We wanted to go to this event yesterday evening, outside St Paul's Cathedral in London. Organised under the patronage of Princes William and Harry it was a salute to the armed forces and an effort to raise funds for the institutions treating injured servicemen and women. Which ought to be fully funded, and well funded from government sources but are not.
We couldn't go so I had to watch on television.  Below from the London Evening Standard is the photo, or one very like it (being taken by a professional this one is better, being in focus and other desirable features) I wanted to attempt to take.

Ross Kemp the actor read an essay by Field Marshal Viscount Slim on the qualities needed by a soldier. I am trying now to find the text and from the references to it I have turned up so far I am not the only person searching. If and when, as and when I find it I will post it here. It is worth reading, or watching again.

The Burton Mail reports on His Honour Judge Maxwell's summing up to the jury at the Crown Court Birmingham here.  The jury are now deliberating.

Robert Irwin has a well-informed and interesting review of both Daniel Martin Varisco's Reading Orientalism and Ibn Warraq's Defending The West in this week's TLS.

Of Ibn Warraq's book he says: "As a Westerner and an Orientalist, I find myself somewhat embarrassed to be defended in such uncompromising terms."

"Although in '98 everything seemed dark because of Rabin's murder, I believed we could still move the peace process ahead more quickly. I did not think we'd have so many problems. I believed the separation between the West Bank and Gaza would make things easier, not harder. I did not imagine that we would leave Gaza and they would fire Qassams from there; I did not imagine that Hamas would show so strongly in the elections."

    -- from an inteview with Shimon Peres in Ha'aretz by Lily Galili  

Since Ehud Olmert is a bit indisposed, the honors have fallen to Shimon Peres. It is he who as President of Israel has met with foreign journalists to remind them – and they do need reminding – of what Israel has achieved in the sixty years of its existence. Seven hot wars and two intifadas, along with unceasing economic and diplomatic warfare did not prevent Israel from becoming the refuge and hope for Jews, and, despite having no natural resources – no oil, for example, to match the trillions that its mortal enemies pile up thanks not to any industriousness or entrepreneurial flair or inventive genius,  but purely to an accident of geology – an example to the rest of the world, of how to build a nation-state. And this building has been achieved not because of, but despite, having a political class unworthy of its citizens, a problem not confined to Israel.

One member of that permanent class is Shimon Peres. For the past three decades Shimon Peres has not only played the fool, but has been the fool. Perhaps now, at long last, after the thousands of rockets fired from Gaza, reality has begun to sunk in. At least he has publicly admitted of his surprise – he, Peres, is always being surprised – at what happened in Gaza once the Israelis left, abandoning Jewish towns (not “settlements” but towns), which was, of course, what anyone of sense could, and did, predict. And it is exactly the lesson of Gaza that applies to the “West Bank,” though perhaps Shimon Peres is incapable of drawing that conclusion. He certainly cannot, at this point, begin to ponder the Islamic basis for Arab and Muslim opposition –murderous opposition – to the permanent existence of Israel. It would be too painful. He can’t do it.

Shall we let bygones be bygones? Shall those who care about the survival of Israel pay attention, on this anniverary, in a spirit of untruth and reconciliation, to what Peres did that was right, long ago, when he helped create Israel’s essential, never-to-be-surrendered nuclear deterrent, and ignore the way he has been, the damage he has done, for the past thirty years, ever since Sadat came to Israel to be hailed as Saint Sadat, Prince of Peace?

No, we shouldn’t. Like Ariel Sharon, who founded Unit 101 and successfully suppressed terror from Jordan, and in the 1948 war and 1967 war and 1973 war was a spectacular commander, but who in his last years expelled Jewish villagers, and tore down their villages and towns, and provided the precedent of the Gaza surrender, and Ehud Olmert, and thus did damage that may have outweighed the good he once did. And Shimon Peres, who in the 1950s helped foster the nuclear-weapons project, by his later words and deeds, undid whatever good he may once have done.

In his famous speech (“The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne/Burned on the water…”) in "Antony and Cleopatra" , Enobarbus ends with an image of those pretty dimpled boys, fanning Cleopatra and her retinue, cooling them down but at the same time heating them up, so that “what they undid, did.”

It’s the same with Shimon Peres and Ariel Sharon, but in scansion-smashing reverse: “What they did, they undid.”  

Those who still don’t know what folly Peres encouraged need to take a look at “Shimon Says,” a compilation, by Rael Jean Isaac and Roger Gerber, of his most self-damning remarks:

"Peres views himself as a visionary (he has stated, "I got a license to become a dreamer")2 and is someone who speaks him mind openly. In view of his central position in Israeli political life, and in the Oslo process especially, we offer a sampling of some characteristically idiosyncratic utterances in recent years.

PEACE PROCESS

This is not a negotiation of give and take because Israel has something to give but has nothing to take.3

I don't think we should judge the process by the performance of Yasir Arafat. We're not negotiating with Yasir Arafat. We're negotiating with ourselves.4

Papers are papers and realities are realities. We cannot judge the PLO and its leader just by what he is saying. Would we do so, we would be completely wrong and we would be in troubles.5

[Responding to an interviewer who asked "Are you saying that what Arafat told you in Oslo is sufficient, that he does not have to sign any new commitments?"] I am not a notary who writes affidavits.6

[Asked about Arab statements that there would be no peace without an Arab Jerusalem]: These are only words. Let them talk.7

[Reacting to an Arab song, "Zionist, your death is in my hands"]: There are those who sing and those who shoot. I'm checking out those who shoot.8

THE NEW MIDDLE EAST

We are going to copy a European example which is called Benelux. I hope the relations between the Jordanians, the Palestinians, and us will be very much of the same nature that exists in Benelux.9

A Middle East where holiness will overcome oiliness . . .10

[In Gaza] a dynamic reconstruction has started. . . . Women are throwing away their veils and are going swimming in the sea.11

STRATEGY

I have always tended to be overly optimistic.12

An army that can occupy knowledge has yet to be built. And that is why armies of occupation are passé.13

It is no wonder that war, as a matter of conducting human affairs, is in its death throes and that the time has come to bury it.14

Anyone who wants peace and security will get neither.15

It was a mistake to bomb the nuclear reactor in Iraq.16

Between ten bunkers and ten hotels, ten hotels are also defense.17

ECONOMICS

We claim that the United States and Europe became so productive that the only thing you can really produce is unemployment. The more productive you are becoming, the more unemployed people you are having. The time has come to export your unemployment.18

In technology, we have an advantage over the former Soviet Union, because our technology is more advanced. We have an advantage over the United States, because our prices are less capitalistic.19

DEMOCRACY

As a protégé of David Ben-Gurion, I subscribe to his philosophy that "I may not know what the people want; I do know what is good for the people."20

ZIONISM

We are discovering that all the things we are fighting for are not so important.21

The more we give up land, we discover we have more Ph.D.s per kilometer -- so we are going to make a living on the Ph.D.s and not on the mileage.22

We live in a world where markets are more important than countries.23

POLITICS

[To those who disagree with his vision]: It's a changed world and . . . you are out of date.24

[In the Knesset, to Benjamin Netanyahu]: You were in America and you are still in a daze. You have just come back and, believe you me, you have not got a clue what we are talking about.25

THE FUTURE

We are in transition from a world of identifiable enemies to one of unidentifiable problems.26

What we have to do is to economize our policies, and not to politicize our economies, which is so costly and so expensive. Dictatorship, nowadays, is so expensive that only rich countries can afford it. Poor countries can hardly suffer it -- with an outsized secret service, the censorship, the permanent control, the worries, the suspicion, the narrowness, the closeness, the ignorance.27

I have become totally tired of history, because I feel history is a long misunderstanding.28

SHIMON PERES

I feel in some ways the most independent political figure in Israel. Nobody can add to what I have done, and nobody can take away from what I did.29

[Describing his courtship]: Her name was Sonia, and she was eventually to become my wife. I sought to impress her by reading to her, sometimes by the light of the moon, selected passages from Marx's Das Kapital.30

1 Shimon Peres, Battling for Peace (New York: Random House, 1995), p. 170.

2 Pennsylvania Gazette, Nov. 1994.

3 Statement before the 50th Session of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, Geneva, Feb. 10, 1994.

4 Jewish Week (New York), June 2, 1994.

5 Heritage (Los Angeles), June 3, 1994.

6 Israel Radio, May 23, 1994.

7 Speech in New York City, May 23, 1994.

8 The Jerusalem Post International Edition, Feb. 3, 1996.

9 Address to Council of the Socialist International, Oct. 6, 1993.

10 Remarks to Fourth Business Forum Conference, Jerusalem, Feb. 28, 1994.

11 Die Welt, July 14, 1995.

12 Shimon Peres, The New Middle East (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1993), p. 18.

13 Remarks on acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize, Oslo, Dec. 10, 1994.

14 Ibid.

15 The Jerusalem Post, May 7, 1995.

16 Ha'aretz, Dec. 24, 1995.

17 Ha'aretz, Jan. 29, 1996.

18 Speech to The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Feb. 2, 1994.

19 Remarks before the Knesset Economic Committee on the Arab Boycott, Feb. 21, 1994.

20 The Jerusalem Post International Edition, Dec. 23, 1995.

21 Jewish Week, June 2, 1994.

22 Pennsylvania Gazette, Nov. 1994.

23 Ibid.

24 Speech in New York City, May 23, 1994.

25 IBA television, Jerusalem, Aug. 30, 1995.

26 The New Middle East, p. 82.

27 Remarks to Fourth Business Forum Conference, Jerusalem, Feb. 28, 1994.

28 The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 30, 1994.

29 The Jerusalem Post International Edition, July 16, 1994.

30 Battling for Peace, p. 25.

So Shimon Peres when young used to court  his wife by reading aloud to her aloud from "Das Kapital." Note to froggies who would  a-wooing go: apparently it worked. One would like to know what other texts Peres found particularly useful in his later celebrated womanizing. Possibly Lenin on Renegade Kautsky? Or excerpts from Stalin's "Short Course"?

Physically Shimon Peres reminds one of Chico Marx. Mentally Peres reminds one of the Fool of Chelm. And for too long, in Israel, over the past 30 years when he started to undo what he had done, Shimon Peres has been near – or even at – the helm.   

"The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Burned on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumèd, that
The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggared all description: she did lie
In her pavilion, cloth-of-gold of tissue,
O’erpicturing that Venus where we see
The fancy outwork nature. On each side her
Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
With divers-coloured fans, whose wind did seem
To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,
And what they undid did.

Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (II.2.192-206)

Eddy Arnold, "The Tennessee Plowboy," has died one week short of his ninetieth birthday.

Anytime

I Really Don't Want To Know

Tennessee Stud & Cattle Call

Texarkana Baby

What's He Doing In My World

Make The World Go Away (later live performance)

Note to Teachers of English (teachers of "language arts" stay away unless there was nothing you could do about it):

In assigning Enobarbus's speech describing Antony's first vision of Cleopatra to your students for dissection and discussion, you might wish to supply them with Shakespeare's source. That source is North's translation into English. in 1579, of Amyot's translation into French, in 1559, of Plutarch's Latin (oops! Thank you, Septimus, and thank you, Thomasina) original written in  -- oh, you've got me there -- well, a very long time ago:

"Therefore when she was sent unto by divers letters, both from Antonius himself and also from his friends, she made so light of it and mocked Antonius so much that she disdained to set forward otherwise but to take her barge in the river of Cydnus, the poop whereof was of gold, the sails of purple, and the oars of silver, which kept stroke in rowing after the sound of the music of flutes, howboys, cithernes, viols, and such other instruments as they played upon in the barge. And now for the person of herself: she was laid under a pavilion of cloth of gold of tissue, apparelled and attired like the goddess Venus commonly drawn in picture; and hard by her, on either hand of her, pretty fair boys apparelled as painters do set forth god Cupid, with little fans in their hands, with the which they fanned wind upon her. Her ladies and gentlewomen also, the fairest of them were apparelled like the nymphs Nereides (which are the mermaids of the waters) and like the Graces, some steering the helm, others tending the tackle and ropes of the barge, out of the which there came a wonderful passing sweet savour of perfumes, that perfumed the wharf's side, pestered with innumerable multitudes of people."

Plutarch, Life of Marcus Antonius (XXVI) (North trans.)  

Senator Lieberman is spearheading the Free Speech Protection Act of 2008 and is also a friend of New English Review. Here is the latest press release:

WASHINGTON – Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman, ID-Conn., and Ranking Member Susan Collins, R-Me., are seeking detailed explanations from the Department of Homeland Security regarding a new initiative to secure federal information technology systems.

In a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, the Senators reiterate their support for the Administration’s heightened attention to cyber security as evidenced by creation of the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI). The CNCI, formally established in January, is intended to strengthen the federal government’s ability to secure the electronic networks and databases upon which it relies.

But, given the Administration’s request to triple DHS’ cyber security budget over the past year, the Senators are asking for specific information on issues ranging from the secrecy of the project to its heavy reliance on contractors to the lack of involvement by the private sector, which controls the vast majority of the nation’s cyber infrastructure.

“Overall, we are pleased that the Department is taking additional steps to secure federal computer networks and that you have decided to make cyber security one of the Department’s top four priorities for this year,” the Senators write. “At the same time we believe that increased openness and information sharing with Congress, the private sector, and the American public will aid in the eventual success of the initiative.”

DHS has a significant role to play in implementation of CNCI, which is still under development, although other agencies, including the National Security Agency are also involved. HSGAC conducted a classified briefing on the initiative in March, but the Administration has been reluctant to share unclassified portions of the program with Congress and the public...

Forget all that stuff about camels and needles. Buy your way into Heaven. From The Times:

If you're thinking of shuffling off this mortal coil, it's best to be prepared. Funeral arrangements, wills and pre-emptive farewells to friends and family will make the end so much more ... reassuring. And now, to ease the passage into a stress-free afterlife, you can book a first-class ticket to Heaven. No more Judgment Day, no more temptation from the other place, no more tiresome queues at the Pearly Gates. For just $12.95 (£6), Heaven is but a ride away.

Edgar Kim and Nathan Davis of Tacoma, Washington State, the founders of the website reserveaspotinheaven.com, have done what many before them have failed to do: struck a deal with the Almighty. “We are the only official distributor of reservations into Heaven,” they maintain. “We are directly affiliated and sent down by the Board of Heavenly Officials, the only governing body in Heaven, to offer you one thing and one thing only: a worry-free, secure way into Heaven.”

So what will $12.95 get you? The essential travel kit: not only a first-class ticket to ride but an official Heaven Identification Card and a mini-information guide (so you can avoid culture shock). Upgrade to $15.95 and you can also obtain an all-access VIP pass (which includes admission to the Land of Milk and Honey).

And if damp conditions never did suit you, worry not. For exactly the same price you can swap hymns and the Bible for “shots and strippers” at reserveaspotinhell.com. With a 100 per cent money-back guarantee on all of packages, there's simply nothing to lose. Book now, or forever hold thy peace.

According to the London Evening Standard, journalist Julie Burchill recently turned down a column in The Sun when it refused to pay her £250 (about $500) a word.

What word would be worth £250? I can't think of any word worth that much.

I wish I were paid £250 a word. This post alone would have earned me £15,000.

Bill Warner, as usual, minces no words in this interview in FrontPage:

Warner: ...The word kafir is the worst word in the human language. It is far worse than the n-word, because the n-word is a personal opinion, whereas, kafir is Allah’s decree. Nearly two thirds of the Koran is devoted to the kafir. Islam is fixated on the kafir and the moderate Muslim thinks that you are a kafir. How moderate is that?

FP: I guess not very moderate.

Warner: Well the moderation does not stop there. A moderate Muslim follows Islamic ethics. Not only is the Koran a dualistic document, but also Islamic ethics are dualistic. Islam has one set of rules for Muslims and another set of rules for the kafirs. A Muslim does not lie, cheat, kill, or harm another Muslim. But, if it will advance Islam, a kafir may be cheated, deceived, murdered, tortured and raped. Or a Muslim may treat a kafir like a brother...

FP: Can you expand a bit on reciprocity of altruism?

Warner: Reciprocity of altruism[1] is the very basis of civilization. Islam does not share this trait. This is one of the reasons that Islam is not a part, nor can it be, of kafir civilization. Islam is built on different ethics and logic than the kafirs. Islam’s dualistic ethics prohibit reciprocity of altruism. Islamic civilization and kafir civilization do not share similar values.

So a moderate non-violent Muslim thinks that you are a kafir and that a kafir does not have to be treated the same as another Muslim. The moderate Muslim (Islamic meaning) thinks that you are Allah’s scum and you can be treated like trash. Or not (dualism always has options).

How can such a person be a true friend, if he believes the Koran. In some 14 verses, the Koran says that the Muslim is not the friend of a kafir. But what if the person actually is your friend? We can deal with this very important question if you wish.

In any case, the term moderate Muslim has two totally different meanings. The kafir meaning is warm, fuzzy and incorrect. The Islamic meaning is cruel, precise and correct.

FP: What are some other false kafir names?

Warner: Radical Muslim. Extremist Muslim. Reformed Islam.

What is a radical Muslim? A radical Muslim is capable of harming kafirs. A radical Muslim is a Medinan Muslim, but a Medinan Muslim follows Mohammed’s actions. So killing kafirs is not radical. Harming kafirs follows Mohammed’s example and is pure Islam, not a radical interpretation.

FP: So, overall, what is the real issue here?

Warner: Islam.

These false names used by kafirs are an attempt to humanize Islam. The kafirized naming tries to put the violence (radical, extremist) outside of Islam or suggest that violence is a bizarre interpretation of Islamic doctrine. But Mohammed was involved in a violent episode on the average of every six weeks for his last nine years. Again, Mohammed defines moderation, and the violence is integral to Islam.

The doctrine of both religious and political Islam is based on dualism and submission. The religious doctrine is of no concern to a kafir. It is the politics that concerns kafirs.

Political Islam is based upon dualism and submission. All of humanity is divided into kafirs and Muslims, with not one good word for the kafirs.

Names like “moderate” and “good” are an attempt to link goodness and Islam. But there is no goodness in Islam for the kafir, only for another Muslim. This is extremely harsh, but it is a consequence of the doctrine of political Islam.

If you are well-read in the Islamic political doctrine, you may jump in and say that the Korans says a positive things about Christians and Jews. These few good things are a very few sentences. It is sad to see how Muslims and apologists drag the pitiful few sentences out of the Koran to show the good in Islam for the kafirs. First, compared to the massive amount of hateful, hurtful and evil things said about the kafirs, the few good sentences are statistically insignificant.

But worst of all is that the good verses are contradicted by later doctrine. This is another aspect of dualism.

The doctrine of Islam is not static since it is based upon the life of Mohammed. The doctrine describes a process. The conclusion of that process was annihilation of the native Arab culture with not a single enemy of Mohammed left standing. In the end, there is no good in Islam for the kafir, nothing. That is the conclusion to the process of political Islam. Those “nice, tolerant” verses are temporary tactics to be used while Islam is weak...

Also see Bill Warner's review of Andrew Bostom's new book in this month's NER.

The BBC have not put City Salute on iplayer.  As it was a BBC outside broadcast I can't think why not and I am not the only person loking for it.There is some rather nice video on You Tube taken by a young man I believe to be Brazillian. He couldn't quite get his camera up to the Golden Gallery above the dome to see where the lone piper was playing but he got quite a lot else. Lots of cheers and union flags waving. Well done that man.
The piece read by Ross Kemp was, according to a comment on ARSE the unofficial Army blog, taken from Viscount Slim's memoirs Defeat into Victory: Battling Japan in Burma and India, 1942-1945.

The Josef Fritzl case is certainly one of the strangest cases of mental defect I have ever seen. To elaborate on Theodore Dalrymple's excellent piece in this month's NER, here is Fritzl in his own words:

...“I knew that Elisabeth did not want the things I did to her. I knew that I was hurting her," Mr Fritzl said in notes given by his lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, to an Austrian magazine.

“But the urge to finally be able to taste the forbidden fruit was too strong. It was like an addiction.”

In reality I wanted to have children with her. I was looking forward to the offspring. It was a beautiful idea for me — to have a proper family, also down in the cellar, with a good wife and a couple of children.

“I always wanted to have many children. Not children that would have to, like I had, grow up alone but children that would always have someone to play with. I had a dream about a large family ever since I was a little boy.”

He also confessed to having lured his daughter to the underground dungeon he secretly constructed in the cellar of his home in Amstetten and admitted that he designed and equipped the underground chamber solely for that purpose – claiming to have wanted to protect his daughter from “bad people”.

But he denied having abused Elisabeth sexually at the age of 11 – as she reportedly told police – claiming that he was not a man “that would molest children”...

According to Mr Fritzl, he kept his daughter hostage for several months without sexually assaulting her but gradually started to “lose control” and went to the cellar one night to rape her.

“The urge to have sex with Elisabeth was getting stronger and stronger. It was a vicious circle, a circle from which there was no exit — not only for Elisabeth but also for myself.

“With every passing week in which I kept my daughter captive my situation was getting crazier. I really was thinking about whether I should let her go or not. But I was not able to make that decision, although — or maybe exactly because of that — I knew that with every passing day what I had done would be more severely judged.

“But I was afraid of being arrested and of having my family and everyone out there find out about my crime — and so I postponed my decision again and again. Until one day it was really too late to free Elisabeth and take her upstairs.”

Fritzl also revealed that he had incestuous desires for his mother, Maria, since early childhood but managed to suppress them. His mother raised him on her own and had to take several jobs in order to support them in the years after the Second World War after she separated from her husband, who, according to Fritzl, “was a no-good scoundrel who was cheating on her".

“She was as strict as it was necessary. She was the best woman in the world. And I was her husband in some way. She was the boss at home but I was the only man in the house.

“But I was strong, almost as strong as she was, and I have succeeded in suppressing my desires.”

WHAM: (Rochester, N.Y.) - A 911 dispatcher, Nadire Zelenaj, has been arrested for using computers at work to access secure government Web sites containing information about suspected terrorists. 

Now, the FBI wants to know what she did with that sensitive information. Agents would not comment other than to say it's part of a larger investigation. 

Zenelaj was hired in 2002 after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Her job enables her to access a secured police data site with criminal information.  

However, police allege Zelenaj accessed a terrorist watch list for personal reasons.

A co-worker saw her using the site and became suspicious. Officials tracked her movements between January 2006 and December 2007 and say she visited that site at least 232 times.
 
Richard Vega of the Office of Public Integrity said that, at present, they can only suspect what she’s been up to.

Zenelaj faces 232 felony counts of computer trespass and one count of official misconduct. She was fired in December.

It's hard to say what was really going on here until we find out to whom she was passing the information. This is hardly an isolated incident, however. Jerry Gordon has details on several such cases in this month's NER.

Perhaps Robert Irwin can come fully to his senses, and start re-thinking a whole series of things, including the wisdom, of assigning books on Islam and the Middle East to a small group of the same apologists, including Francis Robinson, Okkidental Dalrymple (sweet singer of heaving passions amid the luxe et volupte of Mughal courts), Tim Winter (who should be properly identified as Abdul Hakim Murad if he is going to continue to appear in the TLS), and the incredible variety of votaries of "Palestianianism" who get in their meretricious licks at Israel in every conceivable, and many scarcely conceivable, ways, no matter what the book under review may seem to be about.

On the other hand, perhaps he can see his way clear to see through Said, but can't undo what decades of drip-drip-drip misinformation about "Palestine" and Israel have done, to him and to so many others, in Great Britain.

And what a pity it is that Varisco's close attention to the rhetorical dishontesties of Said nonetheless ends, apparently, with some display of quite uncalled-for bile against Martin Kramer's original slow-depth-charge aimed at Middle Eastern Studies as conducted by apologists for Islam (Muslim and non-Muslim) in this country. And there is even a bit about so-called "neocons." Apparently Varisco can go so far -- but not farther.

Ibn Warraq is another matter.  He was born and raised within Islam. He's not Western man. He needn't apologize for, or feel embarrassed by, the West. Like Wafa Sultan or Ayaan Hirsi Ali, he knows what is good about the West and he knows what Islam is all about. He doesn't feel a need, after dissecting Said, to declare that he is still on the side of the soi-disant angels of "Palestinianism." He can, in other words, see clearly, all the way to the end.

Would that others, who may see through Said but can't see through what Said stood for and promoted, could.

Josef Fritzl, who repeatedly raped his daughter, justifies himself using the language of victimhood.

“The urge to have sex with Elisabeth was getting stronger and stronger. It was a vicious circle, a circle from which there was no exit — not only for Elisabeth but also for myself."

Fritzl thus equates his own "compulsion" with a massive steel door. Elisabeth literally had no exit. Fritzl's dungeon was merely in his head. Still, there is no excuse so absurd that some therapist won't believe it, and some defence lawyer use it. Cue Oedipus:

Fritzl also revealed that he had incestuous desires for his mother, Maria, since early childhood but managed to suppress them. His mother raised him on her own and had to take several jobs in order to support them in the years after the Second World War after she separated from her husband, who, according to Fritzl, “was a no-good scoundrel who was cheating on her".

Pots and kettles don't seem adequate. At least Fritzl Senior - we assume - was being unfaithful with women he hadn't fathered.

If Fritzl had fathered a child by his mother, what relation would that child be to the children he fathered by his daughter? Who knows, but somebody should give him a vasectomy. There is, as they say, a vas deferens between having children and not having children.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Brussels officials have turned to religious VIPs to help spread the gospel of an environmentally friendly society and increase awareness of climate change in their parishes, as well as promoting tolerance between different confessions in Europe.

Twenty high-level representatives – 19 men and one woman - from European Christian, Jewish and Muslim congregations met in Brussels on Monday (5 may) to discuss the sensitive issues of climate change and reconciliation between peoples...

Prime Minister Jansa, referring to both the Bible and the Koran, said: "Earth was created and given to man, and man has to be respectful of what he has been given," and called for what the late Pope John Paul II described as an "ecological conversion".

"The success in the fights against climate change relies to a great extent on changes in our habits, in our philosophies in our world outlook and the consumer society that has created superficial needs - needs that justify consumption."..

On the second topic of the meeting, "Reconciliation through Intercultural Dialogue", President Barroso underlined the importance of combining freedom of expression and respect for other faiths, in an attempt to sooth both Islamic outrage in recent years and others' fear of Islam.

The above sentence indicates the insanity of moral equivalence or just plain dhimmitude - take your pick. Bat Ye'or talks about dhimmitude as a state of moral confusion, and so it is.

"Islam today is part of Europe. One should not see Islam as outside Europe. We already have an important presence of Islam and Muslims among our citizens," Mr Barroso said, adding that the inter-faith dialogue proved that the "preachers of a clash of civilisations are wrong."

Yes indeed, there will be much less a clash if Europe simply acquiesces and adopts Islam's blasphemy laws - in other words, if Europe institutionalizes dhimmitude.