Senator Barak Obama, in reponse to Senator Bob Kerrey's pointing out his Muslim backround, said on the Today show this morning: "I have relatives who were Muslim, I am a Christian."

I'm glad to hear him say it.

WAR FOOTING
Al-Qaeda’s air raid on 9/11 eclipsed Pearl Harbor in devastation and shock value. It exceeded anything ever accomplished by Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. It was a domestic military strike, wiping out thousands of American civilians. The enemy, in previous attacks, had already bombed a U.S. naval destroyer and two U.S. embassies.

As it happened, the suicide hijackings also violated several American criminal laws because the jihadist attackers were not privileged combatants — i.e., honorable enemy soldiers who conduct their operations within the laws and customs of war and who are therefore permitted to use lethal force. The civilian penal law, however, was a side issue. This was war, not law enforcement.

As a consequence, the nation assumed its war footing. For political reasons, the revisionist Left has referred to this effort as “the War on Terror of this administration” — to borrow the obnoxious phrase of Judge Anna Diggs Taylor, the Jimmy Carter appointee who tried to invalidate the NSA’s terrorist-surveillance program. But this was never just President Bush’s war. It was — it is — our war. The country’s war. This may seem like ancient history, but in the months after 9/11, we were not in Iraq. We were in the “good” War on Terror — the one Democrats supported, in word and deed, because they damn well knew Americans would tolerate nothing less.

We no longer wanted the Trial on Terror. After eight years of that approach, the mass casualties, the hundreds of billions in wreckage, the smoldering Pentagon, the stunning canyon where twin towers once stretched to the sky, all of it convinced us that a different kind of response was in order. That nation made a political decision to go to war...

The rest is here.

Prompted by Robert Spencer's post here, I read quickly through the piece written by Rosalind Morris. It goes on and on, offers no evidence of anything other than that the claim, made by someone, that Nadia el-Haj had studied at Bryn Mawr with Barnard's President Judith Schapiro,  was false -- as if that made any difference on the value of Nadia el-Haj's ludicrously tendentious work, which was what  the vote on her fitness for tenure was all about. Despite some crushing judgments unanwerably offered, on the quality of that work, Nadia el-Haj was voted tenure. This was  not only because her department is topheavy with sympathizers with the same Cause but because, at the very same time as the El-Haj case, Joseph Massad was being pushed, hard, by his pals (George Saliba, Hamid Dabashi, and others) and Dwight Bolinger may have decided not to contest or block Nadia Abu el-Haj at the same time as the Massad outrage was being attempted.

Rosalind Morris appears to believe that I have an association with Campus Watch. I have none. I've just taken a look at the Campus Watch site. It posts twenty-nine pieces by me. Twenty of the twenty-nine are re-postings from Jihad Watch, New English Review, and Front Page Magazine. These things are posted without my knowledge, and without my permission, as is now the standard practice in much of Blogland. I have no present association with Campus Watch at all. Indeed, the extent of my association in the past was slight. I was commissioned to write about Columbia's MEALAC. I gave them an initial nine items, and then I decided to end my piece-work arrangement. I was always horrified by the pictures in Jacob Riis’s “How The Other Half Lives.”

As I read Rosalind Morris's piece, however, I thought it so turgid, so badly written in every respect, so comical withal in its failure to produce any evidence for its assertions and in its hysterical attempt to cover that up with mere rambling, that surely, I said to myself, this must be one more freshman who is trying out for the Columbia Spectator, and this is her maiden effort. Eventually, I thought, she will no doubt learn how to amass facts, and possibly even acquire the ability to use the English language, if not well, much less beautifully, at least acceptably. I was, you see, in a charitable mood. I did wonder, however, what Jacques Barzun would have made of Columbia's standards today. in apparently admitting someone who found it so difficult to express herself, or to think.

I came to the end of the piece, and found this:

"The author is a professor of anthropology and the associate director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. The views expressed in this article are those of the author only and do not constitute an official statement on behalf of either the department of anthropology or the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society."

Non e possibile. Je n'y crois pas. Ne vozmozhno. But there it is: "Professor of Anthropology" and "Associate Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society."

I hope Jacques Barzun, down in San Antonio, never finds out about Rosalind Morris, or has to endure a sample of her prose.

If, like me, you've been rushing around like a mad thing, your jangled nerves will be soothed by this lovely carol, sung by the Vienna Boys' Choir: "Still, still, still, weil's Kindlein schlafen will." Click on the picture and take a moment to listen:

"...Columbia has proven itself to be nothing but an organization of dimwits."
-- from a reader

This is the kind of remark that undoes legitimate criticism. Columbia, like other universities, has professors of distinction, and some not so distinguished, and then it was what may be called The Usurpers. For they have clambered into academic life as careerists, fixing on this or that modish fashion (which fashion usually turns out to be a collection of phrases), and riding that fashion, and all the things that go with it, right to the top. They can be identified by their constant use of such phrases, or even words. I use some of those words -- "hegemonic," "discourse," "post-colonial" (which strips "colonialism" of any sell-by date) in that satirical paragraph I composed and offered up as the MESA Nostra bit of prose whose author is to be identified.

The Usurpers review each other's books. They provide blurbs. They write references for grants --- Guggenheim, Fulbright, everything that isn't nailed down and that can be used for a summer, or a year, at Bellagio, in southern France, even perhaps right here at home. They not only hire one another, but promote one another, and keep out with what Nabokov once called "the thud of a vindictive racket" those of merit and intelligence whose very presence represents a permanent threat to The Usurpers.

They are less likely to be found, these Usurpers, in those fields, such as the hard sciences, where fakery and fashion are soon exposed by the nature of the subject matter. But where anything goes, gender, sex, race, colonialism, postcolonialism, then the sky's the limit. It used to take a dictator to keep the Usurpers in academic life -- Trofim Lysenko and Nikolai Marr would not have lasted one minute in Soviet universities and institutes had they not had the backing of Joseph Stalin. But now the Usurpers have seen a good thing, and that great good thing for them is the university. One thinks of Gayatri Chakravarti Spivak, of Judith Butler, of the marxisant Jameson, of so many others. And at the same time, one thinks of all of those who had a real, deep, profound love for history, for literature, and who entered graduate school, and did what they could, and then along the way were undone by the Usurpers, not offered a job, or offered one only in some remedial subject for impossible students, or not promoted. Nowadays, many of the best undergraduates, sensing the situation (after all, they have those professors, those Usurpers, and their initial love of History or Literature is not to be encouraged by the likes of these people, simply give up, and head off to Law School or something else, leaving graduate studies in the field, so often, to those who find nothing appalling about the Usurping Professors, because they are little would-be Usurpers themselves. It's not always and everywhere the case, but it is far too often the case. That is one of the reasons that Jacques Barzun writes about the "death" of the American university. In the transmission of culture, once regarded as its most important task, the enterprise is sick.

Here, for example is the biography of Rosalind Morris, professor of Anthropology at Columbia University :

Rosalind Morris focuses her fieldwork in two main areas: Thailand and South Africa. Over the past decade, she has devoted her attention to thinking about a number of inter-related issues and questions concerning: the history of modernity in Southeast Asia and the place of the mass media in its development; the relationships between value and violence; the sexualization of power and desire; the theorization of gender; and the history of anthropological thought and social theory. In her writings on all of these issues, she attends to questions of representation. Her writings include monographs on spirit mediumship and the mass media in Northern Thailand, the archive of visual anthropology, and the afterlife of apartheid in South Africa’s mining towns. Other essays have addressed the history of fetishism, the violence of culture in anthropological theory, translation and radicalism, mediatic war, photography and its discontents, sex, gender and sexuality, and art in South Africa. She is a former Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, the Associate Director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society, and the former co-editor of CONNECT: art, politics, theory, culture.

English contains all that we need - why are our children denied access to their linguistic heritage? Why do I get so annoyed by such trivia?

Because the sum of all the trivia is the culture one lives in and expresses as one does so, I suppose. Language and its usage is by no means the least part of one's cultural heritage.

One notices when, just for example, people, as on this site, start using the reflexive pronoun - myself, yourself, ourselves - when they mean I, me, you or us. It is the imprecision which annoys. The complete lack of any understanding as to how this great language of ours is built and works.

Still, at least people still write here. At least many are prepared to defend our freedoms - I just wish that they could do so using precise and well thought out English. That must be, however, given the enemy that we face, a secondary consideration: but even though it may be secondary I will not stop nagging about it and posting little quibbles about the use of language.
-- from a reader

For more on this, see "The Survival of English" by Ian Robinson. In fact, see all of Ian Robinson's works, including those on the development of English prose and on what modern translations of the Bible have done to the possibility of belief.

Disturbing.  It's at OpinionJournal, here.

Bring me my bow of burning gold
Bring me my arrows of desire
Bring me my spears o'clouds unfold
Bring me my chariot of fire

I will not cease from mental fight
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
'Til we have spread the JihadWatch message...
In England's green and pleasant land

Morning watch, reporting in. -- Mr. Tommy Atkins

Tommy Atkins? Yes, I remember you. Ypres, wasn't it? Flanders Field, if memory serves?

Tommy, that slightly reworked poem is fine, save for two problems. First, the third line of the second stanza needs to better satisfy the metric grid, the prosodic requirements. You can get away with an extra syllable sometime (the late Shakespeare is full of hendecasyllabic lines in iambic pentameter verse), but not two. As it stands now, it's got ten syllables. Back to the old poetic drawing board.

Second, that "o'clouds" sounds like one of my relatives in County Galway -- the ones who stayed behind. Should be -- "o clouds unfold." Some love the apostrophe; some even apostrophize it. But here it gets in the way.

Now I really must try to figure out how to sneak up on Dame Bessonitsa (whom you may google, because she has shown up, uninvited, at NER before) and clobber her over the head. It's her or me.

Do you know, there's a famous unprintable limerick of the Legman variety, the final line of which is: "And my god, it's a quarter to four." Well, my Timex, right now, says the same thing.

(The original exchange was exactly 12 hours ago.--ed.)

The folly of pretending that wars can be fought and won despite the imposition of ever-expanding legal protocols is the theme of my article this morning on the CIA tapes controversy.

At the Jerusalem Post, the irrepressible Caroline Glick is on the same theme, with more concrete and alarming comments from Israel's Attorney General Menahem Mazuz and Military Advocate-General Avichai Mandelblit, who are essentially crowing that — as shown by the summer 2006 war with Hezbollah — the lawyers have taken over responsibility for Israeli national security: 

Mazuz responded negatively to the question of whether legal considerations superseded operational and strategic goals during the war. He claimed that the government and the IDF restricted their plans from the beginning to conform with perceived legal restrictions.

As he put it, that preemptive limitation of goals was "the result of a sort of education and internalization that have taken place over the years. I remember periods where there was a great deal of friction with the senior military level regarding what is allowed and what is prohibited. But today I think that there is more or less an understanding of the rules of the game and I can't identify any confrontation… or … demands to 'Let the IDF win.'"

Mandelblit and Mazuz testified that legal advisers were present at all levels of command in all the relevant service arms and in the security cabinet. At each level the lawyers were asked to judge the legality of all the proposed targets and planned operations before they were carried out. And as the two explained, in their decisions, these lawyers were informed not by the goal of winning the war, but by their interpretation of international law.

Ah yes, the new "rules of the game" — which, you might notice, don't include winning.  Read all of Caroline's piece, here.  Somehow I don't think each level of Hezbollah, Hamas and Fatah's al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades is consulting with the lawyers before firing its rockets at Israeli civilians.