It's the connections in every direction that make one dwell on her obituary:  her East End grandfather, Barney Barnato (ne Barney Isaacs), an associate of Cecil Rhodes who mixed Mile End and Mafeking, Petticoat Lane and Pretoria, king  of the Kimberly diamonds, but also evoking memories of the ostrich-feather craze that relied on struthionic farming in South Africa and connects to pre-World War I  high fashion, which in turn links, in many minds, to the cafe society in London of the 1930s and 1940s (and now it may be time for a  little musical interlude, with Al Bowlly and the Ambrose Orchestra, or Ray Fox, or Harry Roy, or Jack Hylton, or Al Starita, or some other group, possibly at the Kit Kat Club), and while her father Woolf raced cars, she, during the war, put off childish things but high-spirited and brave but now usefully so, became a daredevil deliverer of Spitfires, herself a spitfire, then affianced in turn not to one but to two RAF fighter aces, and then, because both of those aces died in plane crashes,  ended in a contented 30-year liaison with an American, Whitney Straight, both a sometime racing-car driver and another heroic pilot of World War II, of the Whitney and Straight families, which included, connoisseurs of these things will remember,  Michael Straight, owner at one time of "The New Republic" who turned out, some will recall, to be far more than merely a salon Bolshevik. Michael's  daughter Dorothy was the youngest published author on record; I never read what she produced as a six-year-old but did see the written work she did for her most memorable college course, and it was very good.

Here's the obituary, in case you missed it, or in case you want to read it again:  

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1927116/Diana-Barnato-Walker.html 

With scenes of the Kit Kat Club:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBzbqYYOOD4

In this interview, Barack Obama clearly demonstrates he has failed to consider that the siege of Israel has no end, but is manageable, that Muslims will never willingly accept Israel, whatever its size, but can be forced to accept it, unwillingly, whatever its size, if Israel remains stronger, overwhelmingly so, and clearly perceived as such. He has not, Barack Obama, as yet decided to study the geopolitics, the worldview, of Islam. In this respect he is not different, not even worse, from many others, but at this point, one needs someone who will take the time to sit to school (and not with the espositos and armstrongs), will learn the texts, tenets, attitudes of Islam. Barack Obama's own experience gives him the feeling that somehow he knows, somehow he can deal with Muslims. But he can't, as long as he refuses to, or simply cannot bring himself to, learn about Islam. Having a Muslim father, or step-father, or living in Indonesia, is not merely insufficient, but is perhaps worse than no connection at all, because it fools him, apparently, into thinking he does know something.

And his view of Israel is clearly that of someone who has accepted -- without critical investigation -- the notion of a "Palestinian people" even though that "people" were never mentioned prior to the Six-Day War, and even though we have abundant testimony as to the propagandistic origins of that recent invention (see, for example, Zuhair Mohsen's testimony). He talks of the "settlements" like any Guardian editorialist, as someone who believes or pretends to believe that if Israel gives up its legal, moral, and historic claim then there will be peace. But there was no peace when there was not, between 1948 and June 1967, not a single Israeli either in Gaza or the "West Bank." There was not much peace, either, for the Jews, who bought land -- not a single dunam was expropriated until after the 1948 war, and precious little at that, for 90% of the land was not privately owned, but "state or waste land" that devolved, from the Ottomans, to the Mandatory Authority, to the successor state of the Mandate, Israel -- during the pre-state period. War was made on them by the Arabs, whenever they thought they could engage in it with impunity.

The legal claim for the Jews, the one enshrined in the Preamble to the Mandate for Palestine, which sets out the goal -- a Jewish National Home -- to be achieved through the Mandatory power's facilitating "Jewish immigration" and encouraging "close Jewish settlement on the land" -- which when all of Eastern Palestine (i.e., Jordan) was closed to the terms of the Mandate then constituted an area that turned out to be less than one-one-thousandth of the land area ruled by the Arabs, is land that Israel is entitled to hold onto, not only because of the express terms of the Mandate, but by all the rules of warfare (see, inter alia, the disposition of the Sudtirol -- now Alto Adige -- after World War I). In the Middle East and North Africa, in those lands inaccurately called collectively "the Arab world,"  Kurds, Berbers, Copts, Assyrians, and every other non-Muslim or non-Arab minority do not receive equal treatment with Muslim Arabs, nor can they aspire even to autonomy, much less independence. The "clean hands" doctrine that Barack Obama may remember from first-year Torts applies as well to situations bigger than private wrongs.

He needs to learn that David Grossman, whom he says in the interview he has read and admires, is a disturbing  example of Israel leftism at its purest, an example of someone who preaches a moral purity that is impossible, that would spell Israel's end, and that is singularly unrealistic in its gauging of the motives of those who wish to see Israel destroyed, some quickly, with the Fast Jihad of Hamas, and some, more cleverly and patiently, in a necessarily less abrupt but no less relentless way, the Slow Jihadists of Fatah.

David Grossman knows nothing about Islam, though his life and that of his country depend on his knowing about Islam. And it is unfair of Barack Obama not to begin to study this Total Belief-System, and see what it means not only for the Jews of Israel, but for Christians in Nigeria and the Sudan and elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, and for Buddhists in southern Thailand and elsewhere in Asia, and for Hindus, those who still have managed to hold on in Pakistan and Bangladesh, and those subject to Muslim attacks in Kashmir and India itself. He needs to find out, to figure out, why when every other group of immigrants somehow manages slowly or rapidly to integrate into very various societies -- the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the non-Muslim blacks from Africa or the Caribbean, the Hindus -- why there is a problem, and a problem everywhere, with Muslims alone. It is not surprising. They come, packed in their mental luggage, and undeclared, a Belief System that is not merely an alien but an alien and a hostile creed, one which inculcates the idea that the essential division of humanity is between Believer and Infidel, and that a state of permanent war must exist between the two, until all obstacles to the spread, and then the dominance, of Islam, are removed, and Dar al-Harb is swallowed up by Dar al-Islam. If he cannot learn that, if he will not learn that, then such mistakes, based on sentimentalism, as the transplanting-democracy project, the Light-Unto-the-Muslim-Nations project, of Iraq, with all of its squandering, will no doubt continue. And it is impossible to think that Barack Obama will be comprehending, and therefore sufficiently alarmed, about the deployment of the Money Weapon, Da'wa, and demographic conquest by Muslims in Western Europe.

In fact, he may not even care. And that is something we need to find out about now, before the election.

Saying you are "unshakably committed to Israel's security" is the sort of thing everyone -- Jimmy Carter included -- says. It means nothing. One wishes to know: does he, or does he not, at this point understand that the war against Israel is an unassuageble -- but containable -- Jihad, and that the way to contain it is not by forcing Israel to make further suicidal surrenders, but to insist that it give up nothing further, and that its military be kept so strong as to keep the peace. For that military superiority of Israel, properly perceived, is the only thing that keeps the peace, and not all that peace-processing, or those treaties that are broken, by Muslims, simply mimicking the behavior, as is right and proper by their lights to do, of Muhammad with the Meccans, after he had signed with them the Treaty of Hudaibiyya in 628 A.D.

All this is now required not only of Barack Obama, but of any other candidate. The days when assertions of "support for Israel" could be accompanied by a continuing ignorance of the texts, tenets, attitudes of Islam, simply will not do.

Not that it ever did.

I've learned a few practical things that have stood me in good stead:

1) when you have a splinter in your finger, soak that finger in a warm saline solution. Osmosis will do the rest.

2) Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November/All the rest have thirty-one/Except February/Which has twenty-eight or sometimes twenty-nine.

3) Even if, or possibly especially if, you do not believe in God, make sure you pray to Him at take-off, at landing, and during times of turbulence.

Nothing else has stood the test of time as well as these three rules to live by.  

If I learn anything as valuable in the future, I'll be sure to let you know.

Dennis Prager writes at Frontpage:

Whatever misgivings an American has about invading Iraq and removing Hussein, the facts are that America is winning now;

This is a remarkable statement. Winning needs to be defined in a way that makes sense and justifies our enormous sacrifice in both men and treasure to the American people. Simply to assert things like "violence is down" right now doesn't define victory satisfactorily.

that Iraq is becoming the first free and democratic Arab country;

Another incredible statement. Freedom has not been defined vis a vis Islam. We have stupidly and short-sightedly enshrined the system of Islam as the ultimate legal authority over the Iraqi Constitution thanks to "experts" like Noah Feldman. How, then, is Iraq a "free country"?

that Islamists are losing what they themselves call their most important war; and that, as a result of their barbaric cruelty in Iraq and their losing the war now, their popularity among Muslims (except Palestinians) is in decline.

Islam is undergoing a world-wide resurgence - see Malaysia, see Indonesia, see Thailand, see Kashmir, see Western Europe, see the UK, see the United States. How can it be said Islam (or the carefully undefined "Islamism") losing popularity anywhere? If some Sunnis in Iraq are fighting some other Sunnis in the form of al-Qaeda, how is this evidence of Islamic decline everywhere except among the "Palestinians"?

Do most Americans really prefer Obama's and the Democrats' pledge to leave Iraq to the Republicans' pledge to win this war? No matter how horrific, even potentially genocidal, the consequences would be to Iraqis?

Yes.

No matter how adversely it would affect potential U.S. allies who will no longer trust our commitments to them?

What about our ability to trust them? That, it seems to me, is the issue.

And no matter how much it would weaken America's domestic security, given an Islamist victory in Iraq? If so, we are in deep trouble as a nation.

Not if, through our experience in Iraq, we begin to understand that we can have no real Muslim allies no matter what we do. American domestic security with regard to Islam is directly related to how many Muslims are in our country and has nothing to do with Iraq. It would be better to have jihad opportunities galore in Iraq as a result of a low-level Sunni-Shi'a war, than to have Iraq in a state of peace and jihadis turning their sights on us and looking to cause carnage here. We have no interest in preventing Muslims from fighting each other - quite the opposite, in fact, as Hugh Fitzgerald has pointed out innumerable times since early 2004.

Shaden, who is veiled at 17, spoke with her father as her younger sister looked on in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in March 2008.

New Duranty continues its look at the love life, such as it is, of Muslim Arabs:

The separation between the sexes in Saudi Arabia is so extreme that it is difficult to overstate. Saudi women may not drive, and they must wear black abayas and head coverings in public at all times. They are spirited around the city in cars with tinted windows, attend girls-only schools and university departments, and eat in special “family” sections of cafes and restaurants, which are carefully partitioned from the sections used by single male diners.

Special women-only gyms, women-only boutiques and travel agencies, even a women-only shopping mall, have been established in Riyadh in recent years to serve women who did not previously have access to such places unless they were chaperoned by a male relative...

“If your family found out you were talking to a man online, that’s not quite as bad as talking to him on the phone,” Ms. Tukhaifi explained. “With the phone, everyone can agree that is forbidden, because Islam forbids a stranger to hear your voice. Online he only sees your writing, so that’s slightly more open to interpretation.

“One test is that if you’re ashamed to tell your family something, then you know for sure it’s wrong,” Ms. Tukhaifi continued. “For a while I had Facebook friends who were boys — I didn’t e-mail with them or anything, but they asked me to “friend” them and so I did. But then I thought about my family and I took them off the list.”

Ms. Tukhaifi and Shaden both spoke admiringly of the religious police, whom they see as the guardians of perfectly normal Saudi social values, and Shaden boasted lightly about an older brother who has become multazim, very strict in his faith, and who has been seeing to it that all her family members become more punctilious in their religious observance...

In related news, A Saudi Arabian man has been sentenced to eight months in prison and 150 lashes after he was caught meeting a woman without a chaperone in a coffee shop.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-f4FAny0d1c&feature=related

http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/10582/sec_id/10582

From The Global Muslim Brotherhood Report:

Global media is widely reporting the arrest of Muslim Brotherhood leader Hassan Turabi by the Sudanese government who accusing him of helping a Darfur rebel attack on the Sudanese capital. According to the Associated Press:

Sudan arrested its leading fundamentalist Islamic ideologue on Monday, accusing him of aiding a Darfur rebel attack on the capital, according to his party and state media. Hassan Turabi was arrested after dawn at his home in Khartoum and at least 10 other members of his Popular Congress Party members were detained in a government sweep across the city, said Awadh Ba Bakr, a relative and close aide to Turabi. Turabi is believed to wield influence with Khalil Ibrahim, the leader of the Justice and Equality Movement, whose fighters launched an unprecedented attack Saturday near Khartoum, hundreds of miles from their bases in the country’s far west. The attack was the closest Darfur rebels have ever come to the seat of Sudan’s government, which they accuse of marginalizing ethnic African minorities and worsening the area’s humanitarian crisis. Sudan’s official news agency quoted unidentified government officials as saying that rebels already in custody implicated Turabi and other party members as part of a “conspiracy.” Interrogations were underway, it said.

Turabi is probably best known as the man who invited Osama bin Laden to live in Khartoum during the 1990s when Sudan was both a center for terrorist activity and strongly under the influence of Turabi.

Although Turabi himself does not appear to be currently active in the global Muslim Brotherhood, Doctor Isam El-Bashir is a former Minister of Religious Affairs in the Islamic National Front (NIF), Turabi’s Sudanese political party, and a member of the Sudanese “Transitional National Assembly”, composed primarily of members of the NIF. As previous posts have reported, Dr. Basheer (aka Issam El-Bashir) has held numerous positions associated with the global Muslim Brotherhood including as a former director of the UK charity Islamic Relief and a member of the European Council for Fatwa and Research. He currently heads the Center for Moderation in Kuwait which is also associated with the global Muslim Brotherhood.

The BBC has published a profile of Turabi which can be found here.

A history of the Muslim Brotherhood in Sudan can be found here

Hassan Turabi was arrested not for being a "fundamentalist Islamic ideologue" but for being implicated in the latest charge at Omdurman, the pseudo-coup by JEM just outside Khartoum (Omdurman being to Khartoum as Buda is to Pest, or Sale to Rabat, or Minneapolis to St. Paul). The men who arrested him are just as "Islamic" as he is. It was Stalin killing Kirov, or Hitler ridding himself of Rohm. It was as if Malenkov and Bulganin had arrested "party ideologist" Suslov in 1955, on suspicion not of misunderstanding Marx but of power-grabbing miching mallecho.

Brian of London writes:

This week's guest is Patti Patton-Bader, founder of Soldiers Angels, which organises a surprisingly vast array of methods by which you, the ordinary civillian at home, can show real support for the troops.

Whether it be by sending care packages, baked goods, blankets and cards, providng practical assistance for soldiers families, assisting chaplains with their work, or even organising voice-activated laptop computers for wounded soldiers, Soldiers Angels can help you to help the troops.

Go visit www.soldiersangels.org. You will also find news there of the Mom of the Year award that Patti received on Mother's day in the US.

In Blog News this week we talk about Sheik Ali Al-Faqir's appearance on Al Aqsa TV as reported by Memri. Apparently main stream opinion in Islam is that the whole world should be conquered by Jihad. What a surprise.

Obama thinks there are 58 states in the US. It's all over the blogs.

For video of Jeremy Bowen under fire (and not by Israel either) you can look at the BBC site.

"He was kind of an enfant terrible at the time, and I thought of him as an accomplished professional. He'd already had a number of shows, knew everybody, had been to Black Mountain College working with all those avant-garde people." - Jasper Johns on meeting Robert Rauschenberg, in Grace Glueck, "Interview with Robert Rauschenberg," NY Times (October 1977).

"I don't ever want to go," he told Harper's when asked about dying. "I don't have a sense of great reality about the next world; my feet are too ugly to wear those golden slippers. But I'm working on my fear of it. And my fear is that something interesting will happen, and I'll miss it."  --Robert Rauschenberg

I don't know much about cricket, but I know I like the togs. Charles Spencer reviews Richard Bean's new play, The English Game in The Telegraph (my emphasis):

Bean, one of our finest and most prolific dramatists, has played a good deal of club cricket over the years, and has the knackered knees to prove it. His play is a sometimes spiky valentine to the game that has absorbed him for so long, as he depicts an amateur London team, the Nightwatchmen, on a hot August Sunday.

By and large, the team are a tolerant, easy-going bunch. There's a Hindu among the players who is also gay, and a black man, but there is no sense of prejudice except from a boorish guest player mistrusted by all.

But there is an extraordinary passage when one of the most likeable and longest-serving members of the team, and a former radical Sixties firebrand to boot, turns on radical Islam and the fact that we are sleep-walking into an Islamic caliphate. He describes suicide bombers as "racists, fascists and bastards", deplores the credulity of right-on, anti-American attitudes, and insists that "self-hatred is the cancer at the heart of our nation".

It's always dangerous to assume that any character's words represent the view of the playwright, and here another character, a sympathetic GP, leaves the team because he is so upset by his friend's remarks. But this play seems to me to mark a defining moment on the English stage when the conventional liberal pieties that largely obtain in our theatre are finally put under fierce scrutiny, and Jihadist Islam is at last denounced as a malign evil.

It is, however, only one aspect of a splendidly rich play...

No doubt, but the Islamic angle has bowled this maiden over.

Of course, there is no Islam other than "Jihadist Islam", at least not an Islam that has officially renounced Jihad. Still, "Jihadist Islam", in a mainstream newspaper, is better than "extreme Islam" or "Islamism". Denouncing Jihad is a good intermediate strategy, where denouncing Islam itself would alienate the uninformed reader. This reader can imagine that there is another kind of Islam, which may stop him feeling guilty about learning more.

It sounds like a good play. I wonder if they will stop for tea.

Whenas in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.

Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free ;
O how that glittering taketh me !

We go from Mt. Etna (not to be confused with Etna, N.H.) in Virgil to Robert Herrick, and then from Robert Herrick to this:

http://www.garboforever.com/Bilder/Films/Love/Love014.jpg

Please explain the two leaps, one longer than the other, that lead from Virgil to Greta Garbo.

Never trust a man who says "discourse". Never trust a woman who says "nuanced". And never trust anyone, male, female or transgendered who says "zeitgeist".  This week's dozy bint and pseud is Muslim Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik. She attacks "Islam's refuseniks" Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Irshad Manji and Wafa Sultan for being insufficiently "nuanced". Watch those mangled metaphors:

The post-9/11 crisis also created an audience which was eager to hear about the depravity and barbarity of the Muslim world but also not keen on subtlety. A quick, convenient, stereotypical picture was needed, and the "sisters" certainly paint that. There seems to be more of a platform for the angry disenchanted Muslim female. Male exiles from the faith do not seem to attract the same sympathetic open-armed treatment as the damsel in distress who has liberated herself from the shackles.

The "post-9/11 crisis" caused this lack of subtlety? Not 9/11 itself? Is flying planes into buildings subtle, then?

The most prominent of the "refuseniks", Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Irshad Manji and Wafa Sultan have caused a stir for allegedly being "brave enough" to criticise Islam and nail their colours to the west's mast of values.

Why is "brave enough" in sneer quotes? All three are facing death threats - the quotation marks will not save them.

For me, as a Muslim female, the three women all represent false dawns. Wafa Sultan's debut on al-Jazeera , where she bleated hysterically about the irredeemable retardation of the Islamic faith, made her conservative Muslim opponent seem positively temperate.

Yes, we remember how temperate - and how lovely - her opponents were. Sultan is a bit shouty for my taste; I am English, after all. But her opponents were deranged.

[T]he (sometimes faux) extremity of their views spoils the appetite for more nuanced, considered, opinion.

Frenchification - friend or faux?

The "sisters" have set the mould and any address that is not predicated on a complete acceptance of western values and a rejection - nay, abhorrence - of Muslim ones is too dilute, too bland for the numbed palate.

Nay? Nay for 'orses?

I should have a natural synergy with these women but I am appalled at how cavalierly they have appropriated the very limited opportunity to capture attention and raise awareness; how they merely ride the zeitgeist and milk it for all it's worth. Their personal histories exhibit a disturbing ruthless tendency to twist half-truths into a media-friendly tale of woe.

Question - how do you ride a zeitgeist and milk it? Is it like having your cake and eating it? Or is it a winged horse, like Pegasus or Cholima?

It's Eighties and yet Sixties:

The answer to the quiz below is as follows:

The "liquefactaque saxa" in the passage from Virgil put me in mind of the tetrametric line "the liquefaction of her clothes" -- and thus to "Upon Julia's Clothes."  A mental prod was also provided by a memory of Byron's "love's lava," not the kind that flows from parthenopean Vesuvius or trinacrian Etna but the other kind.

The sound of those flowing petticoats, in French (and the same word can legitimately be borrowed for use in English, which lacks such a term) is "froufrou." And "Frou-Frou" is the name of Vronsky's horse in "Anna Karenina." Confusingly, and amusingly, the love's-lava services of a stud horse called "Vronsky," can now be found offered on the Internet.

The name of Vronsky's horse evoked by Herrick's Julia and her petticoats naturally led to "Anna Karenina," and "Anna Karenina" to Greta Garbo, who played in the first version of that book transposed to the silver screen, and I found just the image I wanted, showing Greta Garbo, as Anna, embracing and being embraced by, Count Vronsky, and put it up.

And that's how one thing leads to another, as it almost always does.