Should it catch fire, Ronald Barbour's "The Creative Final Solution To The Muslim Problem In The United States" will explode across America this coming Fourth of July.  It sounds more doable—and less deadly—than Rosie's gay march to Mecca planned for this Valentine's Day.

New Duranty: BAGHDAD, Jan. 18 — An American woman killed here on Wednesday when gunmen fired on her convoy of vehicles was ambushed just minutes after leaving the headquarters of a prominent Sunni Arab political party, where she had been teaching a class on democracy, party members said Thursday.

They said the woman — Andrea Parhamovich, 28, of Perry, Ohio — left the party’s fortified compound in western Baghdad around 4 p.m., heading east to her group’s offices outside the Green Zone, when she and her armed guards came under attack from all sides.

Les Campbell, Middle East and North Africa director for the National Democratic Institute, which hired Ms. Parhamovich about three months ago, said that during the fierce firefight, guards tried to escape, fought back, then called for reinforcements from other private security contractors.

The attackers — perhaps as many as 30 men, according to witness accounts passed on to Mr. Campbell — used heavy weapons, possibly rocket-propelled grenades, destroying the armored sedan that Ms. Parhamovich was in and killing three of her armed guards: a Croatian, a Hungarian and an Iraqi. Two other security contractors were wounded. The attackers then scattered back into the neighborhood.

Saleem Abdullah, a senior member of the Sunni political group, the Iraqi Islamic Party, said that Ms. Parhamovich’s group might have been chosen as a target when it arrived. “It seems that someone, when they saw her in the area, set up an ambush,” he said. “That’s what we think.”...

In contests between reality and fantasy, reality generally wins. Bringing democracy to our benighted Muslim brethren in Iraq is seen by them, and rightly so, as an attack on Islam. Because for men to obey the laws of men is to worship those men or "man" since obedience and worship are equivalent in Islam. This basic Islamic argument against democracy has never been taken seriously by our policy makers and so we continue to send innocents like Ms. Parhamovich to their deaths for nothing.

Lots of news in this department, including everything from successful efforts to ban smoking in one's own apartment and/or car, mayors imposing their personal diet regimes on the restaurants and bakeries in huge cities such as New York, and the post-Kelo-decision increase in government seisure of privaty property deemed necessary for "public use." Expect more, much more, in a political atmosphere where legislation aimed at adults is rationalized as necessary "for the sake of the children."
Albeit in a different context, Chesterton understood the phenomenon not only as totalitarian in nature but as a consequence of political anarchy, when governments can't "leave off governing."   This by way of being "fair and balanced":  Islam isn't the only totalitarian beast out there, just the one that seems more interested in self-preservation than a U.S. government more preoccupied with maintaining open borders and protecting the "privacy" of terrorists than in formulating a rational national defense.

Here's Andrew P. Napolitano on Kelo:

Like a nation of sheep, we continue to allow government to violate our natural rights, of which the right to own property is an essential one. Thinking about the Kelo decision, I am reminded of one of Thomas Jefferson’s favorite quotes from William Pitt the Elder:

The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the crown. It may be frail, its roof may shake, the wind may blow through it, the storm may enter, the rain may enter, but the King of England cannot enter. All of his forces dare not cross the threshold of the ruined cottage.

In short, the natural right to exclude others, including the government, from one’s property—a right enshrined in the Fifth Amendment—has now been eviscerated by the courts. But our natural rights don’t come from the government. They spring from our very humanity, which is why Jefferson called them inalienable in the Declaration of Independence. Thus government has no legitimate power to take them away from us. Of course, if one is a criminal and violates the natural rights of others, the government may use due process through the mechanism of a fair trial and take one’s rights away. But Suzette Kelo was no criminal, and due process was not observed in allowing the City of New London to take what was hers.

One encouraging sign is that, since the Kelo decision, numerous states have fought back by passing legislation or amending their constitutions to prohibit such takings. One can only hope that this movement will continue.   [Read the rest here.]

Alan Wolfe writes in this review, that Dinesh D'Souza parrots the worst kind of Islamic apologetics in his new book, The Enemy at Home. He is committing treason while accusing others of the same. This will be published in the New Duranty Times over the weekend, but it is up at VFR and reporduced here:

At first Dinesh D’Souza considered him “a dark-eyed fanatic, a gun-toting extremist, a monster who laughs at the deaths of 3,000 innocent civilians.” But once he learned how Osama bin Laden was viewed in the Muslim world, D’Souza changed his mind. Now he finds bin Laden to be “a quiet, well-mannered, thoughtful, eloquent and deeply religious person.” Despite being considered a friend of the Palestinians, he “has not launched a single attack against Israel.” We denounce him as a terrorist, but he uses “a different compass to assess America than Americans use to assess him.” Bin Laden killed only 3,000 of us, with “every victim counted, every death mourned, every victim’s family generously compensated.” But look what we did in return: many thousands of Muslims dead in Afghanistan and Iraq, “and few Americans seem distressed over these numbers.”

I never thought a book by D’Souza, the aging enfant terrible of American conservatism, would, like the Stalinist apologetics of the popular front period, contain such a soft spot for radical evil. But in “The Enemy at Home,” D’Souza’s cultural relativism hardly stops with bin Laden. He finds Ayatollah Khomeini still to be “highly regarded for his modest demeanor, frugal lifestyle and soft-spoken manner.” Islamic punishment tends to be harsh—flogging adulterers and that sort of thing—but this, D’Souza says “with only a hint of irony,” simply puts Muslims “in the Old Testament tradition.” Polygamy exists under Islamic law, but the sexual freedom produced by feminism in this country is, at least for men, “even better than polygamy.” And the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s statement that the West has a taboo against questioning the existence of the Holocaust, while “pooh-poohed by Western commentators,” was “undoubtedly accurate.” Unlike President Bush, who once said he could not understand how anyone could hate America, D’Souza knows why Islamic radicals attack us. “Painful though it may be to admit,” he admits, “some of what the critics or even enemies say about America and the West ... may be true.” Susan Sontag never said we brought Sept. 11 on ourselves. Dinesh D’Souza does say it.

Dreadful things happened to America on that day, but, truth be told, D’Souza is not all that upset by them. America is fighting two wars simultaneously, he argues, a war against terror abroad and a culture war at home. We should be using the former, less important, one to fight the latter, really crucial, one. The way to do so is to encourage a split between “radical” Muslims like bin Laden, who engage in jihad, and “traditional” Muslims who are conservative in their political views and deeply devout in their religious practices; understanding the radical Muslims, even being sympathetic to some of their complaints, is the best way to win the support of the traditionalists. We should stand with conservative Muslims in protest against the publication of the Danish cartoons that depicted the Prophet Muhammad rather than rallying to the liberal ideal of free speech. We should drop our alliance with decadent Europe and “should openly ally” with “governments that reflect Muslim interests, not ... Israeli interests.” And, most important of all, conservative religious believers in America should join forces with conservative religious believers in the Islamic world to combat their common enemy: the cultural left.

The “domestic insurgents” who, in D’Souza’s view, constitute the cultural left want “America to be a shining beacon of global depravity, a kind of Gomorrah on a Hill.” “I intend to name the enemy at home,” D’Souza proclaims, and so he does. Twenty recent members of Congress, including Hillary Rodham Clinton and Ted Kennedy, are on one of his lists, and 17 intellectuals (one dead, one British) are on another, with similar numbers of Hollywood figures, activists, foreign policy experts, cultural leaders and organizations. Some of those he identifies—Noam Chomsky, Ramsey Clark, Ward Churchill—might not be surprised to find themselves here. Others—the sociologist Paul Starr, the historian Sean Wilentz, the clergyman Jim Wallis, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum—are less obvious candidates for inclusion. (One person, Thomas Frank, is mentioned on two different lists.) All these people might charge D’Souza with “McCarthyism” for supposedly exposing them, but he accepts the challenge. McCarthy, after all, was “largely right.”

Lest one think that D’Souza exaggerates the danger the cultural left presents to America, he has an ace in the hole to back him up: Osama bin Laden himself. Bin Laden, it seems, has taken pains to identify his natural allies within the United States and regularly engages in “signaling” them through videotapes in “an effort to establish a broader political alliance.” In particular, his fall 2004 tape, generally believed to have helped George W. Bush defeat John F. Kerry, contained a secret message to the cultural left that D’Souza, and D’Souza alone, has decoded. “Whichever state does not encroach upon our security thereby ensures its own,” bin Laden declared. Anyone who thinks bin Laden used the term “state” to mean “country”—common usage in Europe and the Middle East—is wrong. He was actually telling residents of New York and Massachusetts that if they voted for the Democrats, he would refrain from killing them. D’Souza writes like a lover spurned; despite all his efforts to reach out to bin Laden, the man insists on joining forces with the Satanists.

D’Souza has fallen on hard times lately. Political correctness and affirmative action—the issues he has addressed in inflammatory ways in the past—no longer inspire the same passion. “The Enemy at Home” is clearly designed to restore his reputation as the man who will say anything to call attention to his views; charging prominent senators and presidential candidates with treason can do that. (One can dismiss D’Souza’s claim that “I am not accusing anyone of treason or even of anti-Americanism” as either self-delusional or dishonest; my guess is the former.) Yet despite all his heated rhetoric, D’Souza’s book is unlikely to make much of a dent. It relies on a distinction between traditional and radical Islam that even he does not take seriously; there are no theological differences between the two camps, he suggests at one point, and even the “few” political differences between them are disappearing. It is filled with factual errors (Milton Himmelfarb, not Irving Kristol, compared the voting behavior of Jews to that of Puerto Ricans; Diana Eck is not a historian, but Thomas Frank, wrongly identified as a political scientist, is). In a line D’Souza will surely wish he had never written, he brags of the “remarkable progress” in Iraq “since Hussein’s removal from power.” Some of the people he elevates to the status of major enemies of the United States—Kristine Holmgren, Robert Jensen, Glenda Gilmore—are (no offense intended) anything but household names.

At one point in “The Enemy at Home,” D’Souza appeals to “decent liberals and Democrats” to join him in rejecting the American left. Although he does not name me as one of them, I sense he is appealing to people like me because I write for The New Republic, a liberal magazine that distances itself from leftism. So let this “decent” liberal make perfectly clear how thoroughly indecent Dinesh D’Souza is. Like his hero Joe McCarthy, he has no sense of shame. He is a childish thinker and writer tackling subjects about which he knows little to make arguments that reek of political extremism. His book is a national disgrace, a sorry example of a publishing culture more concerned with the sensational than the sensible. People on the left, especially those who have been subjects of D’Souza’s previous books, will shrug their shoulders at his latest screed. I look forward to the reaction from decent conservatives and Republicans who will, if they have any sense of honor, distance themselves, quickly and cleanly, from the Rishwain research scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Alan Wolfe teaches political science at Boston College and is the author of “Does American Democracy Still Work?”

"if we were to leave before our job is done or withdraw our troops as some are suggesting, it will invite Iran in. And, if Iran comes in, other Sunni nations will be… Sunni radicals will be heading into Iraq and we will have a cataclysmic situation that will affect the future of America’s security.’’
-- from an interview with George Bush, the man currently taking a leadership role

Cataclysmic, eh? Yes, indeed, a "cataclysmic situation." But he has the subject wrong. It should not be "we" but "they." "They" being the Sunni Arabs and also the Shi'a Arabs.

Corrected, that phrase now reads:

"[T]hey will have a cataclysmic situation that will affect [for the better, the very much better] the future of America's security."

There. That's much better.

Note to Rich's reader:  It's "low-lifes," not "low-lives."  Just as a baseball hitter who hits a fly ball that's caught has "flied out," not "flown out"; just as a couple of those computer hand gizmos on your desk would be "mouses," not "mice";  just as the preterite of the verb "to joyride" is "joyrided," not "joyrode"; just as if one sabertooth meets another sabertooth at the water-hole, there are then two "sabertooths" drinking, not two "saberteeth";... and so on.

Steven Pinker wrote a book about it.

Anne Cryer, Labour MP for Keighley has never been one to let political correctness get in the way of doing the right thing. Plans for a law against forced marriages were shelved last year, but Ms Cryer has managed to put the issue back on the agenda. From This is Bradford:

Keighley MP Ann Cryer tabled an early day motion demanding the Government take action to end the "rape and false imprisonment" of women and girls, and make forced marriage a criminal offence.

She has now gained support from 75 cross party MPs and said it was time to step up the fight and show Dr Reid how strong support is for a change in law.

She said: "We have strong support to make this evil crime a criminal offence. It is about examining the rights of women and girls.

"We should not take any notice of name calling if we are accused of being racist or Islamophobic - we are trying to protect our young women citizens as we would if they were white. I want the best for my constituents and all women.

"I tried to gauge support with the motion and then go back to John and say I did not approach anyone, this is something people want'."

Mrs Cryer has been campaigning for years to introduce a new law.

She believes Article 12 of the European Convention on Human Right is being breached daily and the Government must legislate to "deter those contemplating the procurement of this unIslamic and inhuman act."

In June the Home Office shelved plans for the offence saying it was not in the "best interest of victims."

But last month Tony Blair gave his strongest hint yet that the work of Mrs Cryer is paying off signalling the Government could re-examine its position on forced marriages.

And in a further boost to her campaign the powerful Home Affairs select committee will also spend a session debating the proposals to introduce a law, after lobbying from Mrs Cryer.

Many of the offences associated with a forced marriage, for example rape and false imprisonment, are currently illegal, but there is no heading under which parties to it can be prosecuted. Muslims often argue that forced marriages are not Islamic. However, what kind of consent can many young girls give if they fear ostracism or, worse still, honour killing?

"These people, ladies and gentleman, have a good look at them. They actually believe if you kill women and children, you will go to heaven," said one young Muslim who waved his finger at the radicals.'

'This is not ideology. It's a mental illness.'...

'Foreign policy has a lot to do with it.'"-- from this news article

Should this nonsense uttered by a supposedly truth-telling "young Muslim" defying or challenging the radicals be cause for cheer, or suspicion?

Suspicion.

Because he is either ignorant of what the texts say beyond anything described as conceivable by Ibn Warraq, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and many others who grew up within Islam and know what Muslims are aware of and what they are not. The Muslim who claims that the ideology of Jihad, including the fast-track to Heaven through killing of Infidel s in Jihad (and Infidels may include women and children in some circumstances, and that too is not a state secret), is not to be seen as the source, and that those who do are simply exhibiting signs of "mental illness" and, furthermore, continues to peddle the line, that will not do any more, that "foreign policy has a lot to do with it," may not be as dangerous as those he is dismissing or denouncing.

But he is dangerous. For he deflects our attention from the texts, teachings, attitudes, atmospherics of Islam. He may really have grown up outside of a society suffused with Islam, and may be genuinely very ignorant, or a misunderstanding Muslim-for-identification-purposes-only Muslim, in the manner of that self-promoting Ms. Manji. But if he is that ignorant, of what worth are his assertions?

And if he does know the truth, and insists that the texts, the "ideology" of Islam, are not the essential source of Muslim terrorism, and of the application of the other instruments of Jihad, then he is simply promoting, in a much subtler way, the same goals, using different methods.

This is a situation in which one has to demand of Muslims what witnesses are asked to swear to in American courts: to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. That is not what this "young Muslim" has done.

"we must expand our military and pay our patriots as well as we pay our professional law enforcement officers"-- from a reader

And a one-time payment of at least $10,000 (and possibly twice as much) should be made to every soldier, full-time, Reservist, or National Guardsman, who served for six months or more in Iraq or Afghanistan. They have been grossly underpaid, and in the case of the civilian soldiers, misled. They deserve it. And they deserve to have their original understandings of the contracts they signed honored -- not unilaterally changed by the government.

How to pay for all that? Why, with a tax on gasoline, and another on uses of oil. And in the end, we should recoup several hundred billion dollars of the amount we have spent by demanding, from the sheiklets of the Gulf (Qatar, Kuwait, the U.A.E.) and from Saudi Arabia, payment if, in the heat of the Iranian-Arab proxy war that will be fought in Iraq, they feel they will need our protection. They should not be allowed to assume we will protect them. We should instead make clear that they will have to buy an insurance policy to pay for such protection.

How much? Oh, possibly $200 billion, from all of the interested and worried parties, for the first two or three years of such protection. And the premiums on that insurance policy will go up, steadily. It is their oilfields. And the very idea that the United States, alone, should be "protecting" the oilfields, without any aid from other oil-consuming nations save Great Britain (and in Iraq that is about to end, and was never a large force), and without those who actually receive the revenues from those oilfields being told it is their problem, not ours (and that is how we should talk of it, instead of allowing the House of Saud, for example, think that the Americans will always be there to defend them, and that they can count on that, rather than have to take out an insurance policy). Why successive American governments keep being suckered into meeting the smug assumptions of the rich Arabs, about Who Is To Pay, is a fascinating question.

JTA reports, "The Mormon church agreed not to posthumously baptize Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal" (h/t: It Shines for all):

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints agreed to a request from the Simon Wiesenthal Center and removed the name of the famed Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter from a list of those scheduled to receive the ordination by proxy ...

The Mormons agreed in 1995 to remove the names of Holocaust victims and Jews from a list of those to be posthumously baptized unless they were direct ancestors of current church members or written permission had been obtained from all living family members. But they didn't honor the agreement and reiterated the pledge in 2000. However, Wiesenthal's name was found last month in a database of people to be posthumously baptized.

"It was astonishing to us that they went against the agreement," said Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Wiesenthal Center. "We believe that Simon Wiesenthal, who lived a full life with great deeds on behalf of mankind, can get to heaven on his own and doesn't need any assistance."

From The Sydney Morning Herald.

Prime Minister John Howard has defended his decision to record a goodwill message for an Australia Day prayer event organised by a controversial group involved in an anti-Islamic court case.

The prime minister will appear in a DVD message for Catch the Fire Ministries, which is sponsoring a multi-denominational gathering in Melbourne on January 26.

In the DVD Mr Howard says Christianity has been an enormous force for good and he congratulates Catch the Fire Ministries for organising the event, to be held next Friday.

"Today is, of course, Australia Day,' Mr Howard says on the DVD.  "It's a time when we celebrate the freedom and privileges we enjoy as citizens of a great, prosperous and peaceful nation so blessed with an abundance of natural beauty. It's also a time to reaffirm our commitment to shared values and our abiding loyalty to our nation, Australia. Christianity has been an enormous force for good and has done more than anything else to shape the lives, not only of millions of Australians, but the character of our nation. "I congratulate Catch the Fire Ministries for bringing Christians from many denominations together for this celebration and I wish you all a very happy Australia Day.'

A spokesman said Mr Howard did not regret providing the message. "The Prime Minister provides messages for a wide array of groups,' the spokesman said.

Catch the Fire's Pastor Danny Nalliah, who is organising the event, was one of two Catch the Fire ministers charged under Victoria's vilification laws in 2002 for allegedly saying Muslims are demons.

An appeal court last month overturned an order that the church apologise to Muslims for vilifying them, but it sent the case back to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal to be decided again.

While the case has still to be resolved, Pastor Nalliah told ABC radio today: "There is nowhere (on) record that we ever said Muslims are demons. I would never say that. "And secondly we never said all Muslims are violent.'
Member of the prime minister's Muslim Community Reference Group and former president of the Islamic Council of Victoria, Yasser Soliman, said Mr Howard should have thought twice about making the DVD.

"Of course the prime minister is free to address anyone he chooses,' Mr Soliman said. "But what he says is extremely influential and what he fails to say is also influential. I would hope that he would clearly condemn hate speeches in all their forms irrespective of who the perpetrators are. It could be perceived that he might have a different standard for some sectors of the community than he has for other sectors in the Australian community, and that would be sending a very dangerous message here and overseas.'

I expect Mr Howard did think twice, three times even, and each time decided that this was the right thing to do.

"...as part of preparations for jihad, actions will be oriented on weakening the non-Islamic’s “Faith,” while strengthening the Islamic’s. What that weakening or “dislocation” entails in practice remains ambiguous. Malik concludes, “Psychological dislocation is temporary; spiritual dislocation is permanent.”-- from this article by Joseph C. Myers, quoting Malik on Jihad

But Islam can be similarly shaken through "spiritual dislocation." The belief-system of Islam can be weakened if Muslims themselves are demoralized and divided. Eighty percent of the world's Muslims are non-Arabs, and their attention should be directed to all the features of Islam that make it the ideal vehicle for Arab imperialism -- linguistic, cultural, and political.

Although fifteen percent of the world's Muslims are Shi'a, those Shi'a happen to be disproportionately represented among the Muslims in the area of the Persian Gulf oil, and indeed the Shi'a of Iran, Iraq, Bahrain, Kuwait and eastern Saudi Arabia outnumber the Sunnis in Iraq and in the countries on the western side of the Persian Gulf -- the U.A.E., Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia. This means that the Shi'a may not, world-wide, be able to withstand the Sunnis, but they certainly are at least a match for them in the immediate area of the Gulf and its oil wealth.

As non-Arabs realize that Islam has helped to bury their own non-Arab because non-Islamic pasts, or caused non-Arab Muslims to become indifferent to all but Islam (as Pakistanis are indifferent to the pre-Islamic history of India of which Pakistan was once a part), they will be more vulnerable to a spiritual malaise and "dislocation" or rather disenchantment with Islam. And if the Sunnis and Shi'a are at each other's throats, this too should provide an exemplary lesson in the natural violence and aggression that Islam encourages because the Qur'an, the Hadith, and the Sira are suffused with such violence, such aggression, such inability to compromise.

British Airways announced today that it was changing its uniform policy to allow staff to openly wear crosses and other religious symbols.

The airline was drawn into a national debate, which included contributions from the Prime Minister, the Leader of the House and the archbishops of York and Canterbury, when it forbade a member of its check-in staff to wear a cross over her uniform last year.

BA said this afternoon that the airline had consulted representatives from the Church of England, the Roman Catholic Church and the Muslim Council of Britain before making the changes, which will allow "a lapel pin symbol of faith such as a Christian cross or a Star of David, with some flexibility for individuals to wear a symbol of faith on a chain". The changes come into effect on February 1.

Jimmy Carter believes all kinds of things. He believes that the 1949 Armistice Lines became permanent borders, even though they never did -- because the Arabs kept refusing the Israeli offer to make them so. And he appeared to know the truth back in 1974, but has forgotten it in the intervening years.

He believes that Resolution 242 is to be read to mean withdrawal from "all the territories" won in the Six-Day War, when it not only says no such thing, but Lord Caradon and others carefully crafted the document so that it would deliberately NOT mean that. And the statements of both Lord Caradon, the British ambassador to the U.N., and of Michael Stewart, the-then British Foreign Minister, make clear that Resolution 242 did not mean what the Arabs, who failed in their attempts to change the wording and the interpretation at the U.N. itself, then went off and insisted without any justification that it did mean -- the meaning which Jimmy Carter, accepting the Arab view, now blithely gives it.

And in return nothing tangible at all was given -- mere promises to discourage hostility toward Israel and to encourage a "peaceful" attitude. The antisemitism of Egyptian television and its press, that is so reminiscent of Der Stuermer in its depiction of Jews lying in wait to snatch a child in order to use his blood for some ritual, has not exactly been an example of what the Israelis had in mind, and what, under the Camp David Accords, was the only thing that they had a right to expect. Even that was denied them.

Shall we go into Carter's credulous acceptance of the "Palestinian people"? What about Carter knowing -- the documents have now been released, and it is clear that the American government knew all along, but was hiding it in order to protect Arafat -- that Arafat himself signed the order for the seizure and killing of two American diplomats in Khartoum by Black September? How could Carter, knowing that, proceed not merely to protect Arafat by not making this information public, but increase his efforts to help Arafat improve his image and polish his sinister message?

And finally, what does Carter know -- what -- about Islam and the doctrine of Jihad? Do you have the feeling he's been studying up on that? Has he been reading the Qur'an and Hadith and Sira, figuring out why it is that the size of Israel does not make a whit of long-term difference to the Arabs and Muslims? Does he know that they differ only on the time it will take to achieve their ultimate and unswerving goal, whether they are like Fatah and support the Slow Jihad and lying or fudging about their objectives, or are like Hamas and support the Fast Jihad and telling the truth about their objectives?

He's a guide to nothing. And an obvious antisemite. Not only in his indifference and cruelty toward Israel, demonstrated on so many occasions. No, that antisemitism is also demonstrated in the sympathy he gave to a self-serving letter from the daughter of a Nazi concentration camp guard and murderer, who had been found out and was in the process of being expelled. Carter found the daughter's letter convincing, and wrote that it was worthy of sympathetic consideration, and then had it sent on to the O.I.S. How often, by the way, does any President ever read any of the mail sent to him? And of the few letters that he actually reads, how often does he feel compelled to write a handwritten note urging that the letter's contents be favorably considered? And how often does that letter's contents, about a Nazi murderer who is being expelled by the Office of Special Investigations after a thorough and meticulous study, become the object of such remarkable presidential solicitude?

There's a lot to say about Carter. He was, in both domestic and foreign policy, our worst president. Under Carter Iran was lost, and Khomeini replaced the Shah. Under Carter, nothing was done, save that witless fireside chat, which proceeded without any attempt to educate the public about the need to get off oil. Under Carter, so many things went wrong that even Gerald Ford, so mediocre himself, later described Carter as a "disaster."

But one did not know, or few did, that he was morally so vicious, morally so unacceptable.

And now everyone knows, or should, and not merely the few who took his measure thirty years ago, and did not like what they saw.

Jordan, the Arab Kingdom of Jordan, was formerly the Emirate of Transjordan, and before that, it was a territory formerly part of the Ottoman Empire that included the entire trans-Jordanian part of historic Palestine. Therefore, it was part of the territory that was originally intended by the Mandates Commission of the League of Nations to be included in the Mandate for Palestine (the Mandate that had as its sole purpose the establishment of a Jewish National Home).

Today, Jordan exists on Jizyah. That is, it exists on economic favors -- outright aid, and special dispensations, such as Most Favored Naton Status -- given it by the United States. These favors are not received with gratitude but rather as due. Jordan's population has consistently shown itself, in polls, to be virulently hostile to the United States. Yet nevertheless, this aid is given as if it were Jordan's due, and never to be tampered with. The attitudes, then, of both donor and recipient are the classic attitudes of the Jizyah, that "protection" money given by the "protected people" to their Muslim masters.

It is absurd for Jordan even to dare to mention that it might want "nuclear power for peaceful purposes." No Muslim state should be allowed to begin work on nuclear projects. No Muslim state currently well along on nuclear projects should be permitted to continue. As for Pakistan, the one Muslim state that, through theft by A. Q. Khan and a program of state deception, was permitted -- through Western negligence -- to acquire such weapons, this is now a country that alone is causing Western nightmares. What will happen to those weapons? Who will control them in the case of a different regime, or no regime at all? What group might be aided by members or ex-members of the Pakistani government (Hamid Gul comes swimmingly to mind)? Pakistan must be prevented from perfecting its weapons-delivery systems, and must be threatened with complete economic collapse and possibly physical destruction, if those weapons are not put in Western hands. The Pakistani masses need not know, but the Western governments must know, that those weapons are not available for Pakistani or other Muslim use.

As for Jordan, even for talking in this way, it needs to be punished. The Administration will not do it. But Congress can end all aid to Jordan, and end as well that program to encourage textile factories which turn out to be factories in which Jordanian Arabs simply exploit non-Arab workers as wage-slaves with their wages often withheld -- a situation that has been investigated by outsiders who declare that the exploitation of workers (non-Arabs) by owners (Arabs) have been the "worst" they have seen anywhere in the world. For more on that, look in the Jihad Watch archives or google more widely.

No, Jordan needs now to be read the riot act and to suffer the consequences even of daring to suggest it has a "right" -- knowing what we all know about Islam and Muslim views of Infidels as inculcated by Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira -- to "nuclear energy" for (of course) "peaceful purposes."

If Abdullah thinks being a nice guy, with fond memories of Deerfield, and having a pretty wife, is enough to blind Americans to the nature of the country he happens to rule thanks to the British doing an unnecessary favor for the Hashemites booted out of the Hejaz by the Al-Saud, he's got another think coming. Or at least he should have, if anyone in Washington had the courage to follow through. And if his "adviser" on how to present Islam to the non-Muslims, a certain Joseph Lumbard, thinks he can present his sanitized version of Islam and continue to have it accepted by unwary Infidels -- whose numbers decrease every day -- he too has another think coming. It will be fascinating to see how Lumbard deals, for example, with the contents of The Legacy of Jihad -- those dozens of Western scholars of Islam, from decades ago, writing on the subject of Jihad. Their articles do not date, but acquire even more force and pith and relevance now.

Chances are he will not dare to read it. For what then can the Lumbards of this world say in response?

And what should be the Infidel response? Just quiet fury, and determination to end the Jizyah not only to Jordan but also to Egypt. And to redimension relations with the chief funder of the ideological Jihad all over the world, in both Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, the most dangerous and malevolent Sunni enemy of Infidels -- Saudi Arabia.

Christiane Amanpour, despite her family background, has no real experience or knowledge of Islam. Herself secular, and married (in a mariage blanc) to James Rubin, she is confused about Islam. She knows Iranian Muslims who are nothing like the Iranian Muslims now in power, but she fails to recognize that those she knows were never the real thing. She doesn’t realize that they were unrepresentative, as unrepresentative of Islam as was, say, Maxim Litvinov of the Soviet regime -- even though he served that regime as Foreign Minister and as ambassador.

She is defensive about Islam without knowing about it, and without knowing how the primitive Muslim masses think. Yet that is what should count in Infidel calculations, and not the suave and often deceptive exceptions -- whether they are Chalabi and other westernized Shi'a exiles inveigling the Americans into removing Saddam Hussein, or plummy-voiced Prince Hassan, a real performance artist, capable of impressing the impressionable.

Amanpour has never studied Islam, never quite grasped the significance of its texts. After all, apparently her own parents were capable of ignoring large parts of them. Nor has she studied the history of Islamic conquest and subjugation of non-Muslims and destruction of non-Muslim cultures, although as someone of Iranian descent, she might well have bothered to do so. Her name gives her, for audiences, a false authenticity, and allows her to be endowed with an authority her level of knowledge does not actually entitle her to claim, or to have attributed to her.

Meanwhile, there is that CNN glory. There is that money. There is that celebritydom. There is that Washington wedding, attended by le tout Clinton administration, and that marriage of convenience, that mariage blanc.

Petro-dollars explain part of it. Stupidity another part. In the case of Amanpour, one wondered how she would come out. Would she realize, in the manner of so many Iranians in exile, that Islam and not merely the Islamic Republic of Iran, was the problem? Would she move from her older positions, like Oriana Fallaci, and see what Islam was all about? Or would she play her "Islamic" card for all it was worth to her -- in entree here and there (to the Hajj, for example)? She is a careerist hell-bent on furthering her career. And what better way to further her career at this point in history than in being a Muslim? Not a real one -- her faith is as sham as her marriage. Instead, she is almost a "Muslim-for-identification-purposes-only" Muslim, who does what she does out of a curious blend of monomaniacal careerism and ambition, together with filial piety. There is also in play for her all sorts of misremembered nostalgia for that jeunesse-doree life as a spoiled child in Teheran -- a child of the very class that benefited financially from the ancien regime, that corrupt, stupid, and unaware regime, that when confronted with Khomeini did not know where to put its feet and hands.

She used to be tolerable -- just. No longer.

Why does the press, why does television, who do political leaders simply refuse to even hint at the truth? Do they think this makes things better, makes us more able to conduct ourselves in what is a permanent war? When, to give one example, 60 Minutes some time ago had a segment devoted to Muslim mistreatment of women among the immigrants in France, the bland and blind though endlessly self-assured Amanpour never, not once, mentioned the word "Islam." When one of her interviewees explains the oppression of young girls -- mass rapes, burning to death, that sort of thing -- as being the result of "tradition," she lets that vague word stand unchallenged and unglossed.

What will it take? Must there be bombs in Jain temples, or at a Confucian altar, sufficiently publicized to make clear to all but the hopelessly stupid and those who are wedded to false symmetries and pat phrases (not just Amanpour, but Tom Friedman, with his platitudes and fake plongitudes, comes nautically to mind)? How much evidence had to be assembled before Copernicus could dare suggest that, after all, the earth really did travel around the sun? How much evidence needs to be accumulated about what is happening now, and what has been happening for 1350 years of Islam's aggression against all non-Muslims, for people to become their own little Copernicuses, and arrive at the unstoppable and ineluctable and unavoidable explanation of what is going on? How much evidence needs to be accumulated for even Christiane Amanpour to do so?

"I`ve been researching this for four years."-- from D'Souza's complacent remark to Glenn Beck

My, my.

And how long did Snouck Hurgronje do "research"? Joseph Schacht, the man who could deliver his lectures on Islamic law in fluent Arabic? How long did Arthur Jeffrey, did Edmond Fagnan, did Armand Abel, did Georges Vajda, study Islam? How long did S. D. Goitein study, and then, at the end of his life, conclude on the basis of that lifetime of study that he had for a long time underestimated, misunderstood, the full malevolence of Islam, and the enormous burden of the Jizyah on those upon whom it was inflicted? How long did that lonely scholar Bat Ye'or, who had grown up and endured a Muslim society, do her research on her many books, including "The Dhimmi" and "Islam and Dhimmitude" and "The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam" and "Eurabia" and a few more, and so many articles as well?

How long, oh D'Souza, how long?
D'Souza must be held up to constant ridicule. He is ridiculous.

When awards are handed out, they often go to the wrong people. It is not the hapless Mohammed El Baradei, nor that apologist-for-Islam ("the mistreatment of women does not come from Islam") Shirin Ebadi, who deserve that Nobel for Peace, but rather Ayaan Hirsi Ali and other brave apostates. And the same is true for those prizes awarded to journalists.

Who has given a prize to Flemming Rose? Or to Hrant Dink?

Hrant  pronounced "Ervant") Dink was a non-Muslim victim of Muslim hatred of non-Muslims. It is true that the particular variant on Islam was the Kemalist cult of "the Turk" -- Kemalism, in constraining Islam, offered a replacement cult, the cult of Ataturk and of The Turk -- and so can be seen to have adopted to a new age essentially the same attitudes. And the re-emergence of Islam has led some Turks, including the one who waited to kill Hrant Dink, to be possessed by a syncretistic mix. The non-Turk means the non-Muslim citizen of Turkey -- Armenian, Greek, or Jew. No offense must be given by these inferior citizens to the cult of the Turk, or to "the Turkish Nation." The same readiness to be offended, the same division of the universe between Us and Them (in the case of Islam it is Believer and Infidel, and in the case of Muslim Turks who have embraced Kemalism it can be, for the primitive, the true Turk and the non-Turk), the same recourse to violence.

Hrant Dink should be remembered, and that memory honored, and not only in Sausalito or Watertown, but everywhere. And the reasons for his killing should be understood, including the reflection of the persistence of Islamic attitudes in Turks, even those who are "defending the Turkish nation from slander" rather than "defending Muhammad from blasphemy." In the minds of Turkish Muslims, these attitudes are mutually reinforcing.

One more thing.

That should be it, as far as entry into the EU is concerned. Call off the farce. And this should also be the time when the Bush Administration reads Turkey the riot act about Kurdistan, and starts to make plans for that independent state, and tells the Turkish government that it had better accept the American-extorted guarantees that there will be no territorial claim made on Turkey by the new and independent Kurdistan, but that Syria and Iran are fair game. And if it doesn't accept that? Then Turkey, whose military is entirely dependent on American re-quipping, American spare parts, American training, can see that American connection go up in smoke from the top of Mount Ararat. No more nonsense about being afraid of "the Turkish reaction." The Turkish government can get with the new program, or be abandoned by its own sure ally. And if it thinks that the Arabs would or could ever be an ally of Turkey, rather than mischief-makers intent on reversing 80 years of Kemalism, it should be disabused of that thought quickly.

"Jordan's population, 70% Palestinian, may indeed be implaccably hostile to the USA, but the King of Jordan is a committed friend..."-- from a reader in response to this post

Several comments.

What matters is not that King Abdullah may be a nice fellow, but what the population of Jordan thinks and does, for that population limits his freedom of maneuver. That population, "Palestinian" (i.e., with roots in Western Palestine) or "Jordanian (i.e., with roots in Eastern Palestine), or 95% of it, freely expresses its hatred of the United States. Could this "committed friend" of the United States, in such circumstances, ever do something to alienate such a population?

Does King Abdullah attempt to slowly educate his Muslim population in anything like the historical reality? Does he dare to explain that the so-called "Arab world" does not belong either to the Arabs, or to the Muslims, alone? Did King Abdullah ever say a word against the regime of Saddam Hussein? Is he on record anywhere as having denounced the massacre of the Kurds? Is he on record as having said that the Lesser Jihad against Israel is unwise, or is he rather on record as attempting to divert Infidel attention from the centrality of Islam in that war, and working to convince Infidels that "if only" Israel gives up this and gives up that, there will be a permanent "solution" to what he surely knows has no solution, but is merely a situation that can be contained if, and only if, Israel is perceived to be overwhelmingly more powerful than those states that might otherwise attack it -- and the rulers of those states who might, just like King Abdullah's father, be forced to join in such an attack, as he was in June 1967, because it seemed, as Nasser assured him in a series of telephone calls (recorded by the Israelis), that the Arabs were winning and there was no excuse for holding back.

I just have to think that this media spectacle likely would be unthinkable in a nation that rated celebrity well below honor, one that taught its children to be self-reliant, and alert.  Like the children of previous generations who read about Huck in school.

Above, the London cover.  According to the U.Va. collection from which this is extracted:

Mark Twain released "Huckleberry Finn" in London through Chatto & Windus in December 1884, just before Charles Webster released the U.S. edition in February 1885. The step gave him an English copyright that prevented pirates from reproducing the book and cutting into his profits internationally.

Have I mentioned Canadian brews?  Unibroue in Quebec Province produces the largest Franco-Belgian style line in the Western Hemisphere.  Don de Dieu, "a triple wheat ale, refermented in the bottle, smooth, rich, and creamy; slightly sweet with a warming mix of strength and full-bodied flavour, delicately spiced with a complex aroma of vanilla and subtle ripe fruits, lightly hopped" is one of their tastiest...

...sipping broues. 

Its name?:

It was named after Samuel de Champlain¹s boat, The Don de Dieu, which arrived in Tadoussac, June 3, 1608. He was commissioned by the King of France to pursue, by way of the great Canadian waterway, the exploration of the vast and inhospitable land called "America".

His mission made him founder of Quebec and the land came to be known as the land of the "somewhat of a great people." Thus, it is in the memory of those ancestors that Unibroue has brewed the "Don de Dieu," a "somewhat of a great beer."

Pour visiter notre site francophone, cliquez ici.

"With your permission, may I reprint your [Christiane Amanpour] article on my blog?"--from a reader

Yes, reprint away.

I used to see Christine Amanpour quite regularly on CNN but for some reason I was not invited to her wedding. When that invitation was not forthcoming, after I had gone and bought something baby-blue-boxed at Tiffany's, which would have gone well with the decor had they both been, as I suspected they might, be fittingly white-outfitted for that mariage-blanc, my feelings were hurt, and I changed the channel,  and haven't returned to it since.

"Where have you seen/heard her [Amanpour] claim to be a Muslim?" --from a reader

I think Amanpour is the product of a mixed marriage. As for attending Catholic schools in England, many among the semi-secular Muslim elite send their children to good, i.e. Christian or Western schools, both in the West and within the Middle East. Chalabi and Allawi and many others in the Iraqi elite attended Baghdad College, run by Jesuits. Musharraf went to a Christian school in Pakistan. Edward Said went to Victoria College in Egypt. In Kuwait, the most advanced Kuwaitis send their children to the American School. At one time many of those in the political establishments of Egypt, of Syria, of Lebanon, of Iraq, and elsewhere, were graduates of AUB (the American University of Beirut). Others have gone to the American University of Cairo. In Turkey, there was Roberts College. In choice of education, as in choice of medical care and in so much else, Muslim elites who can choose anything choose what the non-Muslim West has to offer. They're no fools,  this observable behavior is standard for the secularized elites of Islam, either in exile (as her family may then have been), or even in the Middle East.

But is this ever pointed out? Does anyone ever note that the Muslim elites prefer, for their own children, a Western education because it is the only one that is any good in the Muslim world? No. No one does. And the farce of filial piety toward Islam continues, even among those whose behavior shows, in every way, that deep down, they recognize, even if they will never say, the deep and permanent intellectual failures of Islam -- failures that go with the political, economic, and social failures that are a natural result of the belief-system of Islam.