Justin Katz speculates that it would be state-sponsored this time around, too.--Ramesh Ponnuru

Justin Katz says:  "Just how long does Mr. Derbyshire believe we'll be able to deny a state-sponsored 'right to eugenics' for those who cannot afford a few thousand bucks? (Per child, remember. The picture is compounded by the tendency of such folks to have more children.) Surely even small-government conservatives (if I may indulge in a redundancy) would have reservations about allowing the free market to create a permanent underclass — one with fruits borne within a single short generation."

From BBC Southern Counties.

The birth of 10 baby rays at the start of 2007 is being celebrated at the Sea Life Centre in Brighton, East Sussex.

The newborn undulate rays hatched out of their eggs over the course of New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. Currently measuring 8cm to 10cm (between 3in and 4in), the babies are being housed in a nursery display at the Sea Life Centre.

Mr Jones (curator) said: "Even though they are only a few days old our rays are instinctively behaving as they would in the wild by burying themselves under the sand in their display. This is how they would hide from potential predators including sharks and larger rays."

Hilaire de Sauveterre welcomes your comments on:

The Bungled Death of Saddam Hussein

Jefferson's Koran should not be lent out, not as part of a publicity stunt by somoeone whose worldview is completely antipathetic to that of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson had his dealings with the Muslims, that is with the Barbary Pirates, the Muslim corsairs who preyed on Christian ships and seamenm. He negotatied with them. His own view of their behavior is on record. Unlike John Quincy Adams, who took the measure of Islam (google "John Quincy Adams" and "Islam"), who denounced Islam as a belief-system, Jefferson merely denounced the behavior of all the Muslims he had any dealings with -- but in the end it amounted to the same thing.  His  view had little in common with that of Bush and Blair and the others now "taking a leadership role" all over the ill-led West.

 This stunt by Ellison disgusts, and what further disgusts is the willingness of those in charge tof Jefferson's library to lend out, a book owned by Jefferson to make it appear to the world that Jefferson's possession of  the Qur'an, implieds, or will be assumed to imply, some kind of favorable attitude toward Islam. The legal and political and even educational institutions Jefferson helped to create, his social attitudes, his variegated intellectual interests, all make clear that Jefferson, that child of the Enlightenment, could not have endured an Islamic regime for one minute. Nor could someone like Jefferson ever have been  produced within Dar al-Islam. Everything he held dear, including the spirit of questioning everything that was most unquestioned -- see Jefferson's scissors-and-paste version of the Bible, holding the miracles, keeping the moral lessons -- is flatly contradcited by the unyielding letter, and the grimly incurious spirit, of Islam.

On December 21, 2006, the London daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat published an interview with Dr. Natana DeLong-Bas, who taught this year in the Department of Theology at Boston College and in the Department of Near East and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University. [1] In the interview, she said that Wahhabism is not extremism and that the Muslim Brotherhood and Sayyed Qutb have nothing to do with jihadism. Dr. DeLong-Bas also indicated that there may be a Western conspiracy against the Arab and Islamic world, and said that she knows of no evidence that Osama bin Laden was behind the 9/11 attacks. --MEMRI

WALL STREET JOURNAL Editorial Page

These books are essential to understanding Islam.

BY KAREN ELLIOTT HOUSE
Saturday, November 11, 2006 12:00 a.m. EST

1. "Islam" by Vartan Gregorian (Brookings, 2003)
2. "Muhammad" by Karen Armstrong (HarperCollins, 1992)
3. "What Went Wrong? by Bernard Lewis (Oxford, 2002
4. "The Koran Interpreted" translated by A.J. Arberry (Macmillan, 1955)
5. "Wahhabi Islam" by Natana J. Delong-Bas (Oxford, 2004).

"His [al-Wahhab's] vision of Islamic society was based upon monotheism in which Muslims, Christians, and Jews were to enjoy peaceful co-existence..."--- a quote from Natana DeLong-Bas

On this "peaceful co-existence" see 9.29, 9.5, 5.82, and another hundred and twenty Jihad verses in the Qur'an, and several hundred of the "authentic" Hadith in the collections of Bukhari and Muslim. Read the collected sermons of the three dozen most important Saudi imams. Read Sheik Al-Azhar Tantawi's 700-page compilation of anti-Jewish writings in the canonical Muslim texts and in the commentaries upon them.

Read "The Dhimmi" and "Islam and Dhimmitude" and "The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam" and "The Myth of Islamic Tolerance." Read Antoine Fattal, Le status legal des non-musulmanes en pays d'Islam. Read Joseph Schacht on Muhammaden Law. Read Arthur Jeffrey. Read Snouck Hurgronje. Read St. Clair Tisdall.

View the tapes of Bin Laden receiving the good news about the successsful attacks on the World Trade Center. View all of the subsequent tapes by Bin Lade, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and other Al Qaeda members taking credit for those attacks. Read the accumulated testimony of others in Al Qaeda about the role played by that organization in those attacks.

Then re-read the statements by Natana DeLong-Bas.

Square this circle.

Evidence for the collapse of American education is everywhere. In Massachusetts, the Globe reports, school authorities are worried because those teaching elementary school mathematics (i.e. arithmetic) are apparently having trouble with understanding the material themselves. Addition, subtraction -- that's okay, but it's the pesky multiplication tables, and the complications of division, that are getting teachers all confused.

In American universities, falling all over themselves to make a "catch" -- as Princeton did -- of Cornel West, or to hail the "world-class" talents of Homi Bhabha, as Harvard did, hiring for its English Department someone who cannot express himself clearly in written English, are signs of the times. Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, I believe Karl Kraus called it.

Well, those of you who might be inclined to donate more money to Brandeis or to Boston College might wish to think again. You might wish to make clear that neither you, nor those who can influence, are going to contribute to schools that contribute to the scandal of degraded scholarship and a degraded faculty -- and there are few things as scandalous as the miscomprehension of Natana DeLong-Bas.

There is only one way to get the attention of universities. Deny them money. That's the only thing. No appeal to sense or morality or scholarship will matter. Deny them money. Alumni, stop. The university you think you went to no longer exists. It's all a Development Office scam. Stop contributing. That's it.

"what would you do if you were in George Walker Bush's place now, and to pre-empt one obvious escape route, before the Iraq invasion?"-- from a reader

I would never be in Bush's place, because I would have undertaken, as a duty, the study of Islam, beginning on September 12, 2001. I would have read, and re-read, Qur'an and Hadith and the life of Muhammad. I would have asked for texts describing the treatment of non-Muslims under Islam. I would not have gone to the ranch to chop wood, ever. I would have read Camus's "The Stranger" or any other book on baseball or some biography of someone. I would have spent the last five years doing nothing but coming to understand the texts, the tenets, the attitudes of Islam, and exactly what forces within the Camp of Islam could be exploited to weaken that camp, and finally, I would have asked for as much information as possible on the various instruments of Jihad, and would have realized soon enough that neither "terror" nor open warfare of a more conventional sort is the main problem now facing Infidels.

But Bush did none of that. And furthermore, he failed to understand the sectarian split in Iraq between Shi'a and Sunni, and failed to understand the depth and duration of that split. He failed, furthermore, to understand that "democracy" itself is not a panacea, that is also unlikely to appeal to Muslims whose belief-system teaches the men are the slaves of Allah, and that their opinions should not matter in deciding on the legitimacy of a regime, but only that regime's adherence to Islam, that is whether or not it is in accordance with the teachings and rules of Islam, and whether the ruler himself is a true Muslim. That, and not "democracy," is what most Muslims understand and wish for.

What would I do now? Announce right away that we will be pulling out, beginning within a few weeks, that the pullout will take 4-6 months, that arrangements will be made with local forces for security (that probably means the Pesh Merga, the only local force that can be trusted), and that this was being done because of all the wonderful things that the Americans had accomplished had been accomplished:

1) the Removal of a ruthless dictator, and his sons, and his entire ruling class. (Don't bother announcing that his likely successors, all of them, are despots too - but this time Shi'a despots.

2) the rebuilding of schools, hospitals, power stations and so on had been accomplished (don't bother to say that billions of dollars were stolen by Iraqis, that many Iraqi contractors were never monitored and never did the work they promised, or did shoddy work).

3) the Iraqis now have a written Constitution (Don't bother explaining that that Constitution says that no law may contradict the Shari'a).

4) the "Iraqi people" must now prove to the world, but most of all to themselves, that they are ready, willing, and able to extend the hand of friendship and necessary compromise to each other (Don't bother mentioning that there is no "Iraqi people" but rather Sunni Arabs, who will never acquiesce in their loss of power, and Shi'a Arabs, who will never compromise with the Sunnis or give up the power they now hold in their hands, acquired both through that purple-thumbed election and also through sheer numbers and through their own terrifying militias.

5) we wish "the Iraqi people" well and if they can exhibit that "true spirit of compromise" we will "be there fore them" (don't bother to mention that there is no chance of this, because Islam is a belief-system in which "compromise" with one's enemy is unknown, for there is only victor and vanquished). Also don't bother to note that you are simply lying. Lying -- it's allowed when you are dealing with an enemy. Got that, Americans "taking a leadership role"? You can offer reassurances to Muslims that you have no intention of honoring. That's right. It's called war.

6) Get out, and immediately, without further ado, start a whole series of measures -- even as the crowing about an "American defeat" will be heard, but heard less and less as the Sunni Arabs everywhere realize that the Americans have now withdrawn their protection from the Sunni Arabs of Iraq, and that unless they, the Sunni Arab neighbors, do something, Iraq will indeed fall to the "Rafidite dogs," those Shi'a, those "Persians."

7) Send a few thousand troops to Darfur -- or if necessary, do it with those Ethiopian troops right on the Sudan's southern border. Seize the southern Sudan and Darfur, shooting down any plane or helicopter sent by the Sudanese government, and do so announcing, as those grateful faces of black Africans surround the American forces, that the Sudanese government has betrayed every promise it has made, and that these areas will be held until an international referendum registering the desires of the southern Sudanese, Christians and animists, and the people of Darfur, black African Muslims murdered by the Arab Muslims, have had a chance to declare their views on independence, an independence that would be supported by the oil wealth already in the southern Sudan, and potentially in Darfur.

Let the Arab League scream about the divine right of Arabs to lord it over black Africans. Let's see how that goes over.

8) Declare an end to Muslim immigration to the United States until there is greater clarity, at all levels of government, about what the belief-system of Islam actually teaches. Call in not the espositos and armstrongs, but Hans Jansen, and Bernard Lewis, and others, including some perhaps associated with this website, to discuss what exactly is in the Qur'an, the Hadith, the Sira.

9) Read Saudi Arabia the riot act about the continued funding of mosques and madrasas and Muslim groups that are regarded as instruments furthering Jihad. Tell the Al-Saud that in World War II the assets of enemy aliens were seized, and that can happen again.

10) Announce that a sizable tax, increasing every six months, will be placed on gasoline, and that the proceeds of that tax will be used only for energy-related projects, including the building of nuclear plants, solar and wind energy projects, cleaner methods of coal-burning, and subsidies for mass transit.

11) Set up a department of war propaganda that will identify themes to exploit in attempting to divide and demoralize the Camp of Islam.

All of these things, and many others I won't bother to list here at the moment (many have been posted over the past few years, and repeatedly) should be done quickly so that the American public is reassured that the withdrawal is being done not in order to appease, or to give up on attempts to check the various instruments of Jhad, but rather to do so with less squandering of men, money, materiel, and morale.

That's what I'd do were I the President. And I'd begin to frame things correctly, too -- no more "war on terror." No more sentimental crap about "ordinary moms and dads in the Middle East." No more stupidity as a way of life.

"Mr Derbyshire—-A basic phenomenon when dealing with Russians is that being Russian equates to being Orthodox in the Russian mind. 'Sectarians' (i.e., Protestants) are widely reviled, and Uniates (Roman Catholics using the Orthodox liturgical forms) are mostly confined to Ukraine and its environs.  When did you last hear of a group of Muslim Russian citizens refer to themselves as Russians?

"The upshot? It's like Italians and Roman Catholicism.  The Italians all claim it, even if the piety and practice aren't there."

[Derb]  This issue of religious identification from cultural motives (as opposed to actual piety)  seems to need factoring into any discussion of how religious a population is.  It used to be the case that 99 percent of non-RC English people, faced with a box on a form labeled "Religion" would write in "C. of E.," even in they hadn't been inside a church for years.  I feel pretty sure that my father—a militant atheist, but 100 percent Grade-A English—did this.

"In a weird sort of way you seem to be advocating long term study of Islam as a criterion for election to the United States Presidency."-- from a reader commenting on this piece

Yes.

And why "in a weird sort of say"? Shouldn't our leaders be expected to know about Islam? "Long-term study" does not mean they have to spend every day and every night, but for god's sake, they have to learn enough to find out what is in, for example, the hadith, and what Muhammad was all about (they should be able, for example, to know that he is regarded as the Perfect Man, and then should also know about the Khaybar Oasis attack, the Banu Qurayza decapitation, the murders of Asma bint Marwan and Abu Akaf, little Aisha -- and the effects of this example on the behavior of Muslims in the 1350 years since). They should know how the Qur'an's contradictions are resolved, through the interpretive doctrine of abrogation, or "naskh", and know not only Sura 9 but all the verses about Jihad or about the division between Believer and Infidel. They should have some acquiantance with what the jurisconsults and other major figures wrote subsequently about Jihad -- Al-Ghazali, for example, or Ibn Khaldun.

It could be done in a week's solid tutorial, round the clock. And should be done by all those who now run for office -- it is the absolute minimum one can and should ask of them.

Otherwise we will get the folly of a half-trillion dollars spent on a fool's errand in Iraq.

They can spare the time, goddam it. A little less glad-handing, a little less watching of football games or other ways in which they supposedly relax. They need to know just a bit more, need to have a few real mental demands put on them.

I hope that in any Presidential debate they are asked questions about Islam. If someone says he doesn't know why the Sunni and Shi'a have been at each other's throats for 1300 years, or doesn't know why Khomeini reduced the marriageable age of girls to nine years, or doesn't know why the Qur'an says "do not take Christians or Jews as friends" or is unable to correctly define "Jihad" then I want to know now, and I want to vote against that candidate.

Don't you?

And contrary to rumor, what some might call excessive lucubration will not cause one to go blind. In fact, it would improve, and remarkably,  the vision of our leaders.

Editors of the Oxford English Dictionary are wondering whether anyone wore stilettos before 1959, or used them as a weapon in a domestic before 1963. From The Times:

The English language has 643,000 words, but the origins of some of our commonest phrases remain a matter of conjecture.

The dictionary’s editors think that they know which prat first caused a domestic after taking a bung, but they promise to perform a flip-flop if someone can prove that it is more than a shaggy dog tale.

In other words, they will revise the next edition of the OED if anyone can provide compelling and verifiable evidence of an alternative provenance of a word or phrase. Suggestions will be debated on the new series of Balderdash and Piffle, the BBC Two lexicology programme.

This year the OED editors are particularly keen to examine the secret sex life of suburban Britain. Dogging is tentatively defined as “the practice of watching people engage in sexual acts in a public space”. It was brought to wider attention by a 2003 article in The Times, which revealed that outdoor exhibitionism had become a blight on country parks. The term is believed to have originated with the police. When officers approached suspects, mostly at night, they said that they were “just walking the dog”.

The editors also want to find Britain’s first marital aid. They believe that the euphemism for sex toys was first published in the classified advertisements section of the Gazette published for the residents of Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset, in 1976.

People have been kinky since 1889, according to the OED, but the term then meant “eccentric”. It is believed to have been first employed with a sexual connotation by Colin MacInnes in his 1959 novel Absolute Beginners.

Another university is dropping a cross from its historic imagery, saying it creates confusion and sends the wrong message.

The announcement from Simon Fraser University near Vancouver, B.C., about the school's Coat of Arms brings it in alignment with a precedent set earlier by the College of William and Mary, which said in a story WND broke that a historic cross in a structure built as a Christian chapel hundreds of years ago would have to go because it offended some people.

A spokesman for Simon Fraser said the two crosses on the 40-year-old emblem are a problem. Warren Gill, the school's vice-president of university relations, said the school doesn't want people to think the wrong thing...

At virtually the same time, the school announced that was creating a center for the study of Muslim issues.

It is being funded by $1 million from the Amin Lalji family and $250,000 from school Board of Governors chair Saida Rasul and her husband Firoz. --from this WND article

My, just for a handful of silver? A measly $1 million? He should have held out for $100 million from the Lalji family, in present and committed future donations. Surely the president of Simon Fraser can drive a harder bargain than that.

And all kinds of possibilities suggest themselves. Isn't it time that the Hebrew that appears on Yale's shield be gotten rid of? It gives the wrong idea to Muslim students and faculty (Masin Qumsiyeh, for example, must not have enjoyed seeing that). It implies some kind of connection to the Old Testament, felt by the founders of Yale. Why, some of them might even have known Hebrew. No need to remind people today of that. Not if you want assorted members of the Al-Saud, Al-Maktoum, Al-Thani, and Al-Sabah families, and all their courtiers who made money in the way such courtiers do at the kind of courts that exist in the Middle East sheikdoms, to contribute.

But the Simon Fraser incident is mere metonymy. It is part for the whole. It is what all universities do, when they accept those Arab-funded centers. Georgetown has allowed its name to be corrupted, by allowing the Saudis and others to fund that Esposito-run effort that is merely a propagandistic attempt to mislead about Islam, and that until recently, exploited the Georgetown name, but now me, having been renamed after a Saudi prince, merely exploits the Georgetown connection.

When this or that university -- Durham or Exeter -- creates an islamic or Arab studies center, or when the Saudis suddenly drop large sums on the University of Arkansas when the Man from Hope is President, or when Jimmy Carter takes every conceivalbe multi-million dollar donation he can for all his Carter Centers and other monuments to his own wonderfulness and holier-than-thouness, when the British government refuses to allow legal inquiries to proceed about corruption involving the Saudis for fear of losing a contract, when everyone and his brother tiptoes around for fear of offending the Saudis though there is nothing whatsoever they can do to us, because they have listened to all the well-paid Western hirelings of the rich Arabs, including ex-diplomats, former intelligence agents who then went into business with the Saudis, journalists, and others whose mission it has become to prevent Western governments reading Saudi Arabia the riot act about the tens of billions it spends promoting through mosques and madrasas -- that in turn promote hatred of Infidels (and visits to such mosques, where the kind of written propaganda they distribute has been collected and analyzed) -- the undoing of the West, then the little incident at Simon Fraser, awful as it is, telling as it is, can be seen only as a little token of what is going on, has been going on, and will continue to go on unless the people and governments of the Western world (full of those who no doubt hope to profit once out of government, from doing the bidding of the Saudis and other rich Arabs -- why, a million-dollar speech or two would be just the ticket, wouldn't it? After all, so many of our ex-Presidents and cabinet members have been rewarded in that fashion, and as Prince Bandar says, when word gets around of the promise of such future Arab or Saudi largesse, that can affect present attitudes and behavior).

Just for a handful of silver? Or a bit more, everywhere you look.

OED editors are particularly keen to examine the secret sex life of suburban Britain.

She said that "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town" was the tale of a young man who, full of high ideals, was influenced by a girl of the worst type -- a fancy girl of no morals. "For the sake of the future mothers of our race," declared Mrs. Potts, "this type of film should be suppressed." --National Council of Women garden party, reported in Hornsey Journal

"'German Muslim Held, Denied U.S. Entry,' by Garance Burke..."-- from this news article

Garance?

Her mother really did like that movie, didn't she?

Ernst "Putzi" Hanfstaengl was the subject decades ago of a profile in The New Yorker -- that is, the old, much better New Yorker, written by and for grown-ups.

He had gone to Harvard, Class of '09 (just a  year ahead of Walter Lippmann and John Reed, and T. S. Eliot), because his mother was an American. He returned to Germany, met Hitler in 1922, was enchanted by what he saw, turned Harvard football songs into marching songs for the Brownshirts, and became a full-time propagandist for the Nazis. His American connections, and his naitve command of English, proved especially useful. In 1934, for example, while attending his 25th Class Reunion at Harvard, he made sure to tell all his old classmates, the very people who owned and ran much of America, that they needn't worry about Adolf Hitler or the National Socialist Party. It was all the stout-heared Krupps and Thyssens who firmly held the reins, their sort, and not the other kind, along with some  wonderful Prussian Junkers (the-then equivalent of those ramrod-straight Pakistani generals who for decades were so loved in Washington) who were taking care of things behind the scenes, and dealing with the threat of Bolshevism -- and wasn't therer a threat of Bolshevism in the good old USA, come to think of it?) and Hitler was just a useful facade. In the 1930s he ran the Foreign Press Bureau in Berlin, peddling the same kind and other kinds of nonsense, to the recorded disgust of William  Shirer in his "Berlin Diary." He later fled, via Vienna, to the United States, but his motives were not based quite so purely on moral revulsion  as some may have allowed themselves to believe.  

"Britain’s first marital aid."

It's  called "imagination" which has been known to possess aphrodisiacal properties. It goes back a long way, much longer than the current compilers of the OED appear to think.

Keats thought as much in his poetry, as did Coleridge in his prose.

Shakespeare was good on this aspect of "imagination" as a "marital" or "pre-marital" aid. Malory was a bit better on the "imagination" as an "extra-marital aid."  See Launcelot, see Guinevere.

But Keats, Coleridge, Malory, Shakespeare. -- what did they know?

KARACHI, Pakistan, Jan. 2 — Ali Saleem may have devised the perfect, if improbable, cover for breaking taboos in conservative, Muslim Pakistan.

In a country where publicly talking about sex is strictly off limits, Mr. Saleem has managed not only to bring up the subject on his prime-time television talk show — but to do so without stirring a backlash from fundamentalist Islamic clerics. --from this new item

Ideal co-scriptwriters of a future television series, "Sex and Epicenity" (a Pakistani-American co-production) that could be Ali Saleem's big break: Professors Diana Eck and Marjorie Garber of Harvard.

"Dinesh D'Souza is coming out with a new book in which he apparently argues that the immorality of Western societies hands a weapon to jihadists that we do not need to hand them..."
-- from Robert Spencer's comments here

D'Souza's book promises to be far worse than that. D'Souza, who knows little, almost nothing, about Islam, thinks that true-blue "good" Islam, the Islam of "family values" and so on, is a natural ally of "family values" promoters among non-Muslims. He appears not to realize that a drinking, gambling, womanizing non-Muslim even one who is -- god forbid -- an atheist, for god's sake --is not the threat to non-Muslims that is, per contra, the most upright family-valued Muslim, if that family-valued Muslim also accepts the tenets, and is suffused with the attitudes, of Islam -- including that uncompromising division of the world between Believer and Infidel.

There were all kinds of kirche-kuchen-kinder Nazis, the women dutiful breeders of children, the men dutiful in their respect for German family values, jawohl, family-values people all. The children tramping the heather in Hitlerjugend style, politeness to elders, perhaps a little reading of Goethe by lamplight. None of that decadent Negro-Jewish jazz, none of those awful books by Thomas Mann and others, especially with that Der-Tod-in-Venedig hint of sexual malpractice, only the good, the true, the beautiful, the echt deutsche expressive of "family values." And in this regard, don't forget to read the memoir of his life as a family man at Auschwitz, attended by prisoners who showed them "every kindness" (apparently because the family itself showed such kindness back to the prisoners) by Rudolf or possibly Mrs. Hoess.

D'Souza deserves to be mocked for his dangerous naiveté and miscomprehension, or his missing of the main point. He's the unwitting agent of Islam. And if and when the Prince Hassan Prize for World Tolerance is set up, and then awardee at the Amman Marriott, to great fanfar (Judges: Karen Armstrong, John Esposito, Tony Blair, Gilles Kepel) does anyone doubt that Dinesh D'Souza and his little volume will be very much in the running?

A little more on Dinesh D'Souza's View of the World:

San Francisco Chronicle
God knows why faith is thriving
Sunday, October 22, 2006
by Dinesh D'Souza

[. . .] "The prophets of the disappearance of religion seem to have proven themselves to be false prophets. Even though the world is becoming richer, religion seems to be getting stronger. The United States is the richest and most technologically advanced society in the world, and religion shows no signs of disappearing on these shores. China and India are growing in affluence, and the Chinese government is not exactly hospitable to religion, yet religious belief and practice continue to be strong in both countries.

Europe's best chance to grow in the future seems to be to import more religious Muslims. While Islam spreads in Europe and elsewhere, Christianity is spreading even faster in Africa, Asia and South America. Remarkably, Christianity will soon become a non-Western religion with a minority presence among Europeans."