigration, the engine of Islamization, and ejecting immigrants who refuse to accept the values of Western host countries. The exchange with Stakelbeck elucidates many of the arguments that Wilders presents in Marked for Death and covered in our review, see here.
The Daily Caller interview is more challenging given probing questions about Wilders' views. Weinstein prods him to differentiate between so-called Moderate Muslims and fundamentalists and the practicality of banning the Qur'an which he considers antisemitic and hateful to Christianity and other beliefs as well. When queried by Weinstein about his views about mass Muslim immigration and restrictions on further mosque building in The Netherlands, Wilders follows the arguments presented in our NER interview with Sam Solomon that mosques are more than a place a worship but more a venue for incitement to hate against the host country's Judeo Christian values.
Watch Stakelbeck's conversation with Wilders on his CBN program, Stakelbeck on Terror.
Watch the Weinstein Daily Caller interview with Wilders.
I received the following email from Barack Obama this morning:
What I've come to realize is that for loving, same-sex couples, the denial of marriage equality means that, in their eyes and the eyes of their children, they are still considered less than full citizens. Even at my own dinner table, when I look at Sasha and Malia, who have friends whose parents are same-sex couples, I know it wouldn't dawn on them that their friends' parents should be treated differently.
As we march forward into the sunny uplands of an ever more progressive society, I don't see why this argument wouldn't pertain to polygamists, pedophiles or those of an even more exotic persuasion. Why not?
From Business Insider and repeated with some triumph by the Islamic press.
According to a survey of 10,000 voters conducted by Opinionway for Le Figaro (not online), 93 percent of French Muslims voted for Francois Hollande in the second round of the French election, La Vie reports. (and 79 percent of practicing Catholics voted for Sarkozy)
A prior Opinionway survey showed that 59 percent of Muslim voters (numbering about two million in total) voted for Hollande in the first round of the French elections, with Sarkozy only managing four percent.
"It is the mark of a true rejection of Nicolas Sarkozy" said Julien Goarant, research director at Opinionway. Sarkozy’s attempts to woo Far-right voters and question the role of Islam (especially Halal meat) in France also did not go unnoticed.
For the past few decades, Palestinian Christians have been the primary source of information about the Arab-Israeli conflict and Christian-Muslim relations in the Middle East. Working on behalf of this community, peace activists in mainline Protestant churches, work to convince their denominations to support the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS), campaign against Israel. These activists, and the denominational leaders who support them, describe their anti-Israel activism as part of their mission to stand in solidarity with these Christians who are suffering under Israeli occupation.
The most notable of these Palestinian Christians has been Rev. Dr. Naim Ateek, an Anglican priest who has used anti-Jewish polemics from the New Testament to portray Israel as a singular obstacle to peace in the Middle East. In the story Ateek tells about the Arab-Israeli conflict, Palestinians are powerless and as a result, cannot be held accountable for their misdeeds. Israeli Jews, however, are powerful and are excoriated for their misdeeds and for their insistence on using force to maintain their sovereignty. The Jewish insistence on sovereignty is, in Ateek’s view, a violation of the higher principles of Judaism.
Clearly, Ateek has a problem with Israel and created a theology to justify and broadcast his enmity.
Given that Jewish soldiers evicted Rev. Dr. Ateek from his home in 1948 when he was an 11-year-old boy, it’s understandable that he would be angry at Israel. It is also understandable that he would be angry over another loss suffered by his Arab and Palestinian countrymen 19 years later during the Six Day War. These two humiliating traumas play a significant, if not determinative role, in the formulation of Ateek’s theology regarding the Jewish state.
It took a while, but eventually, Ateek was able to inflict his anger and rage on Israel, and he it did it under the guise of peacemaking and reconciliation. He did it through his writings and by founding Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center, a vehicle by which he reached out to mainline Protestants in the United States and invited them to embrace his enmity toward the Jewish state.
Sadly, more than a few people accepted Ateek’s invitation. Ateek fed his sheep anti-Israel propaganda for decades.
In looking at Ateek’s career, it is particularly shocking to see how his allies, friends and handlers in the United States helped him gather the resources necessary to attack Israel in the manner in which he did.
The Episcopalians who were Sabeel’s first supporters bear large measure of the blame, as do the people who awarded Ateek his doctor of ministry degree at the San Francisco Theological Seminary. The folks at this seminary should have seen the anti-Jewish aspects of his theology at first glance. It was all right there in his dissertation.
He did not hide it.
The people at Orbis Press, who published this dissertation under the title Justice and Only Justice (1989), should have recognized the unwholesome enmity toward Israel Ateek was encouraging his readers to embrace.
This same publishing house should have recognized the defamatory nature of his later text A Palestinian Christian Cry for Reconciliation that it published in 2008. For example, in this book, Ateek accuses Israel of perpetrating “a slow and creeping genocide.”
Yes, of course, Ateek had every right to write his book, and Orbis had every right to publish it.
But authentic Christian expression is not merely about license and what people have a right to do. It is also about responsibility and what people ought (and ought not) to do. Ateek and his enablers in the U.S. encouraged people to hate on Israel. Ateek never transcended his enmity toward Israel. He refined it and worked to make it socially acceptable.
In so doing, Ateek set a bad example that far too many Christians in the U.S. and Europe followed. Eventually people got wise to this reality but not until mainline churches had embarked on a campaign that demonized Israel and its Jewish supporters in some pretty ugly ways.
This campaign does not enjoy the support it did a few years ago, but it is still alive and kicking. Earlier this month, the United Methodist Church’s General Conference voted down a divestment resolution but passed a resolution calling for a boycott of Israeli products made in the West Bank. The General Assembly of Presbyterian Church (USA) is considering two similar resolutions. And the United Church of Canada’s General Assembly will also be voting on a boycott resolution in the upcoming months.
All of these votes about Israel have, or will have, taken place against a backdrop of virtual silence about anti-Christian violence in Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and North Africa.
Christians have been murdered in Iraq, Egypt and Nigeria and yet these churches say nothing, or almost nothing about these murders. They do however, talk incessantly about Israel.
This is no exaggeration. When the national assemblies of United Church of Christ and Disciples of Christ met in 2011, well after it was clear to anyone who was paying attention that Christians were under siege in the Middle East, these gatherings said nothing about this problem.
You can search the agendas of the UCC’s General Synod yourself here. The words Iraq, Egypt and Copt appear nowhere in the minutes to the UCC’s 2011 General Synod, but the word Israeli appears 15 times. A list of the resolutions passed by the Disciples of Christ in 2001 is available here.
You will find nothing about anti-Christian violence at either of these links, but you will learn that the assemblies of these two churches did, however, pass two resolutions warning about the evils of Islamophobia.
You got that right. Christians got murdered in Iraq and Egypt and the assemblies of these two churches passed resolutions warning about the evils of anti-Muslim hostility. Under the circumstances, it would seem reasonable for the assemblies of churches to pass a resolution about anti-Christian hostility in Muslim-majority countries, but they didn’t.
They said nothing.
This is what happens after your church has been exposed to two decades worth of anti-Israel propaganda from people like Ateek. Your church becomes afflicted with a monomaniacal focus on Israel while having its eyes and mouth sewn shut when confronted with Islamist violence against Christians.
Christians from Iraq, Egypt and Nigeria who want their story told by these churches will have to contend with the legacy left by Ateek and his enablers in these churches.
Lord have mercy.
Dexter Van Zile is Christian Media Analyst at the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA).
This file photo from Greenpeace shows a crack in the Weddell Sea, Antarctica. A new study indicates that by the end of the century a huge ice shelf in Antarctica will melt, contributing to sea levels worldwide.
AP Photo/Greenpeace, Morgan
LONDON
Scientists are predicting the disappearance of another vast ice shelf in Antarctica by the end of the century that will accelerate rising sea levels.
"According to our calculations, this protective barrier will disintegrate by the end of this century," said Dr Harmut Hellmer, lead author of the study, published in the journal Nature this week.
The huge ice shelves that float on the seas fringing Antarctica provide a buffer against warming waters eating away at the base of the much larger glaciers behind them that sit on the land.
"Ice shelves are like corks in the bottles for the ice streams behind them," said Hellmer. "They reduce the ice flow.
"If, however, the ice shelves melt from below, they become so thin that the dragging surfaces become smaller and the ice behind them starts to move."
Hellmer and his team predict the melting of the Filchner-Ronne shelf could add up to 4.4 mm per year to rising global sea levels.
According to the latest estimates based on remote sensing data, global sea levels rose 1.5 mm a year between 2003 and 2010 due to melting glaciers and ice shelves, the scientists say. This is on top of an estimated 1.7 mm annual rise due to the expansion of the oceans as the water warms.
The research was funded by the European Union's ‘Ice2sea' program, set up in the wake of the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that highlighted ice-sheets as the most significant remaining uncertainty in projections of rising sea levels. Projections from the Ice2sea project will feed into the fifth IPCC report due in 2013/2014.
It will also inform plans for major capital spending on sea defenses to protect Europe's coastlines, particularly areas of economic importance like London, with its tidal barrier on the River Thames, and the port of Rotterdam. A large part of the Netherlands is below sea level and protected by an elaborate system of dykes.
Professor David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey, who heads the Ice2sea program, told Reuters the Alfred Wegener Institute's findings add to evidence that warming oceans are having the greatest impact on the ice sheets, as opposed to atmospheric changes or the legacy of some long-term change decades or even hundreds of years ago.
"What people need to know with a sense of urgency is what is going to happen to sea levels over the next few decades," said Vaughan. "In those terms, these results are very big news indeed."
Vaughan is cautious about precise projections of the impact on sea levels. "For me, those numbers are about what might be plausible," he said. "I think we need to do some more work with the ice sheet models to determine exactly what sea level rises we might expect, but those are plausible numbers."
All other things being equal, the polar ice sheets reach a balance where the amount of snow going in each year is broadly matched by the number of icebergs coming out, but subtle changes like those associated with global warming, can affect that balance quite rapidly.
Vaughan said there was clear evidence that the widely-reported disintegration of the Larsen A and Larsen B ice shelves in 1995 and 2002 respectively, had led to the ice sheets that fed them moving faster into the sea, some of them many times the rate seen before collapse.
The scientific focus on the melting ice in the Amundsen sea is down to the fact that this is where it is happening now, but Vaughan said although the Weddell Sea is not seeing ice loss at the moment, the German research supports the view that it will spread to other areas.
If there is a lesson for climate scientists, it's "don't behave like the infant school football team and follow the ball," he said.
Recently, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a cover story called "Black Studies: 'Swaggering Into the Future,'" in which the reporter described how "young black-studies scholars . . . are less consumed than their predecessors with the need to validate the field or explain why they are pursuing doctorates in their discipline." The "5 Up-and-Coming Ph.D. Candidates" described in the piece's sidebar "are rewriting the history of race." While the article suggested some are skeptical of black studies as a discipline, the reporter neglected to quote anyone who is.
Like me. So last week, on the Chronicle's "Brainstorm" blog (where I was paid to be a regular contributor), I suggested that the dissertation topics of the graduate students mentioned were obscure at best and "a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap," at worst.
For instance, the author of a dissertation on the history of black midwifery began her research, she told the Chronicle, because she "noticed that nonwhite women's experiences were largely absent from natural-birth literature." Another graduate student blamed the housing crisis in America on institutional racism. And a third argued that conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas and John McWhorter have "played one of the most-significant roles in the assault on the civil-rights legacy that benefited them."
The reaction to my blog post ranged from puerile to vitriolic. The graduate students I mentioned and the senior faculty who advise them at Northwestern University accused me (in guest blogs posted by the Chronicle editors) of bigotry and cowardice. The former wrote that "in a bid to not be 'out-niggered' [their word] by her right-wing cohort, Riley found some black women graduate students to beat up on." (I confess I don't actually know what that means.) One fellow blogger (and hundreds of commenters) called my post "racist."
Gina Barreca, a teacher of English and feminist theory at the University of Connecticut, composed a poem mocking me. (It begins "A certain white chick—Schaefer Riley/ decided to do something wily.") MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry spewed a four-minute rant about my post, invoking the memory of Trayvon Martin and accusing me of "small-mindedness."
Scores of critics on the site complained that I had not read the dissertations in full before daring to write about them—an absurd standard for a 500-word blog post. A number of the dissertations aren't even available. Which didn't seem to stop the Chronicle reporter, though. And 6,500 academics signed a petition online demanding that I be fired.
Corbis
At first, the Chronicle stood its ground, suggesting that my post was an "invitation to debate." But that stance lasted for little more than a weekend. In a note that reads like a confession at a re-education camp, the Chronicle's editor, Liz McMillen announced her decision on Monday to fire me: "We've heard you," she tells my critics. "And we have taken to heart what you said. We now agree that Ms. Riley's blog posting did not meet The Chronicle's basic editorial standards for reporting and fairness in opinion articles."
When I asked Ms. McMillen whether the poem by fellow blogger Ms. Barreca, for instance, lived up to such standards, she said they were "reviewing" the other content on the site. So far, however, that blogger has not been fired. Other ad hominem attacks against me seem to have passed editorial muster as well.
In her Monday mea culpa, Ms. McMillen wrote that her previous "editor's note last week inviting [readers] to debate the posting also seemed to elevate it to the level of informed opinion, which it was not." I have been a journalist writing about higher education for close to 15 years now, having visited dozens of colleges and universities and interviewed hundreds of faculty, students and administrators. My work has been published in every major newspaper in the country, most often this one, and I have written two widely reviewed books on higher education as well.
As I wrote in the book I published shortly before the Chronicle hired me, "It is not merely that [many] departments approach African-American studies from a particular perspective—an Africa-centered one in which blacks residing in America today are still deeply hobbled by the legacy of slavery. It's that course and department descriptions often appear to be a series of axes that faculty members would like to grind."
But why take my word for it? Scholars more learned than I have been saying the same thing for decades. In 1974, Thomas Sowell wrote that from the beginnings of the discipline, "the demands for black studies differed from demands for other forms of new academic studies in that they . . . restricted the philosophical and political positions acceptable, even from black scholars in such programs."
Thirty-five years later in a piece for the Minding the Campus website, former Berkeley Prof. John McWhorter noted that little had changed: "Too often the curriculum of African-American Studies departments gives the impression that racism and disadvantage are the most important things to note and study about being black."
My critics have suggested that I do not believe the black experience in America is worthy of study. That is not true. It's just that the best of this work rarely comes out of black studies departments. Scholars like Roland Fryer in Harvard's economics department have done pathbreaking research on the causes of economic disparities between blacks and whites. And Eugene Genovese's work on slavery and the role of religion in black American history retains its seminal role in the field decades after its publication.
But a substantive critique about the content of academic disciplines is simply impossible in the closed bubble of higher education. If you want to know why almost all of the responses to my original post consist of personal attacks on me, along with irrelevant mentions of Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and George Zimmerman, it is because black studies is a cause, not a course of study. By doubting the academic worthiness of black studies, my critics conclude, I am opposed to racial justice—and therefore a racist.
As Ellen Schrecker, a Yeshiva University historian, writes in her book "The Lost Soul of Higher Education," political ends were the goals of the founders of black studies. Ms. Schrecker—who is, by the way, sympathetic to these political goals—explains that the discipline's proponents "viewed these programs as contributions to the continuing struggle for racial justice, not as conventional academic courses of study."
My longtime familiarity with the absurdities of higher education did not, I confess, prepare me for this most absurd of results. The content of my post, after all, is hardly shocking; the same thing could have been written 30 years ago. And perhaps that's the most depressing part of all this. Despite the real social and economic advancement that has been made by blacks in this country, the American faculty is still stuck in the 1960s.
Ms. Riley, a former Journal editor, is author of "The Faculty Lounges: And Other Reasons Why You Won't Get the College Education You Pay For" (Ivan, R. Dee, 2011) and "God on the Quad: How Religious Colleges and the Missionary Generation Are Changing America" (St. Martin's, 2005).
Nine men who ran a child sexual exploitation ring in Greater Manchester have been jailed. The men from Rochdale and Oldham, who exploited girls as young as 13 were given sentences ranging from four to 19 years.
In comments which appeared to conflict with police insistence that there was no "racial or cultural" element to the crimes, Judge Gerald Clifton added: "One of the factors leading to that was the fact that they were not part of your community or religion." The judge said some of the men claimed their arrest "was triggered by race". But, he said: "That is nonsense. What triggered this prosecution was your lust and greed."
the 59-year-old leader of the sex ring, who cannot be named for legal reasons but was also convicted of two rapes, aiding and abetting rape, sexual assault and trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation, was jailed for 19 years.
His defence barrister, Simon Nichol, said his client "has objected from the start for being tried by an all white jury and subsequent events have confirmed his fears. He believes his convictions have nothing to do with justice but result from the faith and the race of the defendants. He further believes that society failed the girls in this case before the girls even met them and now that failure is being blamed on a weak minority group."
But sentencing the ringleader to 19 years in prison, the judge called him an "unpleasant and hypocritical bully" who had ordered a 15-year-old girl to have sex with takeaway worker Kabeer Hassan as a birthday "treat". 19 years is something like the robust sentencing we have all been hoping for.
Hassan, 25, of Lacrosse Avenue, Oldham, was sentenced to nine years for rape and three years, concurrently, for the conspiracy conviction. Taxi driver, Abdul Aziz, 41, a married father-of-three, of Armstrong Hurst Close, Rochdale, also convicted of trafficking for sexual exploitation, received a nine year sentence. Aziz was said in court to have taken over as the main trafficker of girls.
Married father-of-five Abdul Rauf, 43, of Darley Road, Rochdale, was jailed for six years for conspiracy and six years, concurrently, for trafficking for sexual exploitation. The religious studies teacher at a local mosque asked a 15-year-victim if she had any younger friends and would drive some of the girls to other men, who would use them for sex, despite knowing they were underage. Zarif Khan, in mitigation, told the judge Rauf's fall from grace was "particularly significant".
At least one - Adil Khan - is already planning to appeal against the conviction, citing a tweet from BNP leader Nick Griffin which apparently stated the jury's position before the court had been informed. The tweet led eight defence lawyers to ask for the jury to be discharged and a re-trial.
But, sentencing at Liverpool Crown Court, Judge Clifton said there was "no evidence to suggest a juror was at fault" and allowed the case to continue.
Khan's solicitor, Alias Yousaf, said outside court: "It is of great concern that the chairman of the British National Party appeared to have been aware of the verdicts before they were even communicated to the court. We are left with no option but to conclude that the confidentiality of the jury's deliberations must have been breached and we submit the proper inference should be drawn that there must have been improper communication from within the jury room to Nick Griffin and perhaps others. This leaves open the question of improper influence of the jury's deliberations on the verdicts that happened."
At the hearing Judge Clifton repeated his view that there had been no undue influence of the jury. He said: "Anybody who may have doubted this jury should bear in mind the way that you have analysed the evidence and returned the verdicts. I, and the people of Britain, must be thankful for the painstaking care that you took in the trial. I want you to go home and hold your heads high."
No one these days has a good word to say for paternalism, the notion that someone else not only knows what is best for another person, but that he has the right and even the duty to encourage or make the other person comply with what he thinks is best. Thus one of the sacred principles of contemporary medical ethics is the autonomy of the patient: his right to make an informed decision on what medical treatment, if any, to have, even should his decision be foolish.
In order to uphold the principle of patient autonomy, people in especially vulnerable positions – prisoners, for example – are not to be offered rewards for agreeing either to treatment or to participation in experiments. But evidently there are limits to our belief in patient autonomy.
A paper in the April 19thNew England Journal of Medicine describes the effect of giving a single dose of albendazole, a drug that eliminates intestinal parasites such as roundworm and hookworm, to refugees from Africa and Asia before they arrive in the United States. Prior to 1999, such refugees were not given albendazole before departure; thereafter they were.
Administration of the drug decreased the rate of infestation with nematode worms by 77 percent, that is to say from 20.8 per cent of refugees to 4.7 per cent. The trial was not a randomized one, but it is likely that as many African and Asian refugees were originally infested with worms after 1999 as before, and so the large subsequent difference is almost certainly attributable to the administration of the drug.
Interestingly, the authors of the paper, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and the Minnesota Department of Health, do not mention any ethical problems with the mass administration of the drug. The numbers of people treated were large, 27,736 in all.
The treatment seems to have been compulsory; at any rate, it is unlikely that informed consent can really have been sought from many of them, let alone all of them. Besides, if the treatment was not exactly coerced (the refugees could have refused it, even though it meant non-admission to the United States), the situation was similar to that of prisoners rewarded for taking part in medical experiments, a practice that is now forbidden.
The paper did not mention observed side effects of the drug, if any. American patients are told the following about potential side effects:
Nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, headache, or temporary hair loss may occur. If any of these effects persist or worsen, tell your doctor or pharmacist promptly.
Remember that your doctor has prescribed this medication because he or she has judged that the benefit to you is greater than the risk of side effects. Many people using this medication do not have serious side effects.
Tell your doctor immediately if any of these unlikely but serious side effects occur: vision changes, yellowing eyes/skin, severe stomach/abdominal pain, dark urine.
Tell your doctor immediately if any of these rare but very serious side effects occur: unusual tiredness, easy bruising/bleeding, signs of infection (e.g., fever, persistent sore throat), change in the amount of urine, severe/persistent headache, seizures, confusion, very stiff neck.
A very serious allergic reaction to this drug is rare.
However, seek immediate medical attention if you notice any symptoms of a serious allergic reaction, including: rash, itching/swelling (especially of the face/tongue/throat), severe dizziness, trouble breathing.
Circumstances, then, alter both medical conduct and ethics.
Of course, 16 percent of the refugees given the drug benefited from it, in that their worms were eliminated and infestations are deleterious for health. Moreover, there would have been possible public health benefits to the administration as well, because people who do not have worms cannot spread them to others.
It is difficult to work oneself into a lather of indignation about the whole business; but from the point of view of medical ethics, the paper is certainly not without theoretical interest.
Magdi Allam (Egyptian convert to Christianity*, now living in Italy), and several years ago, when he first converted, a great enthusiast for the Church, has had a change of mind about its behavior:
Se l’Italia abbraccia l’islam è tutta colpa della Chiesa
It is all the Church’s fault if Italy embraces Islam
Lo sapevate che sono circa 70 mila i musulmani con cittadinanza italiana? Lo sapevate che complessivamente in Italia i musulmani sono circa 1.583.000 pari al 2,7% della popolazione? Lo sapevate che l’islam è ormai la seconda religione d’Italia subito dopo il cristianesimo?
Lo sapevate che mediamente in Italia nasce un luogo di culto islamico ogni 4 giorni
? Lo sapevate che ormai sono attivi
dei terroristi islamici con cittadinanza italiana impegnati nel Jihad, la guerra santa, contro gli ebrei, i cristiani, gli infedeli e gli apostati? Ebbene se non lo sapevate è certamente una grave lacuna. Ma ancor più grave è prendere atto che tutto ciò accade con l’esplicita connivenza della Chiesa, espressa sia dalle posizioni ufficiali e dalle iniziative del Pontificio Consiglio per il Dialogo interreligioso sia dal comportamento e dalle affermazioni del clero, da taluni cardinali fino a una schiera di parroci “islamicamente corretti”.
La riflessione ci viene imposta dalle recenti dichiarazioni di Ezzedine Elzir, presidente dell’Ucoii (Unione delle Comunità e delle Associazioni Islamiche in Italia), rilasciate a Klaus Davi (>http://www.youtube.com/user/klauscondicio) in cui in afferma che in Italia ci sono “70 mila ritornati all’islam”. Perché “ritornati” e non “convertiti”? Ci spiega Elzir: “Noi preferiamo usare la parola ritorno perché è una riscoperta della vera fede”. Intende dire che per i musulmani l’islam non è una religione “diversa” dall’ebraismo e dal cristianesimo, a cui pertanto si aderisce convertendosi come accade a qualsiasi altra religione, ma è una religione “superiore” all’ebraismo e al cristianesimo, l’unica vera religione, il compimento della rivelazione e il sigillo della profezia, in un contesto dove si ritiene che tutte le persone nascono musulmane anche se professano una fede diversa, hanno dentro di sé l’islam anche se ne sono ignari, che pertanto l’adesione all’islam è un “ritorno” riscoprendo “la vera fede”.
“Ogni giorno alle nostre moschee arrivano dei non musulmani che vogliono conoscere l’islam, diversi di loro l’abbracciano”, aggiunge Elzir, perché “quando c’è una crisi dei valori ed economica una persona torna a scoprire le sue radici, la sua spiritualità”, inequivocabilmente coincidente con l’islam. Come è possibile che in Italia, la culla del cattolicesimo, terra cristiana che accoglie nel suo seno la Chiesa dei Papi, vicari di Cristo, si sia arrivati al punto da far coincidere la “spiritualità” con l’islam? Ebbene la risposta si chiama “relativismo religioso”. Lo stesso Benedetto XVI ha più volte individuato nella “dittatura del relativismo” il male profondo da combattere perché ci impone, mettendo in soffitta la ragione, di considerare che tutte le religioni, le culture e i valori siano pari a prescindere dai loro contenuti. La testimonianza eloquente del relativismo religioso risiede nella litania delle “tre grandi religioni monoteiste rivelate, abramitiche, del Libro” che pregherebbero lo stesso dio. Così come il relativismo è presente nel comportamento del clero che immagina che per amare i musulmani come persone si debba incondizionatamente sposare la loro religione legittimando l’islam a prescindere dal fatto che è incompatibile con i valori non negoziabili della sacralità della vita, della pari dignità tra uomo e donna, della libertà di scelta religiosa.
Svegliamoci! L’islam è ormai dentro casa nostra! Sono gli italiani stessi che promuovono la conquista islamica, compresi i cardinali e i parroci che si prodigano per la diffusione delle moschee! Liberiamoci dalla dittatura del relativismo! Fermiamo l’invasione islamica! Basta moschee! Riscopriamo la nostra anima, recuperiamo l’uso della ragione, torniamo ad amarci prima di perdere del tutto la possibilità di essere noi stessi a casa nostra!
Watch the election rally for the Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Mursi here.
Egypt now has its "democracy" and its "freedom." And that means the Jihad against Israel will be not a minor theme, not a major theme, but the theme, of Egyptian political life. And the American government refuses to understand this, and despite the best efforts of the well-informed to end aid to the Egyptian military -- the aid that makes an assault on Israel more, not less likely, and that makes the task of Israel's Defense Ministry even more hellish than it already is -- the Obama Administration refuses to recognize what has happened in Egypt. And the press, of course, whose members could take in the same material as is sometimes put up here, the videos and transcripts supplied so usefully by MEMRI, they do not do so?
Why don't they? Why don't they help inform the public, rather than continue to misinform and mislead and confuse it? Why does that happen here, and in the United Kingdom, and in France, and all over Europe? Why?
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