Asking a Saudi "do you support al Qaeda?" is the equivalent to asking, "do you oppose your government and want it violently overthrown?" None but the most foolhardy would answer "yes" and even so, 10% did. Not understanding the implications of the question, the networks will undoubtedly run this as good news for the United States.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Most Saudi Arabia citizens interviewed in a poll oppose terrorism and want closer ties with the United States. But many Saudis remain opposed to making peace with Israel, according to what researchers call an unprecedented survey of the kingdom.

Ten percent of Saudis have a favorable view of the al Qaeda terrorist network, according to a survey by Terror Free Tomorrow, an international public opinion research group based in Washington.

Fifteen percent said they have a favorable view of al Qaeda's leader, Saudi exile Osama bin Laden, the poll found...

But while the poll was encouraging, "It's not all Kumbaya," he added. Bergen said a "substantial minority" of Saudis -- 30 percent -- support fighting against U.S. and coalition troops in Iraq, and 52 percent would support Saudi Arabia's development of nuclear weapons.

Most Saudis oppose al Qaeda, the survey suggests, and it also found limited support for two other groups the United States has branded terrorist organizations -- Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic movement that rules Gaza, and Hezbollah, Lebanon's Iranian-backed Shiite Muslim militia that fought a monthlong war with Israel in 2006.

"Finally, some good news," Ballen said.

Thirty-three percent of Saudis viewed Hezbollah favorably, compared to 42 percent unfavorably. When asked about Hamas, 37 percent had a positive response, while 38 percent viewed the group unfavorably.

But Ballen said the survey shows the Saudi population is now one of the most pro-American in the Muslim world, with 69 percent of those surveyed supporting close ties between Riyadh and Washington.

"We had done a limited survey there about a year and a half ago and found very strong anti-American attitudes, so I was quite surprised by the results," he said...

The quote here attributed to Ben Franklin by delighted antisemites is a fabrication. No doubt there are many other such "quotes" circulating in those circles.

Nor, of course, are antisemites the only creators of false quotations or stories. There is the Donation of Constantine. The Zinoviev Letter. Und so weiter, to the end of time. One fully expects, any minute now, to see a "letter" in Aramaic -- or possibly even Arabic -- attributed to Jesus himself, in which Jesus explains that he is a disciple of "the one who is to come, the Prophet of Arabia" -- a "letter" that, no doubt, will be enthusiastically spread all over the Umma.

In parts of sub-Saharan Africa, one runs into those who are convinced that Beethoven, Abraham Lincoln, and many other figures famous in the West are black,  and while white people have managed to hide this truth from many, they haven't succeeded with unfoolable black Africans. 

There is no end to this.

Postscriptum:

Franklin also had good things  falsely attributed to him. There were those in Europe who assumed that Franklin was the author of the anonymous "Common Sense." Thomas Paine, who did so much between January and July of 1776 to change public opinion in the colonies, seldom got credit for what he did. His "The Rights of Man" was the first book that he wrote under his real name. It was natural that some Europeans would give Franklin, whose name was so well known in Europe, credit that belonged to Paine.

For more on the misattribution, by Radishchev and others in Russia, of Paine's work to Franklin, see the articles by Klara Rukshina, one of the world's great authorities on Paine.

A few days ago, comedian and actor Alan Davies bit a tramp's ear in a tussle after a friend's funeral. "Tramp" is probably "bum" in American, but English bums don't have ears. Not modern English bums anyway, although confusingly the Old English word "ears" is our modern English "arse". Bummer. Back to the story, reported in The Times:

The comedian and actor Alan Davies insisted yesterday that he was “not normally an aggressive guy” after being accused of biting a tramp’s ear while drunk.

Best known on screen for his curly mop of hair and faux-idiotic demeanour, Mr Davies, a vegetarian, was accused of sinking his teeth into Paul McElfatrick outside the Groucho Club in Soho, Central London, last week.

I've always had my doubts about vegetarians. No good will come of it. If you don't eat animals you get perilously peckish and start eating people. To be fair, on the TV programme Have I Got News For You, it was pointed out that it was OK for vegetarian Alan Davies to have another bite, because the tramp now had a cauliflower ear.

As part of a new partnership with Nicaragua's Sandinista President Daniel Ortega, Iran and its Venezuelan allies plan to help finance a $350 million deep-water port at Monkey Point on the wild Caribbean shore, and then plow a connecting "dry canal" corridor of pipelines, rails and highways across the country to the populous Pacific Ocean. Iran recently established an embassy in Nicaragua's capital. --from this news article

"Palestinians" and other Arabs have been arriving in Latin America for some time. And the Lebanese and Syrian Christians, who are often the descendants of those arrived earlier, are worked on by these newer Muslim arrivals -- the theme of "Uruba" or "Arabness" is played upon. Some of these Christian Arabs are, or can become, islamochristian supporters, just as elsewhere in the West, and some have nothing to do with it. But the Muslim influx alone is worrisome. Heavily Catholic Latin America -- or Catholic and now Evangelical Protestant -- may not, however, be as hampered by its own self-imposed solicitudes and hesitancies as hobble efforts in North America and Western Europe to deal with the menace of Islam. But help, practical help, logistical help, is needed to locate, and monitor, these threats, and deal with them appropriately. It should not be a case only of "helping los norteamericanos" to stop terrorist threats but of helping themselves, the people in Latin America who are part of the West, and who so far live in an area that has been freer of the threat than other parts of that West. Those who recognize the menace of Islam to the art, science, freedoms, and indigenous folkways -- and Islam crushes diversity, for it is a one-size-fits-all Total Belief System, whatever those constant propagandistic pratings about "Islam is not a monolith." Islam is indeed a monolith as a mental system, for it is not so much a religion as a Total System, covering politics, economics, social life, and attempts not only to regulate -- to command or prohibit -- every facet of existence, but also supplies a Complete Explanation of the Universe, offers a Total Belief-System that is not merely indifferent but hostile to everything that is outside Islam, and that includes the non-Islamic histories, and cultures, of Latin America, whether of the Spanish and Portuguese who arrived, and their descendants, or of the indigenous Indians and the rich profusion of their own histories, or of what comes of the mix.

Those in Latin America, properly alerted to the danger, are likely to be harder-headed in dealing with such a threat. No one should stop them.

Topping the donors' list [to the "Palestinians"] were the European Union, which pledged $630 million, the United States, with a $555 million pledge, and Saudi Arabia, which will donate $500 million. --from this news article

$500 million?

That's a half day's revenues for Saudi Arabia. That's it?

And what about Kuwait, the U.A.E., Qatar, Libya, and all the other Muslim oil states that have done nothing to deserve their fabulous wealth?

It is a great error for any Infidel state or people to supply what is seen, by Muslim recipients, and soon after comes to be treated by the Infidel donors themselves, as the due of the Muslims, owed to them by the Infidels -- in other words, a classic payment of the Jizyah.

It is madness. It infuriates. If Congress can stop this "donation" (as it is piously called) it should.

Presidential candidates of both parties should make an issue of this, the product of ignorance of Islam, the attitudes of Islam, including the triumphalism, and the desire to everywhere force Infidels to pay, in whatever form, that Jizyah (if those Infidels wish to save face by calling it "foreign aid" the Muslims don't care -- they know that the Infidels are too scared to deny Muslims this aid, and though there was a brief, uncharacteristic halt, but only to the aid to the "Palestinians" and not to Egypt, Pakistan, or that being lavished on corrupt Iraqis), the spigot has been turned on again, and the "Protected People" have tugged at their forelocks in Paris.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and John Edwards have as much right as Romney and Giuliani and Huckabee and the others to ask aloud why the Americans, having contributed more than a trillion dollars to Iraq, and hundreds of billions to Afghanistan, and $60 billion to Egypt, and $27 billion (the figure calculated by Selig Harrison) to Pakistan since 2001 alone, and billions to the "Palestinian Authority" along with other billions sent by the Europeans, many of those billions having disappeared, without a trace, when Arafat died. Where are those billions? And why is it that the "Palestinians," who have received, per capita, more than any other group, in aid, in history, should continue to receive that aid, above all when the Slow Jihad boys have semaphored or said, in every forum, that they have no intention of making a permanent peace but only a hudna, a hudna to be accompanied by demands so grotesque, so dangerous for Israel's survival, that they can never be met, and so the reason for the future breaching of that "truce treaty" is already contained in the proposals now being made?

When, that is, will the Infidels of threatened Europe begin to realize that they are no different from, just a little further down on the To-Do List, threatened Israel?

How horrible that, with ten trillion dollars having been transferred, since 1973 alone, from oil-consuming nations to the Muslim oil states, that still more billions and tens and hundreds of billions, are spent by the profligate and ignorant and timid West, in the mistaken hope that "poverty" is what makes the "Palestinians" or any other Muslim Arabs insistent on waging war. It is not "poverty." It is Islam.

The Infidels refuse to take Islam seriously. This incredible offer shows it. Utter folly. It disgusts. It maddens.

Generally Pseudsday Tuesday has showcased verbal pseudery. For a change, today’s column deals with a musical pseud. I use the word “musical” in a very broad sense.

Click on the picture below to hear Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Kontakte für elektronische Klänge, Klavier und Schlagzeug.

What’s it all about? Narrativity, that's what. Here to explain Stockhausen's narrativity is John Dack. I use the word "explain" in a very broad sense. Dack moves beyond the “bottom up” approach, perhaps because he wants to leave room for the words to get out:

Narrativity is not only able to accommodate such a so-called "bottom up" approach. Alternatively the work under consideration can be placed in a wider social/cultural context which concentrates on an examination of broader concerns ... An additional problem is the bewildering number of theories about narrative. Hillis Miller lists Russian Formalist, Bakhtinian, New Critical, Chicago or neo-Aristotelian, psychoanalytic, hermeneutic and phenomenological, Marxist, reader-response… amongst others.

I first encountered Stockhausen in Musical Appreciation lessons at school. Once was enough for all of us, including the teacher. Nasty, jarring noises that made no sense. I promptly forgot about him until 2001, when I read that he described 9/11 as “the finest work of art ever”. No change there then.

Oliver Kamm has some thoughts on Stockhausen that are worth reading. For now, the last word should go to a reader of Kamm’s piece who comments: 

When I was a student at the Royal College of Music in London, one of the professors strongly held the opinion that no potential professional musician should go through college without having played some "modern" (i.e. unpleasant-sounding) music. Like the music or loathe it, I think he had a good general point, in that musicians owe it to the composer to give a new piece the best possible performance, and to be appropriately trained to do so.

Anyway, one term, he managed to arrange for the college symphony orchestra to play Stockhausen's Carre. This was a square piece, for 4 orchestras positioned in the 4 corners of the hall. The conductors stood in the corners facing inwards so they could see each other and coordinate the beat, and the orchestras faced outwards each towards their own conductor, with the audience in the middle. Each orchestra was a couple of desks of each of the strings, a varied selection of woodwind & brass, an 8-voice chamber choir, and pretty much a full symphonic percussion section. Maybe a keyboard or two thrown in for good & useless measure.

The piece hadn't been performed in London for 35 years. We soon discovered why. I can honestly say that this is the only piece I have ever played where for the entire duration of the music I couldn't actually tell whether I was playing the right notes or not. The singers had tuning forks more or less permanently to their ears to try and help them pitch their notes. There were really no cues you could take from the players around you.

The students rapidly took a fairly lighthearted approach to rehearsals, to the annoyance of the professors. There was a harpsichord player in the 4th orchestra, who rapidly cottoned on to the fact that nobody could hear her over the percussion, and practised Bach and Handel throughout the rehearsals.

We all assumed that nobody would want to come & hear this junk, even though RCM concerts were free for the public. When we filed into the hall for the concert, we were astonished to find the place absolutely packed with people standing in the gallery.

We later discovered that someone had publicised the concert, and because it was so long since the piece had been played in London, all the atonal music junkies had come to hear it. In London, there are just about enough Stockhausen fans to fill a medium sized concert hall if they all turn up on the same night.

Anyway, all went fine in the performance, we made a raucous din for about 30 minutes. The problem came towards the end. The conductor of the 4th orchestra got lost and out of time with the other three. As a result, in the 4th orchestra we finished about 30 seconds early. Nobody noticed. We got a standing ovation and a rave review from the Times music critic.

I was there too, playing John Cage's 4'33". Nobody heard me, but sometimes nobody hears a tree when it falls in the forest. I made silence, and it was golden.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeANUMsEA7g&feature=related

From a previous posting on Chavez and Islam from September 2, 2006:

"Islam and Marxism claim to offer, in their different ways, social – that is, economic -- justice. Marxism failed, and was seen to have failed, in the Soviet Union. In China, while the Communist Party continues to hold power capitalism, of the most unpleasant Dickensian-era kind, has been permitted to develop. Some of those who might once have been Marxists, or thought they were, because that was the most obvious vehicle for the expression of their resentment, discontent, unhappiness, may now find, because Communism seems so comically out-of-date, to find their new Answer to Everything in Islam. In any case Chavez, who started as a crude leveler, and has become a los-de-abajo caudillo, of the kind limned by Miguel Angel Asturias in El senor presidente and by many others (Martin Luis Guzman, Mario Vargas Llosa), appears to have a fondness for Islam not because he has the faintest idea what it is about, but because he knows one thing: it is the enemy of the United States, and by embracing or endorsing Hezbollah he thumbs his nose at the Colossus of the North. What he, Chavez, a primitive man, does not know, is that Islam does not offer social justice, is far more cruel and unfair in the distribution of wealth, both within Muslim countries, and among Muslim members of the umma, and that it has nothing to offer the world, save for a totalitarian belief-system. Of course Chavez cannot understand this, and of course the introduction of Hezbollah influence into Venezuela, and the appeal to anti-Americanism that also proved so effective for Arab and Muslim interests in turning much of the public in Western Europe against its own interests, as it overlooked the Muslim invasion, will have disastrous consequences not only in Venezuela, but in other countries of Latin America.

This is something that those in Latin America, whatever criticisms and doubts they may have about the United States and its historic role, must realize is a threat to liberal democracy. So far Muslims have not been permitted to enter Latin America in great numbers, though there are significant communities of Muslims (and of islamochristian Lebanese) in Brazil and Argentina, and certainly in that Wild West between Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay, and there are people of Arab descent who have climbed to the political top – think of Carlos Menem, bribed to prevent a thorough investigation of the people behind the bombing of the Jewish Center in Buenes Aires, Shafik Handal in Central America, and others. They are dangerous, and Chavez himself, bad enough without Hezbollah, is by allowing Hezbollah freedom of maneuver in Venezuela, doing things that will damage all Venezuelans – who have been damaged quite enough."

For this Galanskov died?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpLwE30sBb4

PARIS — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice joined her counterparts in the international "Quartet for Middle East peace" yesterday in a rare formal rebuke of Israel for its plans to expand Jewish settlements in the West Bank. --from this news item

Has Condoleeza Rice read the Preamble to the Mandate for Palestine? Is she aware that as far as the "West Bank" goes, the provisions of the League of Nations' Mandate for Palestine are still in force? Is she aware that when the United Nations was created, it accepted, without change, the mandates left over from the League of Nations period? Is she aware that the Mandate for Palestine was set up for one purpose and one purpose only, to create the "Jewish National Home," which would inexorably become a Jewish State, and that in order to make this a reality, the Mandate required the Mandatory Authority to do two things.

The first was to "encourage Jewish immigration" into Mandatory Palestine, where Jews asked for nothing but the right to enter, and then to buy land, at whatever price it was offered (and the Arab, often absentee landlords, offered prices so exorbitant that in 1940 desert acreage was being offered at a price equal to the best Iowa farmland).

The second was to "facilitate close Jewish settlement on the land." That is in the Mandate. She can look it up.

She can also look up, if she cares to, the reports from such legal scholars as the Australian Julius Stone (called by Roscoe Pound the foremost legal scholar of the 20th century), Eugene Rostow (former Dean of the Yale Law School), the practitioner William Brinton and many others, on the legal status of the "West Bank" as an unallocated part of the Mandate for Palestine, to which Israel's claim is clearly superior, as the sole intended creation of the Mandate for Palestine (don't worry, there were mandates galore for the Arabs, who in the event came out of the whole messy twentieth century with 22 members of the Arab League, including the most fabulous natural resources, with Israel existing on far less than one one-thousandth of the total land area ultimately possessed by the Arabs.

And then there is Resolution 242, and the history of its wording, and how the English and Americans carefully did not permit the Arab delegates to amend the wording to include "all the territories" but kept the wording "the territories" and, modifying or limiting the whole agreement, the requirement that Israel have "secure and defensible borders." What constitutes "secure and defensible borders" is up to Israel, not up to Condoleezza Rice or anyone outside Israel to decide, any more than non-Americans have a right to dictate to us what measures we regard as indispensable to our own security.

Her not very intelligent, almost dyslexic boss, is greatly impressed with her. He's a child of privilege and at the same time a sentimentalist. He thinks of his "Condi" as quite a find, a black woman with a doctorate. But those of us who do not think in those terms and are so devoid of racism that we have no inhibitions about attacking anyone who deserves it, see her as a mediocre graduate student who simply kept being dutiful. Her idiotic remark about how the Shia' and Sunnis would simply "have to learn to get along" and her amazement at the Hamas victory, and her constant displays of surprise, based on her imperfect, practically non-existent, understanding of Islam, its texts, its tenets, its attitudes, its atmospherics -- she's had six years to find out about it, after all -- shows how very limited she is.

One would wish for her to be ignored. She is, however, still in authority. Fortunately, in brief authority. The clock is ticking. Let's see how much more money, in the next year,  can be given away to Muslims in order to appease them, and how much more damage can be done,  to Israel, or to other countries also facing  Lesser Jihads. Another year of this, and then possibly something better. Or, possibly, something -- hard to believe -- even worse.

Steve Emerson writes at IPT:

On Friday, two Islamic converts, radicalized while in prison, pled guilty to terrorism charges, after admitting plots to attack "United States military operations, "infidels," and Israeli and Jewish facilities in the Los Angeles area."

The cell leader, Kevin James, founded Jam'iyyat Ul-Islam Is-Saheeh (JIS) while incarcerated in Folsom prison, and began recruiting other converts. Levar Washington pled guilty, along with James last week, and a third cell member, Gregory Patterson, pled guilty on Monday.

A fourth JIS member, Hammad Samana, has been found unfit to stand trial, but is accused of having researched "targets and prepared a document called ‘Modes of Attack.' The document listed ‘LAX and Consulate of Zion,' ‘Military Targets,' ‘Army Recruiting centers throughout the county,' ‘Military base in Manhattan Beach' and ‘Campsite of Zion,'" on behalf of the cell.

The JIS plotters face 20 to 25 years in prison. The plots and guilty pleas come as no surprise to those who have closely followed prison chaplaincy programs, as all too often, those in charge of selecting imams have Wahhabist and radical links. Former NYC prison chaplain Warith Dean Umar has stated that the 9/11 hijackers should be remembered as martyrs, and Umar Abdul-Jalil, top Imam of the New York City Department of Corrections, has his own radical views. As reported by the NY Post, citing tapes provided by the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT), Abdul-Jalil spread his radical views at a Muslim Students Association conference in Arizona:

At one conference session, Abdul-Jalil charged that Muslims jailed after the 9/11 attacks were being tortured in Manhattan, according to the tape. "They [some Muslim inmates] are not charged with anything, they are not entitled to any rights, they are interrogated. Some of them are literally tortured and we found this in the Metropolitan Correctional Facility in Manhattan. But they literally are torturing people," Abdul-Jalil said.

Abdul-Jalil also accused the Bush administration of being terrorists, according to the tape. "We have terrorists defining who a terrorist is, but because they have the weight of legitimacy, they get away with it . . . We know that the greatest terrorists in the world occupy the White House, without a doubt," he said.

At another session, Abdul-Jalil urged American Muslims to stop allowing "the Zionists of the media to dictate what Islam is to us" and said Muslims must be "compassionate with each other" and "hard against the kufr [unbeliever]."

And still, despite deadly terrorist attacks perpetrated on U.S. soil, and the all too frequent instances of anti-American sentiment voiced by jihadists, the various usual suspects are intent on either underplaying the threat or pretending that none exists.

In a front page story in October 2006, titled, "F.B.I. Struggling to Reinvent Itself to Fight Terror," the New York Times dismissed out of hand the dangerous nature of the JIS cell in California (and called into question the validity behind other instances of U.S. based-terrorism cells), ...

The rest is here.