From The Telegraph

A grammar school is facing a legal battle over a decision by the head teacher to ban a pupil from wearing the Muslim niqab.

Similar to. . . one involving Shabina Begum, who was excluded from her school in Luton for refusing to adhere to the uniform policy. Last year the law lords ruled that the school was fully justified in sending her home for wearing the jilbab, a long, loose gown for women.

The latest case involves a 14-year-old pupil at Wycombe High School in Buckinghamshire. The head teacher has told the girl that she can no longer attend school if she wears the niqab, a veil that is drawn across the face, usually leaving the eyes visible. The school already allows pupils to wear a hijab – a headscarf which does not cover the face. However, the head teacher has judged that the niqab does not conform to the ethos of the school. . . the girl's father had now applied for a legally-aided judicial review due to be heard next month.

The school's governors are due to meet soon to decide what to do. Without financial support the school could be landed with a legal bill of £50,000 or more.

Paul Goodman, the Conservative MP for High Wycombe, said he was seeking an urgent meeting with Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, to talk about the case.  Mr Goodman said: "It's right that Wycombe High should take the religious requirements of its Muslim pupils into account. The school maintains on educational and security grounds that its students shouldn't wear the niqab. I support the school one hundred per cent.” Mr Goodman added: 'I believe that the education department and Buckinghamshire county council should support the school in principle, and should work together to help fund this court case." 

This is an all girls school. Why on earth does she need to cover her face in front of other women and girls? This is yet another attempt to make a political point.

From the school’s mission statement.

We aim to develop our students’ ability to think independently, solve problems, communicate and live happy and fulfilling lives. We always remember that the young women who leave our school will help to shape the twenty first century. They will need to be resilient, imaginative, courageous and confident.

L'enfant-no-more Martin Amis quoted by Christopher Hitchens (h/t: LGF):

There’s a definite urge—don’t you have it?—to say, “The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.” What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation—further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan. . . . Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children. . . . They hate us for letting our children have sex and take drugs—well, they’ve got to stop their children killing people.

I suspected jihad was a consequence of bad parenting.  Thanks for clearing that up, Mr. Amis

Dean Barnett has a scathing review of Dinesh D'Souza's book, The Enemy at Home, up at Townhall:

First, if the book’s principle theory gains any traction it would be destructive. If conservatives decided that liberals are the reason we were attacked and why we’re hated, it won’t do anything for domestic unity. D’Souza’s theory in this regard is not only misguided, it is offensive. Liberals won’t have to bother to caricaturize D’Souza’s argument. He did that himself.

Second, and this is also no small thing, it’s not liberals’ fault. Radical Islam hates a respectable Church-going Presbyterian family man every bit as much as it hates a spoiled libertine like Paris Hilton. As far as radical Islam is concerned, the two are in the same basic class; they’re both infidels. Short of conversion or surrender, there is nothing our society can do to appease radical Islam.

One of the most distressing aspects of our domestic debate the past five years is the way our government and our intellectuals have so thoroughly failed to grasp the tenets of Radical Islam. It is dispiriting to see D’Souza stumble so badly, and distressing to think that he is selling the theories of this book as a de facto spokesman for America’s conservatives.

Then D'Souza digs in deeper with these comments:

In Iraq we’re getting into a religious war that’s lasted for centuries. This theory, espoused among others by John Murtha, holds that the Sunni and Shia are fighting in Iraq because these two groups have been fighting everywhere since the seventh century. So who wants to get into the middle of an ancient conflict that shows no signs of abating? This would seem to be an argument for America to get out of a religious quarrel that it has no way to settle, and that shows no sign of abating.

But the Shia-Sunni conflict in Iraq is not a religious conflict. How do I know that? Because there are no substantial religious differences between the Shia and the Sunni. And these two groups have not been fighting for centuries. In fact, they haven’t been fighting at all. There are no wars that have been fought between the Shia and the Sunni in the past. Historian Bernard Lewis points out that our notion of Shia-Sunni conflict seems to be an ethnocentric projection of the Catholic-Protestant model onto the Muslim world. As late as the 1980s, Shia and Sunni fought shoulder-to-shoulder to expel the Soviets from Afghanistan.

Then what are the two groups fighting about in Iraq? Not over religion but over power. Saddam ran a big mafia-style operation for 25 years, and he recruited his thugs from his home town of Tikrit, which is to say he recruited from his own tribe, the Sunni. The Shia, although the majority, were under the jackboot of Saddam’s mafia. Now that democracy has installed the majority Shia into power, the Sunni insurgents are waging a desperate war to get back the power they have lost. It’s a ruthless war, to be sure, but it’s not a religious war and there’s no reason to think it will go on and on. One gang will win.

So where do all these myths come from? The benign explanation is the Internet. People get information off websites which get it off other websites, so that idiocy gets passed around frequently enough to become accepted as truth.

Humm. Might I suggest Mr. D'Souza take a little of his own advice? But beyond that, anyone who seeks to divide our people during wartime and then to ally those divided with the enemy deserves much worse than the loss of his reputation.

At American Conservative, Tom Piatak forcibly directs readers away from D'Souza's lethal naiveté:

D’Souza’s Islamophilia also blinds him to the fact that the conflict between Islam and its neighbors originated with Mohammed, not Hollywood. Mohammed began the process of conquest. A Christian West that was far from decadent was the target of Islamic aggression for centuries and survived only because of the valor of Christian warriors in such places as Poitiers, Malta, Lepanto, and Vienna. This Islamic assault on Europe ended only because Turkey was unable to keep pace with European military technology, not because the Ottomans became irenic. In our own age, too, it is only Muslims who react to “a decadent American culture” by resorting to terror. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that no matter what we may have done to make them hate us, tensions on the frontier between the Islamic world and its neighbors are virtually inevitable.

The solution to the problem of radical Islam is not to romanticize Islam, as D’Souza does, by imagining that a shared opposition to such practices as gay marriage can create a genuine community of interest between “traditional Moslems” and Christians for the first time in history. Nor is the answer to invade and democratize the Islamic world, as Bush and the neocons want. Rather, the solution, as Srdja Trifkovic suggests, is to exclude Mecca from America and to disengage America from Mecca, thereby eliminating the greatest threat Islam actually poses—invasion through immigration—and minimizing the tensions and provocations that help Islamic radicalism to spread.

Listen to Brian of London's amusing comments and Tom Paine's great interview with Mark Steyn in which he discusses the Islamic demographic weapon.

Esmerelda posted about yet another attempt by Islam to claim territory for itself. We hear that the father of a Muslim girl fortunate enough, and presumably clever enough, to attend one of our few remaining grammar schools, is taking legal action against the school for refusing to allow his daughter to wear a niqab. And how is he paying? Legal aid – in other words, the taxpayer is paying.

He has no hope of winning. If the jilbab is not allowed, then the niqab will not be allowed. But what of the cost? If and when the case is lost, the taxpayer pays. In the unlikely event that the school loses – perhaps on some technicality or contravention of the absurd, EU driven, Human Rights Act – the school pays. Grammar schools, which should be brought back immediately, are excellent institutions. For a grammar school to be forced to spend time, effort and money on this case is absurd. I can imagine a situation where a school just gives in, because it doesn’t have the resources to fight. Inch by inch, territory is ceded to the Dar al Islam.

This week we learned of a policewoman who refused to shake hands with her force’s chief because of her Muslim beliefs. She is now threatened with dismissal. If she is dismissed, she will claim unfair dismissal and take the case, probably at the taxpayer’s expense, all the way to the House of Lords. She will probably lose. But imagine the costs, both direct – in legal fees – and indirect, in time and effort expended on this case, rather than on doing what a police force should be doing.

Recently a Muslim cashier in W. H. Smith refused, on religious grounds, to sell cigarettes to a customer requesting them. Since she is not performing her duties, she should be sacked. But the company will probably accommodate her, because it is too much trouble not to.

Faced with spiralling costs of defending itself against insatiable and aggressive Muslim demands, many will fight. And they will win, but will have spent time, money and effort on winning which would have been better spent elsewhere. Others will give in. Louise Campbell, exhausted and ill, let Islamic child custody rights prevail. Schools and hospitals, overstretched and under-funded, will give in. Small businesses, which would be bankrupted by legal bills, will give in.

Brett Lock of Harry’s Place makes some good points about this matter, but misses the key point:

But where will this end? A Hindu cashier Sainsbury's refusing to cash up your frozen beef burgers? A Jewish waiter at Pizza Express refusing to bring you meat and cheese on the same plate? An Evangelical Christian salesman at The Gap refusing to let you try on garments with mixed fibres? Another Muslim shop assistant objecting to your balsamic vinegar in your trolley? A Buddhist at B&Q lecturing you on karma when you ask for some pesticide?

Oh, come on now, which of these hypothetical scenarios is the most likely? We know that Hindus, Jews, Buddhists and Evangelical Christians are not the problem.

As a minimum, Islam should be declared a political movement and – if this is not the case already – there should be no legal aid for political cases. Let Islam deplete its own resources. In fact, however, this is beyond politics. We are at war. In the UK, it is a war of attrition, and we are losing. 

An influential government education adviser said today that schools dominated by Muslim children should be closed and replaced with 'multi-faith' academies to integrate pupils.

Sir Cyril Taylor, chairman of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, said the concentration of ethnic minorities and religious groups in certain schools had created a 'strategic security problem'.

The citizenship curriculum review by former headmaster and Home Office adviser Sir Keith Ajegbo is expected to conclude that more emphasis should be placed on British identity and more must be done to proved the 'essential glue' that holds society together.

"Recently the right has produced a spate of Islamophobic tracts with titles like Islam Unveiled, Sword of the Prophet, and The Myth of Islamic Tolerance." -- from Dinesh D'Souza's latest book

Has Dinesh D'Souza read either The Myth of Islamic Tolerance or the other works by those who contributed to that anthology? What would lead him to call this a book of the "right" or its authors of the "right"? Does he know something about them, about their views on anything other than Islam?

Ibn Warraq, for example. What are his views on the world that Dinesh D'Souza thinks make him someone on the "right"? Is it his contempt for Edward Said and the influence he has had on the study of history and literature? Does that make someone on the "right"? Is it his views on the environment, or taxation, or home-schooling, or possibly on what he thinks of free trade, or the unfettered free market? Does Dinesh D'Souza know a thing about what Ibn Warraq thinks about these things?

And what of the volume's main contributor, Bat Ye'or? What does Dinesh D'Souza know about her views of taxation, the free market, education, and so on? I suspect he knows nothing at all, because like Ibn Warraq, she has not revealed a thing about her views on such matters. And why should she?

The cheapness of D'Souza, with his reductionism that cannot accommodate scholarship (real, not false) and that offers only phrases such as those about "left" and "right," can be seen more clearly if one actually examines the contents of The Myth of Islamic Tolerance.

What qualifies Walter Short, author of “The Jizya Tax: Equality and Dignity Under Islamic Law?" to be considered on the right? And what of Samuel Shahid, author of the article "Rights of Non-Muslims in an Islamic State? What, in Dinesh D'Souza's tiny universe, makes Patrick Sookhdeo's review of "Christians in the Muslim World" a product of the "right"? And Mark Durie, the Australian who contributed several articles, including "Documentation of Oppression of Religious Freedom in Aceh, Indonesia"?

And does Robert Wistrich's article "The Ideology of Jihad: Antisemitism/Genocide/Slavery" offend Dinesh D'Souza?

What does Dinesh D'Souza find troubling about the article "Apostasy, Human Rights, Religion and Belief--New Threats or the Freedom of Opinion and Expression: The Problem of Apostasy in an Islamic-Christian Context" by Paul Cook, or the other articles on threats to those who, born into Islam, wish to leave Islam for Christianity or another faith or no faith at all?

What does any of this have to do with "right" or "left"?

Dinesh D’Souza seems unable to think beyond these terms that are so irrelevant to the matter and menace at hand, and in general terms so easy to invoke and wave about. They are a magic wand for someone at the end of his mental tether, struggling to make a media splash and a fast buck, and then a series of slower bucks through the lecture circuit. His inability to go beyond this shallow level is shown in everything about this book and indeed, sheds light on the unedifying career and mental state of Dinesh D'Souza.

He is simply not intelligent enough to discuss these matters. The cheap reductiveness of his thought comes shining through. It was always there. But now it is less difficult, it is easy, to discern.

Someone recently asked: "What religion is D'Souza? I'm trying to get a grip on where he's coming from." But this is the wrong question to ask. It is his ideas and worldview that matter. Sometimes knowledge of a particularly piquant private history can help, but often it means little. There are Christians who are apologists for Islam, and Christians who regard Islam with horror. And Jews, ditto. And Hindus, ditto. There are atheists who offer merely a plague on all their houses, equally, and those atheists who distinguish that belief-system that not only makes universalist claims, but also makes no distinction between religion and politics or any other area of life -- and does distinguish, however, quite clearly, between Believer and Infidel.

Recently some convert to Islam, in ranting about my proposal to withdraw from Iraq as amounting to "genocide" (i.e., if the Americans don't stay to keep the Sunnis and Shi'a at each other's throats, but instead simply leave), described me to Robert Spencer as a "Christian fascist." When Robert corrected at least the epithet, and explained that I was an atheist, the revert-ranter seemed genuinely confused, because he was under the distinct impression that only "Christian fascists" (you know, the ones who have been running around taking over America, and threatening to take over the rest of the world, as Chris Hedges and similar malevolences like to point out) thought this way.

Surely the main point about Dinesh D'Souza is that he is ignorant, is arrogantly unaware of the depths of his ignorance, and is, essentially, stupid. Isn't that the real problem?

Everything was all right, said the Frenchman, until la betise s'est mise a penser. When Stupidity Began to Think. Whole lot of stupid people at a whole lot of think-tanks, getting a whole lot of grants and fellowships, or still worse, hired and promoted in universities, and meanwhile, with Captain Good attending Captain Ill -- well, you get the picture, don't you?

Dontcha?

"Bibi.."-- from Robert Spencer's comments on Benjamin Netanyahu

There is something undignified about public figures in Israel being identified by their nicknames: Bibi this, and Zvika that, and Motti here, and Mookie and Shmookie over there. Those who permit this do not sense it as infra dig, but I do. And if I knew Netanyahu, I would never call him "Bibi" but always, "Benjamin."

And the same problem can be found in the United States, where everyone thinks it peachy that Carter called himself "Jimmy" and Clinton called himself "Bill." But those should be reserved for intimates. When some company calls, usually at dinner time, and some human (the computers are more polite) immediately begins to address you by a nickname (if your first name has an easy nickname to go with it, but some names, such as "Hugh," fortunately do not), hang that phone right up. You did not give them the right to address you in such a manner. And if that nicknaming stuff doesn't infuriate you (be more infuriated -- please), then when they go into the business of employing that smarmy word (outside its legitimate use in the South) "folks" in order to establish that pseudo-intimacy (many are reading from cards telling them exactly how to overcome any resistance on the part of the person they are cold-calling) said to make potential customers more susceptible to some offer, some new way to part that person from his allowance -- you, that would-be victim, before hanging up, should tell the person on the other end to straighten up and fly right linguistically, or you will have their guts for garters. Well, you don't have to add that last. But you know what I mean.

"How about Hughie? Or Huey? Calling Chavez "Huguito" makes him appear not as fierce a caudillo."-- from a reader

Better to set rules so that no one thinks he can, without express permission, call you by what he thinks might be a good nickname. And teachers must be trained not to do that with their charges, either. How do they know that one "Matthew" may not mind being called "Matt" and another one hate it? They should wait to be informed.

Using such forms to demean an enemy is self-defeating; it demeans only the user. Lots of people think it clever to twist the names of Ahmedinejad and Bin Laden; I can't stand it.

Maybe Sen. Clinton can begin her Conversation With America by explaining what she thinks of her husband's pardon of 16 FALN terrorists in 1999 (which Clinton's former advisor Dick Morris has said was done to help HRC politically with New York's Puerto Rican vote in her 2000 run for the senate). 

She might then follow with her views of Pres. Clinton's last official act:  pardoning Weather underground terrorists Susan Rosenberg and Linda Sue Evans.  (See Jay Nordlinger's piece here; also, this piece of mine, in which I discuss support for radical attorney Lynne Stewart, upon her conviction for material support to terrorism, from former Clinton administration Justice Department official Jo Ann Harris — note my error, as well: I said Clinton had pardoned Weather Underground terrorist Laura Whitehorn; not true — Whitehorn was actually paroled in 1999; it was Evans (Whitehorn's and Rosenberg's co-conspirator in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Capitol), not Whitehorn, whom Clinton pardoned along with Rosenberg on his way out of office.)

With the conversation thus started, we could then perhaps address the Clinton administration's complete failure to do anything (i.e., no military action and not even the usual ineffective indictments) in response to the bombings of Khobar Towers (1996) and the U.S.S. Cole (2000). 

We could then ask whether Sen. Clinton favors the declassification of the Millennium After-Action Report (addressing the Clinton administration's performance in the run-up to the Millennium bombing plot) which Sandy Berger was caught stealing from the National Archives in 2003. 

Then, finally, we could ask about the failure to do anything meaningful to apprehend or kill Osama bin Laden upon his indictment in Spring 1998 — after which he carried out the embassy bombings, the Cole bombing, and 9/11.

Armed with this information, we would be in a much better position to assess how firm she'd be with terrorists.

“There’s still a tendency to see these things in Sunni-Shia terms,” Ms. Rice said. “But the Middle East is going to have to overcome that.” She added that neighboring Sunni-led Arab states should understand that Iraq’s Shiite-led government primarily saw itself as Arab and that the only way it would ally itself with Iran, which is Shiite but not Arab, would be “if people deny the Shia-led Iraq a place in the Arab world.”--US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice quoted in this news article

There are two things wrong with the statement of Condoleeza Rice.

The first is the o'erweening, history-ignoring idea that Sunni-Shi'a rivalries and hostilities, can "be overcome." The Sunni-Shi'a split long ago transcended the initial quarrel over succession. Now there are differences in the organization of the Shi'a and Sunni variants of Islam: in organization (the power of the Shi'a ayatollahs and other Shi'a clergy has nothing similar in Sunni Islam), in ritual (the Shi'a Ashoura, with its emphasis on self-flagellation), the Shi'a shrines and visits to those shrines, so offensive to austere Sunnis, especially to the most austere of all, the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia. That is, the belief that somehow deeply-held beliefs and attitudes can be "overcome" as if it were a question of civil rights in the South. One of the silliest and most harmful aspects of American governments is the belief that many things are susceptible of change, or of change that will come quickly. "Let's have self-determination now" or "Let's end poverty the way Jeffery Sachs says we can" or "let's just get right in there and reform Islam." A blend of naiveté, ignorance, and arrogance, which yields a most unappetizing brew.

The second thing wrong with Rice's statement is that apparently she cannot conceive of why this Sunni-Shi'a split is a good thing. She cannot conceive of why chaos and confusion and endless hostility between the two main branches or sects of Islam is not something to be exploited, but rather to be deplored. It appears that American governments want always to take the side of this or that plausible group of Muslims. First, it was the Shi'a in exile who managed to woo and win so many in the American government with their tales of WMD (Chalabi and his group), and others who confidently predicted that once the Americans "liberated" Iraq they would be greeted, those Americans, with an outpouring of joy and presumably permanent gratitude that "would make the liberation of Kabul look like a funeral procession." It would cost, according to Wolfowitz and others, nothing like what it cost to maintain those sanctions -- possibly a few tens of billions of dollars. And then it would be over. A "cakewalk," wrote Kenneth Adelman (sometime purveyor of Shakespeare to corporations so that the tycoons and tycoonettes can apply Shakespeare to the business world).

Many have in this farce, on all sides, in the government, and in the press, been weighted and found wanting.

Meanwhile, there's something just over here, freshly scribbled on this wall, that I'd like to show our rulers and our pundits:

"Mene, mene, tekel upharsin."

Do you think they'll be able to make it out?

"Conversation with America"

"Conversation." My conversation with you, Mr. And Mrs. America. Your conversation with me, your Candidate. Our Conversation with Us.

How they had to plot and scheme and weigh every word, those legions of advisers, to finally arrive, for that  Address to the Nation, that Announcement of "I'm In" by Lady Macbeth, with the predictable use of that  word, that smarmy, smarmier, smarmiest "Conversation."

From The Independent:

The weather is bad, the nights are still long and your Christmas overspending has finally caught up with you.

On top of that your New Year resolution to give up smoking has just gone out of the window as you strive to cope with the pressures of having gone back to work after the holiday break.

So welcome to "Blue Monday" - Monday, 22 January - officially designated by a psychologist as the most depressing day of the year. It has been singled out by Dr Cliff Arnall, psychologist and former tutor at Cardiff University, who has used mathematical equations to reach his verdict.

"Mr. D'Souza from Goa? Do I have that right? Goa was a 'hot spot' of the Spanish Inquisition with a 'court' which judged many 'New Christians' and 'not quite Christians'....-- from a reader

Under Albuquerque, yes. He was a real enthusiast for ferreting out "New Christians."

But surely that has nothing to do with the particular mental deficiencies -- laziness, a tendency to weave a tale that is both comforting and yet at the same time allows him to remain nicely mounted on his own peculiar hobby-horse and to ride it around the public manege at least one mo' time, for fun and, of course, for profit. But this time that hobby-horse has reared up, and thrown him, and now he, Dinesh D'Souza, is lying on the ground, and the hooves of that rearing horse are just above him, and as he lies there, stunned by what has happened, he doesn't quite know what to do, which way to turn or try to crawl away.

He's had it. It's over for Dinesh D'Souza.

Mene, mene, tekel upharsin

From this post. Is that what they got up to in Gomorrah? (We know what they got up to in Sodom.)

"At the moment," said the British historian Niall Ferguson, "a happy ending has a 1-in-100 look about it."-- from this news article

Academic entrepreneur and universal expert Niall Ferguson (that million-dollar house extracted or extorted from NYU, and kept as a cadeau de rupture, though it was Ferguson who did the rupturing in order to accept -- onward and upward with The Career -- the Harvard deal, and then there is all that television, and that world-bestriding Pontification -- Ex Ponto and Ex Cathedra -- About Everything) tells us that a "happy ending" in Iraq is remote.

He has it backwards, for he, like a great many others who now feel qualified to write about Islam based on nothing more than the fact that Islam is there to be commented on, does not understand that the correct definition of a "happy ending" is different for the Camp of Infidels (an unrecognized camp, but a camp nonetheless) and the Camp of Islam.

An ending may be defined as "happy" for the Camp of Infidels if it leaves the other camp, the Camp of Islam, significantly weakened. And that weakening is certain if, but only if, the Americans get out promptly, and stop their squandering of men (3,057 dead, 24,000 wounded), of money (now $700 billion in spent or committed funds resulting from the Iraq misadventure), of matériel (hard to quantify right now), of morale (not susceptible of quantification). And above all, stop the insane policy of trying to shore up the collective position of the Sunnis in Iraq (even as some Sunnis keep up their murderous attacks on those Americans), and getting the Shi'a to make compromises which they will not make, or will make only feignedly, in order to keep the Americans around a bit longer to keep fighting those Sunnis, keep supplying that military training and, above all, the Shi'a calculate, keep adding to the arms (for the cries of "we'll do the job ourselves and you can leave, if only you give us all those nice shiny and very advanced weapons we need").

What should have been said is this:

If the Americans exhibit a minimal intelligence about this, and leave (there is every excuse), there will definitely be, from the American (and other Infidel) standpoint, a "happy ending." And this should have been foreseen many years ago.

And it was. But only, alas, at JW and then here, where it was all set down, in detail, on several hundred occasions, at the beginning of 2004. 

Fred Stambaugh eloquently writes James Taranto regarding the sacrifices we are called upon to make in the war.

I've often wondered what that meant, and, like you, can come up with only tax increases and/or universal draft. But we have sacrificed plenty as a society in the battle against Islamic terrorists:

Heightened security concerns everywhere, from airports to the planes themselves, commuter trains, building entrances, etc., all chip away at both the society's feeling of well-being and its economic strength. Each checkpoint, each delayed departure, costs all of us in a small way, and the sum is doubtless in the billions. Call it an inconvenience tax.

Then there is the sacrifice of liberty. While it is not wholesale incarceration of suspect populations, the accretion to the government of powers to examine the communications and financial traffic we all undertake daily--with or without a warrant--is a step away from the free-wheeling liberty we once fancied was ours. Even if they are exercised against only a few, the fact is we gave the government these powers and in so doing we reduced our own autonomy. We don't wear the uniform, but we are all signed up in this one.

And this price:  we are asked to tolerate the hostile, alien thing which costs us so dearly.  The cognitive dissonance this produces in the public will make governance interesting for the successors of Bush and Blair.

Tuesday comes early for me, as I will be spending a couple of days in Communicado, a city cut off from the rest of civilisation by an IQ-lowering isogloss, of which more later.

While we are on the subject of those isolated from the outside world, perhaps we should spare a thought for the Celebrities of the Big Brother House, so neglected by the media. Who, after all, has heard of Goodygate?

For those not in the know, Jade Goody, Z-list celebrity, famous for being in Big Brother and thinking “East Angular” was “abroad”, has allegedly insulted Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty – keep a hold of those vowels - by calling her a poppadum. This has got everyone in a pickle, causing an International Incident, effigy burning in India and Questions in the House - the Commons, that is, not the Big Brother House.

New English Review readers are above such trivia as a rule. However, they may be interested in the Lacanian angle. Lacan, if you recall, is the French philosopher who worked out that his penis was the square root of minus one. Not to be confused with the French philosopher who said that Khomeini was a good chap, but just a bit different, or the French philosopher who thinks that you should always put your felt tip pens just so, no matter which of your homes you are staying in.

So, what would Lacan say? Well, a new blog, Foucault is Dead, considers “Why Big Brother is not the Big Other”:

The standard example employed to explain Lacan’s concept of the big Other (which is capital ‘A’ on Lacan’s graph of desire) is that of a judge who declares judgement on a case before him. Through this judge, the impersonal big Other utters its judgement - in other words, the judge effectively makes no judgement at all. He is merely an instrument of the big Other…Of course, the big Other is a functional illusion (as Lacan said: ‘the big Other does not exist’), a communal fiction - judges frequently make perverse judgements due to quirks of personality and there certainly is no stable set of mutual understandings. So the big Other provides the necessary communal fiction for social interaction to function. At first glance, Big Brother appears to be a miniature version of the big Other - Big Brother utters its impersonal judgements and rulings through the voices of the individual producers, who (officially, within the fiction of the show) make no personal judgements or decrees of their own. And, as we have seen, even though we know that Big Brother does not exist, that his judgements are the personal judgements of the producers etc, this means nothing - there are still plenty of corrupt judges sitting on the bench in the real world. On closer inspection, however, we soon realize that Big Brother - far from being a miniature big Other - is simply a false barrier between the housemate contestants and the real big Other, out there, beyond the physical barriers of the house. The crucial rule of Big Brother - the one thing without which there is literally no show - is that the contestants have no contact with the outside world… And for “outside world” here, read “big Other”.

The author later regrets his rash words – well, this Lacanian stuff can slip out so easily - and, in a post entitled “Structuralist Contentedness and its Jouissance”, repents:

Over the course of today, I have realized how blinded I was in my recent posts on the Big Brother racism row by my delight (my jouissance) at producing an all-too-elegant structuralist solution to the problem of how to untangle all the race and class issues raised by the controversy. I will try to correct my ideas in this post…

Could it not be that the British working class experience a racist jouissance, whilst the British middle class resent their enjoyment of this jouissance and therefore develop a classist jouissance of their own?

Ilana Mercer writes about the slaughter of 2,000 landholders in South Africa (h/t VFR)

...Journalists for "Carte Blanche," the South African equivalent of "20/20," conducted a six-month investigation into what has become known as farm murders, or "plaasmoorde" in Afrikaans. The short documentary opens with a funeral, Elsie Swart’s. Elsie was one of three farmers killed in the span of only seven days. She died after being “severely tortured, burned with an electric iron, beaten, and strangled to death.”

The victims of this ongoing onslaught, we are told, are invariably elderly, law-abiding, god-fearing whites, murdered in cold blood, in ways that beggar belief...

Best have a little something on your stomach before reading on.

On the way, more cognitive dissonance for which we wait with baited breath:

To the delight of the U.S. State Department, the Saudis will be sending 15,000 of their best and brightest fully funded madrassa products to U.S. colleges (a story I missed Saturday in the Herald Sun, flagged by LGF): 

College administrators say common misperceptions about the oil-rich nation make it crucial to create a tolerant environment for Arab and Muslim students, who have been singled out for scrutiny since the Sept. 11 attacks five years ago.

So, as Kansas State students enjoy a string of home football games this month, they also are preparing for the campus’ first celebration of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month.

“We really want to make this special. We’re going to truck in halal food from Kansas City,” Holland said. “The Saudi government is trying to place the students in a variety of institutions across the country, but where you get the competitive advantage is how you treat the students when they get here.”

 Just try and dismisperception me, baby.  Rah rah rah madan.  Ugh.

(Puts a whole new fetid gloss on the term Land-Grant University.)

"Hitler condemned Hollywood and the "immorality" of America..."
-- from a reader

Yes, there was Jazz, too, described as that "Negro-Jewish"( or possibly "Jewish-Negro") music. There were those naughty Hollywood movies, with all those Jewish directors and producers. There were those books by all kinds of immoral writers -- Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, Heinrich Heine -- that needed to be burnt in that auto-da-fe, good clean fun for healthy Nazi stormtroopers, bursting with morality.

And that is what is so wonderful, in D'Souza's view, about Islam. No tattoos. No adultery. No body-piercing. Just upright people, with upright family values, and children who obey their parents, and everyone obeys Allah, and tries to emulate that Perfect Man, Muhammad. Because everyone, you see, has been raised in a Muslim-only society that inculcates the habit of mental submission. Yes, Follow Orders, Please. Be a Slave to Allah. Ours never to reason why. For Allah knows best. Remember that.

Jawohl, mein Fuhrer.

This evening a great National Conversation begins between you, my fellow Americans, and me, as the only living member of the Surprise Party still in condition to speak. We, the few remaining  members of the Surprise Party, are as surprised as you to find ourselves here, together again at last, after sixty-seven years, once again pitching our political woo with the same fervor and hope as we once did in Coffeepot Gulch, Oregon, and Pickpocket Woods, New Hampshire, and points in between.  

But it is now close to midnight (e.s.t.), and we are not as young as we were sixty-seven years ago -- for god's sake, who is? -- and now is not the time to actually enter into that Great National Conversation, but simply to announce that that Great Conversation has nationally begun, and leave any actual ingleside chat to that effect for another fateful rendez-vous. Think of this announcement as the Surprise Party declaring its interest, and clearing its throat, and offering a first thrum on the lyre, a little anacrusis in the night. At  a later date, we will announce the second installment in our Greatly National Conversation, and then we will begin that harping on the issues that you have every right to expect. And we have issues, all right, we have plenty of issues, we have as many issues as any other candidate and then some, including a certain hot-button issue that might be a bit unseemly to discuss in public, wouldn't it, darling?  

Let me leave you, until the next meeting of our Nationally Great Conversation, with this thought: Beyond the Before Yet Under the Vast Above, the World is in Tears and Tomorrow is Tuesday. That is only one of the many things that can be cited as a reason why, in the elections of 2008, you should vote the straight Surprise Party ticket, and at the top of that ticket, for Gracie Allen in, of course, absentia.