According to this TV report, Omeed Aziz Popal identified himself as a terrorist after he deliberately mowed down pedestrians with his SUV in front of a Jewish community center. His first victim died and at least 14 others are hospitalized. Police told reporters it was not terrorism and the man's statement was not reported in print. The latest story reports he may have been stressed because he had just gotten married. the bride is from Afghanistan and the marriage was arranged. Uh, yeah, that'll do it every time. (h/t JW)

Let the cover-up begin.

Centanni and Wiig merely experienced what tens of millions of people experienced over 1350 years, and one thinks especially of all those Hindu ancestors of of today's Muslims in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, trying to avoid either death or the slave conditions in which many of them lived or, at best, the condition of humiliation, degradation, and physical insecurity that constituted the lot of the non-Muslim, if he managed to achieve the status of dhimmi, under Muslim rule. Their behavior under threat was understandable, and perfectly excusable.

What, however, is inexcusable, and should bar them forever from reporting on any conflict, or indeed any area, involving Muslims, were those statements -- the mask of neutrality ripped off -- full of praise for the wonderful "Palestinians" and for Islam itself, and the treacly hope expressed that their kidnapping would not lead to any lessening of sympathetic coverage, nay advocacy, of those "Palestinians" and their presumed cause, which is, as we know, the cause of Jihad.

That behavior was intolerable. And yet, to top it all off, at the end, they chose not to stay in wonderful Gaza, with wonderful "Palestinians." No, they headed right for Israel, no doubt to take full advantage -- just like the members of UNIFIL used to -- of Israel's doctors, Israel's kindness, Israel's remarkably and at the same time maddening ability to overlook the malevolence or bias of those who, having demonstrated such bias or malevolence, presume that the Israelis will not take any of it to heart, will not offer them anything but decency, such a contrast to those whom the Centannis, and the Annans, of this world, appear to favor, no matter what happens.

LAS VEGAS - Fugitive polygamist sect leader Warren Steed Jeffs, one of the FBI's 10 most wanted men, was arrested after a routine traffic stop near Las Vegas, traveling with $50,000 in cash, 15 cell phones and three wigs, authorities said on Tuesday.

Jeffs, 50, considered a prophet by his estimated 10,000 followers, was jailed on warrants accusing him of sexual assault and other misconduct on minors in Arizona, and as an accomplice to rape in Utah, the FBI and state law enforcement officials said.

"Now he's going to be held accountable," Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff said of Jeffs' arrest. "Nobody is above the law."

Jeffs, feared as a tyrant by many former members of his sect, is accused of arranging marriages between older men and underage girls in a community that is closed to outsiders. Young men and boys are often forced out to ensure a supply of young brides for male elders.

The sect, long based in an enclave on the twin border towns of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona, split from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when the mainstream Mormon Church banned polygamy more than a century ago.

Jeffs' group is believed to be one of the largest polygamist communities in the United States. A joint Utah-Arizona attorneys general report has estimated that 20,000 to 40,000 Americans still engage in the outlawed practice of plural marriage...

For more on American Mormon polygamy see here.

"Some of them are resenting what they see as Arab imperialism and feeling vestiges of pride in their Malay heritage which is largely derived from Hindu/Bhuddist influences (think Bali).

An excerpt: 'You are a shame to the Malay race for saying that the Arabs are smarter than us. Arabs with all the money and oil in the world, cannot even educate their own. Most smart Arabs are living in Bushland the USA/ England. If you love Tantawi so much, why don't you migrate to Saudi? Nearer the stone what....Oh yes to the rest of the Malays who wants to be Arabs, the ARAB RELIGION is nothing more than piagarisation of the religions of the Middle East, mainly Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism and pagan stone worship all in one...So Melayu, get out of your blind stupor and hypnosis by the Arabs and start living a life, for GOD's sake...It is as though there is an awakening from the shackles of the Arabs and the lies that they attribute to GOD are slowly being exposed and eroded. To all those Melayus who wants to be Arabs, we are watching you from afar. Why watching from afar, because whatever bad that happens to you is because of your own doing and we, the Melayus who do not want to worship stones, have nothing to do with it.'"
-- from a reader in reference to this article

The resentment of non-Arab Muslims for Arab Muslims, so far limited only to the most farseeing and intelligent, should be encouraged in every way. For this is one of the three Great Divides in the Camp of Islam. The two others are: the Sectarian Divide between Sunni and Shi'a (adherents of Ibadiya Islam are far too few to matter), and the Economic Divide between the oil-and-gas rich Muslim states, especially those around the Persian Gulf, and the poor Muslim states, such as Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, and that pseudo-polity and pseudo-people known as the "Palestinian Authority" and the "Palestinian people." The latter group of states and pretend-states have been allowed to come to rely entirely, as their due, both received and given in the spirit of the Jizyah-tribute paid as protection money by non-Muslims to Muslim masters in Dar al-Islam, on foreign aid from Western Europe and North America.

So it would be good for this theme to be repeated by intelligent Muslims, exercising their quasi-freedom of speech in the period before the full darkness of Shari'a descends, during that soomerki svobody, that Twilight of Freedom, for which a melancholic and mandelshtamian note is apposite, appropriate, a positive killer app. Hard to believe that Malalya was, in the early 1950s, not at all a center of Islamic madness, that the Malayan rebellion put down by the British was Communist in its promptings, and that Malaya, or later Malaysia, had not yet succumbed to the steady demographic conquest by Muslims that has been the most important development in the history of the area. Hard to believe, too, that just fifty years ago, in Singapore, the leading political figure among the local labour movement, the man who became the Chief Minister of Singapore following independence, was David Marshall, from a well-known family of Iraqi Jews (formerly located in Mumbai, quondam Bombay, where one of them even had as a fellow classmate young Bhutto, in the pre-Pakistani period of his existence), similar in their histories, if not quite as famous, as the Sassoons and the Kadouries who left Baghdad (in the 1920s, the second Jewish city of Asia, after Jerusalem), and established themselves in Hong Kong and, almost as an aside, also became the founding fathers of that city now seen as the embodiment of modern China, Shanghai.

On a different note, some will recognize in the seemingly unremarkable phrase "the two others are" an echo of the list of unpublishable themes enumerated in "On a Book Entitled 'Lolita'" and wonder if the poster (HF) meant it deliberately. He did. Indeed he did.

I hate to stereotype, so I let others do it for me. With thanks to Mert at JW. (By the way, although the UK is now "the enemy", it is safe for Americans to read this post, inshallah.)

The British are feeling the pinch in relation to recent bombings
and have raised their security level from "Miffed" to "Peeved'.
Soon though, security levels may be raised yet again to "Irritated"
or even "A Bit Cross". Londoners have not been "A Bit Cross" since the
blitz in 1940 when tea supplies all but ran out.

Terrorists have been re-categorised from "Tiresome" to a "Bloody
Nuisance". The last time the British issued a "Bloody Nuisance" warning level was during the great fire of 1666.

Also, the French government announced yesterday that it has raised
its terror alert level from "Run" to "Hide". The only two higher levels
in France are "Surrender" and "Collaborate". The rise was precipitated
by a recent fire that destroyed France's white flag factory, effectively paralysing the country's military capability.

It's not only the English and French that are on a heightened level
of alert.

Italy has increased the alert level from "shout loudly and
excitedly" to "elaborate military posturing". Two more levels remain,
"ineffective combat operations" and "change sides".

The Germans also increased their alert state from "disdainful
arrogance" to "dress in uniform and sing marching songs". They have two higher levels "invade a neighbour" and "lose".

It is no wonder Islam thinks it can win.

But us Brits have another security level that we have been keeping for a special occasion: “Absolutely Bloody Furious”.

Last year I offered a write-in nomination for Karen Armstrong to be awarded the King Faisal Prize, in the category of Services to Islam.

But apparently Armstrong did not make the Saudi grade. Perhaps her bizarre flitting from this to that (what is it this week from the fingers and mind of Karen Armstrong? A treatise on Buddhism? How to Bring World Peace? The Search for Bridey Murphy?) and her favorite forms of recreation -- if rumor reached them -- no doubt offended those dour and so very judgmental Saudi judges. But she didn't win, and I suspect now that she won't. She's become too much a figurine of fun.

But I have another someone, not quite so obviously silly as Karen Armstrong. True, there is that little matter of all those Shambhala shambolic sham books on Sufism, which Saudis would hardly find satisfactory, but there is one sure way to free those judges of their doubtful minds and warm their cold cold hearts. And that way is to point not only to the hagiographical "Following Muhammad" but far more important, to take note of the tireless toiling in the vineyard of the Lor-- no, make that toiling or perhaps lolling in the conquered oases of Muhammad, as shown by the effort -- really, beyond the call of dhimmi duty -- in inveigling or forcing non-Muslim students, right in the heart of what Saudis no doubt think of as hopelessly Christian evangelical country (unaware as they must be of the special case of Chapel Hill, and even of North Carolina, the state that in the last century produced, inter alia, Ava Gardner and Walter Clay Lowdermilk, and is hardly part of the Deep South), to read not only Sells's "Approaching the Qur'an" but as part of further reading on given, large doses of both Esposito and Armstrong.

If such an achievement, which required ignoring the criticism by parents and students, does not merit recognition as a Service to Islam, and beyond that, a well-endowed (va-va-va-voom) prize, offered in recognition of that recognition, then one hardly know what would.

And thus it is for me both a rare privilege, and an honor, to nominate at this very posting, at this most relevant website, Professor Carl Ernst, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, to be the 2007 recipient of the King Faisal Prize.

I am sure a great many people, some of them no doubt Professor Ernst's faculty colleagues, will be happy to second that nomination.

Just as the new vehicle for expressing one's antipathy for The System (whatever The System may be) has become for some who are economically marginal, Islam, some in the ACLU seem not so much eager to get up in the morning and defend, with a sense of the measure, a sense of history, a sense of how vulnerable advanced democracies can be, a sense, even, that Islam is akin to Fascism in many things, including its division of the world, for Believers, between Believers and Infidels, its Complete Regulation of Life, which Believers may not adhere to, but of which they are keenly aware; the Total Explanation of the Universe (which leads the primitive Muslim masses to be far more primitive, and in much more dangerous ways, than the primitive non-Muslim masses) and finally, the discouragement of free and skeptical inquiry intended to protect Islam, but also managing to damage the prospects for better understanding, and amelioration, of the political, economic, and social failures of Muslim societies, within and without the Dar al-Islam, but defend Islam they do.

"Red Diaper" babies, the children not of those accused of being Communists but who really were Communists, could be the subject of study. Those whose parents lit out for the territories -- that is, the territories controlled by Chairman Mao -- and who were raised in Communist China, have returned to the United States, and their employment, as professors of law, as makers of documentary movies about China, and so on, reflect their greater understanding of things. Nothing like a childhood in Communist China to set a Red Diaper baby straight. But those Red Diaper babies who never had the good fortune to experience the awfulness of, say, Soviet Russia or Communist China, and who were raised in the bad old U.S.A., may remain convinced...convinced of what? Not so much Communists, or Trotskyites hawking some paper on Telegraph Avenue or Harvard Square, as the busy students bustle so disappointingly by. Convinced, rather, that the United States remains the main source of evil in the world, and that, it doth follow as the day the night, that Islam, now regarded as the chief threat to "American hegemony" or American somethingorother, needs to be protected, defended, seen not as the menace as it is, not as the fascism it so closely resembles, or as the nazism that in its worst it so obviously can become -- think of those black-balaclaved Kalashnikov-clutching bezonians of Hamas, or Hezbollah, or Al-Qaeda, or Islamic Jihad, think of those collective acts of mass prayer that make any intelligent non-Muslim shudder, where every large mosque expresses and reinforces that collectivism that puts one in mind not of some dimly-remembered songs from the hymnal, but of voices swelling in unison, as Leni Reifenstahl films it all.

One would like to know, one has reason to suspect the answer, how many Red Diaper babies are now beavering away at the upper reaches of the ACLU, performing -- in a different way -- services that will weaken the undeclared but felt enemy (that is, the United States), by supporting, by defending, by everywhere taking on as a matter of moment, even such things as this ridiculous lawsuit by these Muslim football players -- a lawsuit, nonetheless, that represents one more betrayal of the ACLU as it once was, and perhaps might still, under different management and with a truer mandate, become.

Libby Purves was as amused as I was by the Great Betjeman Love Letter Hoax. Do read this story if you haven’t already done so – it is well worth a click. She goes on to argue that it is better to read great writers’ works, rather than their biographies:

In youth I learnt much formative wisdom from Howards End before I ever found out that E. M. Forster was gay, or indeed a bloke at all; I read Evelyn Waugh at 12 in an equal state of uncertainty about the author’s gender, and nonetheless revelled in the acid beauty of the prose.

Later, in long university months of studying Paradise Lost, I dutifully checked up on the politics and religion of the time but felt only a passing interest in the fact that the blind poet dictated it to his daughters (and that interest was mainly because my tutorial partner and I had a theory that the damn thing was meant to be six times as long, only the duty daughter sometimes got bored and sneaked out of the room for a nap leaving Milton orating to the cat). As for Betjeman’s sex life, I find I can read Death in Leamington or In a Bath Teashop without giving a hoot whom he slept with.

So far so unarguable. But what if the poet brings his life experience into his work, and that experience isn’t quite authentic? It appears that Betjeman has been a little economical with the truth. From today’s Times:

JOHN BETJEMAN’S carefully cultivated image of himself as a devil-may-care student who “failed in divinity” at Oxford has been exposed as a myth after the discovery of his examination results.

Far from being unfazed by his failure, as depicted in his biographical poem Summoned by Bells, he resat his compulsory divinity examination twice, passing on the third attempt.

The Poet Laureate fooled the academic community for 40 years by relating only part of his academic record in chapter nine of his poem, published in 1960. “Failed in Divinity! O, towers and spires!/ Could no one help? Was nothing to be done?/ No. No one. Nothing.”

He lamented that his dreams of “Reading old poets in the library,/ Attending chapel in an M.A. gown/ And sipping vintage port by candlelight” had been dashed.

But curators at the Bodleian Library stumbled across his examination results while researching an exhibition to mark the centenary of his birth today.

Judith Priestman, co-curator of the Betjeman exhibition at the library, said that she had argued with the archivist because she could not believe that Betjeman had passed. “That is how he presented himself. He needed myths to keep himself going. But he didn’t leave Oxford as a Byronic figure.

“He was a good boy really. He presented himself as this great outsider, but actually he did jump through the hoops. He wanted to be an aristocrat, and an aristocrat would have said ‘I’ve failed, so what?’ and swanned off. He came back like the good bourgeois that he was.”

Whatever next? Will Philip Larkin’s parents turn out to have been decent sorts after all? I have long suspected they were, and that Larkin was an ungrateful little bastard. But he could hardly say so. In an earlier draft of “This Be The Verse”, Larkin thought about telling the truth:

They’re not so bad, your mum and dad

They try to do their best for you

But he thought better of it.

I read this piece in Armed Forces Journal by Ralph Peters with its Big Bright Idea. I disagree with many of the things said in it, but above all with the belief that the problem with establishing a more "peaceful" Middle East is, for example, to weaken Israel (any further weakening of Israel will whet Muslim appetites), its inattention to the problem of Christians scattered about in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and its assumption that most of the problems are those that can be solved with border changes. Borders are not entirely trivial, but the main problem was, is, and remains Islam. If the prescription were to be followed -- and it is simply a fantasy, fun apparently to write -- and all those borders were somehow to be realigned, how would this weaken the camp of Islam? If every Muslim state in the Middle East no longer has to worry about internal conflicts, because of a conscientiously-applied program of border adjustment and large-scale rearrangement of sectarian and ethnic minorities, why would that make things better for the West or other non-Muslims? Would Islam itself be more peaceful, would its doctrines have changed?

I don't like these kind of fantasy articles, especially when they appear in military journals and temporarily find enthusiasts for the wrong things -- it is not the Saudi mismanagement of Mecca and Medina that is the basis of unhappiness with the regime, it is the entire regime, and its appropriation of much of the nation's wealth, and in order to protect the continuance of corruption, its compensatry . I don't agree with much of it, including its implications for Lebanon and Israel.

The question I would ask is not whether the individual Muslim states would have an easier time of it, but whether the Camp of Islam, as a whole, would be weakened as a result, or not. The one important goal that Peters mentions, as has been mentioned by all kinds of people, is the usefulness of creating a free Kurdistan. He argues for it on moral grounds (36 million Kurds, etc.). He says nothing about the importance of establishing an example of a non-Arab Muslim people throwing off Arab domination, and thereby inspiring other non-Arab Muslim peoples, such as the Berbers or the black African Muslims of Darfur. Nor does he consider the possibility that constant unsettlement of Syria and Iran, by its Kurdish population, might occupy and preoccupy both of those countries, and the effects would be better than if somehow, magically, the Kurdish-populated areas were to become part of Kurdistan.

Finally, his analysis of what is the source of discontent is often flatly wrong. In Saudi Arabia he thinks it is the Saudi role in Mecca and Medina. That may annoy people outside Saudi Arabia, and Sami Agarwal the Saudi architect, and a few others may deplore the destruction of old Ottoman forts and even older sites in both cities, but the real fury is directed at something unlikely to change: the appropriation of much of the country's oil wealth by the 30,000 or so princes, princelings, and princelettes, who have no intention of giving it up, as little as they would their role as Guardians of the Two Holy Places.

This suggested scheme to rearrange all the borders of the Middle East is fantasy, but not useful fantasy. It ignores the real problem for Infidels, which is Islam, and were it somehow to be carried out it would not necessarily weaken, and might even strengthen, the individual components, the Muslim-dominated "nation-states" that in Islam possess less significance than they do in the non-Muslim world, for to Believers it is the Umma that matters, and the nation-state an artificial and unnecessary construct.

As a fantasy, it is little different from those lists made by young girls, as they sit dreaming in class, in which they take their own first name, and then ring changes on the last names, supplying those of potential husbands: Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt, Wentworth Miller. And during that class period, during which Mrs. Caruso was boringly talking about tomorrow's test and what they should study for it, by the time the bell rings, all that Kimberley has to show for the hour is a sheet of paper with her name, and ten or fifteen possible married names -- Kimberley Depp, Kimberley Pitt, Kimberley Miller. Fun for Kimberley, but when she has to take the test tomorrow, she won't be laughing.

Michiko Kakutani lets 'er rip today in her review of Jonathan Franzen's new book “The Discomfort Zone":

In his new memoir, “The Discomfort Zone,” Mr. Franzen turns his unforgiving eye on himself and succeeds in giving us an odious self-portrait of the artist as a young jackass: petulant, pompous, obsessive, selfish and overwhelmingly self-absorbed. He tells us that as a child he was “a small glutton for attention, forever turning conversations to the subject of myself.” He tells us that he felt put upon by public entreaties to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina. (“Why should I pony up for this particular disaster?”) And he tells us that he used to find it difficult to enjoy nature’s beauty: a hike up to a spectacular summit was never enough; instead he would imagine himself “in a movie with this vista in the background and various girls I’d known in high school and college watching the movie and being impressed with me.”

While some readers will want to give Mr. Franzen points for being so revealing about himself, there is something oddly preening about his self-inventory of sins, as though he actually reveled in being so disagreeable. And while it doubtless takes a degree of self-absorption for anyone to write a memoir, in the case of this book the author’s self-involvement not only makes for an incredibly annoying portrait, but also funnels the narrative into a dismayingly narrow channel.

 The New Duranty Times has the story:

Enas al-Kaldi stops in the hallway of her Islamic school for girls and coaxes her 6-year-old schoolmate through a short recitation from the Koran.

“It’s true that they don’t understand what they are memorizing at this age, but we believe that the understanding comes when the Koran becomes part of you,” Ms. Kaldi, 16, said proudly.

In other corners of Damascus, women who identify one another by the distinctive way they tie their head scarves gather for meetings of an exclusive and secret Islamic women’s society known as the Qubaisiate.

At those meetings, participants say, they are tutored further in the faith and are even taught how to influence some of their well-connected fathers and husbands to accept a greater presence of Islam in public life.

These are the two faces of an Islamic revival for women in Syria, one that could add up to a potent challenge to this determinedly secular state. Though government officials vociferously deny it, Syria is becoming increasingly religious and its national identity is weakening. If Islam replaces that identity, it may undermine the unity of a society that is ruled by a Muslim religious minority, the Alawites, and includes many religious groups...

This week's pseud lives in Charlotte Street, and discusses bruschetta as barthesian mytheme. Readers of Harry's Place will have seen this before, but it deserves another outing:

I saw in the paper the other day another snide reference to the 'bruschetta brigade'. What is the imitative zeal that sends a phrase like the ‘brushetta brigade’ through the press and blogosphere? What makes it so infectious?...

‘Bruschetta’ has the added advantage of sounding foreign – there is always something somehow foreign and unpatriotic about these intellectuals, non? Thus, the phrase glides along grooves ideologically pre-prepared. It is little more than a Barthesian mytheme.

Finally, there was also, in the ‘bruschetta brigade’ trope a more specific project, a familiar rhetorical trick or fallacy whereby you discolour a particular argument through tying it to some disliked group. (Of course, referring an argument back to the question of 'who speaks' is basic sophistry). In this case, the particular suggestion was that the anti-war argument was somehow the preserve of an ensconced and self-referential metropolitan elite. This is course is nonsense, but (nonsense + familiar mytheme) quickly congeals into fact.

Dr. Carl W. Ernst, professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a leading scholar of Islam, received a major new prize from an Arab cultural organization in Cairo on July 4.

Ernst was awarded the prize for his recent book Following Muhammad: Rethinking Islam in the Contemporary World (UNC Press). - from this news item

Why do I suspect that "Following Muhammad" would not be recognized by Snouck Hurgronje, or St. Clair Tisdall, or Sir William Muir, or Tor Andrae, or Maxine Rodinson, or David Margoliouth,or Joseph Schacht, or Ignaz Goldziher, as presenting a recognizable view of Muhammad, while the straightforward presentation of Muhammad's life, as set down by the most authoritative Muslim biographers, which is what Robert Spencer has done in his forthcoming (October 9) biography of Muhammad -- "polemical" and "unscholarly" as Ernst may try to dismiss it, as will 3/4 of the membership of MESA Nostra, while the remaining 1/4 will be secretly delighted with Spencer's book, and only wish that they had dared to produce something similar, but had too much, departmentally, to lose, so it required an intelligent outsider to do the necessary job, and Spencer came along, and did it.

A few years ago, entering freshman at the University of North Carolina were required to read "Approaching the Qur'an: The Early Revelations" by Michael Sells. This bowdlerized version of the Qur'an, turning it into some kind of cross between Rumi and Omar Khayyam, conveyed absolutely nothing to those hapless freshman about what Islam, or about what the Qur'an, is all about. Leaving aside the Sunna, reducing the Qur'an to those softer "Meccan" suras," it was a guide to nothing at all.

Sells himself, I think, may even be coming around to the fact that his recension has missed something. He may, by degrees, come to realize that his "Approaching the Qur'an" deceives. But he has his own investment in it, and perhaps his reluctance to realize the folly of offering young people, young Americans, a further prolonging of their misunderstanding and naive trust that "all religions teach the same thing" -- of course they don't -- might be understood on that basis (it would be fascinating to hear from Michael Sells himself on whether he now has just a bit of a doubt about what, for example, the great Western scholars of Islam, and of the Qur'an -- let's try to imagine what Crone or Hawting or Ibn Warraq or Luxenburg would make of this, or what any of the thousands of native speakers of Arabic who have become defectors from Islam would say about the pedagogic value of "Approaching the Qur'an."

Yet Carl Ernst, a professor at the University of North Carolina who taught Islam, was all for this exercise in disinformation. He saw nothing wrong, he saw everything right, in pushing this forced mental march through what essentially is no different from the propaganda of an army of apologists who, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, have been having the time of their lives pulling the wool, through the deployment of taqiyya and tu-quoque, over the eyes of all kinds of unsuspecting Infidels.

So at least one question -- not a debate question in the context of some non-appearance with Robert Spencer, but a question that has been waiting to be put, so that a clear answer might be given, needs to be pointedly put to Carl Ernst, who no doubt is infuriated by the notion that anyone outside the cozy and well-patrolled confines of MESA, MESA Nostra, should have the gall to ask him anything, much less expect him to supply an answer.

But such a question exists. And Carl Ernst owes an answer to that question, owes it to the affected students who in the past were required to derive their knowledge of Islam from "Approaching the Qur'an," owes it to the parents of those students, owes it to other faculty members in the University of North Carolina system who may not like the idea, may not approve of the idea, of that kind of apologetics calling into question support for the university, from intelligent and inquisitive alumni, and trustees, and members of the North Carolina legislature. Not everyone on that faculty is a wilting violet, not all will be inclined to defer to his "credentials" and his "expertise" quite so readily as he may think -- there are all kinds of deservedly self-assured people on the faculty there who may have taken it upon themselves, in the years since that brouhaha over Required Reading, to find out for themselves, by reading and studying, not only what the Qur'an contains, but what it means, and what "naskh" or abrogation means, and further, what the hadith are all about, and what is the tremendous significance of Muhammad, uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil, and every detail of his life, including the Khaybar Oasis attack, the decapitation of the Banu Qurayza, the assassinations of Asma bint Marwan and Abu Akaf, and of course little Aisha, on her swing, and with her toys.

And this is the question:

Why did you, Carl Ernst, who knows the contents of the Qur'an, knows about the interpretive doctrine of abrogation, knows the hundreds of violent verses against the Unbeliever, knows what the Qur'an has been taken to mean through time and space by Believers, knows of the uncompromising division between Believer and Infidel, knows what the Hadith -- the Hadith of Al-Bukhari and Muslim -- further offer as a gloss on the Qur'an, and what the Sira, the biography or biographies of Muhammad, offer by way of the Perfect Man suitable for emulation -- why did you not only see nothing wrong, but everything right with the idea of inflicting, as a requirement, on innocent incoming freshman, at a time when it was clear that an intelligent knowledge of Islam was important for reasons of national security, and was not something to be trifled with -- why were you so enthusiastic about the use of that so-called version of the Qur'an, that travesty known as "Approaching the Qur'an: The Early Revelations" (or was it "The Lyrical Suras" -- I forget) which even its compiler, one suspects, must be beginning to question.

Answer your colleagues. Answer those students and their parents. Answer discontented alumni, and trustees, and members of the legislature of North Carolina, some of whom will have the contents of this query made known to them, and not all of them are likely to be charitable when egregious examples of educational malpractice are brought to their attention.

I have been enjoying a few books on holiday, courtesy of Norfolk Library Service and WH Smiths of Norwich. The one I finished most recently is Margrave of the Marshes, the autobiography (in part) of the later John Peel, the DJ and music writer. I say part autobiography as he died unexpectedly in October 2004 and the book was completed by his family from his notes and their own knowledge.

His son describes his father as "immortalised in Pseuds Corner of Private Eye for writing that the music of Pink Floyd evoked the sound of dying galaxies."  It was his Sunday afternoon show Top Gear that was responsible in 1969 for forming my musical taste and introducing me to the sound of Marc Bolan's Tyrannosaurus Rex, Pink Floyd and David Bowie.  He also introduced reggae music to British radio.

His dry wit was a feature of his writing and later radio shows which were of more general interest. His wife  described how he would attempt to assist their daughter Alexandra with her school essays, with hints on how to hold a reader's interest.

"Dad" she reasoned "it's about female genital mutilation.  There's not a great deal of scope there for humour".  All credit to her school for raising the subject, and to her parents for discussing it, and being prepared to mention it.

I can recommend the book and not just to music lovers.

"Dozy bint" is a term I use for a Western woman who voluntarily assumes the yoke of Islam, or for a Western woman who is sympathetic to Islam, an ideology which, "as any fule kno", is the most misogynist on the planet.

Yvonne Ridley, a mediocre journalist, converted to Islam after being held captive by the Taliban. To call this Stockholm syndrome is an insult to the country that gave us Abba and a half-decent joke about a man in a chemist.

Recently she interviewed former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir "The Jews rule this world by proxy" Mohamad. With thanks to Harry's Place, a philosemitic blog of the "decent Left", here is a taster:

Enough said.

Robert asks how to pronounce "Betjeman".

Betjeman was quintessentially English, which means that his name is pronounced so as to confuse foreigners.

It is pronounced in the same way as Beauchampsmain, that is  "Bitch-mun".

Not really. Bet-she-mun is about right.