[Of Bernard-Henri Lévy 's wife] I wonder who she is. From that description she could be almost anyone. --Mary Jackson

His wife is the very attractive and vacuous actress Arielle Dombasle, whose shape can be admired in the film "Pauline au plage." Three years ago she was in a play, "Beauty and the Beast," and I remember cutting out, and then managing to lose, a picture of Dominique de Villepin standing next to Arielle Dombasle, along with a group of her male friends and admirers and agents, on the night of the premiere of that play. If anyone has it, and wishes to send it in, it will be used as an illustration to this letter-press.

Though French, Arielle Dombasle grew up, the daughter of a diplomat, in Mexico City. The promising moue of her mouth, however, is French not Spanish. She is apparently a friend of Sharon Stone, a fact that B-H. L. was careful to mention in his re-make of Tocqueville (he even let drop mention of this "friendship" between his wife and Sharon Stone during stops on his book tour) as the reason that she, Sharon Stone, agreed to meet with him, a mere scribbler, on the L.A. etape of his trip, during the note-collecting phase of his in-the-steps-of-Tocqueville farce. The book that resulted should have demonstrated, at least to those familiar with the supposed original and model, "Democracy in America," that intelligence, erudition, subtlety, and good taste still matter, and Levy lacks all four, and a good deal else besides. The book shows as comical a series of misunderstandings about America as can be found in the daily fare offered by The Guardian or Le Monde or many other English or French papers, and French and English radio stations and television channels. Still, he probably had fun with Sharon Stone.

That's his wife.

Then there's the star himself, Bernard-Henri Levy, both a hero of our time and un enfant du siecle, who doth bestride the world like a colossus.

The most interesting detail offered in BHL's account is this business of the identical offices in "all" of his many houses (gee, how many, exactly? more than the seven that John Kerry and the girl from Lourenco Marques possess? More than George Soros or Jack Welch?) -- containing identical offices, even down to the identical felt-pen to be found in every one of those identical offices. So there he is, Bernard-Henri Levy, shirt open to the waist because he finds "clothes suffocating" and "wants to live as much as possible in the open air, in the sun" -- entre feutre et feutre, or as quite a different writer, a real writer beyond anything to be dreamt of in the philosophy of "philosopher" Bernard-Henri Levy, once wrote,"tra feltro e feltro."

And that same writer, who wouldn't be caught dead travelling in any of the same circles as B-H. L., would if he were here today consign BHL, I'm sure, to a bolgia so deep that no ray of BHL's beloved sun could possibly penetrate, and, perhaps for the first time in his life, BHL would have to button up, and perhaps even button his loose lips, the kind that sink all ships and the foolish crews that sail them. But now I'm getting close to another much more entrancing and passionate boat, alluded to in a different but also ray-less bolgia, somewhere in the same nether-depths neighborhood.

They do report it (see my post yesterday), though, in six short paragraphs appended to its front page story yesterday, "At Universities, Plum Post at Top Is Now Shaky" (hmmm... replace "universities" with "big city daily newspapers"...).

The Times piece focuses on Pace U. president David A. Caputo and is worth reading if you need to know what college presidents' pay is like these days ($500,000+ per year and rising at rates higher than inflation).  It is also good on current administration/faculty disputes.  Nevertheless, the piece fails to alert Times readers that something serious is going on at Pace that reflects similar disputes at universities throughout the U.S.

Here is the NY Post yesterday on the threat (my emphasis):

Pace University administrators threatened to sic the cops on a Jewish-student club if it went ahead with plans to screen a critically acclaimed film about radical Islam, the head of the group charged yesterday.

Michael Abdurakhmanov, president of Pace Hillel, said two deans warned that showing the documentary film would implicate club members as suspects in two hate crimes involving the desecration of the Koran at the university's lower-Manhattan campus last fall.

In addition, Abdurakhmanov said an assistant dean physically restrained him as he attempted to defend the film and his group in a meeting with administrators.

"The message was pretty clear, if you show this film, you're going to incriminate yourself," Abdurakhmanov said.

Hillel had planned to screen "Obsession" during Judaism Awareness Week in November. The school stepped in after receiving complaints from Muslim students that the film negatively portrayed Islam.

Here's the Times:

Dispute Arises Over Film on Islam

The president of a Jewish student group at Pace University accused Pace administrators yesterday of trying to stop the group, Hillel, from showing a documentary, “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West,” after Muslim students objected.

Michael Abdurakhmanov, a junior who is the Hillel president, said that he had invited the Muslim Students Association to suggest a speaker for the program, but that the association instead notified a dean.

He said the dean had advised him not to show the film last fall and suggested that if he did, the police could be called in and Hillel members could be considered suspects in acts of bias against Muslims.

Not long before, copies of the Koran, the holy book of Islam, had been found tossed in toilets at Pace.

Christopher T. Cory, a Pace spokesman, said yesterday that the university had never told Hillel not to show the film, but had cautioned that it would need to notify the police if it expected that an event might incite violence.

Mr. Abdurakhmanov said Hillel planned to show the film in the spring. Zeina Berjaoui, president of the Muslim group, said she would oppose showing the movie then, too.

Looks like it will be "Springtime for Jihad in Academe" in a few weeks when the students come back for a new semester.  (Questions for the Times:  What makes the Koran holy?  How do you know the book was tossed?  It may simply have slipped from somebody's hands.)

Update:  The NY Post runs a fine editorial today framing the issues involved as the Times never would:  "Pace's Film Police."

PARIS: Moroccan police have arrested a man suspected of sending death threats to a French philosophy teacher who has been in hiding since September after airing his thoughts about Islam in a newspaper, the daily Le Parisien reported Tuesday. -- from this news item

An idea (the word no Frenchman can pronounce correctly):

Invite Robert Redeker to teach French literature in one of those departments where, to date, courses have focussed on "francophone" and especially "beur" literature. Let him introduce the students to Montaigne and La Fontaine and Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo. Let them find out what, too often, they no longer find out -- that is about French literature. No discourse, post-modern or otherwise. Nothing hegemonic about it. Just poems and prose. In French. Taught by Prof. Redeker.

Universities fall all over themselves trying to find posts for Cornel West. They offer fellowships to Tariq Ramadan. They offer tenure to Noah "After Jihad" Feldman. They get a "catch" on the order of Homi Bhabha, or a thousand Homi Bhabhas.

Robert Redeker needs a job. He needs a job teaching at the level he taught at in a lycee. That is, the level of the most advanced college courses in American colleges.

Who will offer him that job?

Louise Campbell, mother of Molly Campbell, has thrown her daughter to the lions. From the BBC:

The mother of schoolgirl Misbah Rana has offered to drop her claim for full custody of her daughter, the Supreme Court in Pakistan has heard.

The 12-year-old, also known as Molly Campbell, left Scotland without her mother's consent last August to be with her father, Sajad Rana.

Misbah's mother, Louise Campbell, had interim custody of her daughter.

Ms Campbell's lawyer said she would not insist on full custody in return for regular access to her daughter.

The court in Islamabad had been expected to make a ruling on whether Misbah should return to the UK.

However, there was an unexpected turn of events when the lawyer representing Ms Campbell told the court she would drop her claim on the condition she gets regular access to her daughter....

Ms Campbell has intimated a wish that her daughter visit her in Scotland, although Mr Rana would prefer the visits to take place in Pakistan.

I bet he would. How irresponsible. Whatever Louise Campbell's circumstances, how can it be in any child's interests, let alone a girl's, to grow up in Pakistan? No doubt Molly "Misbah" Cambell will freely adopt the jilbab and freely choose to marry her forty-year-old cousin. No doubt Muslims will be claiming this as a victory. "Misbah" belongs to her father under Islam, and her mother is an apostate.

Dozy, dozy bint.

WaPo ponders our word of the week:

..."Surge," though, has no real history or meaning as a military construct -- unlike, say, "tank" or "M-16." It doesn't appear in reference books such as the Oxford Companion to Military History, the Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War or the Encyclopedia of the U.S. Military. Nor does it show up in the Department of Defense's official Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms.

"It just seems to be a term that cropped up that seemed useful," says Lewis Sorley, a retired Army officer and prominent military historian.

Sorley notes that the word is politically savvy because "surge" seems to suggest a sharp but passing event. "If you're trying to engender support from those who have doubts about the war, it's a useful word," he says. "Because if this is a temporary event, it might be more palatable."

It's not clear who coined the word "surge" to describe troop increases. But it gained quick currency -- that is, it surged -- in November. Its first apparent journalistic use in reference to Iraq was in the New York Times on Nov. 21. A day after The Washington Post reported that the Pentagon was considering whether to deploy more troops, the Times said unnamed Pentagon officials had dubbed this "the surge option."

Thereafter, variations of the phrase "surge option" appeared in newspaper stories and TV reports, then was quickly shorthanded to "surge." (The brevity of the word even might account for its popularity in headlines -- taking up far less space than more neutral phrases, such as "troop increase.")...

The mother of tug-of-love schoolgirl Molly Campbell has dropped her case for full custody of her daughter.  A court in Pakistan heard Louise Campbell had decided not to pursue the case in return for regular access to her daughter. 

Lawyer Nahida Mahboob Ellahi said after the Supreme Court hearing in Islamabad today: "I have made an offer on behalf of my client that she will not insist on full custody provided regular meetings with her daughter take place."

Molly, 12, also known as Misbah Rana, has been at the centre of an international custody battle since she left the Western Isles to live with her father in Pakistan in August.

Lawyers for both parents will now discuss access arrangements before the case calls again on January 17. 

Ms Ellahi said: "Both parties will then come back to discuss arrangements before the judge." The lawyer has argued that Misbah should be allowed to speak to her mother on the phone at any time. A phone number should be provided for Mrs Campbell to call her any time," she said.

Misbah did not attend today's hearing. Ms Ellahi said Ms Campbell had made the decision because of the "mental and psychological strain" of fighting the case.  She had lost hair and weight during the lengthy legal battle, the lawyer told BBC News 24. The case has drawn international attention since Molly travelled to Lahore with her father and elder sister, Tahmina, on August 25.

There were fears that the schoolgirl had been abducted, prompting Ms Campbell to make an emotional television appeal pleading for her daughter's return. It soon emerged that Molly had made the trip voluntarily and wanted to remain with her father in Pakistan.

Ms Campbell told Pakistani courts through her lawyer that her daughter was taken to Pakistan illegally, despite Molly's pleas. She is the girl's legal guardian after winning custody in a British court last year. The family split up when she and Mr Rana divorced in 2001.

Can't argue with the man's logic, but then logic has its limits.  Item from Page Six:

IN a snub that will have Bob Dylan fans blowin' in the wind with rage, Simon Cowell has come out bashing the beloved folk legend as a dull singer who's not as talented as perky pop princess Kelly Clarkson. "Do I prefer Kelly Clarkson's music to Bob Dylan's? Yes. I've never bought a Dylan record. A singing poet? It just bores me to tears," Cowell tells February's Playboy. The acerbic "American Idol" judge adds: "I've got to tell you, if I had 10 Dylans in the final of 'American Idol,' we would not be getting 30 million viewers a week. I don't believe the Bob Dylans of this world would make 'American Idol' a better show." The 47-year-old Brit, who begins his sixth season Tuesday with the smash Fox talent contest that made Clarkson a winner in 2002, says he knows a lot of people think he's a big jerk for his acerbic, in-your-face opinions - and admits they may be right. "Based on public opinion, yeah, I am. If half the people think I'm a [bleep]hole, then I'm half a [bleep]hole."

Local 10 (h/t LGF): MIAMI -- Three Middle Eastern men who were arrested and later had charges against them dropped over a brief terrorism scare at the Port of Miami on Sunday said they were unfairly targeted because of their ethnicity and creed.

Amar Al-Hadad said he was "humiliated, disrespected (and) treated real badly just because my name is an Arabic name and I'm a Muslim."

The Iraqi-born Al-Hadad cried during the Monday news conference in which he described the way he, his brother, Hussain Al Hadad, and friend, Hassan El Sayed, were treated..

Takes the biscuit, you mean. Along with the tea and counsel that great Anna used to take, while three realms obeyed, before the colonials got all uppity, stopped speaking English and had other kinds of tea parties. --Mary Jackson

"the tea and counsel that great Anna used to take..."

Last I looked, Zeugma had been flooded by the new Turkish dam, and not even David Packard could rescue everything in time for transfer to the local museum. So for now, I'm staying away from Zeugma.

And since syllepsis is what you get when you stay in a hospital that has a big problem with hygiene, I don't want to get near that either. Try as you might, you'll get nothing from me, at least right now, about Zeugma, about Syllepsis. Your allusion I shall view as a bait on purpose laid to make the taker mad. And I'm not biting. No, no. Les poissons ne mordent pas, and you won't find me a fool, in McElligott's Pool.

You must be an Aries. --Mary Jackson

Well, tup my ewe.

No.

Aha, but you believe in star signs enough to know what you're not, and, by implication, what you are.

I'm not an Aries either. Must be fate. --MJ

Belief? Belief has nothing to do with it. In my line of work, one has to learn about all kinds of things that hold no intrinsic interest. Islam, for example. Learning about it, reading about it, is a grim duty. Studying the way people avoid learning about it is another duty.

Astrology is silly, but it keeps some people off the street and it can be fun to read about the Year of the Rat and the Year of the Snake and the Year of the Pig on the paper placemats in the restaurant, especially when you have run out of reading material and need a conversation-starter with your companion who is getting a bit fed up with you, as you both sit waiting for the hot and sour soup and the dim sum trolley to arrive.

The problem isn't that literature professors have stopped teaching literature, nor is it that they are forgetful of beautiful language.  The problem is that their self-induced cultural amnesia doesn't encompass all of their memory functions.  How wonderful it would be if they all woke up in their hotel rooms one morning and forgot that they were in town to attend the annual MLA (Modern Language Assn.) convention, forgot they were in a hotel, forgot, in fact, that they were teachers of English.  Go to Armavirumque for Roger Kimball's edifying, satisfying, lengthy post on the laughably self-important MLA:

The annual conventions of the MLA are like fever charts of contemporary academic life. Every radical trend besetting the academy is on florid display: 57 varieties of Marxism, feminism, homosexualism , anti-dead-white-European-male-ism, all dispensed in smug academic doublespeak. I have attended several MLA conventions. Each time I leave thinking things couldn't get any worse. Each time I have been wrong.

PARIS, Jan 8, 2007 (AFP) - France's veteran far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen on Monday predicted that he will again qualify for the second round of the country's approaching elections, but said that this time he could actually be voted president. --from this news item

A Le Pen victory in France would be terrible. It would set back during a critical period the respectability and plausibility of those who would like, correctly, to put a complete halt to Muslim immigration -- and to find ways not to engage in the hopeless task of large-scale "integration" of a population whose belief-system, a Complete System of Regulation, tells them that they are there to possess, to sweep away obstacles so that Islam will "dominate and is not to be dominated."

Le Pen is a crude racist and antisemite. Furthermore, he has shown that his antisemitism remains steady while his attitude toward Arabs and Islam wavers. He was a great supporter of Saddam Hussein, and remains anti-American in one of the recognizable French traditions of anti-Americanism, America as the land of thrusting capitalist skyscrapers as opposed to the certain verities of the French terroir, including Jose Bove's farmers.

What would be the American equivalent? A blend of the late Leander Perez of Plaquemines Parish, the late Gerald L. K. Smith ("For Cross and the Flag"), the still-unlate Paul Findley, and, the most respectable of the lot, with his slicked-back hair and Gucci loafers and BMW, Pat Buchanan. That is what Le Pen is and would be. And Islam would then have a chance to triumph, for many who are against it would not be able to bring themselves to be in such a galere, and those most intelligently alert and therefore alarmed about Islam would be painted as Le Penistes.

Think, after all, the way CAIR and others characterize JW and other websites, as belonging to some mad-dog right-wingers. The charge is absurd. But in the case of Le Pen, the charge would not be absurd. He will only do damage. He has only done damage to the cause of those who are intelligently alarmed about the presence and spread of Islam and Islamic supremacism in the lands of the Bilad al-kufr, and especially in France.

There is nothing good one can say about Le Pen. In France, and perhaps in Europe, this -- well, imagine a movie about Occupied France, and then as you run that movie in your mind's eye, stop the projector slowly when you get to the most craven and vicious kind of collaborator, the born antisemite who has a line to Gestapo headquarters in rue des Saussaies, and you will have a good idea of Le Pen. He has been the greatest obstacle to sensible and forthright discussion of what Islam is all about in theory and practice, and why "integration" will not work, and why there is no time to waste in learning about Islam and undoing the folly of the corrupt or self-assured but stupid promoters of the Euro-Arab Dialogue and all that it is doing to rewrite European history and the relation of Islam to Europe as to the rest of the world.

The sooner Le Pen dies, the more likely it is that in France those who are aware of the problem, but have been holding back because they do not want to appear to endorse Le Pen. Le Pen (who, by the way, visited Saddam Hussein to offer his support, and has every conceivable anti-American and of course anti-Semitic -- that is to say anti-Israel -- view of the European left). One hopes that the handful of sensible leaders -- Sarkozy comes about as close as, at this point, we can hope for -– will step into the breach.

So terrible is the problem, however, that some good people will even vote for Le Pen, as a way of showing how alienated they are. This shows how badly the French politicians have fallen down -- not merely the crook Chirac, of whom no one expects anything (and he should not be taken seriously by anyone in the American government), nor the poseur Dominique de Villepin, but a great many others.

How stupid can people be not to realize that the field should not be left to Le Pen or those like him? Each country is different, and Fini is perfectly acceptable, while Alessandra Mussolini, who split with Fini over his denunciation of the antisemitic legislation -- the "racial laws" of the late 1930s -- is not. In Germany, there is no one called "right-wing" who can conceivably be acceptable; Belgium and the Scandinavian countries, however, each require specific local knowledge to decide where one has a right to worry and where some are labelled "right-wing" or "far right-wing" only because the press is itself propagandizing against them, as it always used to do against the Lebanese Christians. They unfailingly described them as "right-wing Christians" when the epithet made no sense.

Le Pen is not paid by Saudi agents. But if he is not being paid by Muslim agents, he should be.

In attempting to prevent the islamization of Western Europe, Le Pen has been worse than useless. He gets in the way. And his view of the universe, with his hatred of Americans and of Jews, is quite close to that of those he claims to oppose, but he is simply Tweedledum to their Dee.

In "Napoleon Dynamite," Pedro Sanchez is running for Class President and promises his fellow students that "if I am elected, your wildest dreams will come true." It's a good campaign slogan, truthful in its beautiful untruthfulness, and Pedro deserved to win. No one will make our wildest dreams come true in Europe, or in America. But one does hope that in expressing home truths about Islam and islamization, the field will not be left to the likes of Le Pen. The sooner he is gone from the scene, the better.

You would never know that, though, from reading the New York Times. 

Eric Lipton's report begins with the gleeful proclamation that "Delivering on a major campaign promise, House Democrats used their new majority Tuesday to push through a bill that would write into law several remaining recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission."

Of couse, the promise wasn't to enact "several remaining recommendations."  It was to enact the several remaining recommendations — that is, all of them that were within Congress's power to enact. 

The reader does not learn, unless he is willing to wade through to the very end of Lipton's dispatch (and take note of a fleeting remark between dashes), that the House bill not only failed to do that — it failed to do it with respect to the matter that is most within Congress's power to enact: namely, Congress's own internal organization.

Here's the last paragraph of Lipton's story (italics mine):  "Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, who held a hearing Tuesday as the Senate prepared for its version of this bill, noted that one major recommendation — not in the House measure — was strengthening Congressional oversight of intelligence and counterterrorism efforts. 'We found it a lot easier to reform the rest of the government than we did to reform ourselves post-9/11,' Mr. Lieberman said. 'That’s unfinished work.'"

So here's your new national security agenda in the House:  Potentially ruinous regulation of the American shipping industry with no meaningful increase in security (Lipton concedes that "some Democrats have expressed concerns that the bill’s mandate on inspecting ship containers may be unreasonable") ... but when it comes to regulating themselves — a high priority for the 9/11 Commission — Speaker Pelosi's House is AWOL

The British Astronomical Association has some information this week about the visibility of Comet McNaught in the sky at sunrise and twilight. They describe it as a spectacular object in the evening sky when viewing should be better than in the morning. Their advice is that if the western horizon is clear you should start looking as soon as the Sun sets. The comet should be obvious at an azimuth of around 240 degrees and the tail will be pointing almost straight up from the horizon.

My husband went out this afternoon to see and took these at 5.45pm GMT looking slightly south west from a viewpoint in East Anglia.

NASA believe that once the comet has passed behind the sun later this month it should show in the sky even brighter. Their picture is very good, as it should be with all that equipment.

This picture shows the comet enlarged to show the tail best. Below is a picture showing it in context with sky and horizon.

Rome, 10 Jan. (AKI) - Italian conservative MP Daniela Santanche has received death threats over her opposition to the Muslim veil, Italy's leading paper Corriere della Sera reported in a front-page article on Wednesday. Santanche reportedly received a letter in Arabic and English at her lower house office Tuesday night with pictures of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, murdered in 2004 by an Islamist fundamentalist for his movie Submission, which denounced violence on women in Muslim countries, and Dutch MP Hirsi Ali, the film's author, who has also received death threats.

"This is the hour of my liberation...your time has come," the note said. The message also carried a paragraph from the BBC World website on 23 October, describing Santanche as an MP who "has said the veil is not required by the Koran" and has been described as "an infidel by an imam." --from this news item

Death threats are sent and what's more meant, so that Italian MPs and Dutch MPs are forced to be escorted everywhere by armed guards, and so too must the most prominent of Italian journalists (Magdi Allam), while a French teacher in a lycee must go underground, along with his family, and meanwhile the Tariq-Ramadans and imams and Western hirelings of the Arabs can serenely go about their business, no matter what they do, and no one seems to find this strange.

For every death threat that is received by Geert Wilders, by Magdi Allam, by Robert Redeker, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali (who had to leave the Netherlands, and Europe), by Daniela Santanche, by the editors of Jyllands-Posten, by anyone else, the governments affected should turn a screw in their policy: shut down the ten most offending mosques, and ratchet up the policy of returning-to sender the illegal immigrants, to begin with, and then to ensure that those who are legal are going to not only behave themselves, but swear oaths of loyalty to whatever Infidel nation-state they happen to have settled in, with the slightest infraction of that oath being grounds for the stripping of citizenship for that person, and, just the way that entire families lose their rights to public housing if one member of that family is convicted of drug-dealing from the apartment, also the entire extended family of someone found to be supporting or participating in acts to promote violent Jihad. No Infidel, in the Lands of the Infidels, should have to go around with armed guards. Quite the reverse: it is Tariq Ramadan, and assorted imams and Hizb ut Tahrir supporters and promoters, who ought to be constantly worried about doing something that will cause their prompt stripping of citizenship, and deportation back to good old Dar al-Islam, and it should make no difference that some of them, like Tariq Ramadan, managed to be born in Europe. Home is where the heart is, and the heart is with Dar al-Islam.

Stephen Pollard writes:  A BBC mole has sent me this briefing for BBC staff from the BBC's Middle East Editor, Jeremy Bowen, on what lies ahead this year.

-----Original Message-----
From: Jeremy Bowen
To: Editorial Board; Newsg World-Bureaux-Eds; Newsg World Asseds; News Leadership Group; Mark Byford & PA; Simon Wilson-NEWS; Jerusalem Bureau;
Newsg World-Affairs-Unit
Sent: Fri Jan 05 15:16:16 2007
Subject:  Mini briefing on the Israeli and Palestinians

2007 has started as unpromisingly as 2006 ended. The outlook is bleak because of fundamental instabilities and weaknesses on both sides.

Israel's major military incursion into Ramallah on Thursday, killing four Palestinians after a botched arrest operation, was a reminder of the non stop pressures of the Israeli occupation.

What is new in the last year, and will be one of the big stories in the coming twelve months, is the way that Palestinian society, which used to draw strength from resistance to the occupation, is now fragmenting.

The reason is the death of hope, caused by a cocktail of Israel's military activities, land expropriation and settlement building – and the financial sanctions imposed on the Hamas led government which are destroying Palestinian institutions that were anyway flawed and fragile.

The result is that internecine violence between Hamas and Fatah is getting worse. On Thursday six people were killed in clashes between them in Gaza. The death of a major figure on either side would spark something much more serious.

In Israel the political turmoil that followed the inconclusive war with Hezbollah last summer continues unabated.

There are signs that PM Ehud Olmert is trying to set up his coalition partner Amir Peretz as a scapegoat for Israel's problems during the war and since, by ousting him from the defence ministry. Olmert may be hoping he'll get away with it because Peretz's position as Labour leader is already under attack from within his own party. Peretz's people say that if Olmert tries it, the government will fall.

Even if does manage to demote Peretz, he probably won't improve his parlous [sic] position in the polls. It is exactly a year since Ariel Sharon's stroke, so Israelis are comparing their lost leader with the one they have now, and finding him wanting. An air of incompetence hangs around Olmert when it comes to military matters. Typical was the timing of the raid in Ramallah, which ruined yesterday's summit with Mubarak which was supposed to bring closer the release of the captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

Olmert wants to replace Peretz at the defence ministry with Ehud Barak, the former Prime Minister. Barak is a retired general, former head of the Israeli army and its most decorated soldier. (Among his many exploits was disguising himself as a woman during a raid in Beirut to kill various Palestinians). The feeling in Israel is that 2007 will be a year of wars, so aside from coalition politics Olmert wants to have a warrior next to him when they make the tough decisions. The intray could include whether or not to attack Iran's nuclear facilities.

Another serious problem for Olmert is that yet another corruption scandal is lapping close to him. This time the head of the PM's office in Jerusalem is under house arrest for her alleged role in corruption in Israel's tax authority. Olmert is not yet implicated, though he's already been under investigation over separate allegations.

The political crises in Israel - and violent political disintegration among the Palestinians - are not just internal matters. They make it impossible for the Israelis and the Palestinians to engage in a meaningful political dialogue, assuming that their protestations that they want one are true. (The one meeting that Olmert has had with Mahmoud Abbas can hardly be called a process.)

Only strong Israeli and Palestinian leaders would be able to make the tough choices necessary to relieve the serious pressures that are building up in the holy land. To persuade their people to make the necessary concessions, they would need a strong political base, which neither Olmert nor Abbas possess.

Because they are weak - many would say lame ducks - don't expect any progress. And since an uneasy status quo cannot hold, no political progress will equal more violence.

No comment required.

Reading “Is the nation state threatened?,” Andy McCarthy’s alarming New Criterion essay on the continuing judicial decertification of the American republic, I wondered if it is time to begin discussing secession. Government is stripping us of self-government, both the personal and political varieties, a devolution that many welcome.  For those of us who find the process repugnant, the question is what to do about it.

Secession was tried famously by the Confederate States in 1861, and discussed, not so famously, by New England states during the War of 1812, but the secession I’m thinking about would have to be contingent on 21st Century conditions.  Current realities such as the growth of supranational power, uncontrolled immigration, and legal roadblocks to defending ourselves from Islam without and within would not exist unchecked if Americans believed themselves to be self-governing—and were naturally practiced in acting on the principle. 

Signs that many of us are already taking steps toward secession include the replacement of mainstream media by independent media on the Internet and the growing homeschooling movement, in which parents take the place of state schools at the primary level.  These and other trends need to be accelerated in order to keep several steps ahead of the aggrandizing state. 

Step on the gas.

From the website Something Jewish

Two teenage twin sisters from Kyrgyzstan in the former Soviet Union who arrived in Britain after their parents were murdered have been told the Home Office has delayed plans to deport them.
Kamila and Karina Kaya, 18, who have been in Britain for the last three years and supported by members of Birmingham's Jewish community now look set to emigrate to Israel.

"They are going to be allowed home pending arrangements for them to go to Israel. This is very good news because they won't be stuck at the detention centre," said Selly Oak MP Dr Lynne Jones.

With help from the Israeli Embassy and The Board of Deputies, the girls will have enough time to prepare their application to live in Israel.

So our loss is Israel’s gain. Good luck to them with their studies and medical careers.

WASHINGTON - Rep. Keith Ellison has been named to the House Judiciary Committee, a panel that has oversight over issues such as civil liberties, immigration and courts.

In a prepared statement, Ellison, D-Minn., called the selection an honor and privilege.

"I look forward to pursuing a progressive agenda in the committee, including the restoration of American citizen's civil liberties that have come under increasing attack over the past six years," said Ellison, the first Muslim member of Congress.--from this news item

Let him dare to raise the issue of "racial profiling" and then bring to the hearing pictures of John Walker Lindh, and Yvonne Ridley, and Jose Padilla, and others. Cross-question him about the difference between a "race" and an "ideology." Ask him what he makes of certain passages in the Qur'an and stories in the Hadith. Ask where he thinks Islam locates political legitimacy. Ask him what he thinks of the reasons why no Muslim state has endorsed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (well, Iran under the Shah did, but that endorsement is long gone), and why instead the Muslim states carefully composed a completely different Muslim version and attempted to pass that one off as essentially the same thing.

Above all, keep asking him questions that relate to Darfur, and to Islam as a vehicle for Arab imperialism. Keep asking him -- all those who interview him -- about slavery which is part of Islam, legitimized by the Qur'an and Hadith, and therefore can never be done away with, even if, under Western pressure (there never was and never could be a Muslim Wilberforce), the slave trade, and slavery, were in most, but not all, Muslim places, stamped out.

Ask him what he intends to do about the Arab enslavement of blacks in Sudan, Mauritania, and about slavery of all kinds of people, the domestic "servants" treated as sex slaves, behind the high guarded walls of those fabulous palaces in Saudi Arabia.

Ask him what he thinks about "social justice" in Islam. Ask him what he makes of the distribution of wealth both within Muslim countries (as, say, Saudi Arabia, or Egypt, or Jordan, or Morocco, or Iran) and among Muslim countries (the fabulous unearned wealth of nearly a dozen, and the poverty of the others, relieved by the foreign aid not of fellow Muslims, but of Infidels).

Ask him, ask him, ask him. Make him show the inconsistencies in his dreamy view of Islam, force him to admit or force him to lie. It doesn't matter.

Don't let up for an instant on Keith Ellison.

Keep him constantly on the defensive.