"the right-wing daily Le Figaro..."
-- from this news item

Why "right-wing"? Because Robert Hersant once owned it? Because it manages, from time to time, not to attack the United States? Because it carries articles critical of Islam, such as those by the acute Yvan Rioufol? What makes Le Figaro "right-wing"? And is Figaro Madame for "right-wing" women? Is Figaro Litteraire for "right-wing" chers maitres, plume in hand and Gidean cap on head?

Why is Le Monde simply Le Monde, even if for years Michel Tatu for years was prevented from writing what he really wished to write about the Soviet Union, even if Peroz-Hugoncel was taken off the Middle East beat right after he published "Le radeau de Mahomet," even if Eric Rouleau, ardent admirer of Arafat and Khomeini, hater of Israel, was for years the Supreme Ruler of the Middle Eastern rubric at Le Monde?

Why is it never, ever "the left-wing Le Monde" but only "Le Monde"? But "Le Figaro," despite publishing, in the past, such writers as Annie Kriegel in the 1970s and 1980s, and more recently Alain Finkielkraut, Homeric-epithetly the "right-wing Figaro"?

Why?

Respondez, o ye gods and goddesses of the French intellectual ruling class, s'il vous plait. And make it snappy. 

As in Oliver Norvell Hardy? 'Make It Snappy' - from reader 

As in Stanlio and Olio in...well, possibly "Sbrigati!"? [If that isn't the translation of the movie title in question, it should be.]

Well, why not?

Many will have a stake in denying or stifling this -- the beginning of what should have been obvious long ago, and had it been obvious long ago, both in Western Europe and in the United States, would have permitted the former to severely limit Muslim immigration, and the latter from the messianic and fabulously wasteful schemes currently still being engaged in in tarbaby Iraq.

But it's a start, a hint, a glint, a glimmer of common sense coming from somewhere.

Looks like the Pentagon is finally getting it. WND has this story:

...But internal Pentagon briefings show intelligence analysts have reached a wholly different conclusion after studying Islamic scripture and the backgrounds of suicide terrorists. They've found that most Muslim suicide bombers are in fact students of the Quran who are motivated by its violent commands – making them, as strange as it sounds to the West, "rational actors" on the Islamic stage.

Palestinian child pretends he's a suicide bomber

In Islam, it is not how one lives one's life that guarantees spiritual salvation, but how one dies, according to the briefings. There are great advantages to becoming a martyr. Dying while fighting the infidels in the cause of Allah reserves a special place and honor in Paradise. And it earns special favor with Allah.

"Suicide in defense of Islam is permitted, and the Islamic suicide bomber is, in the main, a rational actor," concludes a recent Pentagon briefing paper titled, "Motivations of Muslim Suicide Bombers."

Suicide for Allah a 'win-win'

"His actions provide a win-win scenario for himself, his family, his faith and his God," the document explains. "The bomber secures salvation and the pleasures of Paradise. He earns a degree of financial security and a place for his family in Paradise. He defends his faith and takes his place in a long line of martyrs to be memorialized as a valorous fighter.

"And finally, because of the manner of his death, he is assured that he will find favor with Allah," the briefing adds. "Against these considerations, the selfless sacrifice by the individual Muslim to destroy Islam's enemies becomes a suitable, feasible and acceptable course of action." ...

DW carries a post today on the inaccuracies of the on-line reference site Wikipedia, which links to this article by Seth Finkelstein of The Grauniad (twice in a week, for a paper I only allow in the house when my husband is job hunting, the times they are a-changing indeed).

Wikipedia describes itself as "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit". With some minor exceptions, anyone can change any article - for good or ill. While the benefits of such a low barrier for participation have been widely touted, the concomitant problems are less well known. Such as, what if you find yourself in it, but don't want to be?  . . . For people who are not very prominent, Wikipedia biographies can be an "attractive nuisance". It says, to every troll, vandal, and score-settler: "Here's an article about a person where you can, with no accountability whatsoever, write any libel, defamation, or smear. It won't be a marginal comment with the social status of an inconsequential rant, but rather will be made prominent about the person, and reputation-laundered with the institutional status of an encyclopedia."

A friend of mine is mentioned periferally in Wikipedia.  He is a part time guitarist with a classic rock covers band. 30 years ago he was full time professional and played with several men who went on in, out and into again a band, and bands, which eventually achieved sufficient commercial and professional success to merit the aforesaid Wikipedia entry. I showed his name to my friend. The only correct fact was the spelling of his and his friend's names. He didn't join the Band X in 1977, it was 1976. The drummer didn't join from Band Y, but Band Z, and went to to join Band Y two, not 3 years later. And so on. 

Apparently the internet site which has the history of these bands more or less correct is the Encyclopaedia Metallicum. I knew Wikipedia had it's faults. I have never used it for anything since.

MEMRI: In a critique of the Muslim Brotherhood movement, reformist Egyptian intellectual Dr. Sayyed Al-Qimni explained why he does not believe that the movement has changed its ways and has decided to integrate into civil society. He argued that the movement assumes many guises and forms many conflicting alliances in order to further its own interests. Al-Qimni further claimed that its aim is not to serve Islam but to come to power.(1)

This critique is Al-Qimni's first article since his July 2005 announcement - which followed death threats against him by Islamic extremists - that he was retracting everything he had ever written and that he would no longer write.(2)

Brave man.

In last week’s Spectator (subscription required), Matthew Parris, Prime Minister manqué, lamented his more limited role as hair care consultant:

It was never meant to be like this. I have become an alternative, counter-cultural hair-care consultant. The road from aspirant Cabinet minister to agony uncle of the hair and scalp has been tortuous, rarely appearing to lead where I now see it was always going. But there were glimpses. When a decade ago I wrote in the Times about stumbling (while camping in South America) on a great truth: that if you stop washing your hair with de-greasants it begins to get less greasy rather than more — the lively and inquisitive response from readers should have alerted me to my future career path. But still I thought there was a role for me as a serious columnist, guiding and advising the nation on the best political direction for our country.

Even the job of serious columnist had represented a lowering of sights. Nearly ten years earlier I had entered Parliament with lively youthful hopes of one day becoming prime minister. Slowly these had faded…

There were columns about the future of the Conservative party. Nobody listened. There were urgent essays about the need to improve the means of storing electricity. Few cared. My treatise on the pointless extravagance of trams fell stillborn from the press. And from time to time someone would say, ‘Didn’t you write a column, ages ago, about not washing your hair? I’ve always remembered that. Were you serious? Did you keep it up?’

I’m not proud. So a couple of months ago, on the tenth anniversary of that hair-wash column, I wrote it again. My Times Notebook was able to bring readers up to date with a decade’s happy and successful experience of washing my hair with only warm water.

Letters flooded in. Outraged hairdressers protested. Scalp specialists were invited to comment. … In a television studio Francis Maude actually ran his fingers through my hair to see if it was as fluffy and clean as I was claiming….You can keep up with your emails almost anywhere these days, using internet cafés. So we had not been long in South America before the Times started forwarding messages and questions from readers. They were about hair. All about hair. One man in Dorset had been following the Parris Method for more than a month, and wanted me to know that after an initial greasiness (I did warn of that) things were on the mend. How long before the hair returned to normal, he asked? Had I any tips for his cold-water hair-wash routine?

Time was spent at a screen in Bogotá helping with this query. ‘There’s no need for the water to be cold,’ I found myself tapping on to the machine, ‘but you should wash the hair thoroughly just as with shampoo. Stand right under the shower rose throughout your shower so the hair gets a good, long rinse....

Matthew Parris feels he has much more to offer, and has been unfairly pigeonholed. He is not the only one.

Think of Tony Robinson, the actor and political campaigner, presenter on Classic FM and of the popular archaeology television series Time Team, and debunker, in a television documentary, of the Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.  Robinson may be all these things, but to most of us, he will always be Baldrick, grubby, buffoonish servant of Edmund Blackadder, whose catch phrase “I have a cunning plan” is trotted out with mind numbing regularity by any new people he meets.

Python fans will recall the interview with one of the world’s leading modern composers, Arthur “Two Sheds” Jackson (no relation), in which he begs to be allowed to talk about his music rather than his sheds:

Jackson: No, no. Look. This shed business - it doesn't really matter. The sheds aren't important. A few friends call me Two Sheds and that's all there is to it. I wish you'd ask me about the music. Everybody talks about the sheds. They've got it out of proportion - I'm a composer. I'm going to get rid of the shed. I'm fed up with it!

Host: Then you'll be Arthur "No Sheds" Jackson, eh?

There is something in human nature that makes us home in on the trivial. Why, when asked for a quotation from Death of a Salesman, do I immediately think of "these goddam arch supports are killin' me"? It is hardly the most important line in the play, so I cannot imagine why it stuck in my mind, along with, from King Lear, "Pray you, undo this button," and "Lurk, lurk."

Shakespeare had the good sense not to leave too many clues about his life. Even that second best bed seems to exercise us far more than it should. We know little about Jesus, for example which sandal he put on first, what colour his hair was or whether he was left handed. If those things were known, human nature being what it is, the imitation of Christ would be banal and literal minded, as is the imitation of Mohammed.

Moral: if you want to be a leader of men, avoid personal grooming tips. Nobody knows what shampoo Churchill used, although I suspect he got by with just the one bottle.

Every time "Palestinian" prisoners are mentioned, Samir Kuntar and his act of derring-do (a "hero" of the "Palestinian" resistance) should be recalled. And make sure you have every detail straight. Did Samir Kuntar first smash in the skull of the older girl, the five-year-old, in front of her helpless father, and then kill him, or did Samir Kuntar, that "beacon of light," first kill the father in front of his five-year-old daughter, and then smash her head against rocks on the beach?

Samir Kuntar. One of the "Palestinian" prisoners whose freedom is most insistently demanded by other "Palestinians" and identical non-"Palestinian" Arabs, for Samir Kuntar was so notably brave, so outstandingly admirable.

That is the "Palestinian" "Authority." That is the "Palestinian" cause. Those are the "Palestinians."

Tariq Ramadan has once again been disallowed entry into the United States.

Who will translate into English "Frere Tariq" by Catherine (no, sorry, Caroline) Fourest, which tells you all you need to know? Now that Ramadan has been exposed in France, both through his televised debates and through articles and books by no-nonsense people who set out his sinister taqiyya-and-tu-quoque, he had to get out of the French-speaking arena. His contract was not renewed at the University of Geneva. It was time to head to the English-speaking-world, where Fourest and others were not read, and he could start anew.

Some American TV channel would do well to obtain footage of Tariq Ramadan's two televised debates, one with Nicolas Sarkozy, and the other with Alain Finkielkraut. It would be well worth dubbing and showing both, and showing them again. Sarkozy dismembered him; Finkielkraut made mincemeat of what remained. A sight to see. It does not take much; he is such an obvious, even if soft-spoken and sly practitioner of taqiyya (he told a radio questioner once who dared to mention "taqiyya" -- Ramadan was startled at hearing the word, but knew he could not deny the practice outright -- that "taqiyya" is limited to Shi'a; we were given to understand that, therefore, Sunnis never ever lie about Islam, they just don't have it in them, and Ramadan is Sunni, so no need to worry). He is also a master of tu-quoque, omission, and stony silence. One has to be as willing to be fooled, as are the Scott Applebys (of the Kroc Center, would-be eager benefactor of Tariq Ramadan) of this world, to fall for a Tariq-Ramadan. That doesn't mean that various NPR talk-show hosts and others won't do so, for foolishness is in fashion. But it takes some doing.

Now we read in the papers that "Tariq Ramadan is teaching at Oxford." Sounds good to American ears. But Ramadan has been given a temporary post at a graduate college, St. Antony's, Oxford (Middle Eastern wing) -- not to be confused with St. Antony's College, Oxford (Russian and East European wing). In its Middle Eastern wing, St. Antony's has been a center for Arab propagandists. It was founded with money provided by the estate of Antoine or Anton Besse, a Jewish trader in the Yemen, who would not have been pleased with how his money has been spent. Within a year of its founding, the Middle Eastern part of St. Antony's became the sole fiefdom of Albert Hourani, and remained so for several decades. It is where Rashid Khalidi received his D.Phil. (no courses required), writing up stuff on the "Palestnian people" not noticeably dissimilar from what he had been producing as a PLO propagandist in Beirut as a thesis.

It is also where the Arab world's favorite Israeli, Avi Shlaim, now tries to ignore Islam, and it is the place that offered Tariq Ramadan a place from which, temporarily, to conduct his "work" in England -- that is, his campaigns of Da'wa and dissimulation, of teaching British Muslims to cool it, temporarily, and of talking incessantly about how "we are here to stay" and "we are creating European Islam." This nonsense about the creation of a "European Islam" is presented with all sorts of soft-voiced earnestness, but the actual distinguishing contents of that "European Islam" are carefully left undescribed. Certainly whatever might distinguish it from ordinary, Middle Eastern Islam, and how the Qur'an and Hadith and Sira would differ for adherents of this promised "European Islam," is never quite gotten to, in the many presentations by Tariq Ramadan.

Despite ending up in England, Ramadan has kept his eye firmly on the prize: the United States. It is there that he wishes to conduct his campaign, among those whom he must sense are sufficiently stupid to give him free rein. Why would he think otherwise? He does not sense any Sarkozys or Finkielkrauts or Fourests lying in wait. His contact with Americans has been with the likes of Scott Appleby, head of the Kroc Center. Joan Kroc, widow of the man who proudly claimed Six Billion Served, wanted to do good like so many of the very rich. Being unable, also like so many of the very rich, to choose wisely, she decided in her lavish will to help promote "world peace" -- which these days means that money will always somehow end up being handed out by the scott-applebys to the tariq-ramadans of this dialoguing-to-death, getting-to-yes, all-gods-chillun-want-exactly-the-same-thing-if-only-we-understood-one-another world.

Tariq Ramadan is a worthy grandson of that grandsire who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, Hassan al-Banna, the demagogue who used to whip up Cairene crowds so that, in fits of post-speech enthusiasm, they would then go out and attack Copts and Jews. He refuses to distance himself from his great relative: "he was my grandfather," he says, his voice full of filial piety. Would that answer satisfy you if instead of Tariq Ramadan, the person being interviewed was, say, the grandson of Martin Bormann?

For the take of an Egyptian Muslim who now lives in Italy, and who has become largely a truth-teller about Islam, the celebrated Magdi Allam, see his book "Vincere la paura." In it, he includes a "Lettera aperta a Tariq Ramadan" -- an Open Letter to Tariq Ramadan, in which he says, as one Egyptian Muslim to another, as someone intimately familiar with the Muslim Brotherhood founded by Ramadan's grandfather and with its network of agents throughout Europe (some of whom are quite close to Tariq Ramadan), he can write with authority: "I know you, Tariq Ramadan. I know all about you. You do not fool me." (This is not verbatim, but my recalled summary, distilling the essence of Magdi Allam's comment).

Why he should be taken seriously, or treated with respect, at this point, this sly creature who wears on his sleeve his slyness, is beyond me.

Translate that Fourest book and that Allam essay. Dub and broadcast those French television debates. Find out about Tariq Ramadan, that apparent master (for those who are ready to be led by the nose) of soft-spoken Taqiyya.

No one is forcing American Infidels to play the gull, the fool, the sap made fun of throughout history, now buying a bottle of political patent-medicine, now sending money to a Nigerian who apparently needs it in order to obtain the proceeds from his late father's bank account, which proceeds will of course be shared with the kind American who sends a nominal sum -- oh, $25,000 will do nicely for now.

That's the kind of idiocy one can live with. But the idiocy of those who refuse to study Tariq Ramadan, who refuse to understand his roots, his friends, his supporters, his aims, his insidiousness -- well, unlike the man who sends his life savings to a post office box in Nigeria, the folly in this case affects the rest of us, damages us, makes us all less secure.

And that we should not tolerate.

Keep him out. As Magdi Allam would insist: Non mollare. Do not relent.

A welcome development from Germany:

TimesOnline: THE German Government tried yesterday to defuse an international row that erupted after a nervous opera house called off a Mozart performance because it featured the decapitated head of the Prophet Muhammad.

The opera, Idomeneo, has become a test case of how far the West should go in making concessions to the Islamic world. The Deutsche Oper, one of Europe’s top opera houses, scrapped the production for fear of an Islamic backlash. ..

The decision to call off the performances of Idomeneo was made by Kerstin Harms, the director of the Deutsche Oper, after she read a security assessment by the Berlin police...

Frau Harms has remained adamant that security was more important than the performance. But she received little support from her fellow artists or from the media.

Across the globe, she was accused of caving in to Muslim sensitivities. “Never in German culture has there been such a display of pre-emptive subservience,” said Der Standard, the Austrian daily. Other newspapers accused her directly of cowardice and surrendering Western cultural values. Her decision came on the eve of the Islamic summit in Berlin between German ministers, representatives of registered Islamic associations and independent Muslim writers and artists working in Germany. The aim was to reach a mutually acceptable definition of the limits of tolerance...

Of course, Tariq Ramadan could be teaching at Yale or a University Professorship at Princeton (well-appointed office right next to that of Cornel West, nubile secretary and adoring studentesse, the whole works), or possibly a Visiting Professorship arranged by Leila Ahmad, William Graham, and Diana Eck at Harvard Divinity School, under the auspices of the Pluralism Project. Not to speak of the unspeakable MEALAC program at Columbia. Oh, there are so many possibilities, so many possible slots that Ramadan, the natural inheritor of the scholarly mantle of Joseph Schacht and Arthur Jeffery, could fill.

"the Caroline / Catherine gaffe again. I will now Google to see which is correct. Yep, it's Caroline. Maybe she should change her name to Zenaida so there's no more confusion."
-- from a reader

Caroline, not Catherine. Caroline Fourest. Carolina on my mind. A great-smoky forest or fourest in Carolina. Nothing could be finer/than forays in Carolina/in the morning. Got it.

As for your insistence that confusion disappears when the armful of warm girl in question is called Zenaida, are you quite sure? Was Beerbohm's Bumps-and-Balliol heroine Zenaida Dobson, or Zuleika? Was Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev's Unter-den-Linden nostril-tensing love Zuleika Mertz, or Zinaida? Was Geoffrey Scott's book on Isabelle de Charrière and Benjamin Constant “The Portrait of Zélide” or was it “The Portrait of Zénaide”?

You get the idea. And no mnemonic melody, such as that hummed in the first paragraph, exists to remind one when it is Zenaida and not either Zuleika or Zélide, or vice-versa, or twice-vice-versa, and it becomes especially difficult to avoid making a fateful mistake when there are not two but three graces in question, and their confusable names are Zenaida, Zuleika, and Zélide, each girl more captivating, winsome, and sweetly wanton than the next.

Harry's Place, philosemitic blog of the decent Left, has made available this short documentary by David Aaronovitch, in which the Red-Green Alliance is thoroughly skewered.

You may not agree with Aaronovitch's views on a "two-state solution" in "Palestine", but as he points out, the Islamists are the last people to want this, or any other compromise. This documentary is essential viewing, particularly for those Americans - and sadly there are many - who believe that Britain is lost to Dhimmitude.

Pakistan has a nuclear program based on the thefts of secrets by "Dr." A. Q. Khan, national hero of Pakistan, and willing sharer -- a Secret Sharer -- of such secrets with Iran and North Korea. Pakistan has been the incubator and promoter and supporter of the Taliban, the same Pakistan that has just announced plans to make 40-50 nuclear weapons a year.

Pakistan is a land of impoverished masses who find their solace in Islam and only Islam, while the anglophone families of zamindars and generals are hardly Muslims in their own lives. Their children enjoy English and American universities. Some of those children -- such as the son of the untrustworthy, but bearing-the-allure-of-rectitude Musharraf -- choose to remain (and why not? You would too), making their permanent lives in the Infidel West. (Did Musharraf himself pass out from the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, like so many of those "trustworthy" and "pro-Western" Terry-Thomas-mustachioed Pakistani generals who for decades won the heart of American generals and civilian policymakers?) It is understandable that military men stay in Pakistan, for if you are not a zamindar, it is the best way to obtain power and money, but your children may head geographically Infidel-wards. English is not a problem. Musharraf’s son, when last he was in the news, was working as an accountant in Massachusetts.

Many of the richest Pakistanis, though they have chosen the sanity and safety of Infidel lands for their children (and for temporary frequent retreat for themselves), have apparently not used their mental freedom sufficiently. They have not bethought themselves about the nature of Islam and its connection to the hideous condition of Pakistan itself -- its political, economic, social, and intellectual failures. They have not considered the failure of Islamic countries in general, a failure directly attributable to the tenets and attitudes and atmospherics of Islam. Some of the most famous are sly defenders of the faith, even as they deplore terrorism. Ahmad Rashid, for example, for so long a correspondent for The Telegraph, and now made famous as an "expert" on the Taliban, declares in his "Jihad" that the word's primary meaning is that of the inner struggle rather than the outward war on Infidels.

Meanwhile, those zamindars permit or do not try to stop, and many of those generals support (see General Malik's book-length treatment of Jihad) the role of Pakistan in promoting terrorism against Hindus in Kashmir, and deep within India. And they offer refuge as well to Indian Muslims implicated in such terrorism. Where is that leader of the Mumbai underworld, the one now hiding from Indian authorities after the last terrorist attack? In Pakistan. Where is the ISI that has done nothing to stop, and much to promote, Lashkar-e-Toiba as it once promoted the Taliban? In Pakistan.

But it is not Pakistan alone that is the problem. It is India's appeasement of Pakistan, an appeasement possibly born of fear of local Muslim reaction. The Indian government, as Tavleen Singh points out in a recent article, continues to avoid admitting to itself, and is keeping carefully from the people of India, the existence of domestic Muslim terrorists who are self-propelled -- for fear of the reaction of Hindus, and what measures might then might be demanded, or might need to be taken. The government of India, just as governments of the Western world, is hiding the evidence of support of every kind for Muslim terrorists in Mumbai and elsewhere in India.

Pakistan is to blame, yes. But not Pakistan alone. A better formulation would be: Muslims, in India and in Pakistan, are working to terrorize the non-Muslims of India, and not only those in that part which gets attention in the West, the part known as Kashmir.

India and Pakistan began as independent states at the same time, under roughly the same conditions of development, and their different trajectories can be traced and compared. In political freedom, India has had steady or sometimes unsteady democracy, and Pakistan, a succession of mild or un-mild despots, zamindars or generals or zamindars-posing-as-men-of-the-people. In Hindu-dominated India, the Muslim population has increased, while in Pakistan (formerly West Pakistan), the Hindu population has gone from 14% to 1.5% of the population. In Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan), it has gone from 35% to 7% of the population.

In economic development there is no comparison. Pakistan is kept afloat, and has been kept afloat, only by Infidel aid -- whether through the disguised Jizyah of foreign, especially American, aid (which helped provide the money, beyond the level needed for subsistence, that was no doubt diverted for A. Q. Khan's nuclear project), or through the money received by Pakistanis, often in the form of welfare benefits, in England. The latter is a system riddled with fraud. These transfer payments within Great Britain is a kind of Jizyah as well, for it has led to unmerited transfers of wealth from the Infidel taxpayers of England to the Muslim recipients of every kind of benefit.

Socially, the position of women in both Pakistan and Bangladesh remains far below what it is in India, though in village India, among Hindus, it is hardly ideal. One has been made aware, by one famous example, of the continued mistreatment of rape victims in Muslim societies -- which are quickly attributed only to "cultural" factors.

Morally, the level of Pakistan and Bangladesh can be examined in the light of the attacks by the former on the later in 1970-71, and the mass killings by the Pakistani Army of Bangladeshis, in which local Muslim fanatics who believed that Pakistan had to remain one country “for the sake of Islam” aided them. They took pleasure, during the 1971 civil war, in killing fellow Bangladeshis. Nearly 2 million civilians were killed. Millions of Hindus fled, to be joined even by Muslims who were given refuge in India. These Muslim did not, however, offer the Infidel nation-state of India their loyalty; their loyalty remains, as it must, to Islam, and to the Umma.

Shall one go on? Shall the possibilities for art and literature, and a free press, be compared in India, and in Pakistan? Do it yourself.

Musharraf writes of those terrorists who managed to become citizens of England (England's great mistake) as if they were completely English. They are not. They are Pakistanis-in-England. By loyalty to Islam, to its tenets, by attitude and atmospherics, they have grown up in societies suffused with Islam, even if the streets they once played on were named Brick Lane or Balfour Crescent. They retain close ties to Pakistan, a source of brides, a place to send English entitlement money or even live on more cheaply than could be done in England. They are England's problem -- but they are also Pakistan's problem. Musharraf has spent much of his recent existence avoiding responsibilities, and not only to the United States, but also to Great Britain, to India, and to Afghanistan. Despite the ostentatious rectitude of his presentation of self, he is looking more meretricious every day. And now we will be treated to even more of the same, to study at our leisure.

Thanks to Simon. Thanks to Schuster.

The title of this post is taken from Amanda McKittrick Ros' poem Eastertide.

Esmerelda has already posted about this, the greatest bad writer who ever lived. Today's Times revisits some of her best worst lines. From Irene Iddesleigh:

"Speak! Irene! Wife! Woman! Do not sit in silence and allow the blood that now boils in my veins to ooze through cavities of unrestrained passion and trickle down to drench me with its crimson hue!"

The Times piece does not mention this baffling opening sentence from Delina Delaney:

Have you ever visited that portion of Erin's plot that offers its sympathetic soil for the minute survey and scrutinous examination of those in political power, whose decision has wisely been the means before now of converting the stern and prejudiced, and reaching the hand of slight aid to share its strength in augmenting its agricultural richness?

I wouldn't like to say either way. Would you?

She also wrote a war poem, A Little Belgian Orphan, which ends splendidly thus:

Go! Meet the foe undaunted, they're rotten cowards all,

Present to them the bayonet, they totter and they fall,

We know you'll do your duty and come to little harm

And if you meet the Kaiser, cut off his other arm.

 Thereby rendering him 'armless.

LOSTWITHIEL (Reuters) - A painting attributed to Adolf Hitler fetched 10,500 pounds at auction on Tuesday, despite serious doubts among art experts that the watercolours on sale were the work of the Nazi leader.

YNet:..21 watercolors and two sketches, most of them landscapes, were found in a farmhouse in Belgium, not far from where Hitler was stationed in Flanders. The auction house displayed the works along the wall of the hotel's restaurant, carefully encased in plastic to prevent damage.

 The anonymous owners had the paper tested to determine its age, confirmed the signature and matched landmarks in the paintings to sites where Hitler was posted, said Chris Walton, a spokesman for Jefferys.

The top price was paid by an unnamed Russian businessman for a watercolour on paper entitled "The Church of Preux-au-Bois" and signed "A. Hitler". 

The dream of unified "Arab Islamic states" is nothing more than a restatement of the pan-Arabism associated with, inter alios, Nasser and latterly, the newest claimant to being the champion of "the Arabs," Saddam Hussein. Seen for a long time as distinct from pan-Islamic sentiment (which is merely a way of saying: from the standard view of traditional Islam), pan-Arabism or "Arab nationalism" is merely a subset of the notion of Dar al-Islam, and does not stand in real opposition to it.

Lacking the oil revenues, and with many non-Arab Muslim countries (and some Arab ones) still finding their way after independence, Arabs could scarcely have dreamt of one unified Islamic world, but a pan-Arab state was, and remains for some, the right approximation. Besides, heute Uruba, morgen die ganze islamische Welt, und then, the day after tomorrow, as the Lands of the Infidels slowly yield...well, you know the rest.

Turkey will not be admitted to the E.U. That is no longer the question. The question is whether the beneficiaries of Kemalism will stop objecting to the army's use of force to protect them, and it, and to finally suppress the steady re-islamization of Turkey. About one-quarter of the Turkish population might be called "secular" -- which is a relative not absolute term -- and they have pocketed the gains dervied from, but taken none of the pains to defend and expand, the systematic Kemalist restraints on Islam. Perhaps they have learned a lesson, and will allow force to be used, and not object. As for Europeans, for whom such questions as suppressing Islam as a political force are still -- but not for much longer -- abstract questions, for which they furnish holier-than-thou abstract solutions, they can safely be ignored by the Turkish army.

The Thames was a river of especial sacredness to ancient Britons.  They sacrified bronze weapons and artifacts of great beauty to the water over 2000 years ago.  When a cousin's ashes (a former naval man) were scattered by his sons from Tower Bridge it seemed a fitting continuation of tradition.  This from the BBC is a new page in the London River's history.

According to the Hindu mythology, goddess Durga, who is venerated as the mother of the universe, came to the earth to end the tyranny of a demon, Mahishasur. The goddess' win is celebrated as the victory of good over evil and so every year the deity is said to visit the earth, her home, with her four children. . .  images of the deities - 18ft by 20ft - were made in the British Museum by artisans from Bengal and they will be submerged in the river Thames at Putney on 2 October.  The idols, which will be moved to Camden Town Hall on Wednesday for the festival, drew large crowds.

There is a lot more detail on the British Museum website and the London Puja Committee website.   I'm always happy to celebrate the triumph of good over evil.