NPT (thanks to Ann Corcoran at Refugee Resettlement Watch) NASHVILLE, Tennessee — May 19, 2008 — For the past thirty years, Kurdish immigrants in Nashville have started the first Kurdish Mosque in the United States and opened businesses, restaurants, markets and bakeries, building what is now the largest Kurdish population in North America. On Wednesday, May 28 at 8:00 p.m., Nashville Public Television (NPT) introduces the city to this thriving community with the premiere of NEXT DOOR NEIGHBORS: LITTLE KURDISTAN, USA, the first in a new series of documentary programs under the NEXT DOOR NEIGHBORS banner.

“As refugees, Kurds have overcome significant barriers to survive and flourish in Nashville,” says Will Pedigo, the program’s writer, producer and director. “They arrive as outsiders; estranged from their homeland and strangers in their new home. With this documentary, and the future installments in the Next Door Neighbors series, we hope to encourage Nashville to make strides towards a greater awareness of its diversity and provide an avenue for interaction among all our neighbors.”

Translation: Nashville is obviously full of ignorant southern hicks whom we need to educate about the mutlicultural wonderfulness of having thousands of Muslims living in their midst.

The first significant wave of Kurds arrived in Nashville in 1976. They have since established a vibrant community recognized by Kurds nationally for its strong cultural and traditional heritage. The half-hour NEXT DOOR NEIGHBORS: LITTLE KURDISTAN, USA examines how these Kurds have adapted to life in Nashville and provides insight into the struggles refugees face as they build new lives in a new home. The documentary explores what it means to be Kurdish, and reflects on the journey Kurds make as they become Kurdish-Americans trying to assimilate into American culture and still hold on to their traditions. In addition to meeting a variety of Kurdish immigrants and Kurdish-Americans, viewers will also visit Azadi International Foods for fresh-baked Kurdish bread, go inside the Salahadeen Center, the first Kurdish Mosque in the United States, and hear about life in Nashville from younger generations of Kurds.

The NEXT DOOR NEIGHBORS series looks at Nashville’s status as a new destination city for refugees and immigrants, and explores the rich diversity of people now calling Nashville home. Across the United States, mid-sized cities like Nashville are experiencing unprecedented growth in their international populations. Together these communities are redefining the traditional international city on a smaller local scale.

Elizabeth Noble and I have an article on the "rich diversity" of Muslims in Nashville here.

May 29th 1453 - the fall of Constantinople.

An undeniably strong emotional force exists among many people who feel alienated from society at large to be among the "chosen" - chosen to the the bearer of the "great truth," a new and startling, world-changing reality. Often the fantasy involves catapulting these otherwise unaccomplished and unremarkable men over the heads of their hard-working, but benighted brethren to levels of authority involving privileged access to this new truth - a new priesthood, a priesthood with secular power.

Rocky Mountain News: A video that purportedly shows a living, breathing space alien will be shown to the news media Friday in Denver.

Jeff Peckman, who is pushing a ballot initiative to create an Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission in Denver to prepare the city for close encounters of the alien kind, said the video is authentic and convinced him that aliens exist.

"As impressive as it is, it's still one tiny portion in the context of a vast amount of peripheral evidence," he said Wednesday. "It's really the final visual confirmation of what you already know to be true having seen all the other evidence."...

Peckman, 54, said the video was among the reasons he was "compelled" to launch the proposed ballot initiative, which has generated news as far as South Africa.

"It shows an extraterrestrial's head popping up outside of a window at night, looking in the window, that's visible through an infrared camera," he said. The alien is about 4 feet tall and can be seen blinking, Peckman said earlier this month.

In a statement, Peckman said "other related credible evidence" proving aliens exist will be shown at Friday's news conference, too.

In 2003, Peckman authored an off-beat ballot initiative that would have required the city to implement stress-reduction techniques. The "Safety Through Peace" initiative failed, but garnered 32 percent of the vote.

In this Christopher Caldwell's book review of Steve Coll's book, The Bin Ladens, was an interesting nugget about the ties between the Bin Ladens and American politicians especially James Baker, the Bushes, The Carlyle Group and Jimmy Carter (third paragraph):

...Muhammad bin Laden, Osama’s father, emigrated from the canyons of the Hadhramawt, in present-day Yemen, in the 1920s. He arrived in Jidda, one-eyed and semiliterate, at a time when Saudi Arabia had hardly any paved roads and the king kept his treasury in a tin trunk. Muhammad was charismatic. His workers, with whom he prayed and sang at job sites, revered him. He was scrupulously honest, as Arabian lore holds Hadhramis to be, and his company keeps this reputation still. Most important, Muhammad would serve the greedy and capricious Saudi princes in ways that Bechtel and other foreign contractors balked at — doing humiliating jobs from digging gardens to fixing air conditioners. The grateful royals made him their main palace- and highway-builder in the boom years after the war. By the time Muhammad died in a plane crash in September 1967, his company was worth an estimated $150 million, and he had fathered 54 children by about 22 wives.

Those children, Osama included, grew up in the shadow of a court society. Royal favor was all. Since the Saud family sent its sons to Princeton and Georgetown, Muhammad educated many of his own sons in the West, too, starting with Salem, his impious and ribald successor. Coll’s account of Salem is doting. When the austere King Faisal was assassinated in 1975, the sybaritic King Fahd took power. Hedonism and consumerism became for Salem what piety had been for his father: common ground with the royal family. Knowledgeable about private planes, luxury cars and new gadgetry, Salem became, as Coll puts it, a “royal concierge.”

Salem was purposeful. Those royals he shopped for were the same ones who decided on lucrative construction contracts. Salem assigned each of his brothers a prince to cultivate, while he worked on accumulating powerful cronies in the United States. A wheeler-dealer, Jim Bath, who had served in the Texas Air National Guard with George W. Bush, was his route into the upper reaches of Texas politics — the Bushes, the Bentsens and particularly James Baker, later secretary of state, whom the bin Ladens’ lawyer called the family’s “favorite politician.” Since Salem’s own death in a plane crash in 1988, the family’s present patriarch, Bakr, has nurtured his American ties, both as an investor in the powerful Carlyle Group and as a donor to Jimmy Carter’s causes. The bin Ladens, Coll writes, came to own “an impressive share of the America upon which Osama declared war.” ...

The Evening Standard (thanks to Alan): RISING oil prices and falling property prices are reshaping London at a pace not seen since the oil price quadrupled to $12 a barrel in 1974 and the resulting recession slashed real estate values.

Last week, Kuwait bought an office block in the City for £400 million, roughly the income from six million barrels of oil at today's prices. In May 2007, the block would have cost £540 million, roughly the income from 17 million barrels of oil at last year's prices. This 11 million-barrel saving comes from oil prices doubling to $130 a barrel and the price of City property falling by 25 per cent. The beneficiary, in this case, was St Martins, the state of Kuwait's long-time UK property arm. It purchased the new 500,000 sq ft site in Lime Street from British Land.

The rulers of the Gulf states have long enjoyed a love affair with London. When the sun gets too hot in their native lands they like to flock here, to their palatial houses in the centre of town, in Mayfair and Belgravia, and out in areas such as Coombe Hill in Kingston and St George's Hill in Weybridge. Their adoration of racing sits nicely with the highlights of our summer season, of the Derby followed by Royal Ascot.

Right now, fleets of limousines are being polished, gardens are being spruced up and swimming pools cleaned in preparation for the annual invasion.

This year, though, extra spice has been added to the romance. They have moved beyond owning mansions, cars and bloodstock to buying up some of our plum commercial parcels of real estate. The soaring cost of oil has meant that for them, London, their favourite playground, has become one giant Monopoly board. If they alight on a property they like they can acquire it. Nothing is beyond them - they are that wealthy...

Middle East buyers spent £8.9 billion on office, retail and industrial property in the UK in the year to May 2007, according to property agents DTZ. They have an unexpected cash surplus of around $300 billion to spend, thanks to rising oil prices. At the same time, buyers without access to oil money are largely being driven out of the market, thanks to the credit crunch.

The huge surge of Gulf riches is affecting the London market in two ways. The first comes from a quickening in the number of deals for existing real estate. "There is definitely a lot of activity out there but it tends to be below the surface," says a leading City investment agent, who does not want to be named because the principals he does business with like to keep their affairs quiet.

These "investment" deals involve nominee companies, fronted perhaps by banks or firms of lawyers. They buy occupied blocks of offices or shops from landlords. The unnamed nominee could be anyone from a member of the Saudi royal family to an oil-enriched Russian. The really big deals tend to be done by the so-called sovereign wealth funds. The big daddy fund of SWFs is the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (Adia) with assets of $875 billion. It owns Berkeley Square. So far this year, Adia has spent £640 million on three blocks in Knightsbridge and the ExCel exhibition centre...

Assault by hedgehog in Australia.

More hedgehog news here.

SAN ANTONIO - The Texas Supreme Court ruled Thursday that children taken from a polygamist sect's ranch should be returned to their parents, saying child welfare officials overstepped their authority.

The high court affirmed a decision by an appellate court last week, saying Child Protective Services failed to show an immediate danger to the more than 400 children swept up from the Yearning For Zion Ranch nearly two months ago.

"On the record before us, removal of the children was not warranted," the justices said in their ruling issued in Austin.

The high court let stand the appellate court's order that Texas District Judge Barbara Walther return the children from foster care to their parents. It's not clear how soon that may happen, but the appellate court ordered her to do it within a reasonable time period.

The children were taken into custody after someone called a hot line claiming to be a pregnant, abused teenage wife. The girl has not been found and authorities are investigating whether the calls were hoaxes.

Child welfare authorities have argued that all the youngsters should be removed from the ranch because the sect forces underage girls into marriage and sex. Members of the sect, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, claim they are being persecuted for their religious beliefs, including that polygamy brings glorification in heaven.

At Jihad Watch, Robert Spencer reports on the wisdom of DHS's Charles Allen and his objection to the phrase "War on Terror":  “[It] has nothing to do with political correctness[.]...  It is interpreted in the Muslim world as a war on Islam and we don’t need this.”

Earth to Chuck:  Political correctness refers to the resistance from descriptions of reality because of the way they may be perceived by groups to whom our elites have decided to be hyper-sympathetic.  That is, DHS's language purge is classic political correctness.  And to those of us who've been there, it's embarrassing.

If we strike "War" and "Terror," are Muslims comfortable with "on"?  Or does that offend all the moderate prepositions?

As flood stories go - and they've been going since shortly after "Adam were a lad" - the following is small beer. As they say, "no wrecks and  nobody drownded, fact nothing to laugh at at all".

But it's a sad business. Steven Jacobi - don't worry; I'd never heard of him either - writes in The Times:

I heard about last year's floods in the West of England while on holiday in Spain. The nationwide shroud of black cloud and the apocalyptic deluge had been forecast for several days. The trashing of Tewkesbury and the sinking of Stratford were not so much news as spectator events.

[...]

Or so I thought.

[...]

I called my landlord, from whom I rented the two rooms in which I wrote and stored my books. He confirmed that the office was under water. “I'm actually wading around in 3ft of the stuff,” he said, a little too playfully.

“How bad is it?” I asked.

“The bottom shelves of your books?”

“Yes.”

“First shelf: 100 per cent destroyed. Second: 100 per cent. Third: 100 per cent. Fourth: 90 per cent. Fifth: 90 per cent. Sixth: 50 per cent.”

“Only 50?” I brightened.

“Yeah. There was a painting propped up, just in front of it.”

“Was that damaged?'

“One hundred per cent.”

“What about the other room? The one with all the stuff on the floor.” Actually, the stuff on the floor was research for a novel I'd been working on. Eight months of research. Pages and pages of handwritten notes, photocopied articles, maps, copies of documents from KGB archives, and expensively purchased magazines.

“One hundred per cent.” I grimaced, made the not-so-difficult decision to cut short my holiday, and caught a plane to England.

By the time I arrived back at the office, the water had receded. Through the window, things didn't look so bad. Just a pile of decaying mulch around my desk. Also, I noticed, the carpet was strangely translucent, almost glistening, as if a giant snail had crawled over it.

However, on opening the door, I understood immediately that the situation was worse than I'd feared. Much worse.

First there was the smell, vinegary and pungent, something between manure and grease, possibly with a hint of mould.

[...]

I scrapped an entire set of Sight and Sound magazines, a wrecked printer, an encrusted computer, an antique typewriter (with a faulty “k”), 22 years' worth of photographs, eight diaries, 11 notebooks, more than 500 theatre programmes, two boxes of letters, plus 35 files of miscellaneous notes, clippings and ideas. These accounted for another 26 bin liners. Finally, I moved into the room containing my books. Over the next week, I made a list of the volumes I'd lost before heaving them miserably into the gaping jaws of various hastily acquired industrial sacks. In total, about 700 books found their way into 53 bags.

[...].

Unsurprisingly, I didn't feel much like writing. So I made a plan, giving myself a break, perhaps until the end of September, before trying again. September turned into October. October became November. But try as I might, I just couldn't face it.

I live on the ground floor - raised ground to be precise - and have no choice. Then again, I live on a hill, and so am unlikely to be flooded. But the moral here is: if you have an upstairs, put the things that matter there. The ground floor, particularly the first couple of feet, is for the stuff you don't mind losing. TV, DVD player, chairs, rugs - all these are replaceable; old photographs, precious books, maps, gifts, scrapbooks and diaries are not, and belong on a higher level.