In response to someone's relaying criticism levelled at him by Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch, John Esposito did not bother to respond. Or rather, his response consisted of an attack on the "scholarly" background of Robert Spencer -- no Ph.D. in Islamic or Middle Eastern studies -- and to enclose what in Esposito's worldview, constitutes an unanswerably impressive curriculum vitae that supposedly means game, set, match, without any need to actually adduce evidence of any kind, about anything: "I attach my bio info" was the elegant phrase which was intended to answer all critics.

Esposito allows himself to believe that mere credentialism – defense by inflated C. V.--  will be enough to protect him from detailed criticism. With the credulous, admiring Dinesh D'Souzas of this world, who live by such things (and carefully put down every article, every lecture in their own comically ever-expanding c.v.s) that may indeed work. For intelligent people, well-versed in the tragicomic and deceptive aspects of curricula vitae, and skeptical of those suffering from elephantiasis, such a defense will elicit only contempt.

And Esposito certainly didn't act as if he thought his “credentials” would be enough to protect him when he hurriedly went back and interpolated the word "Jihad" into post-9/11/2001 editions of his books, even though he continued to mislead readers about the standard, accepted, main meaning of that word (for Muslims, not for non-Muslim apologists such as...John Esposito).

Esposito is a "scholarly" colleague of, defender of, friend of, Azzam Tamimi, a Hamas supporter, whose quality of mind and thought can be gauged from this YouTube entry:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zh6q02J6dJk

He used to call another “Palestinian” Muslim fanatic, Al Farooqi (stabbed to death, along with his wife, by one of his own disciples), his “ustadh” or teacher.

Esposito has been on the Arab gravy-train ever since he convinced a Lebanese contractor – an islamochristian who, had he survived, might not have quite as happy with Esposito as he might have been a decade or two ago – to fund his “Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding.” There is no “understanding” – or rather, in a nice reversal, it’s an understanding that passeth peace, and serves as a long-running fount of apologetics for war, the war of Jihad, conducted not only or even, nowadays, mainly by qitaal (combat) but also by many other means, including “pen, speech.” And the propagandistic nonsense put out by the “pen, speech” – in articles (including one with the piquant title     that was published, in timely or untimely fashion depending on your point of view, in September 2001) – of John Esposito is used to keep Infidels in a state of unwariness, distraction, and confusion. He’s Lord Haw-Haw, but at least the traitor Joyce had to go all the way to Berlin to broadcast his propaganda for the enemy. Esposito can conduct his own operation at Georgetown, right in the heart of Washington, D.C., just down the street from the Capitol and the White House. And he can continue to do this at a Jesuit institution, though one can be sure that the view of Esposito held by two well-educated clerics, Professor James V. Schall, S.J. and Pope Benedict VI, is not one whit less critical than that to be found at this or similar websites.

What is to be done about the scandal of John Esposito and his exploitation of the Georgetown connection?  Perhaps alumni contemplating gifts to Georgetown will have second thoughts, if made aware of the scandalous Saudi-funded operation run by John Esposito, and make known that they will not be making such gifts after all, until such time as Georgetown severs its ties with Esposito, and make such gifts contingent on the university severing the ties, in order to remove the deceptive glitter of reflected glory that Esposito glories in and exploits whenever he refers to his “Georgetown Center” or, alternatively, his “Center at Georgetown.”

Let him have his Saudi-funded operation. But let it be free-standing, without any further disgrace to Georgetown. Let the ghosts of Snouck Hurgronje and Joseph Schacht be properly propitiated at long last -- oh, have you seen their c.v.s, by the way?  Place a paragraph by Snouck Hurgronje or Schacht on one side of the balance, and  the collected works, coffee-table picture-books and all, of John Esposito on the other side, and see which side kicks the beam. Surely those highly intelligent ghosts are not pleased with the way John Esposito has been allowed to flourish and to exploit every kind of trust and naiveté that the Western world, and even the supposedly keen-minded Jesuits, have displayed, in his regard, for so long.

And come to think of it, can you imagine Joseph Schacht or C. Snouck Hurgronje ever compiling, much less sending out, a c.v., one accompanied by a note reading "I Attach My Bio Info"?

In the first of his "Blogging the Qur'an" series at Hot Air (reproduced at Jihad Watch), Robert Spencer writes that he does not "believe that religious texts are infinitely malleable and can be made to mean whatever the reader wants them to mean, as some apparently do…”

This immediately brings to mind, by way of contrast, the view expressed by Daniel Pipes that "Islam can be whatever Muslims wish to make of it."

One of these views makes much more sense than the other.

An interesting report from CIS:

WASHINGTON – A new report from the Center for Immigration Studies demonstrates that most H-1Bs are ordinary people doing ordinary work, not the geniuses claimed by industry lobbyists.

Those arguing for an increase in the number of H-1B visas (ostensibly temporary visas for 'specialty occupations,' many of them in the computer industry) claim that continued U.S. leadership in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics hinges on our ability to import the world’s best engineers and scientists. But this new data analysis shows that the vast majority of H-1B workers – including those at most major tech firms – are not the innovators industry portrays them to be.

The new report, entitled 'H-1Bs: Still Not the Best and the Brightest,' is authored by Dr. Norman Matloff, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis, and is online at

http://www.cis.org/articles/2008/back508.html

The analysis is based on the simple fact that in a market economy, if workers are indeed outstanding talents, they will be paid accordingly. This can be determined by computing the ratio of the foreign worker’s salary to the prevailing wage figure stated by the employer (this report calls that ratio the 'Talent Measure' or TM). A TM value of 1.0 means that the worker is merely average, not of outstanding talent. The findings:

# The median TM value over all foreign workers studied was just a hair over 1.0.

# The median TM value was also essentially 1.0 in each of the tech professions studied.

# Median TM was near 1.0 for almost all prominent tech firms that were analyzed.

# Contrary to the constant hyperbole in the press that 'Johnnie can’t do math' in comparison with kids in Asia, TM values for workers from Western European countries tend to be much higher than those of their Asian counterparts.

# Most foreign workers work at or near entry level, described by the Department of Labor in terms akin to apprenticeship. This counters the industry’s claim that they hire the workers as key innovators.

Forget the violins, we need a cryin' country song for this story. New Duranty is in full defense mode for poor Debbie Almontaser (pictured below in headscarf), the would be principal of the Khalil Gibran Academy in Brooklyn.

...Irene Alter, a peppy, retired Queens schoolteacher, was sitting at her computer one morning that February when she read an article in The New York Times about the Khalil Gibran school, she said. A series of questions flooded her head.

Which courses would be taught in Arabic? How would Israel be treated in the study of Middle Eastern history? Then in April, she read an op-ed article by Mr. Pipes in The New York Sun.

Conceptually, such a school could be “marvelous,” Mr. Pipes wrote, but in practice, it was certain to be problematic. “Arabic-language instruction is inevitably laden with Pan-Arabist and Islamist baggage,” he wrote, referring to the school as a madrassa, which means school in Arabic but, in the West, carries the implication of Islamic teaching.

Given how little Mr. Pipes knew about the school at the time, the word was “a bit of a stretch,” he said in a recent interview. He defended its use as a way to “get attention” for the cause. It got the attention of Ms. Alter, 60, who contacted Mr. Pipes and, with his encouragement, helped form a grass-roots organization in response to the school project. Mr. Pipes joined the advisory board of the group, which called itself the Stop the Madrassa Coalition.

Mr. Pipes, 58, has emerged as a divisive figure in the post-9/11 era. An author of 12 books who has a doctorate in history from Harvard, he has made a career out of studying and critiquing Islam. His research group, which he established in downtown Philadelphia in the early 1990s, “seeks to define and promote American interests in the Middle East,” according to its Web site.

Among his supporters, Mr. Pipes enjoys a heroic status; among his detractors, he is reviled. Those sharply divergent views reflect the passions that infuse Middle Eastern politics, arguably nowhere in the United States more than in New York City.

Mr. Pipes is perhaps best known for Campus Watch, a national initiative he created to scrutinize Middle Eastern programs at colleges and universities. The drive has accused professors of, among other things, being soft on militant Islam and sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. It has stirred widespread controversy and, in some cases, may have undermined professors’ bids for tenure.

Mr. Pipes was joined in the monitoring effort by other self-declared watchdogs of militant Islam. Their Web sites are often linked to one another and their messages interwoven. One critic, David Horowitz, founded Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, a campaign aimed at college campuses. He noted in an interview that monitors of radical Islam have increasingly trained their sights on nonviolent Muslim-Americans.

“They don’t throw bombs, but they create political cover for ideological support of this jihadi movement,” he said.

Mr. Pipes places Muslims in three categories, he said: those who are violent, those who are moderate and those in the middle. It is this middle group, he argued, that now poses the greatest threat to American values.

“Are these people who are not using violence but who are not fully enthusiastic about this country and its mores, its culture — are they on our side or are they on the other side?” he asked.

Ms. Almontaser never considered herself unenthusiastic about America, she said. But as the conflict over the Khalil Gibran school intensified, she came to be seen by many through Mr. Pipes’s lens. In his article in The Sun, he referred to Ms. Almontaser by her birth name, Dhabah, and called her views “extremist.” He cited an article in which she was quoted as saying about 9/11, “I don’t recognize the people who committed the attacks as either Arabs or Muslims.” (As The Jewish Week later reported, Mr. Pipes left out the second half of the quote: “Those people who did it have stolen my identity as an Arab and have stolen my religion.”)

The Stop the Madrassa Coalition focused primarily on Ms. Almontaser as a strategy, said Mr. Pipes, because the group could get little information about the school itself. The coalition quickly publicized several discoveries. Ms. Almontaser had accepted an award from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a national Muslim organization that critics claim has ties to terrorist groups (an assertion the group adamantly denies). In news articles, Ms. Almontaser had been critical of American foreign policy and police tactics in fighting terrorism. She also gave $2,000 to Representative Cynthia A. McKinney of Georgia, whom Mr. Pipes and others have characterized as an Islamist sympathizer. (Ms. McKinney, who is no longer in office and did not respond to requests for an interview, has had a strong following among Arab-Americans in part because of her criticism of the Patriot Act.)

Critics of the Madrassa Coalition say its tactics are typical of campaigns singling out Muslims: They lean heavily on guilt by association. The nuances of the claims against Ms. Almontaser were lost as the controversy lit up the blogosphere, said Chip Berlet, a senior analyst at Political Research Associates, a liberal organization outside Boston that studies the political right. One Web site, MilitantIslamMonitor.org, displayed photographs of Ms. Almontaser wearing her hijab in different styles, suggesting that she had undergone a public relations makeover to “disguise” her “Islamist agenda.” The criticism of Ms. Almontaser and the school spread to newspapers, eliciting negative editorials in The Daily News and The New York Sun...

"Christian Solidarity Worldwide, a British human rights organisation whose president is the former Cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken, is calling on the UN and the international community to take action against nations and communities that punish apostasy."
--from the article linked below

Bruce Bawer has an excellent summing up of the West's gradual surrender to Shari'a at City Journal:

...The Western media are in the driver’s seat on this road to sharia. Often their approach is to argue that we’re the bad guys. After the late Dutch sociologist-turned-politician Pim Fortuyn sounded the alarm about the danger that Europe’s Islamization posed to democracy, elite journalists labeled him a threat. A New York Times headline described him as marching the dutch to the right. Dutch newspapers Het Parool and De Volkskrant compared him with Mussolini; Trouw likened him to Hitler. The man (a multiculturalist, not a Muslim) who murdered him in May 2002 seemed to echo such verdicts when explaining his motive: Fortuyn’s views on Islam, the killer insisted, were “dangerous.”

Perhaps no Western media outlet has exhibited this habit of moral inversion more regularly than the BBC. In 2006, to take a typical example, Manchester’s top imam told psychotherapist John Casson that he supported the death penalty for homosexuality. Casson expressed shock—and the BBC, in a dispatch headlined imam accused of “gay death” slur, spun the controversy as an effort by Casson to discredit Islam. The BBC concluded its story with comments from an Islamic Human Rights Commission spokesman, who equated Muslim attitudes toward homosexuality with those of “other orthodox religions, such as Catholicism” and complained that focusing on the issue was “part of demonizing Muslims.”

In June 2005, the BBC aired the documentary Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic, which sought to portray concerns about Islamic radicalism as overblown. This “stunning whitewash of radical Islam,” as Little Green Footballs blogger Charles Johnson put it, “helped keep the British public fast asleep, a few weeks before the bombs went off in London subways and buses” in July 2005. In December 2007, it emerged that five of the documentary’s subjects, served up on the show as examples of innocuous Muslims-next-door, had been charged in those terrorist attacks—and that BBC producers, though aware of their involvement after the attacks took place, had not reported important information about them to the police.

Press acquiescence to Muslim demands and threats is endemic. When the Mohammed cartoons—published in September 2005 by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten to defy rising self-censorship after van Gogh’s murder—were answered by worldwide violence, only one major American newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, joined such European dailies as Die Welt and El País in reprinting them as a gesture of free-speech solidarity. Editors who refused to run the images claimed that their motive was multicultural respect for Islam. Critic Christopher Hitchens believed otherwise, writing that he “knew quite a number of the editors concerned and can say for a certainty that the chief motive for ‘restraint’ was simple fear.” Exemplifying the new dhimmitude, whatever its motivation, was Norway’s leading cartoonist, Finn Graff, who had often depicted Israelis as Nazis, but who now vowed not to draw anything that might provoke Muslim wrath. (On a positive note, this February, over a dozen Danish newspapers, joined by a number of other papers around the world, reprinted one of the original cartoons as a free-speech gesture after the arrest of three people accused of plotting to kill the artist.)

Last year brought another cartoon crisis—this time over Swedish artist Lars Vilks’s drawings of Mohammed as a dog, which ambassadors from Muslim countries used as an excuse to demand speech limits in Sweden. CNN reporter Paula Newton suggested that perhaps “Vilks should have known better” because of the Jyllands-Posten incident—as if people who make art should naturally take their marching orders from people who make death threats. Meanwhile, The Economist depicted Vilks as an eccentric who shouldn’t be taken “too seriously” and noted approvingly that Sweden’s prime minister, unlike Denmark’s, invited the ambassadors “in for a chat.”

The elite media regularly underreport fundamentalist Muslim misbehavior or obfuscate its true nature. After the knighting of Rushdie in 2007 unleashed yet another wave of international Islamist mayhem, Tim Rutten wrote in the Los Angeles Times: “If you’re wondering why you haven’t been able to follow all the columns and editorials in the American press denouncing all this homicidal nonsense, it’s because there haven’t been any.” Or consider the riots that gripped immigrant suburbs in France in the autumn of 2005. These uprisings were largely assertions of Muslim authority over Muslim neighborhoods, and thus clearly jihadist in character. Yet weeks passed before many American press outlets mentioned them—and when they did, they de-emphasized the rioters’ Muslim identity (few cited the cries of “Allahu akbar,” for instance). Instead, they described the violence as an outburst of frustration over economic injustice.

When polls and studies of Muslims appear, the media often spin the results absurdly or drop them down the memory hole after a single news cycle. Journalists celebrated the results of a 2007 Pew poll showing that 80 percent of American Muslims aged 18 to 29 said that they opposed suicide bombing—even though the flip side, and the real story, was that a double-digit percentage of young American Muslims admitted that they supported it. u.s. muslims assimilated, opposed to extremism, the Washington Post rejoiced, echoing USA Today’s american muslims reject extremes. A 2006 Daily Telegraph survey showed that 40 percent of British Muslims wanted sharia in Britain—yet British reporters often write as though only a minuscule minority embraced such views.

After each major terrorist act since 9/11, the press has dutifully published stories about Western Muslims fearing an “anti-Muslim backlash”—thus neatly shifting the focus from Islamists’ real acts of violence to non-Muslims’ imaginary ones. (These backlashes, of course, never materialize.) While books by Islam experts like Bat Ye’or and Robert Spencer, who tell difficult truths about jihad and sharia, go unreviewed in newspapers like the New York Times, the elite press legitimizes thinkers like Karen Armstrong and John Esposito, whose sugarcoated representations of Islam should have been discredited for all time by 9/11. The Times described Armstrong’s hagiography of Mohammed as “a good place to start” learning about Islam; in July 2007, the Washington Post headlined a piece by Esposito want to understand islam? start here...

This is a heartening story for communities feeling victimized by our federal government's unwillingness to do anything about illegal immigration. There are steps we can take locally to reduce the burden.

WaPo: Hundreds of foreign-born families have pulled their children from Prince William County public schools and enrolled them in nearby Fairfax County, Arlington County and Alexandria since the start of the school year, imposing a new financial burden on those inner suburbs in a time of lean budgets.

The school-to-school migration within Northern Virginia started just as Prince William began implementing rules to deny some services to illegal immigrants and require police to check the immigration status of crime suspects thought to be in the country illegally.

Opponents of the rules say they have had a chilling effect on Prince William's once-thriving Latino community, prompting even legal immigrants to flee a hostile environment. Supporters say the rules have done what they were supposed to by primarily pushing illegal immigrants out.

"The resolution is clearly working," said Corey A. Stewart (R-At Large), chairman of the Prince William Board of County Supervisors. "It is driving down the non-English-speaking portion of the schools and saving us millions of dollars. They're going to other jurisdictions and costing them money."

Stewart called those jurisdictions "sanctuary" cities and counties, saying illegal immigrants are welcome there. He added: "There is going to be pressure to enact similar resolutions in those neighboring cities and counties." Officials from those jurisdictions reject that assertion.

Until now, the evidence of a migration has been largely anecdotal, making it difficult to measure or trace its causes. Data from school systems, however, provide the most concrete evidence to date that a significant exodus of immigrants is underway -- and that most of those leaving are settling in neighboring communities...

Still, Stewart noted that Prince William's schools expect to save $6 million in education costs as a result of the exodus -- a cost that will be borne by the other communities. Some officials in Fairfax and elsewhere say they expect the numbers to climb in the next academic year...

Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, DanGillerman has merely said what everyone in the United States, and elsewhere, of moral sense, surely thinks. Why is Carter entitled to any special deference or respect? He's vicious; he's naive; he's stupid; he's evil. Anything else anyone needs to know? Yes, he's also an ex-president. So what?

Gillerman is to be applauded for his undiplomatic truth-telling. And if he's not a believer in Peace Processing, and all that sort of crap, he deserves a promotion, possibly to the job Ms. Livni is doing so badly.

Gilles Kepel, a sociologist, has been a consistent misunderestimator of the menace of Islam, because though treated as an "expert" (and consulted by some in high French places) on Islam, he has never bothered to acquaint himself sufficiently with the texts, tenets, attitudes of Islam, and the reasons why all that talk about "integration" and a "European Islam" are merely a forlorn hope, and a bit of tariq-ramadanish smokescreen, respectively.

Now he produces, or co-produces, an anthology of Al-Qaedisant writing. Fine.

But has he yet realized how all this stuff is not a modern concoction, but is deeply rooted in Islam, is in fact realer than the Islam that those Brave Young Muslim Reformers keep promising, or that Tariq Ramadan keeps alluding to. One wonders.

Here's a Jihad-Watch posting on Gilles Kepel from a few years ago:

Gilles Kepel has been so completely wrong in his analyses and his prescriptions, that his record offers the example of genius in reverse. Whatever silliness is possible to say, Gilles Kepel says it. He has never understood Islam; his books are a gallimaufry of sociology (in the main, he is a sociologist of French Islam, a kind of couscous-connoisseur) and simply does not allow himself to believe that many other people, millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions, might actually be affected by the canonical and virtually sole texts that occupy and preoccupy them and their societies. He knows that Islam is more than a religion, but he seems to think that most advanced French Muslims -- the kind he associates with -- are somehow representative men. We may as well base predictions about Iraq on Kanan Makiya. Or about Saudi Arabia on attending a lecture on Islamic architecture by Sami Agarwal. It makes no sense.

Everything he says in this article shows that he cannot supply an explanatory theory for much of Muslim behavior. Note, for example, that he has nothing to say about Muslims outside the Middle East. He cannot explain why, in Pakistan itself, the Hindu population has declined from 15% to 1% of the total, nor can he explain the persecution of Christians. He has nothing to say about the behavior of the fervently Islamic razakars in the 1971 war in Bangladesh, nothing to explain the murders of Hindus and Sikhs and Christians in Bangladesh. Nothing about the Christians in the Moluccas, East Timor. Nothing about the disguised jizyah of the Bumiputra system.

That he is an apologist for Islam is clear from his attempt not even to express certainty about the 9/11 attack -- that he is not sure, at this point, who was responsible is telling, and damning. He continues to come back, despite the everests of evidence, to that the little matter of "Palestine" as the source of all our woe. He cannot read the Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira -- or if he does, he refuses to think that anyone takes them seriously.

Really, he ought to stop going out to lunch or on lecture tours, and lock himself in his study, and once he has read and re-read those texts, spent a few weeks at Muslim websites, just to see what Muslims make of those texts. If it were anyone but Gilles Kepel (or Olivier Roy, or John Esposito, or Karen Armstrong or....) the results might prove enlightening.

But Gilles Kepel is a True Believer -- in no one being a True Believer.

There are limits to this petit sociologue -- he isn't Claude Levi-Strauss, after all, not by a long shot, and not even if he picked up a pair of blue jeans on his last trip to San Francisco.

The old story. Everything was all right, said the Frenchman, until that moment when la betise s'est mise a penser. When Stupidity Began to Think. So Gilles Kepel thinks he can think. Thinks.

[Posted by: Hugh at April 9, 2005 7:35 PM]

No - he's just got to Mornington Crescent.

May he rest in knip.

(Trumpington's variation, Dollis Hill loop.)

Japan, and other countries of East Asia -- Korea, China -- do not make a fetish, or anything at all, about "diversity." They do a good deal to discourage the "diversity" that the peoples of the West pretend is such a source of strength and delight. In fact, the homogeneity of the countries of Western Europe is a source of power, not weakness, and will be proved to be in the hard times -- get out Halford Mackinder and Alfred Thayer Mahad -- what with unavoidable global warming and its accompanying flooding and other catastrophes including the disappearance within a century of 90% of the world's species, and the collapse of food supplies in many parts of the world, and an out-and-out cut-throat scramble for resources in helpless Africa -- that are soon to come.  

"If you want to get rid of Ken, but don't go a bundle on Boris, vote for another candidate as your first choice. Then vote for Boris as your second choice."
--from this plea

So Condorcet, as mathematical psephologist rather than encyclopediste, turns out to be relevant to this contest in more ways than one. But why take a chance? Rather than vote for the third (policeman), Paddick,  I'd vote for Boris as first and as second choice. Just to be sure.

And if you want to see Boris as he used to be, before he entered politics -- Himself When Young, with that tell-tale unruly mop -- we just happen to have an early clip.

Thursday's mayoral election is very important. Readers of this site are unlikely to be admirers of Ken Livingstone, but it is conceivable that they have doubts about Boris Johnson too. Please remember - the main thing is to get rid of Red Ken. Borderline anti-Semitic, Ken has never met a dictator or mad Mullah he doesn't like. 

If you want to get rid of Ken, but don't go a bundle on Boris, vote for another candidate as your first choice. Then vote for Boris as your second choice.

Above all, turn up and vote. Last time round Red Ken got in by default - with only 23% of the vote - because his opponents couldn't be bothered to vote.

A vote for Ken is a vote for Islam. But so is an abstention.

Get rid of Ken. Boris for first choice if you like him and second choice if you don't.

Takuan Seiyo, who has written for NER here, is now blogging ar Brussels Journal:

...Inconveniences and differences notwithstanding, there is one overwhelming blessing that makes me glad to be in Japan. It's the daily experience of living in a country that, unlike Western Europe, and increasingly the United States, does not actively pursue it's own extinction.

I am a European. Ich kann nicht anders. Europe had left my parents long before they left it almost 50 years ago, so now I am a Euro-American and I take this distinction seriously. Still, I don't feel the religious impulse except  in a church that's at least 300 years old; and it's only European music that penetrates to my soul, and only European languages in which I can express what I hold dearest, and only European artifacts that satisfy my love of beauty and craftsmanship. Well, not quite – Japanese artifacts do that too.

But Europe is my Beatrice: a pure vision of the past with little resemblance to what she is now. The real, contemporary Beatrice does presume to tread the path, like Dante Alighieri's muse, from Purgatory to Heaven, but the Compass of Reality shows that the path in fact leads in the opposite direction: back to Virgil's guided tour of Hell. This is a Beatrice with a bipolar personality disorder, self-inflicted cicatrices, labial and nasal rings and tattooed breasts, sporting combat boots and a black leather suit with a Palestinian terrorist's kaffiyeh wrapped around her studded dog collar, with a book of onanistic gibberish by an Althusser or Bataille or Foucault in one hand, and a Quranic whip for self-flagellation in the other.

What Europe has become is on ample display in the daily news. In the April week in which this has been written, France had put Brigitte Bardot on trial for the sixth time for "inciting racial hatred," but really just because La Bardot desires that France remain French, as did Jeanne d'Arc and, before her, Charles Martel. And in Spain, a very pregnant, 37-year-old woman, wearing a sloppy chemise over her protrusion, reviewed a line of Spanish troops standing at attention. It was not a scene from Luis Buñuel's new film, The Discreet Charm of the Socialist International, but Spain's new Minister of Defense, Carmen Chacon, on official duty.

To put a lactating symbol of feminine vulnerability in charge of the defense of a country with a long and proud martial history is to announce to the world: See, we castrated ourselves; we beg that you be gentle with us; please wear a condom. Would that the Groupe Islamique Combattant Marocain or Al-Qaeda Organization in the Islamic Maghreb lay down its arms in benevolent reciprocity. As it were, the sight of a pregnant woman in charge of the defense of Al-Andalus gives these testosterone–pumped descendants of the Moors some exciting ideas of a very different nature.

And in New York, the erstwhile symbol of what in Europe's formative past was both its best and its worst, the Roman Catholic Pope, proved that the papacy is no longer concerned with pesky value judgments. You can swathe the German postmodern socialist theologian in gold and brocade, but you can't swathe his weltanschauung. And so Benedict XVI, after having inveighed for greater American receptivity to its final inundation by the Third World, lectured the General Assembly of the United Nations that the world is "in crisis" because decisions rest in the hands of "a few powerful nations."

One wonders whether His Holiness wishes for more power to such nonpowerful nations as those paragons of human rights that were on the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, mercifully dissolved in March 2006: Burkina Faso, Congo Brazzaville, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Guinea, Kenya, Mauritania, Nigeria, Sudan, Togo, Zimbabwe, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Guatemala, Paraguay, and others.

To top if off, the former Professor Ratzinger asserted that the promotion of human rights –- presumably by such devoted advocates as Sudan and Saudi Arabia – "remains the most effective strategy for eliminating inequalities between countries and social groups, and increasing security." As though the proper and viable concern of the Roman Catholic Church ought to be the elimination of inequalities between countries and social groups. The Pope's words sound as though taken from a speech by Lenin to some Bolshevik congress.

However, it is not something that may be pinned on single individuals or institutions. Let us not forget the Archbishop of Canterbury, who wishes sharia upon his country; and the legions of EU's secular humanists in Strasbourg and Brussels, busy like the bees in dismantling and replacing Europe's cultural identity, its racial and ethnic ties that bind, its nations' sovereignty, its peoples' freedoms and patrimony won with copious blood shed over many centuries.

This is a systemic and critical infection of Europe's autoimmune system; Western civilization's, actually. 98% of Western Europe's politicians and state functionaries, and its churches, universities, and mass media, and the great majority of their American and Canadian counterparts, are instruments of the same culturally Marxist and economically Socialist movement aimed at demolishing the nations of the West in the lunatic and deeply immoral hope that it will wipe out war, inequality and "discrimination" in the world at large...

Lucy Bannerman writes in The Sunday Times on the late Humphrey Lyttelton:

As chairman of I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, “Humph” was famed for his ability to deliver the smuttiest of innuendoes with apparent innocence, keeping the humour rude, but rarely offensive. But the man who frequently reduced listeners to hysterics with the fictitious sexploits of his scorer, “Samantha”, had talents far beyond keeping a straight face.

Here are just some of those double entendres. Not that I understood them, of course:

“Samantha’s just started keeping bees and already has three dozen or so. She says she’s got an expert handler coming round to give a demonstration. He’ll carefully take out her 38 bees and soon have them flying round his head”

“Samantha has to nip off to the National Opera, where she’s been giving private tuition to the singers. Having seen what she did to the baritone, the director is keen to see what she might do for a tenor”

“Samantha has to nip off to a Welsh Conservative Association dinner for their most senior MP, whose name is said to be almost impossible to pronounce. She’s certainly found the longest standing Welsh member a bit of a mouthful”

“Samantha has to go now as she’s off to meet her Italian gentleman friend who’s taking her out for an ice-cream. She says she likes to spend the evening licking the nuts off a large Neapolitan”

“Samantha does a few chores for an elderly gentleman who lives nearby. She shows him how to use the washing machine and then prunes his fruit trees. Later he’ll hang out his pyjamas as he watches her beaver away up the ladder”

“After tasting the meat pies, Samantha said she liked Mr Dewhurst’s beef in ale; although she preferred his tongue in cider”

Oooerrrrr!

On the same theme addressed on NRO by the editors yesterday and Pete Wehner on Friday, Powerline's John Hinderaker asks an excellent question. 

At a blogger conference call last week, Jen Rubin of Commentary's excellent Contentions blog, asked Sen. McCain about Hamas's endorsement of Sen. Obama for the presidency.  Did McCain get indignant?  Did he spew that an insinuation that Obama might be popular with Islamic terrorists would be "out of touch with reality in the Republican Party"?  Not exactly.  He said:

All I can tell you Jennifer is that I think it's very clear who Hamas wants to be the next president of the United States. So apparently has Danny Ortega and several others. I think that people should understand that I will be Hamas's worst nightmare.... If senator Obama is favored by Hamas I think people can make judgments accordingly.

Of course, he's right about that.  But, as John observes:  "Why it is OK to pin Hamas's endorsement on Obama, but, in McCain's world, 'unacceptable' to tie Obama to another supporter, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, to whom he is obviously far closer."  Exactly:  the Hamas endorsement of Obama, while understandable, was unsolicited; Wright, on the other hand, is someone with whom Obama was tight for two decades and who Obama chose to incorporate in his campaign as an advisor.  Why does McCain figure the former is fit for criticism but focus on the latter is an occasion for smug condemnation of conservatives?

Robert Fulford reviews Al Qaeda In Its Own Words at the National Post (hat tip: Arts and Letters):

It's not easy to remember that terrorists, too, are in politics, with all the insecurity and ambition that implies. Certainly that's true of the four famous Islamic killers, two of them dead, whose statements, distributed on the Web, fill Al Qaeda in Its Own Words (Harvard University Press), published this week. Their messages rally the troops and attempt to recruit new soldiers, but also read like the pleas of politicians for status within the loosely defined and always changing jihadist movement.

The book's editors, Gilles Kepel and Jean-Pierre Milelli, both Paris academics, identify the differences as well as the similarities among the communiques and manifestos issued by Abdallah Azzam (1941-89), Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama Bin Laden, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (1966-2006).

The four men, uneasy comrades at best, exhibit mutual jealousy and sharp policy disagreements as well as passionate hatred of the non-Muslim world. They are often described as thinkers and theorists but an outsider, reading their texts in translation, may find it hard to identify the thought. They confuse ranting with teaching and clearly believe repetition is a virtue, nuance a vice.

For them, the distant past has a vividness that's lost in the public conversation of the West. Azzam, for instance, thinks nothing of quoting a jurist who died in 1090 or citing a battle in the year 626 as casually as we might mention D-Day.

As Kepel notes, they all consider history a single narrative. The Prophet appears, Islam rises and extends its power and then each succeeding generation must accept the task of completing what is so far only a partial conquest of the world...

Something I think that is largely missed in our discussion of Islam is that culture, all culture, is a product of the imagination. The mythical Islamic past succeeds very well in capturing the imagination of young Muslims, thus directing behavior and shaping culture over the centuries. Young jihadis like al-Zarqawi are emulating the deeds of the Prophet and his Companions. Terror is devotion. Young western children, on the other hand, are no longer taught to revere the heroes of their cultural past and this is proving to be a great disadvantage in the war of imagination - the war of culture. Our past is being forgotten, while theirs is eternally revived.

At Jihad Watch there was, and perhaps still is, a regular reader who called himself Alarmed Pig Farmer. I always liked that nickname, and it was certainly better than the one I chose for myself. I once asked him whether it was the pig farmer who was alarmed or whether he was a farmer of alarmed pigs. In a Muslim context, of course, it is the farmer; indeed the pigs can relax in the knowledge that they may live to oink another day.

When they can, Muslims impose Sharia law. When they cannot officially do so, for example in "secular" Turkey, they impose it unofficially by rigorous and inconsistent enforcement of regulations or sclerotic bureaucracy. From the BBC, with thanks to Alan:

The role of Islam in Turkish society is a subject of continual debate. Secularists are protesting against what they see as the government's increasingly Islamic agenda, and as Sarah Rainsford found out, the latest battleground could be across the butcher's counter.

We're going filming at a pork butcher's and a pig farm," I told my Turkish cameraman in a text message. Slightly anxious, I added: "Is that OK with you?"

A moment later a message from Gokhan flashed back.

"Yes," he wrote. "I like a good pork steak!"

He is not the only one.

Another Turkish friend told me that eating pork, which is forbidden by Islam, is increasingly popular in secular high society here.

She described this as an act of defiance by some Turks who fear religious dictates have begun creeping into their lives since a government led by devout Muslims took power.

But those people could soon be looking for a new way to rebel because Turkey's pork industry is on the brink of extinction.

Lazari Kozmaoglu describes himself as the last pork butcher in Istanbul.

For more than 40 years he has been selling pork to his own fast-shrinking Christian community, to defiant Muslims, and to foreigners. Now, he is being squeezed out of business.

Lazari's being prevented from slaughtering pigs and the stock of meat in his freezer is running critically low.

He owns an abattoir but the Agriculture Ministry has refused him a license to operate it, saying it does not meet strict new regulations.

Curiously, all the other slaughter-houses that once dealt with pork have been closed too. Lazari's reluctant to say what he suspects is happening.

"There are only 2,000 Greeks left in Istanbul," he grumbled. "None of us dares speak out."

So a rare customer filled-in the gaps.

"It's all about Islam," Sami said, as the shop-assistant wrapped his sausages in greaseproof paper.

"Most people are more religious these days. They don't want to eat pork, and they don't let others produce it either."

[...]

Back in Istanbul, the local agriculture ministry man denied the situation's anything to do with Islam.

He insists the regulations were introduced to bring Turkey up to European standards.

"We've got no problem with pork," Ahmet Kavak told me. "The farmers just need to meet the criteria."

So the Turks are enforcing "European standards" of hygiene? That has to be a joke. The only country that enforces "European standards" - on hygiene or anything else - is Britain. Other countries flout them, some quite openly. If the French don't give a monkey's about clean pig-slaughter, we can't seriously be expected to believe that the Turks do.

The devil quotes Scripture for his purposes. And the Muslim quotes EU regulations.

Haaretz: The United States registered an official protest with Israel against its ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman, for calling former U.S. President Jimmy Carter an "enemy of Israel" prior to Carter's recent visit to the region.

A senior Foreign Ministry source said Saturday that the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv asked that Gillerman be made aware of the U.S. administration's dissatisfaction with the disrespectful comments about the former U.S. President.

In addition, the State Department is planning to issue a public statement condemning comments made by Gillerman at a press conference in New York on Thursday, where he called Carter a "bigot."

Carter, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, "went to the region with soiled hands and came back with bloody hands after shaking the hand of Khaled Meshal, the leader of Hamas," Gillerman told reporters. Gillerman also described the Carter-Meshal as "a very sad episode in American history."

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni refused yesterday to respond to the demand by MK Yossi Beilin that Gillerman be recalled for his statements against Carter. Beilin described the ambassador's statements as "mad."

A Livni aide said that the foreign minister does not normally communicate with Israeli ambassadors through the media.

However, a Foreign Ministry source said that Gillerman is due to leave his post in the coming months, following five years at the UN...

The U.S. government has no business trying to censure this man for telling the truth as he sees it. He's right. Carter is a disgrace and it was he who had no business conducting his own private diplomatic initiative with Hamas. This further confirms our suspicion that Secretary Rice is perhaps the worst Secretary of State in American history - and that's saying something.

Like the cowardly lion in The Wizard of Oz, the art world is all bluff and bluster, but when it comes to showing real courage in backing artistic freedom...well...

THE HAGUE, 26/04/08 - The controversial Mohammed-exhibition of work by Iranian artist Sooreh Hera remains hidden from the public. For the third time in succession, an exhibitor willing to show her work has reversed this decision.

Hera took photos of homosexuals wearing masks of the prophet Mohammed and his son-in-law Ali. The work was first going to be exhibited by the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, but the museum changed its mind because it "did not wish to become part of a political debate," as Director Wim van Krimpen put it.

MuseumgoudA then took on the role of advocate of artistic freedom. In December 2007, museum director Ranti Tjan offered to exhibit the work of Hera, who by then had begun to receive serious threats. But Tjan then needed protection himself and called the whole thing off.

Nor will the photos be shown at Art Amsterdam, an exhibition in the RAI at the beginning of May. Galerie A in Amsterdam offered two weeks ago to show the photos at Art Amsterdam, but now suddenly claims there is "not enough space". Only Hera's "less controversial" photos will therefore be on display in the RAI...

Anwar Sadat was killed while watching a parade....

BBC: At least one person has been killed and 11 were hurt in an attack on a military parade in the Afghan capital Kabul attended by President Hamid Karzai.

Security forces whisked Mr Karzai and other dignitaries away and hundreds fled as shots rang out. Two MPs were reported to be among the wounded.

The parade was a celebration to mark 16 years since the overthrow of the country's Soviet-backed rule.

A spokesman for the Taleban said the movement had carried out the attack.

He said they had not targeted Mr Karzai directly, [that's because they missed - RB] but wanted to show how easily they could get access to such events.

The BBC's Alastair Leithead in Kabul says the fact that they were able to get so close despite such tight security is worrying for both the government and the international community.

The Taleban spokesman said six militants had been deployed near the parade with suicide vests and guns. Three of them were killed and the other three arrested, he added...