I'm in Pajamas again, developing my theme of pig tales, pigtails and Islam. PJM's editors have added an -ism to my naked Islam and Americanised my spelling and punctuation, but the piece seems to be otherwise intact.

Click on the piggy for more:

Update: and there's an Oxford comma in the title, which I would never have put there.

On the subject of things porcine, Black Pig Morris a border side from Nottinghamshire, in Rochester on Saturday.

Photograph by a member of my family

The Hezbollah supporter the McCain campaign dropped from its fundraising committee in Michigan, Ali Jawad, is demanding an apology even though he doesn't actually dispute anything Debbie Schlussel wrote about him as we reported last week.

AP: DEARBORN, Michigan - Arab- and Muslim-American leaders said Monday they want John McCain's campaign to apologize for severing ties with an Arab-American businessman serving on the Republican presidential candidate's Michigan finance committee.

Ali Jawad, founder of the Lebanese American Heritage Club, was listed with five other finance committee members on an invitation to a $2,300-per-person (Ð1,490) fundraising dinner McCain plans to attend Tuesday in Oakland County.

 Jawad and his supporters said during a news conference that he was asked to resign from the committee after Michigan blogger Debbie Schlussel wrote that he had ties to the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. They said her comments they said were based on rumor and innuendo.

 We do not want a president who makes a decision ... based on false information,' said Osama Siblani, president of the Arab American Political Action Committee and publisher of the Arab American News. This is an insult to every Arab-American and Muslim-American in the country.'

 Requests for comment were left Monday afternoon with the McCain campaign.

 Besides an apology, Siblani said Jawad's supporters also want McCain to ask the businessman to rejoin the finance committee. Jawad said it would be premature to say whether he would accept such a request.

Oh brother.

 Jawad told The Associated Press Monday evening that the accusations by Schlussel were false, including any links to Hezbollah. On one particular trip to Lebanon, he said, he met with the U.S. ambassador, who arranged all his appointments with the president and members of parliament.

 This is our country by choice,' he said. We're patriotic Americans, as much as anyone else.'

 McCain plans to be in Michigan for Tuesday's fundraiser and plans to hold a town hall meeting with supporters Wednesday morning at a local university. There are over 300,000 people in southeast Michigan who trace their roots to the Middle East...

  Jawad is president of Dearborn-based Armada Oil and Gas Co. He moved to the United States in 1976. A Republican, he said he has contributed to Republican candidates as well as Democrats such as Michigan Sen. Carl Levin.

 Schlussel said among her concerns about Jawad were two federal cases involving him and his company: He was convicted in 1997 in U.S. District Court in Detroit for insurance fraud and sentenced to probation. His company was convicted the same year of mail fraud and was ordered to pay more than $250,000 in fines and restitution.

She also alleges that he has met with Hezbollah leaders and Hezbollah-allied members of the Lebanese parliament on two trips to Lebanon.

John McCain did the right thing by asking Ali Jawad to leave,' she said.

For his part, Jawad said he was not forced into resigning. He asked to be removed from the committee after receiving two calls from the McCain campaign inquiring about the allegations and questioning his integrity and loyalty to this country.'

If he resigned voluntarily, why is he asking for an apology and reinstatement that he may or may not accept?

Siblani said McCain is starting off on the wrong foot' with Arab- and Muslim-Americans with this decision, and if the candidate stands by it he could lose many of its voters.

Does this mean Hezbollah supporters won't vote for McCain?

This shows you (McCain's campaign) doesn't care about our community,' he said. This group is essential to the war on terror. We need to work with the government hand in hand.' 

If McCain becomes President, which looks increasingly likely, one hopes he will look very closely at a number of faulty assumptions about Islam, such as Muslim-Americans are essential allies in the "war on terror," and policies based on those assumptions, such allowing Muslims to dictate what words government officials can and cannot use to describe the enemy.

Vladimir Nabokov may or may not be God, but he is supernatural, at least according to his son Dmitri. Stefanie Marsh writes in The Times on the Laura kerfuffle:

Dmitri Nabokov has finally made a decision. For years the son of Vladimir has been tormenting critics, academics and the reading public with his dilemma: should he publish his father's last novel? Before he died in 1977 Vladimir Nabokov left instructions that the novel, The Original of Laura, be torched, but Dmitri demurred, then vacillated. First, he publicly implied very strongly that it would be burnt, then changed his mind, then threatened to burn it anyway after a nobody claimed to have detected in Lolita signs that Vladimir had been abused by his uncle.

In February The Times joined the debate in an article I wrote; it so enraged Dmitri that he fired off several incandescent e-mails, capped-up for emphasis in Dmitri's trademark style. He became convinced that a woman I'd never heard of, Lara Delage-Toriel, had leaked information about the novel's contents. Luckily, I'd been primed. “Dmitri loves drama,” two of his associates had warned me. His missives became so violent that we ceased communication. Then he sent me a copy of what Business Standard had done on the story.

But finally Dmitri has announced his intention to do what we always knew he would do: publish. “IT'S TRUE,” reads his most recent e-mail. How did he resolve his dilemma? When his father's ghost appeared to him in Palm Springs. “[He] appeared before me and said, with an ironic grin, ‘You're stuck in a right old mess - just go ahead and publish!'” The surprisingly mellow ghost of Vladimir further counselled his son: “Do what you like, but why not make some money on the damn thing?” And after this 30-year drum roll, there's little chance he won't.

Marsh is probably being a little unfair, but that's journalism for you. In any case, Dmitri isn't the only one to have seen Vladimir Nabokov's ghost. He appeared to me a couple of days ago. Unfortunately he didn't have any money-making advice. "Cut that Vivalcomb stuff out," he said. "It's not big and it's not clever. I only said it the once.  And read some more of my books, you bone-idle bint."

"Lara Delage-Toriel"?

This slightly-off lac-lemanish Laura, like so many others determined to babble on in public about this matter, eager to find their names in print (while those who know better remain carefully silent)  makes one think there has been a misprint. For Dmitri Nabokov realizes that, at this point,  because of the  “après moi, la Delage" problem, he has no real choice any longer, he can’t leave it to her, or any of the other subscribers to the Zemblan website, with their memories, and their jostlings for attention, and there is no turning back, he's got to get what's on those index-cards properly published while he can oversee and curate the whole business. As for that Delage whom he once apparently had trusted turns out to be, forsooth, a prattling Lalage, a Lalage unredeemed by that final Toriel, or little tower, the one just down the road, beyond the side-by-side tombstones in Clarens, on that same -- this is where we came in, isn't it -- cloudless lake.  

"If McCain becomes President, which looks increasingly likely..."
--Rebecca Bynum's comments below

No, it doesn't. Not if he doesn't make a clean break with Bush, not if he thinks that there is little he can do to get America unstuck from Tarbaby Iraq (with the likes of kagans and kristols and maxboots to boot all surrounding him, and keeping him locked into this crazed Iraq policy of squander and futility and, still worse, unrecognized appeasement of Islam, all of it being presented as sturdy soldiering-on just as "victory" is within view -- and not a thought to exploiting the fissures, not a thought to anything smacking of ruthlessness, not a thought to the Money Weapon, Da'wa, and demographic conquest in Western Europe that matter far more than does any possible outcome in Iraq).

As for McCain's touching desire to "learn about economics" by starting to read Adam Smith -- not the Adam Smith of "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" but the other Adam Smith, the one who in abridged versions of "The Wealth of Nations" appears (falsely) as the prophet of free-market fundamentalism -- along with the Ricardian comparative-advantage business that, if swallowed whole, persuades Western elites to allow China, rapacious hard-working ruthless China, to destroy industries small and large everywhere from Como in Italy to Kalamazoo in Michigan, with no end in sight, all in the name of that "comparative advantage" that works to our future permanent disadvantage -- well, that just won't do.

McCain presents himself as a "maverick." He's not nearly "maverick" enough. He's not nearly the "traitor to his class" that he needs to be if he is to remain a sensible patriot, at a time when American national interest and cultural cohesion, and free-market fundamentalism, clash, and cannot be reconciled.

As for economics, it is probably too much to expect McCain to get beyond mere rational man, to go beyond the Samuelson-textbook orthodoxies, and to see economics as a place of play of the passions as the wise men who did not leave economics to the economists, teach us (see farseeing, old-fashioned Gabriel Tarde, see up-to-date Kahneman and Twersky, see see see).  

The three candidates still standing are all most imperfect. One wishes that McCain could be made to come to his senses now. Because if he doesn't, he will lose, and if the winner is Obama the consequences, for this country's foreign policy, are unknown, but all the signs -- from his mental formation and known connections, from his choice of present advisors, even from what he has chosen to criticize, such as his attack on Hillary Clinton for her useful and welcome remark, that correctly threatened Iran's government with "obliteration." -That kind of warning, to give the Iranian government pause, should not have been criticized, but seconded. There's a lot to worry about with Barack Obama, what with that"change we can believe in" stuff, unrelieved by homely and indispensable detail, or when it is, here and three, so relieved, the detail turns out, so often, to be exactly what worries the most. 

Such theatrics are sure to receive inordinate media coverage on a day when Israel should be taking her bow.

Jerusalem Post:...Entitled "The Initiative of Return and Coexistence," the plan urges all Israelis to "welcome the Palestinians who will be returning to live together with them in the land of peace."

A committee established by the organizers to prepare for the event met at the Al-Bireh Municipality offices this week to discuss ways of rallying support. Abu Ein told participants that more than 100,000 refugees from Lebanon were expected to take part in the march toward Israel's northern border.

He added that refugees from the West Bank and Gaza Strip would also participate in the events by staging marches toward Israeli checkpoints and border crossings.

At the meeting in Al-Bireh, the organizers strongly condemned world leaders and dignitaries who were planning to participate in the Israeli celebrations. "This is the day when the Palestinians were uprooted from their lands," they added. "It would have been better if these leaders visited the refugee camps which are the victims of Israel's so-called independence."

The plan calls on the refugees to return to Israel with suitcases and tents so that they can settle down in their former villages. The refuges are requested to carry UN flags upon their return and to be equipped with their UNRWA-issued ID cards.

The plan asks Arab countries hosting the refugees to facilitate their return by opening their borders. The plan specifically refers to Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq.

Palestinian refugees living in the US, EU, Canada and Latin America have been requested to use their foreign passports to fly to Ben- Gurion Airport, while dozens of ships carrying refugees will converge on Israeli ports.

What was Nabokov's view on Bellow?
-- from a reader

I recall some dismissive brief remark about "Herzog" in one of Nabokov's letters, and I recall an interview (with Israel Shenker) where that dislike is again mentioned. I don't think he paid much attention to Bellow, though I am sure he would have approved of "To Jerusalem and Back" (based on a trip prompted partly by Bellow's Israeli cousin, a merchant seaman and late-blooming writer, John Auerbach), and also, certainly, of Bellow's famous "but where is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?"

I'm not fond of either the English writer (Amis) or the transatlantic speaking-truth-to-power-at-The-Nation-and-The-Guardian transatlantic journalist (Hitchens). One way to explain their taste for Bellow is that they find a high-low raciness, an "energy" (god, I hate that word) in hogbutcher-to-the-world Bellow, who can link low-life bookies to what some like to call , smacking their mental lips complacently, "the life of the mind" -- that is, the life of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

But since I'm an American, and unconcerned about energy and raciness and stuff like that, I'm less impressed.

I'll ask my mother what she thought of "The Adventures of Augie March." I saw it on her shelf. If she remembers what she thought of it, she'll give me the straight dope, and I'll email it on to you. She's never wrong.  

I don't like the phrase "senior moments." All the best and keenest people I know -- people who know everything, people who understand everything -- are over 80. No one can hold a candle to them or, at least, to two of them (and Jacques Barzun makes three). They never have "senior moments." On the other hand, their unworthy children, and their incompletely-formed-returns-are-not-yet-in grandchildren, have been having those goddam "senior moments" for lo, these many decades.

The Times today chose to devote its longest piece, part of its Observance of Israel's Birthday series,  to Arabs who claim they don't feel they fully belong in Israel, that they are not made fully welcome. Given that the Arabs in Israel represent a permanent threat, given that in the Negev and the Galilee Arabs have been attacking Jewish farms (and done so with such impunity and regularity, that one Jewish soldier from an elite unit has been organizing farmers to defend themselves -- just as had to be done in the 1930s, when Orde Wingate taught Jewish settlers how to protect themselves and, for his pains, was expelled by the British Mandatory Authority, for he appeared too willing to take seriously the British commitments made in receiving the Mandate for Palestine), given that the Arab representatives in the Knesset have repeatedly displayed behavior that one can reasonably call traitorous (and one of them is now on the lam, outside of Israel), given that despite all this, the Arabs of Israel are provided with education and free medical care beyond a level that any Arabs, anywhere, receive, and that many -- especially in the "West Bank," live in villas that would surprise foreign visitors who assume they are maltreated, given that they are entitled to vote, to hold office, to do everything that Israelis do except they are not required to serve in the miiltary, one would have thought that the Times might celebrate the amazing forbearance of the Israelis.

But that was not to be. Instead, it was the usual litany of Arab complaints, ripped out of context: the context  of a permanent war being made on Israel and on the Israelis by the Arabs and Muslims, whose natural allies are the Arabs inside Israel.

And there was, of course, a big photograph, showing an aged Arab returning to what he claimed had once "been his house." Now most people are unware that nearly 90% of the land in Mandatory Palestine was not privately owned, but state or waste land. And most people are unaware that very few Arabs owned anything; a handful of landlords, many of them absentee, owned what private land was available, and from Beirut, or Cairo, or Amman, proved perfectly willing to sell their land -- at incredibly inflated prices (in 1940 such land was being sold at prices higher than that of the best farmland in Iowa -- the richest in the world) to Jews desperate to buy. In the Arab propaganda, all of this selling, and buying, is forgotten. It is forgotten that 90% of the land that was state and waste land was first the property of the Ottoman rulers, then came into the possession of the British as Mandatory authority, and then devolved, naturally, and according to the meaning, and provisions, of the Mandate for Palestine, to the government of Israel as the intended and sole beneficiary of that particular Mandate (there were several others, and the Arabs benefited, as the sole beneficiaries, from those).

This mythology took hold. But some, who knew better, resisted. There was, for example, the most celebrated Italian journalist of the 20th century, Indro Montanelli, who was born in 1910, and lived through the entire century, and was well-versed in its history. He could not be fooled. Here is what he wrote about the "Palestinian refugees" [meaning: the Arabs who left Mandatory Palestine], and where they should be directing their anger. Of course Montanelli did not realize -- who did? -- that the war against Israel was endless, because it was prompted by Muslim refusal to contemplate the permanent existence of an Infidel nation-state. But nonetheless, he did recognize, he did remember and refused to forget, that it was the Arab states themselves who had urged the local Arabs to leave, the Arab states themselves that had prevented the Arabs from Mandatory Palestine from becoming citizens of the countries in which they then found themselves, it was the Arabs -- all the Arabs -- who exploited them, kept them in as impermanent and wretched a state as possible, refusing the slightest effort to integrate them, in order to keep them as a handy weapon of war. and, especially, a useful tool of propaganda. 

Here is Montanelli on the matter:

"Che i profughi palestinesi siano delle povere vittime, non c’è dubbio. Ma lo sono degli Stati Arabi, non d’Israele. Quanto ai loro diritti sulla casa dei padri, non ne hanno nessuno perché i loro padri erano dei senzatetto. Il tetto apparteneva solo a una piccola categoria di sceicchi, che se lo vendettero allegramente e di loro propria scelta. Oggi, ubriacato da una propaganda di stampo razzista e nazionalsocialista, lo sciagurato fedain scarica su Israele l’odio che dovrebbe rivolgere contro coloro che lo mandarono allo sbaraglio. E il suo pietoso caso, in un modo o nellaltro, bisognerà pure risolverlo. Ma non ci si venga a dire che i responsabili di questa sua miseranda condizione sono gli «usurpatori» ebrei. Questo è storicamente, politicamente e giuridicamente falso. "

Dal «Corriere della Sera», Indro Montanelli, 16 settembre 1972

A loose translation, with the meaning preserved and with a few interpolated comments:

Of the fact that [some of] the Arabs who left [Mandatory] Palestine have been miserable victims, there can be no doubt. But victims of whom? Victims of the Arab states, not of Israel. As for these so-called rights to their fathers’ houses [about which such a hue and cry is made] they in fact have no such rights, because their fathers, by and large, did not own any property, for [most of the (very small amount) of privately-owned] property belonged to a small class of landowning sheiks, who happily, and of their own free will, sold it [to Jews]. Today, drunk on propaganda of both a racist and Nazi cast [this was in 1972, before things really got going], the wretched fedayin [again, this is 1972 – updated, the word today would be “terrorists”] direct toward Israel the hatred that they should be directing against those who led them on. Their status will have to be resolved one way or another. But no one should say that those responsible for their wretched condition [n.b.: in 1972, Montanelli was unaware of just how many billions were then flowing through UNRWA to those Arabs, or how many more billions would later flow from Infidel tax-payers to the “Palestinian Authority”] are the Jewish so-called “usurpers.” Such a charge is historically, politically, and juridically false.

DEBKA: Pro-Western Siniora government and Iran-Syria-backed Hizballah forces exchanged fire in the streets of Beirut Wednesday, May 7. DEBKAfile’s sources report both have ordered a general call-up of their adherents.

Hizballah fighters clad in national army and police uniforms are infiltrating government party strongholds in the capital to seize control. In the north and the western Beqaa Valley region of Kharoub, government forces are mobilizing. First units have been sighted heading for Beirut.

During the day, Hizballah blocked the roads leading to the airport and vowed to keep it under siege until the Siniora government goes back on the decision announced Tuesday, May 6, to shut down the private telecommunications network Iran installed for the group and reinstate the pro-Hizballah airport director Gen. Wafiq Shuqeir. To pile up anti-government pressure, Hizballah called labor unions out on strike.

General Shuqeir was removed after Druze Progressive Socialist Party leader Walid Jumblatt accused Hizballah of installing spy cameras at the airport to monitor the movements of Lebanese and foreign leaders. Jumblatt said incoming flights were bringing the Shiite militia supplies of weapons from Iran.

On August 9, 2007, DEBKAfile first revealed that Iranian military engineers were installing a secret underground telecommunications system to support Hizballah’s missile unit. The network runs through south Beirut, the Beqaa Valley’s Yohmor region near the Syrian border – where Hizballah and the Palestinian Popular Front-GC keep their training facilities – and connect the southern towns of Tyre on the Mediterranean with Abassieh, seat of Hizballah’s southern headquarters.

For the ten months during which this military telecommunications network was being installed, the Beirut government did not dare touch it.

Prime minister Fouad Siniora finally decided enough was enough when satellite images provided by Western agencies showed work on connecting Hizballah’s network with the communications and eavesdropping systems set up by the Syrian army along the Lebanese border.

DEBKAfile’s military sources report that the two networks and their linkage are part of military preparations by Iran, Syria and Hizballah for a possible new flare-up of hostilities with Israel.

The former Jordanian Minister for Religious Endowments (Waqf):

http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/1761.htm

You don't take this seriously, do you? Would you take it seriously if you realized that many, possibly most,  of the world's Muslims do so?

The most important part of this tape is not  the business about the future relations between Syria and Israel  More important is the complaint, by this Sunni member of the Muslim Brotherhood, or Ikhwan, of Syria becoming a puppet of Iran and the alarm he expresses over Iranian penetration into Syrian society and Shi'a proselytizinig efforts -- apparently successful -- among Sunni Arabs in Syria:

 http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/1762.htm

This kind of alarm is not to be discouraged.

Welcome news (thanks to Jerry Gordon for sending us this press release):

WASHINGTON, D.C. (May 7, 2008)—U.S. Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA), Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-CT), Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and U.S. Representative Peter King (R-NY), Ranking Member of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security, today announced the introduction of the Free Speech Protection Act of 2008.  This bill would protect American journalists from libel suits brought in foreign courts that do not have the same protections for free speech that are found in the U.S. constitution.  It mirrors H.R. 5814, legislation recently introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives by Representative King.  

“Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of expression of ideas, opinions, and research, and freedom of exchange of information are all essential to the functioning of a democracy, and the fight against terrorism,” Senator Specter said. “There is a real danger that American writers and researchers will be afraid to address the crucial subject of terror funding and other important matters without these protections.”
 
“Discovering the truth requires full and open debate, which is not possible when courts are used to chill inquiry and research,” Senator Lieberman said.  “The freedom of American journalists should not be threatened by foreign courts that do not adhere to America’s principles of free speech.”
 
“Our journalists provide us with insight on issues that affect all Americans, such as war and terrorism,” Rep. King said. “We cannot allow their voices to be silenced by those who prefer to keep secret the inner details of these issues. American authors and journalists should be able to practice their first amendment right without the fear of a lawsuit.”

This legislation creates a federal cause of action and federal jurisdiction so that federal courts may determine whether there has been defamation under United States law when a U.S. journalist, speaker, or academic is sued in a foreign court for speech or publication in the United States.  The bill authorizes a court to issue an order barring enforcement of a foreign judgment and to award damages.  
 
The impetus for this legislation is litigation involving Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, a U.S. citizen and Director of the American Center for Democracy. Dr. Ehrenfeld’s 2003 book, Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed and How to Stop It, which was published solely in the United States by a U. S. publisher, alleged that a Saudi Arabian subject and his family financially supported Al Qaeda in the years preceding the attacks of September 11.  He sued Ehrenfeld for libel in England, although only 23 books were sold there.
 
The United Kingdom has become a popular venue for defamation plaintiffs from around the world, because under English law it is not necessary for a libel plaintiff to prove falsity or actual malice as is required in the United States. The U.S. journalists or publications who are named as defendants in these suits must deal with the expense, inconvenience and distress of being sued in foreign courts, even though their conduct is protected by the First Amendment in the United States.