At last count there were at least 40 young Somali men missing from the Minneapolis area and since travel back to Somalia is not inexpensive, they must be getting funding from somewhere, possibly form Saudi Arabia. The Minneapolis Star Tribune (h/t: Refugee Resettlement Watch):

An imam and a youth coordinator at a Minneapolis mosque were prohibited from boarding a flight Saturday morning to Saudi Arabia as part of a spiritual pilgrimage, an attorney for the mosque confirmed Sunday.

The attorney said it's likely the men are on a federal "no fly" list because they and the mosque have been connected by rumor to a number of missing Somali men whose families fear have returned to their East African homeland to fight in that nation's civil unrest or to receive terrorist training.

The FBI, which has been investigating alleged links between some in Minneapolis' large Somali refugee community and the strife in that nation, would not comment on the airport incident. The scope of any such links, if they exist, remains unclear.

Sheikh Abdirahman Ahmed of Abubakar As-Saddique, a large mosque in the Cedar-Riverside area of Minneapolis, and the mosque's youth coordinator, who did not want to give his name, were not allowed to board a flight at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, but were not told why. The youth coordinator said others in a group that planned to make the trip -- a hajj, or spiritual pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina-- also were not allowed to board, but he did not know how many people were involved...

So reads the headline in The Sunday Times, with no bat of an eyelid:

BRITISH men and women are now the most promiscuous of any big western industrial nation, researchers have found.

In an international index measuring one-night stands, total numbers of partners and attitudes to casual sex, Britain comes out ahead of Australia, the US, France, the Netherlands, Italy and Germany.

The researchers behind the study say high scores such as Britain’s may be linked to the way society is increasingly willing to accept sexual promiscuity among women as well as men. They also believe that, among certain age groups and at certain times, men and women are equally liberal.

I wonder who comes bottom. Brits are also poachers:

Schmitt’s findings are reinforced by earlier research showing that the British are more likely than other nationalities to have “stolen” other people’s lovers. A third of British men are in relationships with women they have poached from other long-term relationships, he found.

Among British women, 28% have apparently poached their other halves rather than formed relationships with single men. Only 17% of men in America had poached their girlfriends. In France only 10% of both men and women were poachers. In Germany the figures were 17% of men and 14% of women.

A poacher can turn gamekeeper. As well as casual sex, Britain is almost certainly top nation for badgers. Sarah Lyall, from my post a few weeks ago:

[Britain] has so many badger-support groups that it was deemed necessary to create an umbrella organisation, the National Federation of Badger Groups, now known as the Badger Trust, to coordinate all the disparate badger-related activity.

Game, sett and match.

UK viewers may be interested in a documentary by Saira Khan (of Apprentice fame) about forced marriages, in which girls born and raised in the UK are taken to Pakistan by their parents and forced to marry against their will. The film follows a dedicated unit at the British consulate that rescues girls who call them for help - if necessary, serving the family with a writ of habeas corpus. "But by calling for help, the girls risk losing everything - including all contact with their families".

And, the preview doesn't add, their lives.

The programme is at 7pm on BBC 2.

Badgers?

Badger,badger, badger.

An Egyptian-born writer who was baptised by Pope Benedict XVI last Easter after converting to Christianity from Islam has announced that he has founded a political party to "defend Christian Europe" which would field candidates in next June's European elections.
Magdi Cristiano Allam, 56, said the party, "Protagonists for a Christian Europe", would work to defend Europe's Christian values, which were threatened by secularism and moral relativism to the point where Europe risked "committing suicide". The party would be open to people of all faiths.  An outspoken critic of Muslim extremism and a supporter of Israel, Mr Allam is under armed guard because of death threats.
The party symbol bears the twelve stars of the EU round an Italian flag, with the words "Truth and Liberty", "Faith and Reason", and "Values and Rules".

Cold December has set in,
Poor people's backs are clothed thin.
The trees are bare, The birds are mute,
A pint of purl would very well suit.

The traditional cry of the town cryer of Colchester Essex for the 1st of December. Purl is a mixture of hot beer and gin.
The present cryer has a slightly different version on his website here. He asks for a pot and toast.

by John M. Joyce (Dec. 2008)

by Theodore Dalrymple (Dec. 2008)


I once stayed at the Taj Mahal in Bombay (as it was then still called). I didn't enjoy it as much as I might have done, because I was recovering from the hepatitis I had contracted in the South Seas. But I still recognised the magnificence of the institution, even as I regretted the modern excrescence that been added to the original building that ruined its architectural unity.

One morning as I left the hotel, a middle-aged man with a black umbrella and a medium-clean dhoti said to me, 'Come with me.' His teeth were stained with betel, but I thought to myself, 'Why not?' and so I went with him. I don't know whether he recognised in me a man with a taste for the unusual and the bizarre, but if so he was a man of sound judgement. As for me, I guessed that he was odd rather than bad, and I proved to be right as well. more>>>

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NMyQBFyiFk&feature=related

Israel's right to exist basic tenet of new Italian party

Magdi Allam, an Egyptian-born Italian journalist and writer of Muslim origin who was baptized by Pope Benedict XVI last Easter, said Sunday that he has founded a political party that will run in next summer's European Parliament elections.

Allam said his "Protagonists for Christian Europe" party would work to defend Europe's Christian values, which he sees as being threatened by secularism and moral relativism.

While the name of the new party conveys an impression of a rightist, traditionalist front, beneath the surfaces lies the authentic Magdi Allam - the Magdi Allam who was honored two years ago by Israel, and in the US by the American Jewish Committee, for his book, Viva Israele! ("Long live Israel").

"Israel's right to exist" is a basic tenet of Allam's political ideology that derives from his belief in the religious principle of "the sacredness of life."

The 56-year-old says that even the current violence in India is the result of total disregard for these principles.

Another pillar of Allam's program is "the historic truth of the Judeo-Christian roots of Europe" which assimilated "all that is positive and constructive" in Greek, Roman, secular and Liberal thought.

According to Allam, two destructive forces now threaten European civilization.

One is an absence of ethical values in a "savage capitalism that ignores human rights, paradoxically emulating today's Communist China."

The other is, quite straightforwardly, Islam - which he defines as a "religion of violence."

Alongside Islam he places Europeans' "Islamically correct" behavior, nihilism, and multiculturalism, as expressed by the cultural relativism of values that should, instead, be absolute.

"I am against Islam, but not against Muslims" he is quick to add. "I want no war of civilizations, but rather to build a society where all human rights, including the freedom of religion, are respected."

Allam criticized a Vatican document issued jointly by Catholic and Muslim participants in an interreligious summit in Rome last November 9. The document recognizes Muhammad as "an illuminated prophet."

"How can we call Muhammad illuminated when his hands were soaked in the blood of 700 Jewish males slain in the year 627," Allam asks. "And since Islam considers the Koran, which incites to violence, the Word of God, how can we place hopes in a reformed, moderate Islam?"

Allam's stance is close to that of Benedict XVI, who recently stated that there should be "dialogue between cultures" but "there can be no dialogue between religions."

Above all, Allam warns that Europe's well-intentioned overtures to Islam (citing as an example, the UK's legitimizing of Shariah courts) are turning Europe into an ideological vacuum that can be filled by whichever group bargains most loudly.

Wherever he moves, Allam is surrounded by security guards because of repeated death threats against him by radical Islamist groups. But this is something he takes in his stride. "Fear for my life has never conditioned my moral choices," he says.

by Ibn Warraq (Dec. 2008)

This afternoon on NPR I listened to all kinds of solemn discussion, naturally prompted by the introduction of what is called "Obama's team," devoted to American foreign policy. I heard a lot about which "problem" was to be "tackled" and then "solved" first. One person thought that the Obama team should first "solve the problem" in Afghanistan, while another, begging to differ, thought that it was important to first finish with "the problem" in Iraq. Another said that "the Afghanistan problem" could not be solved until "the Pakistan problem" was solved, so the "Pakistan problem" should be tackled first. And still another thought that attention should be given at once, without any further delay, to "the Middle East problem" -- with the "Middle East" apparently excluding Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, but referring to (who decided this, and when?) the "Arab-Israeli conflict" (the traditional American way to describe the Lesser Jihad against Israel; in Europe this is now called the "Israel/Palestine question" or, more often, "meeting the legitimate grievances of the 'Palestinians'"; both in Europe and America this is also called "saving Israel in spite of itself"), but that now was the time to take or tackle or turn to the "Syrian track" and "solve that problem" because electoral uncertainty both in Israel and in the "Palestine" Authority made it unwise to atttempt to "follow the 'Palestinian' track" at this particular time.

So now we know what to do: in the Middle East the American government should first choose  to follow the "Syrian track" so as "settle the Syrian-Israeli problem" and only after that  should it follow the "'Palestinian' track" so as to "solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem," while outside the Middle East, the American government should "settle first" either the "Iraq problem" or the "Afghanistan problem" or the "Pakistan problem" and then, with one of those three problems solved, starting in on whichever of the remaining two  "problems" in the area remain, with the proper priority  no doubt to be determined at that same later date, by the very same experts or others very much like them in their understanding of the world, and possibly on the very same program, with the very same host, as the one I listened to, in head-shaking dismay, this afternoon.  

Retired Israeli General Moshe Ya'alon has recounted the story of the last decade and a half of folly and woe that followed upon the Oslo Peace Accords here:

http://www.azure.co.il/article.php?id=474 

Ya'alon's piece is excellent. Yet even Ya'alon still holds out hope for eventual "peace with the 'Palestinians'" once their civil society has been transformed, corruption ended, the middle class developed, and suchlike. In this respect he echoes or seconds Sharansky's remarks about democracy not being imposed but created, necessarily, from the bottom up, and requiring the development of a"civil society." Ya'alon, in other words, still has an insufficient grasp of islam, and is therefore not nearly as bleakly rational as Moshe Sharon, the retired Hebrew University professor who, recognizing what Islam inculcates, and what minds on Islam are like, argues that the Israelis themselves must abandon all hope for negotiations, and peace treaties, and permanent changes of Muslim hearts and minds, and simply get on with the business of solidifying control over what Israel now controls, making sure not to surrender a single dunam more, and also to furthering an understanding of Islam in the imperilled countries of Western Europe, one that will,  naturally, also serve to explain and justify Israel's refusal to engage in any more surrenders of tangible assets.

And perhaps Ya'alon's approving reference, en passant, to the Haganah's intolerable firing on the Altalena -- the ship under Avraham Stern (who was killed by the Haganah forces led by a young the Yitzhak Rabin)  was bringing military supplies that were essential to the imperilled  and nearly defenceless Jews of Palestine  -- hints at something that apparently remains within him and that prevents him from following his understanding all the way to where it logically should lead. So after you have read the Ya'alon piece, read one or two of the much bleaker ones by Moshe Sharon on the subject of Islam. Several can be found on-line. They are forthright and very bleak.  The bleaker, the truer. The truer, the safer in the end who read them all will be.  

For some, truths nearly impossible to accept. But they must be accepted. In Israel. In the countries of Western Europe. And, in the end, even in the mighty, not-quite-so-impregnable-as-many-may-once-have-thought United States.