The two Andies (Andys?), Murray and Roddick, have just gone out to play. May the best Andy win.

Question: when the crowd shouts "Come on Andy!" how will Andy or Andy know which Andy they mean?

Update: Rebecca has asked me not to say who wins, as they're delaying broadcast over there. Well, it's early days, but I'm pretty sure the winner is going to be Andy.

Roger Kimball writes:

What can I say? That Katharine Weymouth, publisher and CEO of the Washington Post, was shocked, shocked to discover that her marketing department was selling places to a series of “intimate and exclusive” political salons at her house? Or, rather, was she shocked and dismayed to discover that her marketing department had been discovered selling the spots?

Personally, I have a grudging admiration for the brass of Charles Pelton, the Post executive who came up with the idea. “Bring your organization’s CEO or executive director literally to the table,” one of his fliers advised.

“Interact with key Obama Administration and Congressional leaders . . . Spirited? Yes. Confrontational? No. The relaxed setting in the home of Katharine Weymouth assures it.”

The cost? $25,000 to “sponsor” one event (Maximum of two sponsors per “intimate and exclusive” event). Or get a bulk deal on all eleven: only $250,000 for the lot. The Washington Post, incidentally, lost $19.5 million last quarter.

The blogosphere naturally had a field day with the story. Every place from the Daily Kos to The Weekly Standard reacted with disgust (tempered, in many cases, with a dollop of humor: The Weekly Standard reports this “Twitter of the Day”: “i heard joe biden tried to pay the Post $25k to have access to the obama administration”).

My unofficial survey suggests that the word “pimp” has not made so many public appearances since the days of the Mayflower Madam. Once the egg had been thoroughly distributed across the collective countenance of The Washington Post, it was simply business as usual for Ms. Weymouth to step on to her oversized mare to express sorrow, disappointment, surprise (shock, shock, remember?) that such a thing could be going on at her newspaper. “Absolutely, I’m disappointed,” she said.

“This should never have happened. The fliers got out and weren’t vetted. They didn’t represent at all what we were attempting to do. We’re not going to do any dinners that would impugn the integrity of the newsroom.”

Marcus Brauchli, executive editor of the Post, got on to a horse of his to iterate this deep concern about journalistic integrity. Ms. Weymouth was “disappointed,” but Brauchli confessed himself positively “appalled” by the idea. “It suggests that access to Washington Post journalists was available for purchase,” he said, underlining the obvious...

This Forward interview with ex-Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin confirms elements of what I wrote about back in January 2006 in a piece entitled, "Are we are all Jonathan Pollards, now?" posted here. Specifically, I accused  former FBI counter-intelligence chief, David Szady and others were part of a blatant anti-Semitic cabal intent on finding an "Israel Mole" and that Jews in our national intelligence echelons were suspect of "dual loyalties".

Contrast what I said in January, 2006 when Franklin was sentenced with  what Franklin has said in this Forward interview:

             GORDON -2006:

The harsh sentencing and jailing of former Defense Analyst Larry Franklin ordered by Federal Judge T.J. Ellis, III has shocked American Jews and Christian allies.

Are those of us who defend Israel all simply "Jonathan Pollards?"

Malcolm Hoenlein from the rostrum of the prestigious Herziliya conference in Israel this week has articulated what a lot of us here in the US are concerned about in the so-called Franklin "affair": the less than subtle official anti-Semitism in certain Washington "power corridors."<!--more-->

Listen to his comments:

"The very fact that this kind of climate can exist in the capital of the U.S. is unacceptable," he said at the Herzliya Conference.

Rosen and Weissman, he said, "are two patriotic American citizens working for a Jewish organization, who did nothing to violate the American security."

The April trial of Steve Rosen who created the successful AIPAC lobbying model and Ken Weissman one of their senior Middle East policy analysts has to be played out against the backdrop of FBI's drive led by associate director and counter intelligence chief David Szady and his hunt for "moles" in the American Jewish community whose divided loyalty in his view is" questionable."

As an example, we have the case of former CIA staff lawyer, Adam Cirelsky against the CIA and FBI that revealed Szady's alleged anti-semitic comments during an earlier 1999 investigation.

Szady probably believes that every American Jew is a closet "Jonathan Pollard." Fundamentalist Christians, too, by the likes of DoD analyst Larry Franklin's harsh penalty handed down by Federal Judge Ellis last week: 12.7 years plus a fine, unless he "squeals."

To those of us here in the US that smacks of the classic "Juden frage" or the "Jewish question" of 19th and 20th Century Europe where governments and citizenry alike accused Jews of "dual loyalties" - a dynamic "conflict" between being loyal citizens of countries in the Diaspora and being supporters of Zionism and the formation of the Jewish State, Israel.

Over the weekend, I got an email from Janet Levy in California who is active in Dr. Frank Gaffney, Jr.'s Center for Security Policy. She wrote about her questioning of FBI associate director and Counter Intelligence chief Szady at last year's Intelligence Conference held across the Potomac in Northern Virginia in the Washington, DC vicinity about Larry Franklin and AIPAC defendants, Messrs. Rosen and Weissman. Szady was adamant in his remarks about the "relentless" prosecution of fundamentalist Christian and loyal Americans Larry Franklin and the AIPAC Jewish officials, Messrs. Rosen and Weissman.

FORWARD/FRANKLIN-2009: 

Although charges against the two other key players, former lobbyists Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, were ultimately dropped in May, Franklin pleaded guilty early on as part of a plea agreement and is preparing to serve his reduced sentence of 100 hours of community service and 10 months in a halfway house.

Franklin’s narrative of his ordeal, which started off with him being described on national news as the “Israeli mole” in the Pentagon, reflects a mixture of naiveté, frustration with government bureaucracy and a deep belief that his views must be heard, even if it meant breaking the rules. In retrospect, it was a practice in humility for the devout Catholic military analyst.

“I’ve learned a lot by crawling on the ground,” the 62-year-old father of five said in his first interview since the affair began in 2004. The lessons that Franklin has learned from his experience include the capacity by his colleagues and partners for — as he sees it — betrayal, and the persistence, he has concluded, of deep-rooted antisemitic sentiment in certain quarters of America’s intelligence community.

Franklin in the Forward article believes that he was betrayed by Weissman and Rosen when they relayed some of the Iranian nuclear threat information to the two former AIPAC lobbyists.  In fact, as the circumstances behind the government dropping the case and questionable legal basis indicate they did nothing wrong.   

Here is what Franklin states and Steve Rosen's reply:

He said it was made clear to him by the FBI that Rosen, then AIPAC’s foreign policy director, was the target of the investigation and had been followed by the FBI for years. “The bureau told me Rosen was a bad guy,” he said. Believing that he himself had “done wrong,” Franklin agreed to cooperate with the FBI investigation.

This cooperation culminated in a June 26, 2003, meeting at an Italian restaurant in Arlington, Va., where Franklin was sent by the FBI to carry out a sting operation against the AIPAC lobbyists. Before his meeting with Weissman, agents wired Franklin with microphones and transmitters and provided him with a fake classified document alleging there was clear life-threatening danger posed to Israelis secretly operating in Iraq’s Kurdish region. Passing on the information would help seal the case against the AIPAC staffers.

“At the time, I believed they were guilty,” Franklin said of Weissman and Rosen. Yet he still came to the meeting with mixed feelings. He put the document on the table, but hoped Weissman would not reach out for it. “And when he did not take the document, I did breath a silent sigh of relief,” he recalled. In retrospect, Franklin sees that moment as “one I am not proud of.”

Though Weissman didn’t take the document, he read its content, which was allegedly classified, and the sting operation succeeded. Weissman hurried back to AIPAC headquarters with the supposedly classified information disclosed it to Rosen, who subsequently relayed it to an Israeli diplomat. Even without Weissman taking the actual paper, prosecutors, who were wiretapping all the players, felt they had enough of a case to press charges against both Rosen and Weissman for communicating national defense information.

Franklin said he felt betrayed by the two former AIPAC staffers. He believed that he was sharing information with them so that they could pass it to other government officials, and was disappointed to learn they conveyed it to Israeli diplomats and to the press. “I do think they crossed a line when they went to a foreign official with what they knew was classified information,” Franklin said.

Rosen told the Forward in response: “Franklin did not expect us to warn the Israelis that they would be kidnapped and killed? That’s like telling officials of the NAACP that there is going to be a lynching, but don’t warn the victims, because it is a secret.”

The unfortunate aspect of the AIPAC 'spy case' is that the FBI sting operation that ensnared Franklin, Weissman and Rosen in a four year long hellish nightmare was perpetrated by  anti-Semitic counter-intelligence 'experts' in our government searching for an Israeli mole. At the same time, our government was permitting Muslims to infiltrate our intelligence community after 9/11 and denying talented American Jews and Christians the opportunity to ferret out the real threat to our security that Rosen and Wiessman were seeking information about.

As I noted in my January, 2006 piece:

The FBI counterintelligence functions may be an important segment of our national security apparatus in the post 9/11 environment created by patent radical Islamic jihadists. But then, why has this same agency bent over backwards to engage in PC multicultural "benefits" for its Muslim staff that violate our civil rights laws vis a vis segregation of women staff? Or never followed up on reports of FBI Arabic translators "celebrating" 9/11 as reported by loyal non-Muslim Turkish American Sibel Dinez Edmunds in a FrontPageMagazine report by author Paul Sperry? Why are these same Muslim patently disloyal FBI workers given a free pass? Moreover, why has the FBI with a backlog of over 100,000 hours of intercept tapes not seen fit to hire both Middle Eastern Christians and Mizrahi and Iranian Jews who are fluent Arabic and Parsi speakers to assist in this translation effort?

The word we get back from those in both communities who applied as loyal American citizens immediately after 9/11 was rejection because of-you guessed it- "dual loyalties."

What is the careworn French expression:"Plus de choses changent, plus qu'ils restent les mêmes",  in English,  "the more things change, the more they are the same."

...as Franklin might have said. It’s John Messner from Lexcentrics Ltd. here – back at work after a slight, inconvenient but protracted, illness, and monitoring all you good folk who enjoy the Crossword at NER that we provide.

From The Christian Science Monitor and The Times
Teachers have been told how to spot cases of potential forced marriage as the summer holidays approach.
The guidelines, issued to schools, doctors and the police aim to to identify families in which girls are made to marry against their will while abroad in the summer.
Chris Bryant, the Foreign Office Minister, insisted that every school should be looking at the issue as he acknowledged some may have been “uncertain” about cultural sensitivities.
The summer break is a peak time for incidents of young people, usually girls, being taken to south Asia in particular and forced by their families to marry.
Seventy per cent of cases involve families of Pakistani origin, and 11 per cent from a Bangladeshi background, according to the most recent figures from the Forced Marriage Unit.
“It may be possible that some schools have been uncertain about the cultural issues here. But I should make it absolutely clear there is no culture and there is no religion in which forced marriage should be acceptable or indeed is acceptable.”
Mr Bryant said: “The most important thing is to spot the problem before it happens. There are key times of the year just as now when this is the case.”
The Christian Science Monitor has a case study to give a human face to the abuse.
But Britain's new efffort has its critics, who say that the tougher message will not be heard in the Urdu-, Punjabi-, and Sylheti-speaking corners of London, Birmingham, and Manchester until there is a specific criminal offense for forcing someone to marry.
Currently, judges can make an order under the Forced Marriage Act, which became law in November, to stop potential victims being taken abroad and married against their will. Orders can also release a victim from the control of their family. But no one has stood trial for forcing a marriage.
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) is also training its sights on perpetrators of other so-called honor crimes – which, in the extreme, include murder – and the communities that collude in them through silence.
Nazir Afzal, the lead lawyer for London's CPS, says the issue boils down to the power relations within male-dominated societies.
"It is not just the elders who may believe women are inferior," he says. "I met a 21-year-old Muslim boy, who told me 'man is a piece of gold, women are silver. If you drop gold in mud it can be cleaned; drop silver and it is worthless.'
"That's what we're up against, but we are heading in the right direction."

From The Times
Even in the age of high-tech warfare, shifts in the world population give a military advantage to ‘underdeveloped’ countries.
But another factor that has had a huge bearing on our ability to wage war in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq has received much less attention.
For decades, strategists have maintained that raw numbers should no longer be a decisive factor in military thinking. In an age of high-tech warfare, professionalism, training and technology are supposed to be the keys to military success, not population. Yet in Iraq and Afghanistan none of this has helped anything like as much as the experts predicted — and demography has had a lot to do with it.
The problem has been that, even for a power as mighty and sophisticated as the US, occupying a Third World country with a fast-growing population means putting an uncomfortably large number of boots on the ground.
Britain discovered this 90 years ago when we occupied Iraq in 1918 after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War. Iraq’s population at the time was 2 million, compared to about 45 million in the United Kingdom. Even so we had to deploy more than 100,000 troops to hold the country in the face of tribal unrest and nationalist insurgency, and even with that many men we were hard pressed to keep control.
In terms of numbers the West still held the upper hand compared to the Middle East until well after the Second World War. In 1950 all the Arab countries together had a combined population of only 60 million, compared with nearly 160 million in the US and a combined total of 120 million for Britain, France, and Spain — the three European powers that then still ruled territory in the Arab world.
By 2000 the demographic balance had changed dramatically. The Arab world had increased fourfold to just over 240 million, not far short of America’s 284 million. Over the same period the population of Iraq increased even faster, from under 6 million in 1950 to 25 million in 2000 — and 30 million today. In Afghanistan (which is not an Arab country) it went up at a similar pace, from 8 million to 20 million by 2000, and approaching 30 million today.
Thanks to their high fertility, these countries are also now much younger than the West. Between 1950 and 2000, the average age in America rose from 30 to 35, and in Europe from 30 to nearly 38 — the oldest of any continent. In Iraq and Afghanistan the average age fell over the same period; in Iraq it was only 18 in 2000 and 16 in Afghanistan. The result, as America and Britain have discovered to their cost, is that both have disproportionately large reserves of fighting-age men.
In a region that is already unstable, fast-growing young populations — usually with plenty of time on their hands — are highly likely to spell trouble, even if Western nations steer clear of them. Across the Middle East, youth unemployment was estimated by the International Labour Organisation at 25 per cent in 2003, the highest in the world.
And, as elsewhere in the developing world, more and more of the population are concentrated into the slums of large cities. Within ten years more than 70 per cent of the region’s population will be urban, with a quarter living in cities with populations of one million or more. For any potential invader, demography like this is a nightmare.
Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq, it should be pointed out, is an especially large country by the standards of today’s developing world. Iran is two and a half times as numerous as Iraq, while Pakistan's population is nearly six times that of Afghanistan. And what goes for Middle Eastern demography is also true of Africa. In 1950 the countries that now comprise the EU had a combined population one and a half times that of Africa. Now Africa outnumbers the EU by more than two to one, and by 2050 the ratio is expected to be five to one.
Many Western leaders, however, still appear to think that they can hold sway over both regions, much as they did 50 or 100 years ago. What such thinking ignores is the enormous shift in the balance of world population that has occurred since the days of empire — and is still continuing. Europe began the 20th century with 25 per cent of the world’s population and finished it with 12 per cent. By the middle of the century that figure is projected to fall to only 7.5 per cent.
One of the most important lessons of both the insurgency in Iraq and the battle against the Taleban in Afghanistan is that not only is the power of numbers now on their side not ours, but in future the disparity is going to get only greater.

Virtually on the heels of my July NER article, “Zakat and Terrorism,” came this confirmation in a  front page article in today’s  New York Times (NYT), “In Refugee Aid, Pakistan’s War has a New Front: Islamic Radicals Vying With U.S. on Relief. ”   The  NYT article notes that Islamist charities have competed successfully against US Aid, as the latter is funneled via the Pakistani government to the two million internal displaced refugees from Taliban-controlled in the Swat Valley. The Pakistani government will not permit direct shipment of US aid to these refugee centers.  One Pakistani American businessman, Mahboob Mahmood, who was interviewed for this NYT article remarked with regard to US assistance, “They have been almost completely neutered.” Obama Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke has been  appearing  at  these  refugee camps saying that US aid is coming. But how are the refugees to know.

Instead radical Islamist charities are delivering refugees aid along with the message of Jihad against America and the West. 

Witness this from the NYT report:

Last week, a crowd of men, the heads of households uprooted from Swat, gathered in this village in northwestern Pakistan for handouts for their desperate families. But before they could even get a can of cooking oil, the aid director for a staunchly anti-Western Islamic charity took full advantage of having a captive audience, exhorting the men to jihad.

“The Western organizations have spent millions and billions on family planning to destroy the Muslim family system,” said the aid director, Mehmood ul-Hassan, who represented Al Khidmat, a powerful charity of the strongly anti-American political party Jamaat-e-Islami.

The Western effort had failed, he said, but Pakistanis should show their strength by joining the fight against the infidels.

Witness these comments from US refugee advocates and Pakistani local officials:

Yet Islamist and jihadist groups openly work the camps.

“Because of the lack of international agencies, there is a vacuum filled by actors that are Islamist and more than that, jihadist,” said Kristele Younes, a senior advocate with Refugees International, a Washington group established in 1979.

One of the most prominent jihadist charity groups, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, had been barred from the camps, according to Lt. Gen. Nadeem Ahmad, the head of the Pakistani Army’s disaster management group. The group was designated as a terrorist organization by the United Nations Security Council in December.

Nonetheless, it set up operations in Mardan under a new name, Falah-e-Insaniyat, according to Himayatullah Mayar, the mayor of Mardan. After the order to leave the area, Falah-e-Insaniyat went underground but still appeared to be operating to some extent, Mr. Mayar said.

In our NER article on “Zakat and Terrorism,” we noted that among the express purposes of Zakat  or Muslim charity was support for the ‘way of Allah” or Jihad.  Thus, it would appear that the Obama Administration outreach to the Muslim ummah, especially in Taliban-racked Pakistan has failed.  We  have been shut out from any Pakistani  delivery of American humanitarian aid that will cost US taxpayers $110 million.  It’s all because Jihad rules.

A Muslim dentist who tried to force patients to wear Islamic dress goes by the topsy turvy name of Omer Butt.

It seems he is to be given the elbow.

I first spotted this in The Times of India, who got it from the UK tabloid the Daily Star, well known for its pin-up models but also a useful source of odd stories. And writers from the Indian press, who I am sure are only there for the news, do find those stories of interest for their readers.
LONDON: In a bid to hit back at French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s attempts to ban the burqa in the country , hardline Islamic cleric Anjem Choudary has branded his wife Carla Bruni a prostitute.
Choudary has said that former model and singer Bruni, 41, represents the face of a depraved Western society where women are treated like sex objects.
Choudary, 42, below, wrote on the Islam4UK website: “Sarkozy may be content with being wed to a prostitute who flaunts her body to the world believing it to be righteous conduct, but he is reminded that a Muslim is not this shallow and depraved.”
That's a matter of opinion, of course. Child marriage, polygamy, slavery etc.

From Miadhu News of The Maldives
Islamic affairs ministry has revealed that women’s mosques across the country will be shut down in order to minimize government expenditure.
Speaking to media at Dharubaaruge Deputy Minister at the Islamic affairs ministry, Sheikh Mohamed Faroog said the ministry has decided to shut down all mosques used exclusively by women in order to cut down expenses. He further said, in Islam, the best place for women to pray was at home.
Sheikh Faroog said the government’s policy was to build bigger and larger mosques with separate areas for men and women. He said this would reduce the number of mosques in the country and would be more cost effective.
Sheikh Faroog further said in addition to women’s mosques, small and old mosques will also be closed once bigger mosques are erected.
Is it about cost of maintenace or is it about control? And will those women's areas be just as comfortable as those of the men or compare well with what the women are used to in their own mosques?

Kirk Semple writes in the New York Times:

Spurred by a broad coalition of religious, labor and immigrant groups, the City Council overwhelmingly passed a resolution on Tuesday to add two of the most important Muslim holy days to the public schools’ holiday calendar.

But the vote, which was nonbinding, put the Council in conflict with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who has the final say to designate the days off and has said he is resolutely opposed to the idea.

The mayor told reporters before the vote that not all religions could be accommodated on the holiday schedule, only those with “a very large number of kids who practice.”

“If you close the schools for every single holiday, there won’t be any school,” he said. “Educating our kids requires time in the classroom, and that’s the most important thing to us.”

The current school calendar recognizes major Christian and Jewish holy days like Christmas and Yom Kippur, but no Muslim holy days.

Mr. Bloomberg’s stance has irritated advocates of the measure, and some said he risked alienating many in New York’s fast-growing Muslim population as he seeks re-election in the fall.

Imam Talib Abdur-Rashid, a leader of the campaign to add the holidays, said that if the mayor continued to oppose the move, the results for him at the voting booth could be “catastrophic” among the city’s roughly 600,000 Muslims.

“We really have confidence in the mayor’s intelligence,” said Imam Talib, head of the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood in Harlem. “It’s an election year.”

The proposal to add the two holy days — Id al-Fitr and Id al-Adha — has not drawn much visible public opposition. Some council members have expressed reservations about subtracting more classroom days from the school calendar, though only one, G. Oliver Koppell of the Bronx, voted against it.

After the vote, Mr. Koppell said the existing schedule of religious holidays might have to be reviewed and trimmed, lest other growing religions in New York start demanding their own days off. “Where are we going to end with this?” he asked.

The resolution’s advocates said that since about 12 percent, or more than 100,000, of the city’s public school students are Muslim, they deserved recognition. The two holidays have already been adopted by school districts including Dearborn, Mich., and several municipalities in New Jersey.

Supporters also say that since the Ids (pronounced eeds) are floating holidays whose timing is set by the lunar calendar, they often fall on other religious holidays, on weekends or during the summer. During the next decade, for instance, at least one of the two Ids each year is expected to coincide with summer recess or an existing school holiday, according to a report by the Immigrant Rights Clinic at New York University.

It was unclear on Tuesday whether Mr. Bloomberg would continue to have final say on the issue, because the State Legislature still has not passed a bill to extend his control over the schools. But some officials said that even if the bill did not pass, he would be able to exert indirect control through appointments to the Board of Education.

The Council resolution also urged the Legislature to pass two pending bills that would amend state education law to require the holidays in the city’s school calendar. That could allow the move without the mayor’s approval, said Councilman Robert Jackson of Manhattan, a co-sponsor of the resolution and a Muslim...

Helen Thomas, who is 89 years old, has been a White House correspondent for every presidency since John F. Kennedy’s. She's mad as hell and not going to take it any more.

(CNSNews.com) - Following a testy exchange during today’s briefing with White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas told CNSNews.com that not even Richard Nixon tried to control the press the way President Obama is trying to control the press.

“Nixon didn’t try to do that,” Thomas said. “They couldn’t control (the media). They didn’t try.

“What the hell do they think we are, puppets?” Thomas said. “They’re supposed to stay out of our business. They are our public servants. We pay them.”

Thomas said she was especially concerned about the arrangement between the Obama Administration and a writer from the liberal Huffington Post Web site. The writer was invited by the White House to President Obama’s press conference last week on the understanding that he would ask Obama a question about Iran from among questions that had been sent to him by people in Iran.

“When you call the reporter the night before you know damn well what they are going to ask to control you,” Thomas said.

“I’m not saying there has never been managed news before, but this is carried to fare-thee-well--for the town halls, for the press conferences,” she said. “It’s blatant. They don’t give a damn if you know it or not. They ought to be hanging their heads in shame.” ...
 

LATImes: In a movie career that flourished in the 1950s and '60s, Malden played a variety of roles in more than 50 films, including the sympathetic priest in "On the Waterfront," the resentful husband in "Baby Doll," the warden in "Birdman of Alcatraz," the pioneer patriarch in "How the West Was Won," Madame Rose's suitor in "Gypsy," the card dealerin "The Cincinnati Kid" and Gen. Omar Bradley in "Patton."

The variety of the roles established Malden, former Times film critic Charles Champlin once wrote, "as an Everyman, but one whose range moved easily up and down the levels of society and the IQ scale, from heroes to heavies and ordinary, decent guys just trying to get along."

Eva Marie Saint, who worked with him in 1954's "On the Waterfront" and became a good friend, called Malden "a consummate actor."

He "never changed, he always became the character. If you watch his work, he never falls, there's never a false move," she told The Times on Wednesday.

Malden was a longtime holdout on television roles until he agreed to play Lt. Mike Stone on the ABC police drama “The Streets of San Francisco.” It ran from 1972 to 1977 and earned him four consecutive Emmy nominations.

He won his sole Emmy for portraying a man who begins to suspect that his daughter was murdered by her husband in the fact-based 1984 miniseries "Fatal Vision." ...

He was born Mladen Sekulovich in Chicago on March 22, 1912, the son of an immigrant mother from the nation that later became Czechoslovakia and a Serbian father, who was a milkman.

Malden spoke little English until his family moved from their Serbian enclave in Chicago to the steel-mill town of Gary, Ind., when he was 5.
 

Here is a clip from One Eyed Jacks (thanks to Alan).

Michael Farr of Queensland, Australia is our crossword winner for June. He will receive an autographed copy of Ibn Warraq's Defending The West.

Congratulations Michael!

Honorable mention once again goes to Aymenn Jawad of Wales.

About last month's puzzle, George McCallum wrote: "I believe that these crosswords were designed by the Lexcentrics people in London as revenge for losing the Revolutionary War."

Tu quoque, "whataboutery", "yesbuttery", whatever you like to call it, is a classic strategy of denial. Reluctance to criticise Islam has led "feminists" into all kinds of contorted attempts at moral equivalence. Don't you know, they squeal, that one in five American women has been assaulted by her partner? And that only one in twenty British rapists is convicted?

It is wearisome to explain that wife-beating in Islamic countries is not even a crime, that the reporting of rape is only possible where the victim herself will not be punished, that, in short, the country to worry about is one that does not admit to problems. It is exhausting to repeat ad nauseam that the glass ceiling is not the same as the stoning of rape victims. But repeat it we must, until the wall of stupidity and dozy binthood is toppled - preferably without crushing a homosexual.

David Thompson frequently tackles the subject of moral equivalence. Here he defends Christina Hoff Sommers, who makes an eloquent and one would think uncontroversial plea for accuracy in comparing women's lot:

Needless to say, Sommers’ line of enquiry isn’t universally welcomed. Her points about gross errors, overstatement and competitive victimhood are often met with prickling indignation, not least from those whose activities include some combination of the above. Some denounce Sommers as “conservative” – a synonym for evil – a “female impersonator” and an “anti-feminist,” a term that suggests both the crime of apostasy and a very narrow definition of what “real” feminists should be concerned with and how they’re permitted see the world. One taker of umbrage offers the following, entirely without irony:  

That Sommers does not get that the vast majority of American women are every bit as hobbled by constrictions around dress, mobility and behaviour as women in developing countries tells me Sommers needs to get out more.

Readers will, I’m sure, be nodding in agreement. After all, women across America are accustomed to being given a three-day deadline to shroud themselves from head to toe or face imprisonment. And doubtless when American women find themselves pregnant out of wedlock they too have a very real fear of execution at the hands of local government. You see, in degree of constriction, the “vast majority” of American women are indistinguishable from Aisho Ibrahim Dhuhulow, a Somalian woman found guilty of extra-marital intercourse by her local Islamic court. No doubt all across America unfaithful wives risk sharing Dhuhulow’s fate. Which is to say, they too risk being bound from head to foot and buried up to the neck, screaming, while their skulls are pelted with rocks by 50 pious men until, finally, they scream no more. All in front of a crowd of equally pious onlookers.

Yes, “every bit as hobbled.” Not one iota less.

Michael Jackson’s untimely death has forced out of the closet a number of writers whose indifference to him is matched by a compulsion to tell us of it. New English Review’s Theodore Dalrymple imagines he’s the only one – well nearly:

I must be one of the few people in the western world who would not recognize a song by Michael Jackson. No doubt I have heard one or several of his songs, pumped inescapably into a public place like poison gas, but I have spent a number of decades reducing my exposure to this kind of thing to an absolute minimum. 

The other people in the western world who would not recognize his songs are my friends. 

Friends of Darymple be warned: if he catches you tapping your foot to Billy Jean, he’ll never speak to you again. Not that he’d know what you were tapping your foot to, of course. 

Alas, the circle of Jackson-snubbers is wider than Dr Darymple thinks. It includes Lawrence Auster:

I never took the slightest interest in Michael Jackson, other than to be instinctively repelled by him or just indifferent; I actually don’t remember which….If there are readers who do have a sense of Jackson, who knew his music and watched his performances at their best, it would be interesting to hear their thoughts. I can’t contribute to the discussion, having no impressions of him beyond what I have already said.

Auster now makes up for his indifference – or was it repulsion? - devoting four or five posts to the singer.

Erstwhile New English Review writer John Derbyshire scarcely noticed him:

What a fuss about Michael Jackson! I can’t say he ever impinged much on my consciousness, my interest in pop music having faded before he appeared. To me, Jackson was mainly a name that turned up in the jokes of late-night comics. There are people, though — including sane, grown-up people — who like his stuff and rank him up there with the pop greats.

Chippy American-in-exile journalist Carol Gould takes a break from attacking her adopted homeland the UK to ask:

Am I the only person in the world not moved by or concerned with the death of Michael Jackson?

No, Carol, you’re not. There are hoards of you, each more unmoved than the last.

So far defender of high culture Roger Scruton has remained loftily above the discussion.  In The Times, Sir Peter Stothard speculates on what Scruton might say were he to write a column on the subject. It would be along the lines of his critique of pop music:

Pop music, which presents the idealised adolescent as the centre of a collective ceremony, is an attempt to bend music to this new condition – the condition of a stagnant crowd, standing always on the brink of adulthood, but never passing across to it.  It shows youth as the goal and fulfilment of human life, rather than a transitional phase which must be cast off once the business of social reproduction calls.  For many young people, therefore, it constitutes an obstacle to the acquisition of a musical culture.  It is the thing that insulates them from the adult world, and all other uses of music – singing, formation dancing, playing an instrument, listening – arouse their suspicion."

And my own opinion of Michael Jackson? I couldn’t say, for I have never heard of him.

Mike Levine of FoxNews has a story,  “Somali-Americans Accused of Al Qaeda Ties Indicted on Terror Charges, Sources Say” about possible indictments  against Somalis in Minneapolis who were under Federal investigation for recruiting American Somali youths to join Al Shabaab, the al Qaeda affiliate. At the center of the FBI and grandjury investigations is the Abubakar As-Saddique Islamic Center in St. Paul.   This is a story we spotlighted a June NER article, “Foot Soldiers of Islam”  presented at the recent Nashville Symposium and in earlier posts on The Iconoclast. We had also urged Senator Lieberman’s Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee to reopen hearings on recruitment for Al Shabaab in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area given the murder in Mogadishu of 18 year old Burhan Hassan.

Here are some of the emerging details in the FoxNews report:

Among those charged is a man from Minneapolis who went to war-torn Somalia and then, about four months ago, relocated to Seattle, according to the two sources and a leader in the Minneapolis Somali community. The man was then arrested in a Seattle airport and transferred to a jail in Minneapolis, where he is currently being detained, according to the law enforcement sources.

The law enforcement sources said the man, described as in his 20s, has been charged with providing material support to a terrorist group, in this case al-Shabaab, which has been warring with the moderate Somali government since 2006.

Omar Jamal, the executive director of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center in St. Paul, Minn., identified the man as 21-year-old Abdifatah Ise. FOX News was unable to independently confirm that. Jamal said the man's family contacted him for "assistance" after the arrest, but he had been unable to speak publicly about it until now "in the interest of" a federal investigation.

For much of the past year the FBI has been looking into how dozens of young, Somali-American men were recruited to train and possibly fight alongside al-Shabaab in anarchy-stricken Somalia. The investigation has centered on Minneapolis, where a grand jury has been hearing testimony from witnesses for several months, but the investigation has also been active in Seattle; Columbus, Ohio; Cincinnati; Boston; and San Diego.

A source told FOX News in March that "several" recruits had returned to the United States, but counterterrorism officials have repeatedly said there is no intelligence indicating that any such recruits are planning attacks within the country.

"[Their] primary focus obviously is not on the homeland, it's abroad," Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano said during a briefing with reporters last week. "But any time you have people who are being trained in terrorist-type activities, that's something that needs to be monitored."

Note the focus of these federal investigations and possible indictments: the Abubakar As-Saddique Mosque:

According to Osman Ahmed, whose 18-year-old nephew was one of those to go to Somalia late last year, at least a dozen people have testified before the Minneapolis grand jury in the past few weeks alone, including officials from the Abubakar As-Saddique Islamic Center in St. Paul.

One law enforcement source said that shows "major progress" in the investigation, since the Abubakar mosque has been a focal point for investigators from the beginning.

Many of the men recruited to join al-Shabaab attended the Abubakar mosque, and several mosque officials, including director Farhan Hurre, could face indictment, one source said.

In addition, a youth volunteer at the mosque, Abia Ali, recently testified before the grand jury, and she is now worried that she could face indictment, according to Ahmed, who said he talked to someone close to Ali. Ahmed said he was told that Ali had been planning to visit family in Africa sometime in the next few weeks, but after testifying to the grand jury authorities told her not to leave the country.

In a recent interview with Minnesota Public Radio, Ali acknowledged that she felt like a target of the FBI investigation, but she denied any involvement in recruiting Somali-Americans to join the fight in Somalia.

The scope of these Federal investigations in several US Somali communities underlines the failure of FBI and Homeland Security monitoring of radical Mosques largely Saudi funded,  the conflicts in loyalties of naturalized American Somali admitted to this country under our generous humanitarian refugee program administered by our State Department and the Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Refugee Resettlement.  Further, it raises a serious question about the lack of screening of radical Imams who are admitted to this country using so-called religious orders Visas. 

These are issues that should propel Senator Lieberman’s HSGAC committee to reopen hearings on Al Shabaab recruitment, soon.

IsraelNN.com:

Fire fighters in northern Israel fought dozens of blazes that broke out during the day Wednesday, most of them around noontime.

A source in the Hadera Fire Services told News1 that due to the fact that numerous fires broke out in a relatively limited area, the working assumption is that they were deliberately set. “We still do not know how the fires were set and we do not have details about the arsonist or arsonists,” he said.

In one of the fire locations, north of Rosh Pina, the fire spread to within close range of the residents of Rosh Pina, and dozens were asked to leave their homes. The Israel Land Fund said that more than 1,000 dunams of natural thickets had gone up in flames.

Arson likely
Initial investigations by fire fighter squads in the numerous fire locations found a likelihood of arson. “This is man-made terror,” a fire commander said. “Fires don’t just break out on their own.”...

I returned with specimens of the Powdered Quaker, the Clouded Drab, the Hebrew Character, the Beautiful Brocade, the Marbled Coronet (but failed to find Barrett's Marbled Coronet, taken by him at the Baily Lighthouse, Howth, Co. Dublin, on 10.vi.1861), the Sword-grass, the Red Sword-grass, the Deep-brown Dart, the Brindled Ochre, the Black Rustic, the Lunar Underwing, the Marbled Green (outside Cork City), the Copper Underwing, the Old Lady, the Small Dotted Buff, the Mother Shipton, the Nut-tree Tussock, the Fan-foot, and the Yellow Shell in the banded form of Gumppenberg.

I did not find the Dingy Shears or the Feathered Ranunculus or the Small Mottled Willow or the Common Fan-foot.

I was only there for a week.

You can't have everything.

I dedicate this interlude to President Ahmedinijiad, by way of again congratulating him on his recent re-election.

The other day I began to read  "Unfinished Business," a memoir by the actor and writer John Houseman.

Here are the first two paragraphs:

"I was conceived in the second year of this century and legitimized five years after that. By then I was speaking English with my mother, French with my father and his friends, Rumanian with the household and German with a visiting governess. Two of my first four birthdays wre celebrated on board the Orient Express between Paris and Bucharest, the city where I was born on 22 September 1902 of a Jewish-Alsation father and a British mother of Welsh-Irish descent.

He first saw her in the Bois de Boulogne riding a bicycle and wearing a bright red blouse with black polka dots. A month later they were living together at Maisons-Lafitte near the race track. Six months after that, when he was sent off to manage his family's grain ahd shipping interests in the Balkans, she accompanied him to the shores of the Black Sea, where they occupied a large brick house on a hill overlooking the Danube.

Till I was four and a half my hair fell in long golden curls over my shoulders: the day it was cut off I was photographed twice -- before and after. That same year my father's family business collapsed as the result of a great-uncle's disastrous investment in the Marseilles streetcar system. As a result he was able to marry my gentile mother and I was registered at the French consulate under the name of Jacques Haussmann. Returning to Paris, he set up in business for himself as a broker and operator in commodities. He was a gambler; for the remaining ten years of his life he rode a series of speeding roller coasters (wheat, cotton, sugar, cocoa, cofee and various sorts of vegetable oils) up and down the 'futures' markets of the world. They carried him from month to month, and sometimes from week to week, from riches to ruin and back again."

I was put immediately in mind of Humbert Humbert: 

 "I was born in 1910, in Paris, a salad of racial genes, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in my veins. My very photogenic mother (picnic, lightning) died when I was three...."

But I was also put in mind of more than a sentence, however memorable, in a book.  I thought of  Europe Before The Great War,  and then of that diminished entre-deux-guerres Europe after that war and before the Second World War, and then, of the still more diminished Europe, stripped of its possessions abroad,  which is now again in a pre-war period of sorts, a drole de guerre that is likely to be lost and won not on any battlefield or Field of A Cloth of Gold (though gold -- in the form of OPEC revenues --  is certainly playing its part). This wa, this Jihad, is being conducted, steadily and insidiously, through means other than that of open warfare. I wonder if the indigenous peoples of Europe, after the self-inflicted wounds of the quite-unnecessary Great War, and after the self-inflicted wounds of the quite necessary World War II, might at long last come to their senses, and exhibit powers of recuperation and resistance that will depend on the level of  intelligent gratitude for the civilisational legacy which they have inherited and hold in trust (with life estates, not fee simples), and so have no right, whether out of fecklessness or fear, to hand over  that legacy into the destructive hands of primitives, animated by a cruel and barbarous faith that reduces men to mental slavery.

Fortunately, there's still time. Just.

I hope nobody has confused me with Michael Jackson, despite the fact that we're both M. Jackson. There are many differences between us, the main one being that I'm alive. You can't get much more different than alive is from dead.

Michael Jackson could more readily be confused with Farrah Fawcett, since they died on the same day. He had lighter skin towards the end, but the main difference, of course, is that while Ms. Fawcett cavorted with Majors, Mr. Jackson cavorted with minors.

Getting all my girlish ghoulishness out of the way in one post, when a famous figure dies, I sometimes look to see how fast Wikipedia puts the death date in, and changes "is a famous...." to "was a famous..." The haste is often unseemly, and the celebrity can scarcely be cold. A zealous Wikipedia editor may one day kill someone just so they can get the time of death to within a second.

Were you savoring the big 6000, youths want to know?  Kudos as always.

LONDON, June 23 (Reuters) - Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari said on Tuesday Britain has to tackle its own issues of deprivation to stop the radicalisation of British Muslims.

In an interview with ITV's "News at Ten", he rejected the suggestion it was Pakistan's role to win the hearts and minds of radicalised British Muslims, although he said his country would arrest any radical Briton visiting Pakistan and send them back to the UK.

"The appeal has to be on the other side," he was due to say in the programme to be aired on Tuesday evening.

"I think Britain has to take the responsibility and make sure that they do not feel the deprivation they have been. Because we all know this is a state of mind that comes up from some kind of this.

"And one has to fight it in Britain and not in Pakistan."