Not to be outdone by the French, who recently produced a guide to the Gallic shrug, the moue and the Camembert, Max Davidson in The Telegraph has produced a guide to English gestures and expressions. This should be useful to all visitors, Americans included. Practise these, together with your Cockney rhyming slang, and you will be indistinguishable from a native - except that you would spell "practise" wrong:

The Anglo-Saxon Shrug. Far subtler than the Gallic Shrug, and involving no more than a minuscule twitch of the shoulders, accompanied by a fractional shake of the head, the Anglo-Saxon Shrug is a monument to our national phlegm. Wheeled out many times in the course of the year, to greet everything from the latest Gordon Brown stealth tax to a 5-0 Ashes whitewash, the shrug is designed both to conserve energy and to put over-emotional foreigners in their place.

The Raised Eyebrow. The weapon that ruled the British Empire and one of our greatest national inventions. Where Frenchmen and Italians need to deploy both eyebrows before anyone notices, Englishmen are taught from the cradle how to make maximum impact with a single eyebrow, elevated no more than a couple of millimetres. The gesture reached its apogee in PG Wodehouse's Jeeves, but can still be seen in such diverse settings as Waterloo station, opposite the departures board, and the perfume section of Harvey Nichols during the post-Christmas sales....

The Double Tea-Pot. This is the nuclear weapon among Anglo-Saxon gestures, if only because it is so physically striking. The Englishman standing with both arms on his hips is a fearsome sight and will keep any foreign invader at bay. Although the gesture is usually reserved for major set-pieces, such as confrontations with traffic wardens, it is not uncommon to see it in the Harrods food hall when supplies of organic salmon are running low.

The Light Bulb. This one really baffles visitors to London, particularly Americans. The right hand makes a slight rotating movement, as if screwing in a light bulb, to convey a sense of complexity. The subtext of the gesture is: "I am cleverer than you, Johnny Foreigner, so do not mess with me." The late Roy Jenkins was a master of the Light Bulb, which is now commonplace among news vendors being asked directions to Buckingham Palace...

The Cold Nod. Nobody does frostiness better than the English, and when the frostiness is accompanied by a curt nod, the effect can be devastating. Masters of the Cold Nod, which reduces politeness to its bare essentials and absolves the nodder of any need to make conversation, include dog-walkers in Holland Park and people sharing a lift in Peter Jones. It is one of the few London gestures that Parisians instinctively understand.

The Limp-Wristed Wave. Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy at its inimitable best. Londoners lead such busy lives that they have had to master the art of greeting people they know in a half-hearted manner that pre-empts further pleasantries. Classic deployers of the Limp-Wristed Wave include mothers in BMWs outside school gates and busy vicars in Putney.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations said it would be organizing interviews with American Muslims who were coming home from the annual pilgrimage to Mecca "to spot-check their treatment by airport security personnel and border protection authorities." --from this news item

Fritz Kuhn's Bund and William Pelley's Silver Shirts were quite bold in their pro-Nazi and antisemitic activities. The Bund held a famous rally right in the middle of New York City, in Madison Square Garden, as late as 1940. But after December 7, 1941 the Bund was disbanded, its members harried, some arrested, and all lapsed into silence. And so did the members of the other groups tracked by John Roy Carlson in "Under Cover."

The equivalent of December 7, 1941 in this war-without-end that began earlier, but was not marked by one spectacular attack, the Jihad that had fallen over the past two centuries into desuetude only because of Muslim weakness, and was revived when three things occurred to make Muslims believe that they could now go for broke, and achieve superiority over their permanent, because non-Muslim, enemies.

These three things were:

1) the past, present, and continuing OPEC oil revenues, which since 1973 have amounted to ten trillion dollars

2) the tens of millions of Muslims permitted by heedless elites everywhere to enter and settle and and make themselves at home in Infidel countries, all over the Bilad al-kufr, behind what they are taught to regard as enemy lines

3) the exploitation by Muslims of Western advances in technology, such as audiocassettes (so useful to Khomeini in 1978-79, videocassettes, satellite television (Al-Jazeera, Al-Manar, and others), and the Internet, on which all those Muslim websites preach the faith, inveigle the Spiritual Searchers, and offer videos of decapitation of Infidels that apparently are such a useful recruiting tool for the cause of Jihad.

During the Cold War those who were regarded as agents of the Soviet Union were tracked. Some were arrested. Some lost their jobs. Some were punished for membership in the Communist Party, by the government or, informally, by fellow citizens unwilling to tolerate such an allegiance.

Why does CAIR behave so boldly as to attempt to thwart, completely without fear, and at every step, the most modest measures of self-defense? Why does it think it can get away with the kinds of things it does?

Because it can. And will until enough people, including those from quarters CAIR least expects, have learned enough to be implacable in their mistrust and their relentless hostility to CAIR and everything for which it stands, and in a thousand ways, that go beyond what trivial measures are taken by the government, make life as difficult as they can for CAIR and for all its supporters. Just as they would have, in 1941, for supporters of Fritz Kuhn's Bund.

A grocer of Palestinian descent pleaded guilty to misleading FBI agents about his brother's intentions to leave the United States for Israel and become a suicide bomber.--from this news item

If not a citizen, to be deported after serving a sentence.

If a citizen, to be stripped of citizenship, and all those whose citizenship -- i.e. minor children -- may be linked to the arrival and temporary sojourn here of one or both parents -- depends on his should also have it taken away. This will enforce, not loyalty (which cannot be enforced) but behavior that is not quite so dangerous to Infidels, here, there, and everywhere.

Aiding and abetting anyone engaged in supporting, planning, or carrying out violent attacks as part of what can reasonably be described as "Jihad" -- that is the campaign, wherever undertaken, by Muslims to promote the spread of Islam throughout Dar al-Harb so that Islam dominates everywhere, and everywhere Islam rules -- should be criminalized if it is not already. And part of the punishment should be the stripping of citizenship. Special courts should be created for this purpose. And stripping of citizenship should realistically extend to the family of those charged and convicted. If the father or mother or both were never capable of offering loyalty to the spirit and letter of the American Constitution, that is to the legal and political institutions of this country, then there is no reason to allow their children to benefit from this fraud.

Legislation is fun to draft. Legislative drafting is now taught in many law schools. Try it out. Make it your third-year project.

Did you remember to take down your Christmas tree last night? If not, according to The Telegraph:

...you are probably in for a run of rotten luck: you will burst a tyre, lose a contact lens down the sink, be cornered by Patricia Hewitt at a party, or some other horror. That is what comes of forgetting that Twelfth Night – January 5 – marks the end of the festive season.

But, should you realise that the tree and cards are still in place, don't panic: some folk believe that Twelfth Night runs until sunset today. So there is still time. Unless you are reading this after dark, in which case you can still invoke the ancient rule that Christmas lasts right up to Candlemas. Alas, keeping the festive spirit flowing until February 2 will exact a heavy toll on your wallet and liver. Our advice: resign yourself to bad luck, but carry a precautionary set of earplugs to every party.

I didn't forget, but I was too busy, so my Christmas tree is sadly still up. Taking the other decorations and cards down is easy, but the Christmas tree is another matter. My flat has narrow corridors, and the tree will knock against the walls, shedding more needles than it has on it. The needles remain stubbornly resistant to even an industrial strength vacuum cleaner. The only way to get them out of the carpet is to pick them out one-by-one with your bare hands. Life is too short to do this properly, though the act feels and looks like a suitable penance for over-indulgence.

Once New Year is over, Christmas decorations look rather sad, especially in the office, when the year's work is beginning in earnest. At home, when you've taken the decorations down, everywhere looks bare. A good trick is to get lots of cut flowers to brighten it up. That will be one of today's tasks, but first I've got to tackle that Christmas tree.

Rome, 5 Jan. (AKI) - Souad Sbai, a member of Italy's government-appointed body on Muslim affairs, the Consulta, welcomed Friday the proposal of interior minister Giuliano Amato to control foreign funding of mosques. "Finally. We had been asking for years controls on money for mosques in our country," said Sbai, who is also the leader of the Confederation of Moroccans in Italy. "We have always warned the government and public opinion that the nature of foreign funds for some mosques is unclear." --from this news item

And the American government?

Why has it not read Saudi Arabia the riot act? Why haven't the hate-filled pamphlets collected at mosques around the country that were built and are now maintained by Saudi money, collected by Rice or Bush and put out on a table at the White House, and then the Arab ambassadors all invited over to see this "Special Exhibit," an exhibit to which representatives of all the major networks and the major newspapers here and abroad will be invited, and urged to cover?

And then why does Bush or someone else not have a little private meeting with the enraged Saudi Ambassador, to tell him that there is much more in that sort of "Special Exhibit" -- which could of course tour the country -- if he doesn't stop funding the mosques and madrasas in this country, doesn't allow Saudi money to pay for Muslim missionaries in the prisons and to prey on the psychically as well as economically marginal.

If the American government had a mind to do it, it could bring the Saudi government around in no time.

But it doesn't because so many former government officials, and those who listen to them, are directly or indirectly on the Saudi or other Muslim dole. Who pays Eugene Bird, and pays for the ads of the "Council for the National Interest" that is virtually identical in its views to the Saudi government? Who pays for "consultancy" by Raymond Close, or James Akins? Who pays for that magazine about the Middle East, full of Arab propgaganda, that another ex-diplomat, Andrew Kilgore, runs? Who pays or has paid fees to Brent Scowcroft? To George McGovern? What Presidential libraries have been battening on Saudi and other Arab money? Who has received those million-doller lecture fees in Kuwait, or from that Arab-funded lecturership at the Fletcher School (hint: Bush, Clinton). Who has been getting what?

Ask yourself why since 1973 there has been not a move toward decreasing, through the simple device of taxes, demand for oil and gasoline? Why for thirty years did American energy policy consist of trusting "our staunch ally Saudi Arabia" to keep prices low, when it never happened, and never could have happened? Why was no one aware until the last year or two of what, inevitably, OPEC oil revenues would fund? Why was Prince Bandar the only foreigner allowed in on the plans for invading Iraq? Why today do we worry about what the Sunni Arabs want, and believe that we have a duty to remain in Iraq to protect those Sunnis (i.e., keep the "catastrophe of civil war" from happening)?

And that is just the beginnning of the list of questions that need to be asked.

New Duranty: Jan. 5 — Warsaw’s new archbishop, Stanislaw W. Wielgus, caught in Eastern Europe’s widening witch hunt for former Communist secret police informers, admitted Friday that he had collaborated with the Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa, or Security Service, known as the S.B...

Two years ago, files surfaced showing that the Rev. Mieczyslaw Malinski, who had been close to John Paul II, worked for the S.B. in the 1980s. Several other prominent priests have since been accused of having been informers, and some have admitted that they had links to the secret police. The Polish church publicly apologized last year for priests who collaborated with the S.B., but has tried to keep their names secret...

The documents published by Rzeczpospolita and other newspapers suggest that Bishop Wielgus was recruited by the S.B. in 1967 when he was a philosophy student at the University of Lublin in eastern Poland, more than a decade before he signed the cooperation agreement. Newspapers cited other documents in which the S.B. claimed he had given them information about activities at the university, where he later served as a professor of medieval philosophy.

The newspapers claimed that some documents referred to Bishop Wielgus by the code names Grey, Adam and Adam Wysocki. They said he received training and was rewarded for his collaboration with a grant to study in Munich.

Sam Schulman writes in the WSJ:

...Thanks in part to the actions of a few jihadists in September 2001, it is believers who stand accused, not freethinkers. Among the prominent atheists who now sermonize to the believers in their midst are Dr. Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett ("Breaking the Spell") and Sam Harris ("The End of Faith" and, more recently, "Letter to a Christian Nation"). There are others, too, like Steven Weinberg, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Brooke Allen (whose "Moral Minority" was a celebration of the skeptical Founders) and a host of commentators appalled by the Intelligent Design movement. The transcript of a recent symposium on the perils of religious thought can be found at a science Web site called edge.org.

Naturally, the atheists focus their peevishness not on Muslim extremists (who advertise their hatred and violent intentions) but on the old-time Christian religion. ("Wisdom dwells with prudence," the Good Book teaches.) They can always haul out the abortion-clinic bomber if they need a boogeyman; and they can always argue as if all faiths are interchangeable: Persuade American Christians to give up their infantile attachment to God and maybe Muslims will too. In any case, they conclude: God is not necessary, God is impossible and God is not permissible if our society--or even our species--is to survive.

What is new about the new atheists? It's not their arguments. Spend as much time as you like with a pile of the recent anti-religion books, but you won't encounter a single point you didn't hear in your freshman dormitory. It's their tone that is novel. Belief, in their eyes, is not just misguided but contemptible, the product of provincial minds, the mark of people who need to be told how to think and how to vote--both of which, the new atheists assure us, they do in lockstep with the pope and Jerry Falwell.

For them, belief in God is beyond childish, it is unsuitable for children. Today's atheists are particularly disgusted by the religious training of young people--which Dr. Dawkins calls "a form of child abuse." He even floats the idea that the state should intervene to protect children from their parents' religious beliefs.

For the new atheists, believing in God is a form of stupidity, which sets off their own intelligence. They write as if they were the first to discover that biblical miracles are improbable, that Parson Weems was a fabulist, that religion is full of superstition. They write as if great minds had never before wrestled with the big questions of creation, moral law and the contending versions of revealed truth. They argue as if these questions are easily answered by their own blunt materialism. Most of all, they assume that no intelligent, reflective person could ever defend religion rather than dismiss it. The reviewer of Dr. Dawkins's volume in a recent New York Review of Books noted his unwillingness to take theology seriously, a starting point for any considered debate over religion.

The faith that the new atheists describe is a simple-minded parody. It is impossible to see within it what might have preoccupied great artists and thinkers like Homer, Milton, Michelangelo, Newton and Spinoza--let alone Aquinas, Dr. Johnson, Kierkegaard, Goya, Cardinal Newman, Reinhold Niebuhr or, for that matter, Albert Einstein. But to pass over this deeper faith--the kind that engaged the great minds of Western history--is to diminish the loss of faith too. The new atheists are separated from the old by their shallowness...

[See also Colin Bower (who writes as an atheist) on Dawkins in this month's NER.]

• We must balance our focus on training Iraqi soldiers with a determined effort to secure the Iraqi population and contain the rising violence. Securing the population has never been the primary mission of the U.S. military effort in Iraq, and now it must become the first priority.
• We must send more American combat forces into Iraq and especially into Baghdad to support this operation. A surge of seven Army brigades and Marine regiments to support clear-and-hold operations that begin in the spring of 2007 is necessary, possible, and will be sufficient to improve security and set conditions for economic development, political development, reconciliation, and the development of Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) to provide permanent security.
• American forces, partnered with Iraqi units, will clear high-violence Sunni and mixed Sunni-Shia neighborhoods, primarily on the west side of the city.
• After those neighborhoods are cleared, U.S. soldiers and Marines, again partnered with Iraqis, will remain behind to maintain security, reconstitute police forces, and integrate police and Iraqi Army efforts to maintain the population’s security.
• As security is established, reconstruction aid will help to reestablish normal life, bolster employment, and, working through Iraqi officials, strengthen Iraqi local government.
• Securing the population strengthens the ability of Iraq’s central government to exercise its sovereign powers.

Isn't this exactly the same thing we've been trying to do for the past three years? So the new improved plan is, try, try again...

Apparently Umran Javed was not happy after his conviction for incitement to murder yesterday.

According to The Times There was uproar in court as the verdict was delivered and the Common Serjeant of London, Judge Brian Barker, QC, remanded Javed, a married father of one child, in custody. One man was led from the public gallery by security guards after shouting: “Allahu Akbar [God is greatest], I curse the judge, the court, the jury, all of you.”  Other friends and supporters of Javed also shouted insults.

The Times uses the more correct translation of Allahu Akbar,  God is greatest, ie our God is greater than your God, so lets forget this fiction that we worship the same one. The hu at the end of Allah increases the power of Allah tenfold, so it really means our Allah is greater than your God, with knobs on, yah, boo, sucks to you to. Which is somewhat childish.

Besides they call that a curse? This is a curse. Many years ago in a London criminal court  the trial took place of a west African man who had cheated vulnerable people out of large sums of money for fake cures using his "skill" as a Witch Doctor. He used a lot of chickens in his rituals and had become known as The Chicken Man. He was convicted and sentenced to a period of imprisonment, at which he expressed his displeasure.  The following week the Judge felt unwell during another trial. A doctor who was in court as expert witness attended to him in chambers. The diagnosis - chicken pox.

Keep committing contempt in the face of the court; Contempt of Court carries a penalty of up to 2 years imprisonment.  The genie is out of the bottle and it can't go back now.

Hugh says "redouble" means "quadruple" rather than "double with an oomph". Does it? It ought to, but so many people use it to mean double with an oomph that this may be what it does mean. If it does mean quadruple, then you would need to do it one more time (the thing, not the quadrupling), making five, if you wanted to pip the redoublers to the post. "Redouble and then some" is what I'd do.

Presumably if you re-quadruple you get sixteen, which is over the top.

I wouldn't go to the barricades over this word, since it is one I don't use, unlike apophthegm, where I would fight for the -phth- with every last breaphth, retripling my efforts and then some.

Nabokov: "First and last things tend to have an adolescent note."

Can't this kind of stuff be discussed privately, between consenting adults?

Then Sunnis finally acquiesce in their loss of power,? Shi'a decide to give the Sunnis far more than the Sunnis ever gave them? Iran does nothing? Saudi Arabia does nothing?

Iran's nuclear project stops, so impressed is the Islamic regime with the progress made in Iraq? The islamization of Western Europe comes to a halt, because the progress made in Iraq makes everyone decide they should stay home and follow Iraq's example?

If every single thing that Frederick Kagan and Bush and Rice and McCain and Lieberman wish to achieve in Iraq is achieved, how does this weaken the Camp of Islam? How does deliberately NOT exploiting the ethnic and sectarian fissures help the Camp of Infidels?

O Fred, where is thy victory?

I love Charles Krauthammer, but yesterday's WPost column, "The Hanging: Beyond Travesty," is, in important respects, beyond the pale.  Take these passages:

The trial managed to repair the image of the man the world had last seen as a bedraggled nobody pulled cowering from a filthy hole. Now coiffed and cleaned, he acted the imperious president of Iraq, drowning out the testimony of his victims in coverage seen around the world. ... That was bad enough. Then came the execution, a rushed, botched, unholy mess that exposed the hopelessly sectarian nature of the Maliki government.

First, does anyone really think for a second that Saddam's trial, imperfect as it was, "managed to repair the image" of Saddam.  For someone as smart and steeped in history as Krauthammer, this is overheated and shortsighted. 

All criminals, including war criminals, no matter how seedy the circumstances of their capture, get spiffed up for their trials.  If we consider nothing else except the trial, Saddam's nice haircut and soapbox soliloquies still don't alter the fact that he was shown to have engineered a mass-murder in Dujail (albeit, a comparatively minor one given the rest of his monstrous resume').  But why would we only consider the trial?  If Saddam had been killed before he had been apprehended, how would history have remembered him?  Exactly as Krauthammer elsewhere describes him:  "the preeminent monster on the planet."  No trial could change that.

Second, "the hopelessly sectarian nature of the Maliki government" has been patently obvious to many of us observers for a long, long time.  Those who view popular elections as a talisman that somehow transfigures theocrats into democrats are evidently stunned to learn that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki — a career Dawa apparatchik who ran its Jihad Office in Syria at the time Dawa terrorists, for example, bombed the U.S. embassy in Kuwait — is a died-in-the-wool Shiite fundamentalist.  For the rest of us with eyes to see, this is not late-breaking news. 

The hopelessly sectarian nature of Shiite Iraq has been clear since we've known that the single most significant figure in the country is Grand Ayatollah Sistani — who, though he compares favorably to Iranian Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei, is an Islamic fundamentalist who instructs that non-Muslims are lesser beings, homosexuals and apostates should be brutally killed, etc.  It's been clear as Maliki has drawn his regime closer to Iran; it's been clear as he's insulated Moqtada Sadr; it was clear when he endorsed Hezbollah; it's been clear as he's provoked conflicts with the U.S. (having opposed our invasion in the first place); and it's been clear as he's done nothing to rein in the Shiite militias and death squads doing his dirty work. 

These guys are the same guys they have been all along — we hardly needed a couple of Sadr thugs taunting Saddam at the gallows to figure out that they were hopelessly sectarian.

More typically, Charles Krauthammer closes yesterday's op-ed with this trenchant observation:  Given that the Maliki government "stands for Shiite unity and Shiite dominance above all else," we

should not be surging American troops in defense of such a government. This governing coalition — Maliki's Dawa, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim's Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and Sadr's Mahdi Army — seems intent on crushing the Sunnis at all costs. Maliki should be made to know that if he insists on having this sectarian war, he can well have it without us.

He's right.  If we're gearing up to crush al Qaeda in Iraq and position ourselves to deal with the state sponsors of terror in Iran and Syria who jointly pose a true threat to American national security, that's one thing.  But that worthy goal would imply that we are not going to tolerate, much less permanently install, a Shiite-extremist Iran satellite in Baghdad.  As far as that goes, Maliki is part of the problem.  

Americans still support the global war on jihadists.  President Bush needs to explain, compellingly, how his new strategy for Iraq — surge or no surge — advances our position in the wider war.  If the plan is to invest more blood and treasure solely to prop up the current Iraqi regime, what's in it for us?

Starting maybe with this:  If, as is not unforeseeable, an overt military conflict were to break out between us and Iran, what would Maliki do?

"The FBI said that it is investigating a death threat sent to the leader of a local Muslim group after US Sen. Barbara Boxer rescinded a certificate her office had awarded to him."
-- first sentence in this AP news item

This is a peculiar way to put it. It is as if there is some kind of necessary connection between the alleged "death threat" that is now being investigated, and the fact that it was supposedly made "after US Sen. Barbara Boxer rescinded a certificate her office had awarded to him."

That makes it sound as if what Boxer did triggered the "death threat," and so, wrong before, by Muslim lights, it is doubly wrong for it has some kind of assumed relationship -- indeed, is presented as possibly the cause -- of that "death threat."

Why did the AP present the story this way?

It could have done a number of things. It could have ignored the story, because everybody and his brother gets death threats these days. It could have carried the story, but written it correctly.

How would that be?

Like this:

"The FBI is investigating a death threat that the leader of a local Muslim group, Basim Elkarra, claims to have received.

Mr. Elkarra, executive director of the Sacramento chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, was in the news recently when an award initially to be bestowed upon him was rescinded by Senator Barbara Boxer upon her investigation of details of Mr. Elkarra's expressed views and his work for a group several of whose founders have been charged, and successfully prosecuted, on terrorism-related charges.

The Special Agent in Charge, Karen Ernst said Friday the bureau launched an investigation and it is continuing."

None of that stuff that the AP includes in such detail, that clearly CAIR wanted to have appear and it did appear, all about how "Elkarra, executive director of the Sacramento chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, received a certificate of accomplishment from Boxer’s office in November recognizing his oustanding service" and then the following paragraph, that goes on at similar brainwashing length, quoting Elkarra himself:

"Elkarra said the award reflected his group’s efforts to establish good relations with Christians, Jews, minority groups and the FBI."

None of that.

Just the facts, Ma'am. Not the special pleading by AP, on behalf of Elkarra, CAIR, and Islam.

AP really has got to cut it out.

One of the founders of CAIR and its former Board chairman, one Omar Ahmad, is a self-described "Palestinian." He has been quoted, famously, as saying that Islam is in the U.S. to become dominant, and the Qur’an the only law of the land. He now denies saying it, but the original reporter stands by her reportage. One wishes to add that Omar Ahmad, in addition to his tireless work on behalf of Islam and its promotion until it assumes what he regards as its rightful place in America and the world, meanwhile makes his living as CEO of a company called Silicon Expert Technologies.

That company can be searched for online; among the companies that have a "partnership" with "Silicon Expert Technologies" is Azerity. One would like to think that computer engineers, and computer executives at other companies, in choosing whether or not to "partner" or have other dealings with Omar Ahmad, would first fully inform themselves of what CAIR does, and what Omar Ahmad does and says and thinks. They could perhaps factor that information into their mental equation, and even, one would like to think, into their business decisions. One would hope, as well, that those alive in 1938 would not have bought Voigtlander cameras, or in 1953 bought Baltic amber from official Soviet outlets, such as Vneshtorg, which would use that valyuta or hard currency for purposes inimical to the health of liberal democracies.

Everyone is free to consider the wellbeing and safety of our own Infidel ways and institutions and their continued existence, in making decisions as to what partners one wishes to have, and what companies one wishes to hire to provide goods and services. And others, in turn, can make their commercial decisions as to whether or not to have dealings with that second company as well.

Or not, as the case may be.

Perhaps Infidels, in their own small way, can have an effect on the businesses which those who run CAIR, or contribute to CAIR, or support CAIR in any way, may rely on for their livelihood.

Sauce for the goose, sauce for that famous gander.

"I will fight for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and for an international reconstruction effort..."-- from Rep. Keith Ellison's description of his plans

As to that "immediate withdrawal" -- I agree, but for reasons quite different from those of Ellison and, for that matter, others who think such a withdrawal cannot conceivably be undertaken for the reasons that have been suggested here and at JW for the past three years -- to more effectively exploit the pre-existing fissures within the Camp of Islam, and to allow those fissures, ethnic and sectarian in Iraq, to divide and demoralize the Camp of Islam, and to allow a Demonstration Project of Muslim violence and aggression to be observed by the entire non-Muslim world.

It's the second part that deserves attention. Ellison supports "international reconstruction effort." What does he have in mind? We know what he has in mind. He has in mind even more money from Infidels being spent on the hopeless and for Infidels exactly the wrong goal, of making Iraq a nation-state where the natural aggression, violence, and refusal to compromise that are what may be called the "attitudes of Islam," part of the "atmospherics of Islam," because he likes the transfer of Infidel American wealth to Muslims -- in Iraq as in Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan, and to the "Palestinian" Arabs. That's his goal.

But that should not be our goal. Not a single cent more should be squandered in Iraq. Not a single American cent more for any Muslim people or polity, for inevitably we will only be weakening ourselves, and for those Muslims, delaying the day when some of them begin to realize that their own political, economic, social, moral and intellectual failures are directly connected to, derive from, arise out of, the tenets, the attitudes, the atmospherics of Islam.

Our "staunch ally" Saudi Arabia pays for Da'wa (and mosques, and madrasas) throughout the West, and many of its richest people cheerfully give money to terrorist groups or sympathizers, for if one does not participate actively in Jihad, one is allowed to support it in other ways. "Our staunch ally" Egypt, ignoring every single commitment it made to receive the entire Sinai, has become a world center, in its press, radio, and television, of antisemitism and anti-Americanism, and its Muslim population has not hesitated to terrorize the Copts, the descendants of the original Egyptians. Muslim states cannot conceivably prevent a very great number of their people -- even where those states systematically have tried to curb the power of Islam, as in Kemalist Turkey -- from being hostile, often murderously hostile, to Infidels.

The problem is not "poverty" though George Bush and Keith Ellison seem to agree that more "international construction" is just the ticket. Iraq has the second-highest oil reserves in the world -- possibly, if the Saudi fields are indeed in decline, the highest. Iraq, or "Iraq," can borrow against future earnings. Or alternatively, the Shi'a Arabs and the Kurds don't have to borrow at all. They have quite enough. The Sunni Arabs, on the other hand, can receive money not from long-suffering American taxpayers, at the end of their collective and individual tethers, but from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, the countries which have received most of the ten trillion dollars taken in by the Muslim members of OPEC since 1973.

I have seen exactly one photo of Ellison looking or pretending to look with interest at the text of Jefferson's Qur'an. That photo was taken by a Muslim photographer, and one can be sure that Ellison specified that that photographer, and no other, would be allowed to take his picture, thus ensuring that any proceeds from the photo, which appeared in the world press, would redound to the benefit of a fellow Muslim. Loyalty to the umma al-islamiyya. Never to be forgotten or overlooked.

What did Ellison learn by looking at that Qur'an? Did he see the prefatory remarks by George Sale? If he didn't, he can find them here, and the remarks of Sale, on his purpose in translating the book, because he, had noticed that the previous versions did not convey the real and disturbing contents of the Qur'an (not even Prideaux had done so), and he looked forward to contributing to the final "overthrow" of Islam, as an English Protestant, by Protestants.

And has Ellison read what Jefferson, what Adams, what John Quincy Adams, what all the greatest figures in American life, concluded about Islam, based in some cases on their long experience negotiating with the King of Morocco and the Deys of Tunis, Tripoli, Algiers, and supplemented by their study of history or, as in the case of that scholarly John Quincy Adams, of the canonical texts as well?

They knew about Islam. They knew a good deal about Islam, and certainly far more than have any of their recent, and most unimpressive, successors.

For the moment great sums of money flow in, and they will continue to flow in. But this does not mean that every effort cannot be made to diminish that flow of money (instead of aiming at a ludicrously irrelevant "energy independence" for the United States, which is both unachievable and would have no effect on Saudi Arabia or other Muslim oil states, for oil not sold to America will simply be sold to others, unless collective demand goes down).

Saudi Arabia needs to be "ridimensionato" -- that is to say, cut down to size. "Money can buy everything - except civilization." It is a barbarous place; its government is barbarous, its economy barbarous, the mental state of its inhabitants barbarous. A very few, who have spent a long time in the West, can appear to have acquired the habits of thought of Western man. And a very few of those may actually manage to do so. But no one should be fooled by the oleaginous new ambassador, Al-Jubeir.

Who in Congress will use the phrase first?

Who will say:

Stop the Jizyah.

Who will demand that no more money be sent to Iraq for "reconstruction." For god's sake, Iraq has the second largest, or possibly largest, oil reserves in the world. Has no one heard of borrowing against future earnings? Why is it an American responsibility? Is it because $500 billion has already been squandered on Iraq, and what's another $30 billion?

Who will demand that Egypt, Jordan, and the "Palestinians" (the local Arab shock troops of the Lesser Jihad) be asked to ask their fellow Muslims, the rich ones, the ones who have over the past 30 years taken in ten trillion dollars in entirely undeserved and unmerited oil wealth, to pay for them? Let the "Palestinians" get what they can, from their fellow members of the umma al-islamiyya. Aren't the members of that umma supposed to share? Aren't we always told about the wonderful social justice to be found in Islam? Let's see it.

No more transfer of wealth from Infidels to Muslims, across national borders, or within nation-states, as is happening through the grotesque exploitation of the European welfare states and their Infidel taxpayers by Muslims able to exploit, and then some, every conceivable benefit offered by those hapless Infidels.

End the Jizyah.

Tancredo? Webb? Who's going to be the first to use the phrase, and then explain that phrase --

Stop the Jizyah.

Who? Whoever it is, many will take that statement, and the person who makes it, to heart.

Just do it.