France, or rather Sarkozy, Emerging as Europe's Leader

Here's lookin' at you, mes amis

Roger Cohen isn't my fave NYT Op-Ed writer---that might be Douthat, if it's anyone at all [I'm disgusted with David Brooks' endless simpering and equivocations every Friday on PBS Lehrer News Hour which I watch to see Mark Shields sink into senility.]

But Cohen has a great article in Sunday's NYT, where Sarkozy is finally giving France back its pride after seven decades of shame due to its siding with the Nazis in 1940 after Churchill offered the French joint-citizenship with the British. The Popular Front & other decadents chose Hitler, since he must be invincible to have crushed the French so handily in SIX WEEKS. Despite De Gaulle's posturing and Mitterrand & Chirac's treasonous cowardice, France still has a backbone, as Sarkozy is beginning to demonstrate:

Only in recent weeks has the distance traveled come into focus: France, reintegrated in 2009 into the command structure of NATO, spearheading the United Nations-backed NATO military operation in Libya; providing armed muscle to the U.N. forces in Ivory Coast; and giving its pacifist-trending ally Germany a lesson in 21st-century Atlanticism.

Adenauer and de Gaulle must be turning in their graves. Here was Germany standing wobbly with Brazil, Russia, India and China — and against its closest allies, France and the United States — in the U.N. vote on Libyan military action. And here was France providing America’s most vigorous NATO support.

This was a dramatic inversion of postwar roles. It revealed the drift of a navel-gazing Germany unprepared to lead despite its power and impatient with Adenauer’s Western anchoring. It also demonstrated France’s break under Sarkozy from the posturing Gaullist notion of a French “counterweight” to America. These are seismic European shifts.

In Benghazi, the capital of free Libya, when they see a NATO aircraft they say, “There goes another Sarkozy.” After the French shame of Rwanda, a genocide where Mitterrand let time do its fullest work, that’s something.

Perhaps it’s only now with Sarkozy that another, deeper French shame is passing, one Mitterrand and Chirac knew: the “strange defeat” of 1940 with its paralyzing subsequent obfuscations.

And Nicolas turned around decades of the strange anti-American policies that crypto-Commies Mitterrand and the spectacularly Berlusconi-like Chirac [who took mountains of Napoleons d'Or from Saddam' half-brother UN Ambassador in Geneva, in diplomatic sacks marked for the Elysee Palace.] This happened when his first vacation as le President was in Lake Winnepesaukee in New Hampshire, a state that Mark Steyn also finds congenial to his Franco-Flemish tastes.

Sarkozy has intuited three things. First, the democratization of the Arab world is the most important European strategic challenge of the decade. Second, it was time “to take the training wheels off,” in the words of Constanze Stelzenmüller of the German Marshall Fund, and have Europe rather than an overextended America lead in Libya. Third, the U.N. cannot always be an umbrella that folds when it rains. If its “responsibility to protect” means anything, it must be when an Arab tyrant promises to slaughter his people.

While Britain remains staunchly in the US camp despite the bizarre Anglophobia of our present pseudo-POTUS whose daddy was a former Kenyan descended from Arab slavers, it is Germany where the beleaguered Angela Merkel flails after losing two important state elections in the last six months---seeking to find a mddle ground between her former reincarnation of Metternich as the New "Coachman of Europe" and just another minimalist participant in the EU descent into fiscal mediocrity.

We stand at a high point in French postwar diplomacy and a nadir in German. There were strong arguments on either side of a Libyan intervention, but with a massacre looming in Benghazi, Germany had to stand with its allies. Angela Merkel has proved herself more a maneuverer than a leader. Germany often conveys the sense that it now resents the agents of its postwar rehabilitation — the European Union and NATO.

I don’t think Germany believes its future lies with the BRIC countries, as the U.N. Libya vote suggested. I do think Germany has entered a new era of ambivalence and nationalist calculation.

That means several things. European integration is on hold, and as long it’s on hold the future of the euro is at risk. The German-French alliance will remain under strain. Obama should look to Sarkozy, not Merkel, for strategic support.

A last thought. This restless French leader is at his best with his back to the wall. He’s shown that. The same quality means it would be foolish to count him out next year

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I'm hoping that Nicolas gets another six-year mandate to lead France out of the doldrums of 140 years of reaction to Prussian & Nazi militarism followed by relapse into a socialism which may be necessary in order to keep the country out of the grasp of the OPEC monsters [remember that Qaddafi was one of the original instigators of OPEC in 1971-2] with its nuclear and hydro alternatives to the fossil fuels the crazed petrostates control.

Obungler Throws Down Gauntlet to Ryan; Gets Hammered by Gallup

Barry Obama just got bitch-slapped by reality, as the latest numbers from Gallup show that his stupid rejoinder to Paul Ryan, the one that put Vice-Moron Biden to sleep, has not gone over well. Gallup is marginally an agent of the DNC, so it finished up with this "implications" paragraph:

President Obama is now as unpopular as he has been at any time since he became president. He faces difficult challenges ahead in trying to improve the economy and get the federal budget deficit under control, and must do so with Republicans in control of the House. His ability to navigate these challenges will help determine whether he will be elected to a second term as president. Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton all were similarly unpopular at this stage of their presidencies, but the last two were able to turn things around in time to win a second term in office.

They used to call such strange hopefulness "whistling past the graveyard."

I think Barry-boy is Carter Redux---he has that sort of deformed manic side to him that comes out at inopportune times. Like the Carter cuck00-cl0ck that just keeps making noise.

Obama Speech Dishonest and Gutter Politics

The Wall Street Journal doesn't pull any punches on the ridiculous partisan attack POTUS Obungler made in the guise of a "budget and deficit" speech.

Did someone move the 2012 election to June 1? We ask because President Obama's extraordinary response to Paul Ryan's budget yesterday—with its blistering partisanship and multiple distortions—was the kind Presidents usually outsource to some junior lieutenant. Mr. Obama's fundamentally political document would have been unusual even for a Vice President in the fervor of a campaign.

The immediate political goal was to inoculate the White House from criticism that it is not serious about the fiscal crisis, after ignoring its own deficit commission last year and tossing off a $3.73 trillion budget in February that increased spending amid a record deficit of $1.65 trillion. Mr. Obama was chased to George Washington University yesterday because Mr. Ryan and the Republicans outflanked him on fiscal discipline and are now setting the national political agenda.

Mr. Obama did not deign to propose an alternative to rival Mr. Ryan's plan, even as he categorically rejected all its reform ideas, repeatedly vilifying them as essentially un-American. "Their vision is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America," he said, supposedly pitting "children with autism or Down's syndrome" against "every millionaire and billionaire in our society." The President was not attempting to join the debate Mr. Ryan has started, but to close it off just as it begins and banish House GOP ideas to political Siberia.

Mr. Obama then packaged his poison in the rhetoric of bipartisanship—which "starts," he said, "by being honest about what's causing our deficit." The speech he chose to deliver was dishonest even by modern political standards.

Wow, that's strong stuff for the most influential newspaper in the United States, judging from paid circulation of over 2 million & RISING whereas the pretender imposter NYT has a paid circ of 800 thousand and hemorrhaging about 5% every SIX MONTHS.

It's obvious from his speech last night that Obungler doesn't have a clue on how to confront the Ryan challenge to get SERIOUS about reducing our mammoth gigantic deficits which in the month of February this year were greater than the entire year 2007 under GWB.

Obama's latest Gallup Poll numbers are below 50% approval even for his core constituents, and his flailing around last nite may be a sign of incipient panic---it's obvious that he's so used to getting his way that this confrontation is making him lose his cool.

Just like Jimmy Carter, another one-termer whose incompetence was only matched by his political tin ear.

Stanley Kurtz on Middle East Tribes and their Clannishness

Stanley Kurtz is a brilliant expositor of just about everything that is wrong with the world, and in particular, with Barack Obama.

Philip Carl Salzman's new book, Culture and Conflict in the Middle East (Humanity Books, 224 pages, $34.95)......is a major event: the most penetrating, reliable, systematic, and theoretically sophisticated effort yet made to understand the Islamist challenge the United States is facing in cultural terms. A professor of anthropology at Montreal's McGill University, Salzman specializes in the study of Middle Eastern nomads. He, too, is something of a last survivor of a once proud band. What Salzman has managed is to have preserved, nurtured, deepened, and applied to our current challenge a once-dominant anthropological perspective on tribal societies: the study of tribes organized into "segmentary lineages." It was one of the great achievements of modern anthropology. Yet, over the past 40 years, scholars have largely rejected and forgotten the study of segmentary lineage systems.

Why would a social science like anthropology largely neglect and even forget an entire branch of lineage system studies?

The anthropological understanding of tribal social structures--especially in Africa and the Middle East--has been shunned for 40 years as exaggerating the violence and "primitivism" of non-Western cultures, discouraging efforts at modernization and democratization, and covertly justifying Western intervention abroad. Decades of postmodern and postcolonial studies have conspired against the appearance of books like Salzman's. That an academic, "on the inside," could have worked in relative concealment long enough to produce this book is testament to the possibility of cultural survival. Indeed, fully appreciating what Salzman has to teach us will first require us to dust off our records of his all-but-forgotten language, and trace the trajectory of its destruction.

Kurtz translates Salzman's excavation into the depths of classical anthropological skullduggery to emerge with this description of Salzman's discoveries:

As with other fundamental sociological terms like "state" or "class," it is difficult to provide a precise meaning for the word "tribe." Whatever their similarities, there are important differences between relatively small hunter-gatherer Indian bands in the California hills like the Yahi and large Middle Eastern tribes professing a world religion and interacting in complex ways with nearby states.

In the Islamic Near East, however, the term "tribe" has a fairly specific meaning. Middle Eastern tribes think of themselves as giant lineages, traced through the male line, from some eponymous ancestor. Each giant lineage divides into tribal segments, which subdivide into clans, which in turn divide into sub-clans, and so on, down to families, in which cousins may be pitted against cousins or, ultimately, brother against brother. Traditionally existing outside the police powers of the state, Middle Eastern tribes keep order through a complex balance of power between these ever fusing and segmenting ancestral groups. The central institution of segmentary tribes is the feud. Security depends on the willingness of every adult male in a given tribal segment to take up arms in its defense. An attack on a lineage-mate must be avenged by the entire group. Likewise, any lineage member is liable to be attacked in revenge for an offense committed by one of his relatives. One result of this system of collective responsibility is that members of Middle Eastern kin groups have a strong interest in policing the behavior of their lineage-mates, since the actions of any one person directly affect the reputation and safety of the entire group.

Universal male militarization, surprise attacks on apparent innocents based on a principle of collective guilt, and the careful group monitoring and control of personal behavior are just a few implications of a system that accounts for many aspects of Middle Eastern society without requiring any explanatory recourse to Islam. The religion itself is an overlay in partial tension with, and deeply stamped by, the dynamics of tribal life. In other words--and this is Salzman's central argument--the template of tribal life, with its violent and shifting balance of power between fusing and fissioning lineage segments, is the dominant theme of cultural life in the Arab Middle East (and shapes even many non-Arab Muslim populations). At its cultural core, says Salzman, even where tribal structures are attenuated, Middle Eastern society is tribal society.

Does this sound anything like the old Hobbesian dictum that in primitive societies, life is "nasty, brutish and short?"

In reviving and updating classic anthropological studies of tribal kinship, Salzman is implicitly raising one of the great unresolved problems of political philosophy--one whose implications in today's environment are anything but theoretical. When anthropologists first decoded the system by which lawless and stateless tribes used balance-of-power politics to keep order, they quickly recognized that their discovery cast new light on Thomas Hobbes's "state of nature" theory.

However, Salzman is a two-handed anthropologist and on his other hand:

From one perspective, Middle Eastern tribal structures completely contradict Hobbes's notion of what life in stateless societies must be like. Far from being "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short," life outside the state turns out to be collective, cohesive, and safe enough to generate a stable and successful world-conquering civilization. Man as such is not, therefore, inherently individualistic, as Hobbes, the founder of modern liberalism, presumed.

Yet scholars have noted continuities between Hobbes's account and the conditions of life in segmentary tribes. Edward Evans-Pritchard (1902-73), the anthropologist who first described these societies, called them systems of "ordered anarchy," implying that, kin-based organization notwithstanding, life in segmentary systems necessitates endemic, often preemptive, low-level violence and neverending mutual distrust: what Hobbes might have recognized as the state of nature's "perpetual and restless desire of power after power."

And despite collective guilt and powerful group-based pressures for conformity, anthropologists commonly characterize segmentary tribal systems as intensely individualist, egalitarian, and democratic. This is arguably the central paradox of Middle Eastern social life. Muslim tribal society is both fundamentally collectivist and profoundly individualist. In the absence of state power and formal political hierarchies, no man of the tribe can, by right, command another. All males are equal, free to dispose of their persons and property and to speak in councils that determine the fate of the group. This tribal tradition of equal and open consultation is singled out by those who argue that democracy is far from alien to Middle Eastern culture.

Back in grad school at the University of Michigan, I considered changing my major to a new science in its early stages of in utero development called Political Anthropology. Evans-Pritchard and his study of the Nuer in South Sudan, the new nation just voted into existence months ago, was one of the pillars of the methodology which would support the superstructure of intellectual scaffolding needed to construct this new edifice of knowledge. I even have a book named Political Anthropology which I borrowed from a visiting U. of Chicago professor and promised unfaithfully to return. It appears that what "political anthropologists" nowadays avoid is precisely any methodology which might cast the lineage and tribal affiliations in such a bad light that colonialism or merely outside intervention in feuds might seem to be justified.

So which is it? Are Near Eastern tribes laboratories of individualism and democracy or generators of kin-based loyalties that render the Middle East refractory to modern, liberal governance? Does life in stateless communal tribes represent a radical alternative to anything Hobbes might have imagined possible? Or does the bold and martial egalitarian individualism of tribal life actually confirm Hobbes, thereby encouraging hope for gradual, liberal cultural change?

Cast in such unequivocal terms, Kurtz [or rather Salzman] is blunt and straightforward:

It is difficult to answer such questions when the mere mention of the word "tribe" is now all but banished from public discourse. Contemporary anthropologists, especially those influenced by "postcolonial theory," have in many respects repudiated the culture concept. For these anthropologists, the very notion of a distinctive culture is held to entail excessive generalization and to subtly imply that non-Westerners lack rationality. The rebellion began in the late 1950s and early 1960s with the newly independent states of Africa. The last thing modernizing intellectuals and politicians in these countries wanted was to have their societies thought of as essentially tribal or connected in some fundamental sense with the "aboriginal" or the "primitive." Although by the 1960s anthropologists had come to look upon the subtleties of tribal social structure as anything but simplistic primitivism, in the public mind the word "tribe" remained an insult. So to respect the perspective of exasperated Third World intellectuals, why not buck up regional pride by studying a sophisticated modern metropolis or a brilliant Muslim philosophical text instead? Why must anthropologists actually highlight those "primordial" loyalties most likely to undermine the modern state? (Anthropologists must highlight them precisely because they cut against modernization, Salzman would reply.)

But the situation became even more tangled when a professor of Victorian music and literature at the University of Columbia became a born-again Palestinian:

On top of all this, decades before 9/11, the rise of terrorism as a tactic in the Palestinian struggle against Israel suggested embarrassing continuities between the endemic violence of traditional tribal life and the present. Edward Said's 1978 Orientalism was the key work in the rise of postcolonial theory, and Said, a savvy Palestinian academic and advocate, was particularly keen to keep the focus on American and Israeli policies that he claimed explained terrorism, rather than on any causes internal to Palestinian society. By attacking efforts to link terrorist violence to Middle Eastern culture as bigoted "Orientalism," Said and his followers gave a hard edge to already widespread Third World complaints about Western scholarship. That move, coupled with the growing number of faculty members entering American universities from outside the West, put paid to all but a remnant of the anthropological study of Middle Eastern tribes. The triumph of Said's perspective meant that by the post-9/11 era, when we'd need it most, the systematic understanding of Muslim tribal violence was largely lost.

Radicalized anthropologists not only stopped trying to make systematic sense of tribal social life, but many even worked to debunk segmentary lineage theory. The first and greatest critic was Emrys Peters (1916-87). Having done field research with one of the Bedouin tribes where segmentary lineage theory was first applied, Peters argued that feuding actually had little to do with who was descended from whom. According to the famous Arab saying, it was: "I against my brother; I and my brother against my cousin; I and my brother and my cousin against the world." Yet Peters claimed that the elegant tribal system of "balanced opposition" between small families nested in clans, nested in larger clans, and so on, was simply a bogus native "ideology," mistakenly taken for reality by credulous anthropologists. In truth, said Peters, other than a kaleidoscopic blur of secondary considerations, material interest was the only factor explaining tribal social structure.

The debunking of lineage, kinship, clannish and tribal affiliations had a convenient alternative to replace the mere recording of facts on the ground such as Evans-Pritchard and other painstaking anthropologists who actually lived among the tribal societies they then wrote about. Let's just see if all this fits into a paradigm which would avoid field trips and long sojourns in hot dusty hellholes by imposing a convenient template top-down onto the messy facts-on-the-ground:

With many anthropologists already drawn to Marxism in the 1970s, Peters's theory found a receptive audience. And when Marxism declined and postmodern anthropology took its place, it was actually Peters's notion of a kaleidoscopic blur that caught on. His careful fieldwork had indeed uncovered important exceptions to what the classic lineage model would have predicted. For example, he discovered that, when it comes to feuding over precious resources like water and pasturage, where you live often trumps whom you're related to. So having given up Marxist explanations, and drawn to Edward Said's radicalism, postmodern anthropologists seized upon Peters's exceptional cases as an excuse for further debunking the systematic study of tribal social structure. Exceptions were now considered the rule, and generalization became postmodern anthropology's bogeyman.

Yes, one size fits all and if the size is wrong, stop even thinking about tribes or any "primitive" groups at all---it's all about real estate, location, location, location, rather than age-old customs which in a transhumance society of nomadic goat and camel herders trumped where a given tribe might make its main spot of territory.

Salzman takes an opposite approach. In a 1978 article, "Does Complementary Opposition Exist?," in American Anthropologist, he defended and refined segmentary theory. If Peters found important exceptions to the classic pattern of alliance and feud along lines of male descent, Salzman showed there was a systematic explanation. He found that when erstwhile nomadic tribes settle down, a given clan's location and its immediate neighbors begin to trump the call of traditional kinship loyalties. Yet even settled tribes preserve the classic kin-based ideology of feuding and alliance, precisely because they might someday be forced by economic necessity--or by war with the state--to pick up and move. The further nomads are from the settled life of a state, the more they rely on kin-based, segmentary, balance-of-power principles to keep order. So even after settlement, Bedouin preserve classic segmentary kinship ideology as a kind of "social structure in reserve" for times of movement, crisis, and conflict.

It really all goes back to Ibn Khaldun, whose Muqaddimah is sitting on my shelf as I write this:

In the early 1980s, the brilliant social theorist Ernest Gellner resurrected the cyclical theory of tribe-state relations first suggested by the 14th-century Arab philosopher Ibn Khaldun. In Khaldun's theory, outlying tribes tied together by traditional kinship solidarities conquer, settle, and rule a state. In time kinship loyalties loosen, the rulers urbanize and grow effete, their state loses control over distant tribes, and the cycle begins again. The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan present variations on this theme, and it's clear now that in 1978 Salzman was one of the first to recognize an important piece of the cyclical puzzle. So it turns out that tribes aren't so simple after all. Nor is understanding them incompatible with a study of brilliant Muslim philosophical texts.

In Culture and Conflict in the Middle East, Salzman draws on his fieldwork with nomads of Iranian Baluchistan to show how the classic tribal ideology of patrilineal descent and revenge actually works on the ground. It makes for riveting reading. Walk with Salzman as he accompanies a war party of 100 fighters armed with clubs, axes, sickles, and brass knuckles to prosecute an escalating feud. The aggrieved lineage in this party, the Kamil Hanzai (who'd seen their women and older men dishonorably roughed up in an earlier clash), were accompanied by men of six closely related lineages, who'd united to fight a comparable kin-based coalition backing the offending lineage.

A long description of the internecine strife of some Baluchi groups is followed by Kurtz's summary of Salzman's own field work conclusions:

Knowingly or unknowingly, American liberals and conservatives highlight sections of the tribal template, though for their own preferred uses. The implicit dovish take on tribalism notes that our own use of force actually serves to unite the foe. By hitting back at terrorist-harboring states, doves remind us, we create the impression of an infidel war against Muslims, thus figuratively recruiting every Muslim lineage into bin Laden's civilizational war party. This danger is real, yet the doves omit the rest. Failure to strike back creates an impression of weakness that invites further attacks.

The effective use of force deters in other ways, too. As Salzman accompanied the 100-man war party, he noticed that allied lineage members, while perfectly willing to fight in solidarity with their aggrieved lineage brothers, lacked the passion of the Kamil Hanzai. These calmer, more distant allies--as well as lineage members related to opposing groups through ties of marriage--act as checks on hotheaded adventurism. So the successful use of force can split the opposing coalition and create pressure for settle-ment, even on disadvantageous terms. The West's doves see themselves acting as checks on our own hotheaded adventurism, but Islamists, with considerable justice, view the cooing of the doves as a sign that their feud against the West has successfully weakened and split our own coalition.

The most disturbing lesson of all is that, in the absence of fundamental cultural change, the feud between the Muslim world and the West is unlikely ever to end. Tribal feuds simmer on and off for generations, with negotiated settlements effecting only temporary respites. Among the tribes of Waziristan, the saying goes: "I took my revenge early. I waited only 100 years." The Western liberal template takes an experience of peace under the lawful authority of a state as the normal human condition. In this view, when peaceful equilibrium is disturbed, reasonable men reason together to restore normalcy.

I have my copy of Olaf Caroe's book The Pathans 550BC-AD1957 which the interested reader can find online on Googlebooks if he so wishes to delve into a deep study of Waziri tribes and customs by the last Political Agent the British had in the Northwest Frontier Provinces. Caroe was revered by the Paki ruling establishment as knowledgeable in tribal affairs in a much more detailed way than their own citified and educated governing elite in Peshawar. Honor is paramount in Pathan society, which is closely analogous to Arab norms in their shared nomadic tribal traditions.

Yet by themselves, harsh calculations of deterrence are insufficient to account for the dynamics of tribal violence. The pervasive quest for honor adds a critical aggressive charge to the politics of tribal life. How was Karim able to mobilize a war party so quickly in the wake of the theft of his palm trunks? Alone, he had no ability to compel support, nor did a state with the power to require military service stand behind him. Yet Karim had risked his own life on behalf of his lineage mates in the past, and he would be needed again in the future. In a stateless environment, with kin-based alliance the only defense, each individual has a strong sense of his dependence on relatives for safety in case of attack. Individuals are also intensely aware that their personal destinies depend upon the deterrent reputation of the group. At one level, then, a man's willingness to risk his life in battle on behalf of his lineage-mates is a form of self-interest--an entirely rational calculation in an environment of stateless semi-anarchy. Yet when it comes to risking your life in battle, a gap between the individual's short-term interest and the long-term interests of the group remains. How can it be self-interest to die for a relative's deed? Honor bridges that gap. A man's personal honor is a matter of the highest pragmatic import. A given individual may be free to refuse to help his lineage mates, but in that case not only will his group lose standing, but his personal reputation will suffer and others will refuse to aid him in the future.

Is the search for and maintenance of "honor" the glue which cements tribal coherence? Is the protection of the family's womenfolk's honor more important than an individual woman's life? Are "honor-killings" the most brutal oxymoron that can be employed to support the infrastructure of a brutal, nasty contrivance which assures self-defense at some higher level?

With so many strictly rational reasons to maintain it, the quest for honor takes on a life of its own. In a society without ascribed hierarchies, honor marks some as superior to others. Honor is easily challenged and easily lost. It is also increased by displays of aggressive courage and dominance. So over and above even the necessities of preemptive deterrence amidst "ordered anarchy," the neverending quest for honor encourages violent action. Salzman gives the example of a tribe that took up smuggling as a form of economic warfare against the Syrian state that had stamped out their ability to make war. This had material benefits, of course, but the danger involved was actually a positive inducement as well since it permitted tribesmen to display martial virtues essential in a competitive system of honor. Honor as an end in itself helps make sense of the not-so-pragmatic calculations underlying suicide bombing and again reveals the tribal template hidden beneath an overtly religious surface.

Although Salzman doesn't say it, I'd add that the dynamics of honor and collective responsibility help explain the particular resistance of Middle Eastern culture to change. Even when an individual is inclined toward modern attitudes, the need to protect the honor of the group draws him back to tradition. Salzman tells the story of a Druze serving in the Israeli army who shot and killed his sister to preserve family honor.

The young woman had lived in America for several years and returned to visit her family wearing Western garb. Her brother was inclined to ignore this, until his uncle's loud complaints about their endangered family honor were heard by the neighbors. Salzman's point here is that honor depends less on the action itself (e.g., wearing earrings) than on public knowledge and response. What's notable, however, is that the key characters in this honor killing are a relatively modernized young man and his sister. Experience in the Israeli army and time in America had worked a change on both. Yet the responsibility of each individual for the honor--and therefore the safety and prosperity--of the group as a whole makes it difficult to break away from tradition.

And Salzman generalizes by going from one instance and geographic location to another across the Arab world:

Salzman says that it is not the details of tribal kinship structure that pervade Arab culture but the underlying principles of "balanced opposition," in which collective responsibility, honor, and feuding shape every action and thought, often calling for quick shifts in loyalty. Unite with your erstwhile enemy in opposition to a more distant foe; treat all members of an enemy group as potential targets; demand honorable behavior from members of your own group; and maintain your own and your group's honor by a clear willingness to sacrifice for the collective good. Warring Sunni and Shiite sects from Beirut to Baghdad follow principles of balanced opposition. They may be at each other's throats, yet they'll unite in opposition to an outside threat, as when Shiite Iran harbors members of Sunni al Qaeda on the run from America. In a sense, Islam's founding triumph was to raise the stakes of balanced opposition by uniting all the Arab tribes in an ultimate feud against infidel outsiders.

Since Muslims treat the tribal era of Muhammad and his early successors as the golden age of Islam, the cultural influence of the tribal template remains pervasive. To prove it, Salzman takes us on a country by country tour of Middle Eastern tribalism, from Jordan, where Bedouin form the backbone of the army, to Iraq, where even towns are heavily tribal, to Kuwait, where the strongest parliamentary opposition to women's rights emerges from tribal MPs.

Writing in 2006, Salzman cites a news report of clashes between Hamas and a powerful clan in Gaza to show tribal themes enduring in towns and cities. By early 2007, when Salzman's book was in press, the Palestinian unity government had fallen apart and Gaza was in quasi-anarchy, with Fatah and Hamas too busy fighting each other to govern. Such order as existed was enforced by brutal, battling clans.

This is no isolated occurrence. We ought to understand the emergence of Gaza's feuding clans as the revelation of a bedrock of Middle Eastern social organization ever-present and ever-influential, beneath superficial layers of Islam and state. Salzman noted the phenomenon in Gaza well before it became obvious. And long before he could have known of the tribal-based Anbar Awakening of 2007, Salzman identified it in nucleus thanks to some throwaway news reports in 2005.

But the ancient Arab balance and opposition between the Haadar and the Bedu, The Settled and the Nomads, persists today and is a good example of the dynamics still at work in the Arab moieties whatever we want to call them---tribes, clans, Sufi sects, or simply nationalities.

I think we can also extend Salzman's case for the pervasiveness of balanced opposition even further. In treating towns and cities, Salzman focuses on settled populations of Bedouin who retain many features of tribal social life. Yet the massive slums of cities like Istanbul and Cairo clearly display many of the marks of balanced opposition. Salwa Ismail's 2006 book Political Life in Cairo's New Quarters describes life in Cairo's shantytowns. With their homes illegally built, largely off the government grid, and seldom reached by police, the residents of these quarters keep order through a combination of traditional kinship ties and local loyalties (much as do the partly-settled/partly-nomadic tribes studied by anthropologists).

When a quarrel breaks out in a Cairo shantytown, men line up according to alleyway prepared to fight. Neutral parties are then sent out to explore intention and arrange a settlement, just as in Mahmud Karim's quarrel over those desert palm trunks. In effect, then, the vast, unpoliced "new quarters" of Cairo are the modern equivalent of extra-state territories ruled on tribal principles. And in some of these new urban tribal lands, as in faraway Waziristan, Islamism has taken root.

But the underlying paternalistic tribalism lurks beneath every exterior manifestation of life in the Islamic world, including even forms of the religion itself:

The state, such as it is in the Middle East, offers but a thin alternative to "the war of all against all." Too weak to provide public utilities, policing, or impartial justice, most Middle Eastern states are just reincarnations of the predatory, winner-take-all tribal coalitions of old. Why exchange the protection of your family, tribe, or sect for submission to a weak or predatory state? Tribal society contains just enough order to make a bit of violent anarchy bearable, and just enough grasping anarchy to make a liberal social contract unreliable.

Some political scientists decry cultural explanations for failure of democracy in the Arab world. They argue that Arab dictators deliberately cultivate "primordial" tribal loyalties, so as to block the formation of the genuinely liberal political parties, labor unions, and voluntary associations that might bring an end to their unjust rule. Yet this begs the question of why family, tribe, and sect were available and powerful enough to be "exploited" by authoritarian leaders. We're looking at a vicious circle, in which primordial loyalties undermine the modern state, which in turn is forced to rely upon and reinforce primordial loyalties. This causal circle is an only slightly updated version of Ibn Khaldun's cyclical theory.

It won't be easy to weaken the circle of particularism--the self-reinforcing loyalties of extended family, tribe, and sect that dominate Arab countries at both the state and local levels. The British did something comparable in traditional India by creating a counter-system of liberal education and advancement through merit, rather than kin ties. But that took time, military control, and a favorable political environment. The road to genuine cultural change is long, and there are no easy shortcuts. On the other hand, the tribal template offers a ray of hope.

Since 9/11, we've understood Islam as the fundamental source of the cultural challenge coming from the Middle East. That has given rise to a strategy of direct assault--an almost Voltairean attempt to deflate religious pretensions in hopes of forcing a change. Islam itself may be a complex extension of tribal culture, yet technically, Islam is defined as something different from, and sometimes antagonistic to, pure tribalism. When Muslim immigrants in Europe debate amongst themselves female seclusion, cousin marriage, and honor killings, reformers argue that these are "cultural" rather than strictly "Islamic" practices. There is truth here and also an opening.

While tribalism is in one sense culturally pervasive in the Middle East, tribal practices are less swathed in sacredness than explicitly Koranic symbols and commandments--and are therefore more susceptible to criticism and debate. Even jihad and suicide bombing can be interpreted through a tribal lens. We've taught ourselves a good deal about Islam over the past seven years. Yet tribalism is at least half the cultural battle in the Middle East, and the West knows little about it. Learning how to understand and critique the Islamic Near East through a tribal lens will open up a new and smarter strategy for change. The way to begin is by picking up Salzman's Culture and Conflict in the Middle East.

I am going to order the Salzman book to see what I missed when I answered the State Department's call to join the Foreign Service and cut short my graduate studies in the end of the sixties. Political anthropology seemed a promising new perspective on societies in various stages of development, as even our western societies still seem to be in.

Shale Gas Best New Affordable Source of Cheap Energy, NYT says.

Andrew Revkin has been bleating about global warming for nigh on a decade, but in his opaque and barely intelligible recent writings, he now seems to be beating a very slow retreat as the evidence for AGW simply is not "settled." He does a jump shift over to shale gas, available in immense quantities in the US, among other places, and easy to find and easier to transport than traditional "fossil fuels." But you still have to howl at a sentence like this:

I would greatly appreciate some reflection from you on the new shale gas assessment from EIA (global estimates for areas that have been surveyed) against the trends for food crops, including cassava, going to make fuels, as reported today by Elisabeth Rosenthal in The Times.

Cassava. Uh huh. That's the insanity of the New York Times glowing with a million-candlepower glare.

However, the rest is better. The new study on shale gas by the EIA in Paris, where I used to hang out with David Knapp, is very interesting.

Origin of "Lorem ipsum...."

STRAIGHT DOPE by Cecil Adams has the answer:

Lorem ipsum was part of a passage from Cicero, specifically De finibus bonorum et malorum, a treatise on the theory of ethics written in 45 BC. The original reads, Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit . . . ("There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain …").

Apple uses it as filler for its online blogging facility and if you want to see my blog online, go to:

daveinboca@me.com

NYTimes Refused to Print Retraction of Goldstone's Anti-Semitic UN Report

Pinch Sulzberger is the greatest self-hating Jew on the planet, it seems, as the NYT turned down an Op-Ed column by South African jurist and self-hating Jew Goldstone before the Washington Post printed it to widespread international acclaim.

A source close to Goldstone stated that in the past few days the judge had approached the editor of the New York Times opinion pages requesting to post the article he wrote in the paper – and was told his article was rejected.

The editor gave no explanation as to why the article was rejected, but the source believes this was due to the newspaper's political agenda.

The letter was ultimately published in the more conservative Washington Post over the weekend.

The New York Times said in response that they do not comment on the editorial or reporting process. In recent years the New York Times adopted a highly critical line of reporting towards Israel. Lately, its senior commentator Thomas Friedman has been publishing extremely aggressive articles against Israel and its current government.

The source also said that since the publication of the Goldstone Report two years ago, the judge and his wife have been socially ostracized in Jewish circles, which has caused them a great deal of sorrow.

Who wouldda thunkit???

Fat-boy Tommy Friedman has been getting more and more unintelligible with his recent posts on Israel and the Middle East in general. Now that self-hating Jew Frank Rich has been shit-canned and affirmative-action token stepinfetchit Herbert shown the door, perhaps fat Tommy might be the next who immolates himself [figuratively, of course] on the steps of the NYT building, like one of those bonzes in Vietnam who protested the corruption of their government's policies.

On second thought, don't bet on it as Fat Tommy has the ethical probity of a Bernie Madoff and the moral courage of a sewer rat. Goldstone finally came out for various reasons, friends said.

...other sources close to Goldstone claim that the decision to publish the letter didn't stem from social pressure but from the judge's deep understanding that the UN Human Rights Committee took advantage of his name, status and his being Jewish to unfairly censure Israel. "He would never have written or published the article," the source explained, "if he didn't feel with the utmost certainty that he needed to tell the world that he was manipulated

Of course, it's good that Goldstone finally saw the light, but not many people are going to believe that his original stance with the UNHRC wasn't taken with full knowledge of the consequences having a distinguished Jewish judge would have when Goldstone excused Hamas terrorists and came down hard on the Israeli response to rockets fired at civilian homes and towns and the kidnapping and holding for ransom of a young IDF soldier.

Tea Party Losing Steam?

Michael Barone writes that Tea Party enthusiasts are simply running out of gas. On key issues like the Wisconsin Supreme Court election on April, the Tea Partiers haven't mobilized like the union thugs and goons:

....in the state that has made more headlines than any other this year, Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker is facing some headwinds. He did get the Republican legislature to pass limits on the bargaining powers of state employee unions. And union dues aren't going to be deducted from public employees' next paychecks.

But the Democratic state senators' tactic of leaving the state and the often violent protests at the state Capitol have mobilized public employee unions and their supporters.

A Polling Company poll conducted for Independent Women's Voice showed 53 percent of voters with unfavorable feelings toward Walker and only 46 percent favorable. By a similar margin voters sided with the public employee unions over the governor in the recent controversy.

It should be noted that this poll has a small sample and a larger share of voters in union households (38 percent) than in the 2008 and 2010 Wisconsin exit polls (26 percent). And on issues of this kind, question wording can make a big difference in responses.

Next Tuesday, voters will have their say in an election for state Supreme Court. Incumbent Republican David Prosser is being challenged by Democrat Jo Anne Kloppenberg, who is giving strong hints that she'll uphold a dubious ruling by a lower court that the legislature acted illegally in limiting public employee unions' powers. A Prosser defeat would give Democrats a 4-3 edge on the court.

Off-year elections tend to have low turnout, and the public employee unions are working hard to get their voters out. It's unclear whether tea partiers and others whose enthusiasm and energy transformed Wisconsin from a 56-42 percent Obama state in 2008 to a 52-46 percent Walker state in 2010 will be similarly energized.

In addition, both parties have threatened to recall at least some of the other side's state senators. Recall petitions are being circulated and require relatively few signatures.

You can be sure that if the Supreme Court overrules the Walker ruling, the national lamestream MSM will go berserk with premature obituaries for the Tea Party and further get the left-wing libtards mobilized for 2012. The sad fact is that Gov. Walker and his GOP House & Senate majorities have been assuming that the November, 2010 elections had basically given them a carte blanche to lower the state budget's deficit levels by removing some of the most egregious union sweetheart deals worked out with corrupt Demonrat administrations over the last couple of decades. Walker has been so low-key as to be invisible. When Ann Coulter jumped out of her little black dress on TV last month trying to energize the lethargic phlegmatic GOP in WI, it seemingly had no effect and Barone hints broadly that a little more vim & vigor by Walker might be in order:

There's an assumption by many Republicans, seemingly shared by Walker, that voters settled these issues definitively in the November elections. But the IWV poll suggests that voters are not necessarily well informed and have been swayed by those who frame the issue as collective bargaining "rights."

Respondents become more favorable to Walker's position when informed that public employees are paid 45 percent more than private sector union members and that union dues have been automatically deducted and go to support candidates workers may not favor.

In New Jersey, a more Democratic state than Wisconsin, Gov. Chris Christie has won majority support in his struggles with public employee unions by making his case repeatedly, with facts and figures, and with a forcefulness that has made his town hall appearances a YouTube hit.

Christie and Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, both elected in 2009, have won public acceptance of major spending cuts by making the alternatives and the facts clear.

The public has seen that vast spending increases haven't generated jobs, and they understand that tax increases can choke a sputtering economic recovery. Given the facts, they understand that public employee unions inflate spending, reduce accountability and operate as a mechanism for the involuntary transfer of taxpayer money to one political party.

The press won't make that case. Republicans and tea partiers need to do it themselves.

If the Tea Partiers in Wisconsin don't wake up and smell the coffee, the entire law might be overthrown on spurious bogus technicalities by an activist judiciary while Walker & his friends snooze the opportunity away. A little dab of Christie might not be in the Teutonic tradition of Wisconsin Badger conservatism, but it might get enough Republicans to the polls to head off a zany Supreme Court takeover of the three branches of Wisconsin state government.

Tax Status of Media Mutters should be re-examined

HazzzMat has a good piece on the reaction to the ho hum news that David Brock, the phoney gay conservative who did an Andrew Sullivan and launched toward the home of paraphiliacs---the Demonrat sewers of political discourse---has announced that the sole future of Media Mutters will be to attack Fox News. David Weigel made the same kind of move and it seems that every Log Cabin Republican might be suspect if this sort of switcheroo---Arianna did it for social-climbing reasons---that keeps happening as Manchurian Candidate gays defrock themselves leftward.

There is a serious tax issue involved. Brandon Kiser is quoted by HazzzzMat thusly:

The cutesy-sounding mission of Media Matters to “correct conservative misinformation” is no longer even remotely appropriate. No, MMFA is a political group with $10 million-plus in annual funding designed to wage war against Fox News, and in their eyes the GOP and conservatives as a whole.

Because of this, Media Matters should reconsider their 501(c)(3) status which is designated for religious, charitable, scientific, literary, or educational purposes. MMFA no longer meets any of these qualifiers (it’s arguable they never [sic] did) and under the banner of waging a war against Fox News and the GOP puts them in an entirely different zip code.

Indeed it does, and HazzzMat and Kiser go on to make an excellent analysis of the parasitic beasts hiding under tax free status that are eating away at the very underpinnings of democracy. What used to be called "the marketplace of ideas" is now undercut by a constant barrage against the good faith of the opponent---often accusing Fox, for instance, of slanting the news the way the three alphabet networks tend to do [when they can get away with it, an important qualifier].

HazzzMat didn't emphasize the battalions of legal organizations which are quick to subpoena e-mails and sue GOP politicos---a multi-pronged attack which drove Sarah Palin from office and I wonder if the tax status of these organizations makes them exempt. Another example: a lawsuit demanding Gov. Walker's e-mails was instigated with full hue and cry. A few days later, a Univ. of Wisconsin professor's e-mails were also subpoenaed after a partisan attack on Walker on the NYT Op-Ed page. The hypocrites on the left immediately shrieked about academic freedom, seemingly oblivious to the double standard that the Left has toward advancing its agenda. Gramsci is a good place to start and the ancient Alinsky's code, which Hillary Clinton did her senior thesis on at Wellesley, should also be memorized by every thinking Republican. Remember that the Republican Party is still the party of principles, [at least in theory]. and ideas---the Democrats have only hysteria and special pleading and moving goalposts in their court. Subterfuge is their chief skill and the average American isn't cynical or perceptive enough to not take them at face value.

Indeed, if the Democrats didn't have double standards, they'd have no standards at all.

The only conspiracy out there is the one where Democrats create disinformation out of whole cloth to slander Fox which they accuse of spreading "misinformation." Misinformation implies wrong, but no intention. "Disinformation" from the Demonrat agitprop battalions of the MSM and Soros

Bill Keller Approaching the Haywire Stage

Managing Editor Bill Keller shows that the whines can be so fine in the New York Times.

I think a little of the assertive defensiveness of Keller’s self-serving Apologia in this week's Sunday Magazine comes as a result of the hemorrhaging of New York Times paid circulation. Since the onset of his arrival three years ago as Managing Editor, the paid circ has gone down 21% and profits 57%. The NYT was put in the embarassing situation of having to get temporary financing from Carlos Slim, the Mexican superbillionaire, until they got through a particularly rough patch. And the way things are spiraling downward, it’ll be hard to pull the NYT out of terminal nosedive, say, five years out, despite their lucrative media holdings in Yankee and other broadcasting rights.

Also, Keller has gone so far as to enter the marketplace of ideas by a direct assault on his most successful competition. When he attacks Fox News in public, as happened recently, he is really attacking Murdoch, whose brilliant acquisition of the Wall Street Journal has completely flummoxed the Times. The WSJ recently became the highest paid circ newpaper in the country when it passed USA Today. The WSJ is gaining paid circ despite keeping most of its articles off-line. The NYT, whose paid circ is around 40% of the WSJ’s, is now reduced financially to adopting the Journal’s pay-to-see online format.

With Keller, methinks the gentleman doth protest too much. He’s in trouble and so is the NYT. And his Olympian pretenses continue, so that the comment section of the paper online is shut down by the time the non-early bird reader wants to pen a response. Opacity no longer implies veracity.

NSC Chief Donilon the Ultimate Eff-Up in the Libya Fiasco?

Actually, I combine stupidity and stubbornness to equal degrees...a perfect bureaucrat!

PJM's Richard Pollock has a very good takedown of the complete fool in charge of the NSC, a political operative along the lines of Sandy Berger of National Archive document-stealing fame.

Donilon is portrayed by Bob Woodward as an opinionated oaf far out of his depth in the opinion of his predecessor James Jones and SecDef Gates. But as the most politicized and corrupt presidency in US history since Warren Harding, Donilon fits right in, with ties to serial-gaffer Joe Biden that are secured with hoops of steel. The fact that the brewing crisis in Libya did not avert Obama's "trade-mission tour" to Brazil is simply astounding, as silly as this pickininny's addiction to golf when the going gets tough.

Tom Donilon’s other major liability is his long-time reputation as a harsh political operative. He learned the art of sharp elbowed politics as a 23-year-old assistant to Jimmy Carter’s chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan. Jordan dispatched him to the 1980 Democratic National Convention to do President Carter’s dirty work. He successfully shot down Senator Ted Kennedy’s challenge to the president.

But Donilon may be best-known as the chief lobbyist for government-backed mortgage giant Fannie Mae — just before it imploded. For six years he was a fierce fighter at Fannie Mae, fending off reform efforts by Republicans to rein in the federal agency. He also was deceptive about the agency’s troubles. According toABC News, he painted a rosy picture of the agency while it was going south:

Donilon is described as someone who lobbied for and helped paint a rosy picture of Fannie Mae’s financial health to the company’s board. He did so at a time when Fannie Mae faced accusations that it was misstating its earnings from 1998 to 2004.

A 2006 federal investigation caught Donilon as part of a group of Fannie Mae executives who exchanged “scripts” in advance of meetings of the agency’s independent compensation committee. When Fannie Mae’s independent regulator — the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight — sought to investigate Fannie Mae, Donilon aggressively attacked it. David Frum wrote: “Donilon is the ultimate Democratic Party politico.”

But why is Donilon the NSC Chief in the first place? Is this another example of Demonrat wrongheaded politics overn foreign policy? Why are certifiable buffoons like Donilon and Clapper remaining on the job while steady-as-they-go types like Jones and Gates looking to exit this sinking ship? Why is Obama looking to appoint a certifiable politico embroiled in the DOJ scandal of keeping FBI & CIA from each other, the ineffable insufferable Jamie Gorelick, as FBI Director? Gorelick went from the DOJ to Fannie Mae to collect a cool $30 million while a corrupt and mindless lamestream media looked the other way.

The well-connected Donilon initially served as Obama’s transition chief at the State Department, and hoped to land a top job there. His controversial role at Fannie Mae convinced Obama that Donilon would never receive Senate confirmation, so he landed at the NSC.

A number of State Department officials have told PJM that when they see what looks like seat-of-the pants management, it looks like Donilon’s work: “This is pure Tom Donilon,” a USAID official told told PJM. “He makes it up as he goes along.” The official spoke to PJM on the condition of anonymity.

On the conservative side of the fence, the analysis about Donilon isn’t much better. Andy McCarthy of the National Review Institute told PJM the administration’s Libyan operation “looks like what you would expect it would look like if they didn’t have a plan going in and they didn’t have an objective.”

As the Libya adventure goes south, Washington seems to be entering the fingerpointing stage. Even now, so early in the deployment, many issues seem to point to strategic military and diplomatic blunders, and much of them fall onto Tom Donilon’s desk.

For example, few are clear even now whether the U.S. military mission is to protect Libyan civilians or to topple the regime of Col. Muammar Gaddafi. The NATO alliance itself appears to be fracturing. From the NATO command in Brussels there is reported criticism of the “hastily improvised nature of the military coalition.” The German military now has entirely pulled out its military forces from the Libyan coalition. The Brits and Americans are in a public brawl as to whether or not Gaddafi should be assassinated. Turkey has tried to exercise a veto about NATO leadership.

And there is near universal uncertainty about whether the continuing military action will be directed by the U.S., NATO, or a new unspecified international coalition. “The NSC is kind of the hub that’s the intersection between intelligence, national security and the military,” McCarthy says. “It seems to be a failing of arriving at a coherent strategy from all those different components of government.” This is all Donilon’s portfolio.

The verdict from the State Department and Congress is unequivocal:

And how could Donilon permit President Obama to take a whirlwind tour of Latin America as a major wartime mission was getting underway? The State Department source called it “purely astonishing.”

There also is the rupture with Congress and liberal Democrats. Donilon, a consummate political operative, should have foreseen the need to formally notify Congress under the War Powers Act, which requires formal notification of Congress when military hostilities begin. And the White House did not reach out with kid gloves to the party’s left wing, who are enraged by the use of military force in a third Muslim country.

Certainly there is enough blame to go around, from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Secretary Gates and President Obama. But the nexus of the entire operation is Thomas Donilon, and fingers seem to be pointing at him as the possible fall guy.

But competence and judgment skills take a back seat in this administration to the much more important qualification that Donilon enjoys:

In addition to President Obama, Donlion enjoys the confidence of Vice President Joe Biden: Donilon served as a close confidant to Biden in the late 80s. When Biden was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Donilon was a key player in the destruction of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork. He was also part of a close-knit group of advisors behind Biden’s presidential bid in 2007. Brother Mike Donilon currently serves as counselor to the vice president, and wife Cathy Russell is Jill Biden’s chief of staff. Few were willing to talk publicly about Donilon. Typical was this statement from a former political colleague:

Everybody I know who knows Tom Donilon wouldn’t say that he his unqualified — even if they believe he is. This is mostly due to the fact they are all former campaign colleagues, or they want to curry favor with him.

When you have a silly sh*thead for a protector like Joe Biden, who needs the skills required for the NSC job?

Corrupt Leftist Elites Destroy Marketplaces and Compassion

City Journal has another interesting piece by Michael Knox Beran on the methodical takeover of wealth by the nouveau riche on the Left who are now trying to deny new stakeholders from entering the marketplace after the debacle of the Fannie Mae collapse. An interesting read and Beran's call for "a revival of the agora" to forestall the centralization of the economy in the hands of incompetents makes perfect sense after reading this piece.

Reuters Calls Bus Stop Atrocity "Terrorist Attack" in Quotes!!!

Libtard Reuters prompted Jeff Goldberg to this exercise in wonderment:

This is from a Reuters story on the Jerusalem bombing earlier today:

Police said it was a "terrorist attack" -- Israel's term for a Palestinian strike. It was the first time Jerusalem had been hit by such a bomb since 2004.

Those Israelis and their crazy terms! I mean, referring to a fatal bombing of civilians as a "terrorist attack"? Who are they kidding? Everyone knows that a fatal bombing of Israeli civilians should be referred to as a "teachable moment." Or as a "venting of certain frustrations." Or as "an understandable reaction to Jewish perfidy." Or perhaps as "a very special episode of 'Cheers.'" Anything but "a terrorist attack." I suppose Reuters will mark the 10th anniversary of 9/11 by referring to the attacks as "an exercise in urban renewal."

The mind reels.

Oh, and I tried to comment on that Reuters article, only to find out I'd been banned for previous accuracy in my comments on their fake "journalism" concerning the Middle East. Goebbels couldn't have crafted a more malicious example of Nazi Dreck than Reuters---along with BBC & AP, three reasons for the thinking man to mourn the passing of true journalism.

I am an Arabist trained by the State Dept. and was staunchly anti-Israel until the '90s, when as an Amoco exec for New Entry Strategies, I was invited to Israel. By this time I had visited every Arab country in the Arab League except Djibouti and Libya, & also visited Israel just once in the mid-70s while studying Arabic in Beirut.

I found the atmosphere in Israel far different from what I'd imagined. Of course, I DID GET a three-hour one-on-one meeting with Shimon Peres, then Foreign Minister, who grilled me on everything I'd picked up about the Arab World and the prospects for Israel to get a water pipeline from Egypt [Amoco made the best pipelines in the world] to the Negev Desert [Nil, I told him.]

From that time forward, I was moderately in the middle, until 9/11, when the true nature of Islamic brutality showed its face. And I went to King Abdul-Aziz U. in Jeddah where Osama was studying at the very same time and encountered on a frequent basis that hatred of the West that simmers beneath the cosmopolitan surface many Arabs present to gullible Americans. Now I see that the stupidity and venality of proglodytes fit nicely with the lies and basic lack of humanity that Islam represents---almost a perfect fit.

UPDATE Reuters has another of its lying representations on the matter, as called out by Jeff Goldberg.

Bush Had Twice as Many Supporters for Iraq than Obama has for Libya

GWB was relentlessly pilloried by the corrupt MSM for "going it alone" into Iraq. Yet the US in 2003 had almost twice as many allies as the UN-supported No-Fly Zone effort voted on over the weekend.

Coalition Countries - Iraq - 2003

Afghanistan,
Albania
Australia
Azerbaijan
Bulgaria
Colombia
Czech Republic
Denmark
El Salvador
Eritrea
Estonia
Ethiopia
Georgia
Hungary
Italy
Japan
South Korea
Latvia
Lithuania
Macedonia
Netherlands
Nicaragua
Philippines
Poland
Romania
Slovakia
Spain
Turkey
United Kingdom
Uzbekistan

[Source: US State Department]

Coalition - Libya - 2011

United States
France
United Kingdom
Italy
Canada
Belgium
Denmark
Norway
Qatar
Spain
Greece
Germany
Poland
Jordan
Morocco
United Arab Emirate

Now that the corrupt clowns in the lamestream media are trying to regroup like the preposterous libtard David Weigel and others execute what on the socialist left is known as a "corrective movement," it's good to remember facts in the barrage of disinformation and misinformation the corrupt New York Times and its Sancho Panza, the Washington Post, throw up into the air to confuse honest citizens and diminish domestic tranquillity.

UPDATEReuters has another of its lying representations on the matter, as called out by Jeff Goldberg.

Lionel Trilling: Liberal Hero or Proto Neocon?

Michael Knox Beran has a great article on Lionel Trilling:

Lionel Trilling’s 1950 book The Liberal Imagination was not a celebration of liberalism. It was an indictment of liberalism’s dependence on what we might call the social imagination—a method of studying people’s social attributes in order to understand and even to save them. Trilling believed that the human mind is too complex to prosper when it is subjected to the organizing impulses of social technocracy, and he questioned the faith in beneficent regimentation that descends from the nineteenth-century social philosophers—the belief, expressed in the 1940s by a writer in the journal Science, that “if by employing the methods of science, men can come to understand and control the atom, there is a reasonable likelihood that they can in the same way learn and control human group behaviour.”

Trilling delves deeply into that vale of tears that the French Revolution imposed on French literature with its new idea of mankind and the stringencies that one's background and "class" imposed on one's outlook and prospects for success. I am now in a course of reading as much of Balzac and Flaubert as possible, with stops in Stendhal's The Red and the Black and the great panorama of nineteenth century Paris which continues to enchant us to this day.
But Trilling has more relevance today than ever, as his misgivings about the social imagination and the social engineering that inevitably ensues are coming front and center to the American stage.

For Trilling no less than for Balzac, society fostered a perception that both reveals and distorts the character of human beings. By showing how they are “packed in strata, layer above layer, in the framework of society,” the social imagination discloses the complexity of the worlds we inhabit. But by reducing people to type—by making them creatures of the particular strata to which they belong or of the particular roles they play—the social imagination makes it easier for us to lose sight of their idiosyncratic humanity. When you affix a social or social-scientific label to a person (“bourgeois,” “anal-retentive,” “extrovert”) or classify him according to his provenance (“working-class,” “Ivy League,” “inner-city,” “WASP”), you often have the illusion that you have plucked out the heart of his mystery. It is a dangerous conceit. As soon as you have reduced a person to a type, you have begun to forget that he is human. In The Middle of the Journey, Trilling makes Gifford Maxim, a character modeled on his Columbia schoolmate Whittaker Chambers, disparage the myopia of those who have cultivated the social vision too intensely: “Social causes, environment, education—do you think they really make a difference between one human soul and another?”

Chambers great tale of defection from the youthful idealism of Stalinism in Witness should be required reading today, of a soul in distress when he realizes that the objectification of social categories carries the crushing ballast of reductionism, that reduces people to their common denominator. Only not the denominator of children of God, but of useful idiots and fellow travellers on the Journey to the End of the Night.

The social imagination in the mid-twentieth century was perhaps best pilloried by Celine in his down-to-earth ragings reminiscent of a Balzac on methamphetimines. Celine and Chambers are two bookends of the progressive insanity reduced to proglodyte ravings. Still, what has Trilling have to say to us in the 21st century? Here is Knox Beran's summary:

In portraying the novel as the arbiter of the moral world, Trilling was carrying on the work of the Victorians—Matthew Arnold, Leslie Stephen, and George Eliot, among others—who sought a secular substitute for spiritual traditions that seemed to them to have lost not only their intrinsic plausibility but also much of their moral sanction. Yet in an age of electronic pleasures and literary degeneracy, Trilling’s faith in the moral efficacy of books may be simply too remote from the way we live now to be an adequate foundation for moral culture.

The weakness of Trilling’s remedy has its origin in his own experience. In his essay on The Princess Casamassima, Trilling observed that the young man from the provinces must reject his native tradition and find a new and more urbane one. In his own journey to the metropolis, Trilling found a substitute for forsaken provinciality in the tradition of the Victorian and Edwardian moralists. He was the foster child of Arnold, James, and Forster, to whom he was closer, in style and spirit, than he was to the liberals of his own generation. He was the heir, too, of Freud, in whom he found a rejection of human perfectibility, a belief in “the ineluctability of the pain and frustration of human existence” that confirmed his own doubts about the effectiveness of social reform. Freud’s skepticism about the possibility of devising radically better social forms is, Trilling said, “profound—is, we cannot but know, entire.” Freud, for Trilling, is a prophet who insists “upon the essential unmitigability of the human condition as determined by the nature of the mind,” and his “imagination of the human condition preserves something—much—of the stratum of hardness that runs through the Jewish and Christian traditions as they respond to the hardness of human destiny.”

I find Jung much more open to human perfectiblilty than the deeply pessimistic Freud----Jung's Psychological Types and expermiments with the small group and other group therapies are beyond the rigidities and constrictions of the "liberal" social imagination's strait-jacket mindset of class and inevitable clashes. Knox Beran's final thoughts:

Yet however great the moral light an intellectual communion with authors like Forster and Freud may give, it will probably always be, in some measure, artificial if it is not supported by a living tradition, one in which art cooperates with ritual and routine to refine moral sensibility. Morals are intimately related to mores, to manners and customs, to the habits of decency inculcated by the living traditions of particular communities. Trilling perceived the weakening of the moral sense that has taken place with the growth of the social imagination, that disintegrator of tradition; he was wrong only in supposing that books could be a sufficient hedge against its dominion.

UPDATE:
Louis Menand has a short piece on Trilling in the New Yorker.

US on the Decline? GOP Theme for 2012 Debuts in Iowa.

Obama's fecklessness across the board in domestic, foreign and budget policies has spurred the GOP to pronounce America in steep decline, especially due to the loser vibe and apology tour emitted by BHO during his first three years in office. Obama's deer-in-the-headlights response to Arab revolutions in Tunis & Cairo & his seemihg craven cowardice in Libya, disdaining to even offer a no-fly zone over that country which lacks a world-class air force----all crowd together for first place in the campaign meme of the decade. Surprisingly, the somewhat colorless Tim Pawlenty of MN has come up with the best line yet:

“Just because we followed Greece into democracy doesn’t mean we need to follow them into bankruptcy,” Pawlenty said at a presidential candidate forum near Des Moines last week.

Another immortal send-off comes from Herman Cain, the former Godfather’s Pizza CEO, with what has become his signature closing line.

“The United States of America is not going to become the Unites States of Europe!” Cain thundered, “Not on our watch.”

The Leiter Side of Union Thuggery

James Taranto appears to be working riffs with blogress Ann Althouse on a lot of issues, well, two, anyway, concerning the left's lurching once more, after calling for "civility" after the Giffords shooting, toward the violence and coercion where it finds a natural home.

Suffice it to say that the recent shakedowns by police unions on private companies have an air of mafiosi malignancy about them. Read the two articles above for the gist of the shakedown, but it seems that the criminal elements of the left are beginning to assert themselves, which always seems to occur when a Republican victory succeeds a Demonrat takeover of the public weal---as a nanny-bitch named Elizabeth Warren is trying to do under the Indonesian Imbecile's auspices.

The Republicans should defund this PMS case before she inflicts more harm on a housing economy that is still shaky. And when are the GOP going to stand up to that gibbering fool twiddling his thumbs in the Oval Office?

Scott Walker: Presidential Material???

Scott Walker is from my hometown of Wauwatosa, after Milwaukee and Madison the third largest municipality in Wisconsin, slightly larger in population than Green Bay, home of the World Champion Packers and justly noted as "Titletown" for its 13 NFL Championships. So with my own homie prejudice declared, I think that the attached Wall Street Journal article should be considered as a basis for considering Scott as POTUS potential.

The reason for this is very simple. Most GOP professional politicians are averse to rocking the boat and content to allow the steady hemorrhaging of private sector taxpayer rights as long as they themselves have access to the big-money government trough.

Walker seems to be a different breed of cat or a horse of a different color, to use metaphors that the earthy Midwesterner or two reading this might appreciate. [On the Left Coasts, animals seem to be relegated to household pet status or racetrack competitor]. Scott sums up the homely example of his brother and sister-in-law, both employed in the private sector with none of the cushy protections that the Bolsheviks in the media and Hollyweird and the academy, along with their useful idiot fellow travellers, have bestowed upon the unions over decades of Democrat racketeering [contribute to my campaign, get the cushy contract].
The Wall Street Journal seems to agree, but time will tell.

Bachmann OverKill: Her Brain's On Fire

Megan Kelly disproves the canard that a woman's looks are inversely proportional to her brains, and Sarah Palin hasn't made a major booboo like Obama's "57 states" ever.

But Michelle Bachmann sadly showed she may have dozed through high school history class on the events of 1775:

"You're the state where the shot was heard around the world in Lexington and Concord. And you put a marker in the ground and paid with the blood of your ancestors the very first price that had to be paid to make this the most magnificent nation that has ever arisen in the annals of man in 5,000 years of recorded history."

She was born in Waterloo, Iowa, which certainly is far from the East Coast, but throughout the speech, she kept repeating this canard. Dumber than Obama? You make the call.

Obama Doctrine: Speak with a Teleprompter & Do Nothing at All

The Wall Street Journal has an article on the feckless second-rate loser known as the Indonesian Imbecile whose main pronouncement last week was concerning how he was "bullied" as a small boy.

Is this the reason he seems to be a deer in headlights every time a foreign policy crisis lands at his doorstep? Is he a coward or a procrastinator?

Bill Clinton, who actually is rumored to have a certified pecker in his pants, is getting browned off with Obama's insipid lack of leadership skills. Clinton's call for an end to drilling moratoriums as the world faces skyrocketing oil prices shows that someone outside the White House is actually paying attention.

I wonder if Bill has a back-channel to Hillary who's following Obama's mincing two-step dance away from confronting Qadafi, and sending the human STD, Clap clap, light's out, to testify that the Libyan clown/murderer is unbeatable.

Which is true, by a "General" of Clapper's skill sets.

And yet last night I noticed the senile moron Shields pronounce WI a huge Demonrat victory. The Washington Post's house moron Dionne concurs with all 70 of his IQ points. Is there something in the water inside the Beltway?

Gallup Gives King Hearings 52% Support

Gallup leans left even when it's findings are beneficial to Republicans. In its latest poll, it headlines that "Country is Divided" over the King hearings even though a clear majority support it. And Gallup buries the negative numbers deep in the text of those who OPPOSE the hearings at 38% in the tiny box without any comment.

Downplaying anything popular with the vast majority of the country which trend center-right to right is part of Gallups corporate culture, if that's a word to describe the scanting of accrued public knowledge in one direction rather than another.

We still have nothing to hear about NPR or PBS or any public broadcasting. I think Gallup is afraid the numbers won't support their hidden agenda.

New York Public Unions Crush State Budget

William Jacobson says:

Having secured very sweet contracts for their members through political influence, the public sector unions have no incentive to change. They know from history that politicians eventually back down or move on, and the consumer of public sector services ends up paying through higher taxes and diminished services.

The current system also pits older union membership, which has vested in all these benefits, against younger members, who will bear the cost of cutbacks and likely never will see such sweet deals for themselves because there simply is not enough money.

The cause of the problem is not just the terms of a particular public sector union contract, it is the system which allows public sector unions to pass costs onto future generations of taxpayers and union members.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is correct to recognize that collective bargaining for benefits is the cause of the problem, and that it is not enough to treat just the symptoms.

Steve Malanga goes further:

When they can’t win favorable new deals from state legislatures, unions are adept at persuading lawmakers to protect the old ones, including when they’ve expired. In states like California, New Hampshire, and New York, government unions have won passage in the legislature of so-called “evergreen” clauses, which require old union contracts to remain in force until new agreements are reached. Such clauses give unions incentives to reject concessions during tough times because they can keep their old contracts active, sometimes with automatic pay increases. Last year in California, public unions used the evergreen clause of the Dills Act, which grants collective bargaining rights to state workers, to resist proposed changes to work rules. (The state’s Democrat-controlled legislature had the power to override the evergreen clause but sided with the unions.) New York’s evergreen clause, known as the Triborough Amendment, lets union members drag their feet on contract negotiations while their annual seniority-pay increases keep kicking in. So even if Governor Andrew Cuomo manages to freeze state workers’ pay this year, as he has suggested, taxpayers will still be on the hook for $140 million in seniority-pay hikes.

Read both the sites for a better understanding of the problems public unions pose to governments trying to balance budgets.

Kristof on "The Problem of Islam"

Is Islam the Problem? is the title of a Nick Kristof Op-Ed in the Sunday Times.

Randa the Egyptian girl above gave an interesting explanation of how Egyptian deelopment was retarded by British colonial policy. However, the Chinese could have made the same argument that the Sinaitic jump to warpspeed modernity was forever retarded by the Opium War and severe trading restrictions.

Jumping to the cause of the slowness of Arab Development problem from a wider perspective, the nub of Mr. Kristol's article might be summarized with one paragraph of his article:

The Muslim Brotherhood has often used the slogan, “Islam is the solution.” And to the West, the unstated feeling upon looking across the bleak Middle East landscape has often been: “Islam is the problem.” Professor Kuran’s research suggests that, at least looking forward, the more correct view is: Islam isn’t the problem and it isn’t the solution, it’s simply a religion — meaning that the break is over, there are no excuses, and it’s time to move forward again.

Kristof may have studied Arabic and he may have studied Islam, but "Islam is simply a religion" doesn't cut it for an overall explanation. To every self-righteous Muslim of the billion or so rabid members, Islam is THE religion.

Timur Kuran's studies on Islamic law might explore one corner of Islam's failure to confront modernization. As The Economist has mentioned often in the UNDP reports on Muslim
failure to modernize, there's a lot more out there to ponder about the Arabs' religion and its deleterious effect on modernity.

Wisconsin Is Front Line of GOP War on Democrats, So Where Are the National Democrats?

You're gonna lose because the sane and sober citizens of WI, of which I was formerly one, know that the state is broke and they're gonna have to fix it. And my relatives in the public service unions [teachers] are in agreement. Not everybody in the unions is a crazy marxist. You can always move to California if you don't care about budget balancing.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Pat Down of 9-year old in Train Station---another reason to avoid AmTrak

Here is another example of the lez-bean-in-chief of the TSA and her sex slaves groping ordinary citizens for using the AmTrak midnight train to Georgia.

What aspect of "unreasonable searches and seizures" is NOT covered by this Nazi bitch Napolitano's hatred of ordinary Americans. Thank God for my automobile.

Demonstrators Freak Out and Hate On Sen. Grothman

Here is video of a mob of screeching crazy freaks in Madison hating on a lone State Sen. trying to get into the locked State Capitol. Juxtaposed are the ridiculous members of the so-called Black Caucus deliberately wading through a tea party crowd obviously trying to goad them into an incident. Some of the lying crooks in Congress actually claimed they had been spit upon and were called racial epithets. Despite hundreds of video cameras, NOT ONE incident was actually recorded. Of course the Black Caucus should be in Zimbabwe where their corruption would be commensurate with their political skills.

Still, it's easy to see the gigantic lie that the elites are trying to foist on the law-abiding tea party members and the civilized majority of Americans. At the same time, the same leftists that the d-bags in the media and academy praise for their zeal in support of unions [who suck the money out of middle class taxpayers] are hating on and surrounding a legally-elected State Senator trying to harm him. He was saved only by the civility of a Democrat assemblyman who accompanied him.

Some of the "demonstrators" are from the quasi-criminal left which are pilot fish to movements like legal protests sanctioned by the local and state by-laws.

If this crowd harassing Sen. Grothman had been tea party members [impossible since tea party members are law-abiding and sane members of society fed up with fiscal harikari like the public unions commit], the MSM and lamestream operatives would be on the job 24/7 trying to goad violence and confrontation.

The use of drugs and particularly crystal meth might have something to do with the exhaustion and demented behavior of some of the protesters.

Also, being bussed in from out-of-town without local resources adequate to the upkeep of demonstrators could be another cause.

And some are just hippie, love-drug radicals left over from the sixties who have nothing better to do with their life.
UPDATE
Obama had his little SOTU squat-fit in front of the SCOTUS because his coddled public service union cash cows had been put back into a bigger herd with the other corporate people out in the USA. Now the Indonesian Imbecile sees his chances for a re-elect in '12 jeopardized by the exercise of democracy, not the corrupt skirmishes that the Democrat Party wages.

Bozell is right. The backbone of the union movement is mob violence and coercion, forced payment of union dues and closed shops----all totalitarian practices that need to be supported by union thugs, goons and criminal types across the board.

The media are part of the criminal conspiracy to subjugate workers' rights under a union dictatorship. The media, especially the lamestream losers on the old alphabet networks, are sinking into a quagmire of their own inconsistent reporting on these issues. The reason that more people watch Fox is because Fox presents more aspects of a particular issue, with representation of both sides.

Libya Gets Praised for its Human Rights--Oops, gag me with a spoon!

I'm loved, they love me, how d'ya like my threads?

The Libyan Arab Jumhurriya in its stint as head of the Human Rights Council in Geneva got these encomiums from some of the world's most wonderful countries:

31. The Sudan inquired if the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya could provide it with information about the initiative to distribute wealth to low-income families and whether the country considered this to be the best means to improve the standard of living of families with limited resources. It noted the country’s positive experience in achieving a high school enrolment rate and improvements in the education of women. The Sudan made recommendations.
32. The Syrian Arab Republic praised the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya for its serious commitment to and interaction with the Human Rights Council and its mechanisms. It commended the country for its democratic regime based on promoting the people’s authority through the holding of public conferences, which enhanced development and respect for human rights, while respecting cultural and religions traditions. It asked about the social care system for the elderly and the living conditions at their special homes. The Syrian Arab Republic made a recommendation.
33. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea praised the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya for its achievements in the protection of human rights, especially in the field of economic and social rights, including income augmentation, social care, a free education system, increased delivery of health-care services, care for people with disabilities, and efforts to empower women. It noted the functioning of the constitutional and legislative framework and national entities. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea made recommendations.
34. Bahrain noted that the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya had adopted various policies aimed at improving human rights, in particular the right to education and the rights of persons with disabilities. Bahrain commended the free education system and praised programmes such as electronic examinations and teacher training. It commended the country for its efforts regarding persons with disabilities, particularly all the services and rehabilitation programmes provided. Bahrain made a recommendation.
35. Palestine commended the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya for the consultations held with civil society in the preparation of the national report, which demonstrated its commitment to the improved enjoyment of human rights. Palestine praised the country for the Great Green Document on Human Rights. It noted the establishment of the national independent institution entrusted with promoting and protecting human rights, which had many of the competencies set out in the Paris Principles. It also noted the interaction of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya with human rights mechanisms.
36. Iraq commended the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya for being a party to most international and regional human rights instruments, which took precedence over its national legislation. It welcomed the efforts to present a comprehensive overview of the human rights situation in the country based on the unity among democracy, development and human rights. It also commended the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya for its cooperation with the international community. Iraq made recommendations.
37. Saudi Arabia commended the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya’s achievements in its constitutional, legislative and institutional frameworks, which showed the importance that the country attached to human rights, and for the fact that international treaties took precedence over its national legislation. It noted that the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya had become party to many human rights conventions and had equipped itself with a number of blah blah blah blah blahs to blah blah blah into a barf bag. Venezuela acknowledged the efforts of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya to promote economic, social and cultural rights, especially those of children. . . . Cuba commended the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya for the progress made. . . . Myanmar commended the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya for its economic and social progress.

James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web pulled together this rogue's gallery of nations, some of which even Obama might hesitate to abjectly bow and apologize to, in his hilarious send-up of the ridiculous institution on Turtle Bay in NYC. Here's the naughty James at his naughtiest:

And that's far from comprehensive. Gadhafi's regime, of course, did not just start slaughtering and oppressing Libya's people last week. It has been at it for 42 years. Nonetheless, until just now the regime has been a member of the U.N. Human Rights Council. The council is a joke, and its actions should be judged by the same standard as any other joke. It ought to approve the report because that would be funnier than rejecting it.

Reply to a "Fearfully-Concerned Muslim"

PJM has a sort of stilted dialogue between a Muslim named Selim Mansur and Roger Simon, called "Letters from a fearfully-concerned Muslim to an American Jewish friend. The link provides access to the third such letter. Here is my reply to whom I consider a sincere Muslim who simply seeks a sort of Moses Maimonides and a "Guide for the Perplexed."

"I am a trained Arabist, who was taught at the Foreign Service Institute in DC & Beirut and attained a 3+ level speaking- and 4-level reading proficiency. I worked in three embassies in the Middle East in Arab countries and consider myself reasonably knowledgeable concerning the history of the Arab and Muslim peoples over the last 1400 years. Indeed, I read one of Marshall Hodgson’s books, The Gunpowder Empires, one of the three that Mr. Mansur so heartily recommends. And I did this at the recommendation of Rashid Khalidi, then a professor at the U. of Chicago where he became a confidante of our present President, and whom I count as a personal friend despite profound differences on many issues. In point of fact, Rashid got me faculty privileges at the U.of Chicago’s library, which has the most impressive collection of Islamic literature and manuscripts in the western hemisphere.

However, the atrocity of 9/11 and subsequent attempts by Muslims at special pleading and ridiculous arguments that the US somehow brought this absolute act of war and massive crime on itself was argued by persons who now have excluded themselves from the circle of civilized dialogue. To blame the atrocity on Israel or even the CIA demonstrates how demented [Charlie Sheen is a so-called 'truther' & this fits the pattern] that the insane America-haters have become. There are simply boundaries beyond which no civil dialogue can take place.

Mr. Mansur seems to be honest on the face of his arguments, but the basic and key premise of Islam is that Muhammed is the last prophet and the dialogue between God and Man cannot be further extended now that the revelation accorded to this prophet has closed the books, so to speak, on any religious development outside the extremely narrow purview of this 1400-year old “revelation.”

I’m afraid that he will be repudiated by his own kith and kin and more importantly, that he speaks only for himself when he wishes for a dialogue among Christians, Jews and Muslims, for starters.

The problem that all highly-educated Arabs will admit to in macro-historical terms lies in the simple fact that Islam has not experienced, in any real sense, the huge “transmutational experience” of the Renaissance that Hodgson refers to in his works. In a very real sense, this eliminates the basis for any true dialogue—as a real mature discussion of essential and existential conundrums facing both the West and the fractured body of Islam lack a common language. As Bernard Lewis mentions several times in his works, the inexorable rise of Salafi Islam through its Wahhabi traits has been dragging Islam back into medieval and Dark Age mindsets ever since the middle of the 18th century, when the Enlightenment was topping off many of the interesting avenues opened by the rise of science and advanced mathematics which in turn has led us to the Atomic Age.

E.M. Forster has an absorbing monograph “Alexandria” written during his World War II sojourn in that Egyptian city . Forster’s probing mind traversed the history of the city since its eponymous founder and had an interesting metaphor for the 7th c. conquest of the great city by Ibn al-Walid and his desert warriors. To paraphrase Forster: “The zealous warriors of Islam found the great library and all the other appurtenances left of what had been the highest level any city had attained in the civilized history of mankind, and like a child with a watch who knows nothing of the strange mechanics of the piece, broke it and left it broken as a child would leave a broken watch, without even knowing what he had done….”

Of course, Bernard Lewis is eloquent later on in tracing the history of science under Islam, but that historical development started in the Abbasid Dynasty and lasted until the Greek and Syriac and Persian classics on math and physics and medicine and literature had been absorbed and in some cases improved upon [logorithms & such], but then by the fall of Baghdad in 1258 with Helagu’s conquest and destruction of the first city of Islam, the poem Ozymandias became later on a symbolic objective correlative of everything lost in translation."

I wrote this early in the morning and hope it doesn't sound as disjointed as I felt writing it.