Following speculation about an "inappropriate relationship" with twenty-five-year old special adviser Christopher Myers, William Hague has the support of leading Tories. David Cameron, in particular, is right behind him.

We certainly aren't. Thanks to Del in the comments to my begging letter:

Tired of the cliché "that's wrong on so many levels," I hoped to explore the meaning of level. Or the level of meaning. Or indeed the meaning of meaning, or of of or of the. These questions, and possibly others, were answered by a Brian Massumi - or possibly the Brian Massumi, for how could there be more than one translator of Deleuze called Brian anything, let alone Brian Massumi? Thanks to reader Ole Sandberg for drawing attention to the New Criterion article in which the following passage is quoted, not, I should add, with approval:

Just as higher functions are fed back - all the way to the subatomic (that is position and momentum) - quantum indeterminacy is fed forward.

It rises through the fractal bifurcations leading to and between each of the superposed levels of reality. On each level, it appears in a unique mode adequate to that level. On the level of physical macrosystems analysed by Simondon, its mode is potential energy and the margin of “play” it introduces into deterministic systems (epitomised by the “three body system” so dear to chaos theory). On the biological level, it is the margin of undecidability accompanying every perception, which is one with a perception’s transmissibility from one sense to another. On the human level, it is that same undecidability fed forward into thought, as evidenced in the deconstructability of every structure of ideas (as expressed, for example in Gödel’s incompleteness theorem and in Derrida’s différance). Each individual and collective human level has its own peculiar “quantum” mode; various forms of undecidability in logical and signifying systems are joined by emotion on the psychological level, resistance on the political level, the spectre of crisis haunting capitalist economies. . . . The use of the concept of the quantum outside quantum mechanics, even as applied to human psychology, is not a metaphor.

Oh yes it is.

On a more mundane level, with so many undecidabilities, how do you tell the différance? Answers on descartes postales, s'il vous plaît.

This would be the "far right" Pat Condell:

Today is Bank Holiday Monday. I hope no Great People are working. William Waldegrave argues that Great People must take proper holidays. From The Times:

At Dorney Wood, the official house now occupied by George Osborne, there is a bagatelle board. When I was 17 and Alec Douglas-Home lived there as Foreign Secretary, I spent hours and hours trying to achieve a score high enough to allow me to write my name in the ancient book of record that went with the board. When I had finally wasted enough time and won a score high enough to allow me my page, I found that a titanic name from the past had gone before me. Winston Churchill had done the same thing, presumably spending similar hours winning the same right to be recorded in the bagatelle book of fame. When had he found the leisure to do this? June 1940.

Alongside all his other genius, Churchill had the genius for switching off. Painting, wall building, bagatelle. That is the sort of man you want to be led by. Harold Macmillan was famously found with his feet up reading Trollope during some crisis. Drake finished his game of bowls. Alexander the Great took Aristotle with him for light entertainment when he set off to conquer the world, and took time on the way to solve the Gordian knot and visit Diogenes in his barrel.

Imagine the frustration of the Macedonian staff: “The bloody man is arguing about the nature of happiness with that damned philosopher again . . .” All the evidence is that the very great have curiosity, other interests, hinterland, culture — call it what you will — and though they may single-handedly rally the free world against Nazism or lead an army on foot from Greece to Afghanistan and back to Babylon, their minds have more than one track.

That means that they know how to take real holidays. Busybodies who regard holidays as a matter of merely working somewhere else are not the people you want in charge: Sidney and Beatrice Webb chose to waste not a minute on their honeymoon and so were accompanied by suitcases full of Blue Books on social policy. It is no surprise that no aspect of our lives would have been left unregulated in the world they wanted to create.

I'm all for leaders backing off and butting out - it's generally the best thing Government can do. And certainly, politicians should take a break from politics. What do they know of politics, who only politics know? But such a break should not be purely recreational. One leader in particular, if David Cameron can be called a leader, should take time off from his PR trips to Turkey and India to study Islam. Churchill studied Islam and understood it. Cameron could never be a Churchill, but he could at least try to learn from him. He could learn from this site, as could Tony Blair, whose donation would be felt in our coffers more than missed in his.

Moazzam Begg is the British jihadist and traitor who was, rightly, held as an enemy combatant in the much maligned but relatively comfortable Guantanamo Bay. He has since milked his “suffering” for fame and fortune, aided by the useful idiot lawyer Gareth Pierce (a woman). This week Begg and his doting father (“He was such a nice boy, just wanting to do the right thing”) were interviewed by the BBC. The interview itself was reasonably challenging, but Kate Chisholm’s review of it, in The Spectator, betrays an ignorance and gullibility that, while disappointing, should no longer surprise:

British Muslims, Father and Son (Radio 4, Monday) gave us a refreshingly frank account of Begg’s life before and after his ‘extrajudicial’ imprisonment. He was seized one night in Islamabad, where he was living with his young family, after he answered the door to a group of men who pushed a gun to his head, forced him to his knees, shackled his hands and legs, ‘hooded his head’ and carried him off to three years of incarceration in a converted sea container. He was under suspicion as a British Muslim whose passport revealed he had visited all the major war zones in which the Muslim world had been under attack — Bosnia, Afghanistan, Chechnya — and on several occasions. Yet if MI5 had looked further back in his family records, they would have discovered that generations of Beggs had fought in the British army as Indian Muslims and that he had considered joining up himself before the first invasion of Iraq in 1991 made him realise that as a British soldier he would be involved in fighting against other Muslims.

What a fatuous observation. Chisholm writes of Begg’s decision not to join the British army and “fight against other Muslims” as some kind of mitigating circumstance. On the contrary, his overarching, treasonous loyalty to fellow Muslims is all of a piece with his predilection for war zones in which Muslims are waging jihad, or “under attack” as Chisholm dutifully puts it. As for the “generations of Beggs” who “fought in the British army as Indian Muslims”, so what? It is Moazzam's generation of Beggs – and Ahmeds, and Khans – that matter, and this generation, discovering Islam without the dilution of Indian culture, is as belligerent as Mohammed and his henchmen intended. Indeed this Begg, for whom family loyalty is as nothing compared with Islam, dismisses his ancestors as agents of “a colonial power”.

Chisholm continues in the same uncritical, ignorant vein:

Nothing is straightforward in Begg’s life. As a young boy his parents (who emigrated from the subcontinent to Britain in 1966, having as children been forced to flee to Pakistan from the anti-Muslim riots which followed Partition) sent him to a Jewish school because they thought he would get the best education there. As a father himself, he moved his family to Afghanistan and settled in Kabul because he wanted his children to grow up in a broader cultural context than was possible in ‘arrogant Britain’. He felt they should be brought up in a Muslim society, where they could be protected from the kind of Paki-bashing he had suffered as a teenager in the Midlands.  

Weep for him. A victim of “Paki-bashing” in “arrogant Britain”. How could he not wish for the diversity and “broad cultural context” of Kabul? After all, we arrogant, narrow-contexted Britons only use our football stadiums for football. And how could he not be “radicalised”, what with all that racism? Hindus and Sikhs, who, in the UK, are the same race, were never “radicalised”, but let’s not talk about that.

Not good enough.

While I have yet to embrace the Kindle, mainly because I like the smell of paper, I believe it makes perfect sense for reference books to be online, or on CD-Rom. I am not too worried about the Oxford English Dictionary being online only, nor by the greater capacity for more ephemeral words that this, according to Times columnist Ross Clarke, will bring in its wake:

The 80 or so lexicographers who have spent the past 20 years beavering away on the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary won’t be short of words to describe their disappointment at learning that their life’s work will never appear in printed form, only in online format. I know how I would feel: peeved, piqued, embittered, spleenful, miffed.

It was probably inevitable that the paper edition of the OED was eventually going to be discontinued. Few learned sorts nowadays have pockets deep enough or a study cavernous enough for the entire 20 volume, £750 dictionary. But we are going to lose something with the paper edition of the OED. The trouble with the online edition is that it is too tempting for the editors to update it constantly, inserting frivolous and ephemeral words.

Words used to have to be well established before achieving the honour of entering the OED. My dog-eared Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, revised in 1990, does not even find room for the word “hoover” in the main body of the text: it appears only in the addenda, with a note saying that it first appeared in 1927. Of fashionable words from the 1980s there is no mention at all: no mullet hairdo, no sloanes, no yuppies. Since the online edition of the OED was introduced, however, there has been a steady acceleration in its acceptance of new words. The verb “google” was included in 2006. “Hoodie” and “dogging” both entered in 2007.

One hates to sound like a fogey but the problem with accepting new words too quickly is that the OED then becomes hostage to marketing operations. Words such as twitter and tweet have already made the Oxford Dictionary of English, an offshoot of the full OED, which tracks current usage. It may not sound so very different from the entry of hoover, but there is a fundamental difference: the latter was accepted only after it became clear that it was being used by people as a generic term, regardless of their brand of vacuum cleaner. You can’t twitter without using a product devised by one company.

What about google? I think people google even if they don't use Google, although most people google with Google. In due course they'll find something else to twitter with.

It isn’t just the OED that risks losing authority from going wholly online. Purely electronic archives are too easy to “correct”, “update” and generally fiddle with. I don’t know who has access, for example, to recent Cabinet papers awaiting release under the 30 year rule. But I know that, as long as they are kept in paper form, no one can easily change them without making it obvious.

I’ll never forget the GP who was an early advocate, in the 1980s, of computerising his patients’ medical records, something that seemed frightfully modern and progressive then. His name? Harold Shipman.

Unlike Ross Clarke, I love to sound like an old fogey. Nevertheless,  there are one or two recent additions to the English lexicon which I would like to see in the OED: dhimmi, jihad, jizya, hudud and taqiyya. And if we have to google and twitter them, so be it.

Tonight, at 7.30 is a documentary Britain's Secret Slaves. From the Channel 4 Website:

Over 15,000 domestic workers leave their families to come to Britain every year. Charities claim that many are not only badly treated but that they are living as slaves.

This report investigates the plight of overseas domestic workers brought to the UK, and enslaved behind closed doors by rich and powerful employers in the upper levels of British society.

Dispatches goes undercover as some of the employers accused of modern-day slavery are confronted on camera about how they have treated their workers.

Many workers make the sacrifice to leave their country for the UK in order to better provide for their families back home. But lobby groups and charities communicate that a worrying proportion of domestic workers have their passports taken away from them, are kept locked up and subjected to sexual, physical and psychological abuse.

Many are paid less than £50 a week for 20 hour days and some wages are withheld completely.

This is followed, also on Channel 4, by a drama, I Am Slave, inspired by the true story of a woman called Mende Nazer, who was taken from her home in the Nuba mountains of Sudan to be a slave, first in Khartoum, then London, before managing to escape.

If neither the documentary, nor the drama, mention Islam, it will be a deliberate distortion of the truth. In London it is mainly rich Arabs who have slaves, just as they do in Saudi Arabia, and with full Islamic sanction. In particular, Arabs have enslaved Christians and black Muslims in Sudan.

Yes, argues Minette Marrin, responding in The Sunday Times to the Dispatches documentary When Cousins Marry:

Cousin marriage is risky, particularly for groups which have practised it for generations. Closely related first cousins face greater than normal risks of having babies with serious recessive genetic disorders.

To say that is not to criticise anyone for anything. It is not to attack any particular religion or ethnic group or culture. It is merely to state a painful fact, of which people used to be unaware.

Did they? My grandmother, who had little education and would never have heard of recessive genes, knew that it wasn't a good idea. Stop making excuses. In fact, having stated that no "particular religion or ethnic group or culture" is being "attacked", Ms Marrin goes on to make it clear, as did the Dispatches programme, that it is one particular religion and culture: Muslims of Pakistani origin (the programme also mentioned Arabs and Africans). This is not one ethnic group, however - British Hindus and Sikhs do not practise cousin marriage in any significant numbers.

However, today this subject is political dynamite; most people don’t dare talk about it at all. That is because the people mainly affected are British Pakistani Muslims: hence the deafening, pusillanimous silence on what should be a serious public health concern.

People have always married their first cousins — Darwin did, Einstein did — and it is legal to do so here. But British Pakistani Muslims actively favour cousin marriage and traditionally have done. About 55% marry their first cousins in this country and in Bradford the number is about 75%.

The result, sadly, is what you would expect. British Pakistani couples account for about 3% of all births here, but they produce nearly a third of all British children suffering from recessive genetic disorders. The BBC reported in 2005 that Birmingham primary care trust estimated that 1 in 10 of children born to first cousins in the city either died in infancy or went on to develop a serious disability due to a genetic disorder.

Many of these problems were discussed by a young British Pakistani woman brave enough to report on this last week on Channel 4’s Dispatches programme.

Tazeen Ahmad showed harrowing scenes of a young man writhing and protesting in the misery of his genetic disorder, while his exhausted mother looked after his two blind sisters.

Ahmad spoke of the disabilities and early deaths among her own uncles and aunts, as a result of cousin marriage, and made the general risks plain. What was profoundly shocking was the resistance to these known risks; she spoke to imams, community leaders and parents in a state of resentful denial.

Although some younger people seemed more aware, and angry about the intense family pressure on cousins to marry, most people interviewed simply did not accept the scientific evidence. One mother said her children’s disorders were caused by the drugs given to them by the National Health Service.

Worst of all, not a single MP from a constituency with a large Pakistani population would agree to appear on television. Not one was brave enough to run the risk of being called racist or Islamophobic, which is the usual reaction against anyone prepared to talk openly about this subject. Only the redoubtable Ann Cryer, retired MP for Keighley, was courageous enough to appear, calling stoutly for an end to cousin marriage and saying that much of the Pakistani community was in denial about the risks.

It is a national disgrace that members of parliament have allowed themselves to be cowed into silence. (Phil Woolas, like Cryer, is an honourable exception; he warned of these dangers in 2008.) They owe it to their constituents and to the public to face up to and speak out about a practice that causes horrible suffering, to say nothing of the vast cost to the NHS.

[...]

To avoid in future the terrible and unnecessary suffering of those many children born with recessive genetic disorders, the government should be brave enough, and compassionate enough, to make first cousin marriage illegal.

But why pass a law for non-Muslims, when Muslims are the problem? The French banned all religious symbols in schools, when only the hijab was the problem, thereby making non-Muslims suffer for the militancy and intransigence of Muslims. For non-Muslims, making first cousin marriage illegal would be a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Far better to end Muslim immigration.

The Dispatches programme was good as far as it went, but it did not explain why British Muslims are disproportionately married off to first cousins. True, is isn't in the Koran, but then nor is honour killing, yet this is an overwhelmingly Muslim crime, even in civilised Western countries like the UK.

In the comments to my post here, Hugh puts forward an explanation:

Why is cousin-marriage favored by Muslims? I suggest that in Islam trust is not encouraged, but rather deception, aggression, and violence, and that those raised up in this faith, and who have been affected by the attitudes and atmospherics of Islam, that color even relations with fellow Muslims (supposedly their "brothers"), and that their total belief-system creates a mental and emotional world, and people, who are "savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,"  and because trust is so lacking, even without the presence of Infidels who of course are never to be trusted by Muslims, it is considered best in those societies that are most deeply Muslim, or among those who take Islam most to heart, to marry off daughters to other family members, so that at least a modicum of trust might conceivably be placed.

I agree. Islam is above all primitive -  a word insufficiently used under the present cult of Diversity. Muslims, even in advanced, civilised Britain, hold to the customs of the desert and the jungle, because Islam is tribal and primitive. To this I would add a further explanation, borrowing one of Hugh's phrases: inshallah fatalism. It was difficult not to feel sorry for the afflicted children, but the parents are a different story. Passively, fatalistically and moronically, they intoned that it was God's will. The mother who blamed the NHS drugs was like those Muslims - and there are many - who believe 9/11 was the work of the Jews. Perhaps she should try camel's urine instead and save her non-Muslim, taxpaying supporters a fortune.

... is big in China, where the title is translated as "A record of an orphan girl who drifts about alone". I suppose Wuthering Heights would be "A record of family quarrels where there is no collective farming".

"Jane Eyre" is probably quite hard to say if you're Chinese. I wonder what they made of Nicholas Nickleby. "A record of a sans-culotte who turns on a sixpence"?

As for A Tale of Two Cities, let's hope the Chinese don't spake moonerisms.

Tony Blair, whose financial profligacy laid the foundations for the banking crisis and the deepest recession since the war, has set up a bank to act as deal-maker in investments for the super rich. From The Daily Mail:

A company set up by Tony Blair can now act as an investment bank after registering with the Financial Services Authority.

His Mayfair-based company Firerush could provide the former Prime Minister with further opportunities to boost his fortune, estimated to be in excess of £20million.

Firerush is understood to be one of a number of firms Mr Blair set up to manage the finances of his consultancy firm, Tony Blair Associates (TBA).

But this development raises the possibility of Mr Blair acting as a deal-maker in investments for the super-rich.

Some of Mr Blair's staff have also registered with the FSA and are able to offer services to clients.

They include Catherine Rimmer, who worked in the research unit at Downing Street, and Jo Gibbins, a former aide.

A spokesman denied that the company would act as an investment bank.

He said: 'FSA registration was appropriate given the potential there was for TBA to do work that might fall under the scope of the FSA.'

Firerush was registered with the FSA in January and was originally thought to have been set up to manage Mr Blair's own private portfolio.

There's no snob like a socialist snob and there's no greed like a socialist's greed.

A holistic hadith from Bukhari/Muslim:

A believer is not bitten from the same hole twice.

Bite me from the same hole once, shame on you. Bite me from the same hole twice, shame on me.

"Freedom and tolerance will always defeat terrorism and tyranny," declares Michael Bloomberg, megamosque-mongering Mayor of New York.

Wrong. Tyranny was defeated by bombing Berlin and sinking u-boats. Or, in the case of the Soviets, by outspending them in the arms race. Tolerance towards Islam will get us only the moral victory - and when your country's heaving with mosques, that's as much use as a chocolate teapot.

Never mind tolerance; make sure that we have the Gatling gun and they have not. On second thoughts, they can have the Gatling gun, as long as we have the nukes.

Scientists have threshed out the genetic code of wheat, and it's five times larger than the human genome. Does bread live by man alone? From The Telegraph:

The genome sequence is expected to help scientists develop new wheat strains which are more resilient to harsh conditions and disease and deliver higher yields.

Scientists hope the breakthrough will ease pressure on the world’s food supply and help stabilise rising food prices.

Wheat is one of the world's most important food crops, with an annual global harvest of more than 550 million tonnes. The cereal is worth more than £2 billion to Britain's agricultural industry each year.

The new genome data will give breeders and scientists access to 95 per cent of all wheat genes.

And the bad news? It's the other 5 per cent that's different from the chaff.

Economy grew "more than thought", reads a headline at the BBC.

Penny for them.

A new Cameron has arrived, bearing a daft name - not corny but Cornish. The devil take me if I can work out what is meant by the second paragraph of this short piece in The Times (my emphasis)

David and Samantha Cameron have named their new daughter Florence Rose Endellion. The second middle name is taken from a village in Cornwall close to the one in which they were staying when the Prime Minister’s wife went into labour.

Possibly, this is quite clever. Had they not chosen something more conventional than “Endellion” then the first question anybody would have asked her would have been, “Was your dad the Prime Minister?”

Now it will be, “Did you say dandelion?” To which she will reply, “Endellion.” And they will say “What?” She will say, “I was born in Cornwall.” And they will say: “In the village of St Endellion?” and she will say, “No.”

But they didn't choose "something more conventional than Endellion"; they chose "Endellion". Unless they mean as a first name. But then, she wouldn't say "Endellion"; she'd say "Florence", which doesn't sound a bit like dandelion, although it has to do with flowers.

The second daughter of the Prime Minister was not expected for another month and not expected in Cornwall at all. Announcing her birth yesterday, Mr Cameron said that her name would “have to have something Cornish in the middle”. Few suspected that the Camerons would take the Brooklyn Beckham route (more or less) and choose the name of a village in which they weren’t quite staying.

St Endellion was named after St Endelienta, a Christian martyr who crossed the Bristol Channel to bring Christianity to Cornwall in the 6th century. Legend holds that she survived on cow’s milk, but that her cow was killed by the Lord of nearby Trentinney. Endelienta’s godfather, King Arthur, killed him in turn. Endelienta revived him and became a saint. Quite the soap opera. She was buried in the village under what is now the church.

“There’s not much here,” said Mark Symons, 41, who runs the local farm shop and tea rooms. “There is a cheese named after the village, but I suspect she wasn’t named after that.”

A shame she wasn't named "Mousehole", to rhyme with tousle. Nick Clegg's middle name is a bit like Mousehole, but rhymes with Basel.

It has been too often assumed that opponents of the proposed mosque at Ground Zero are "Islamophobes". Quite apart from the fact that the word "Islamophobe" is a meaningless, opportunistic creation, the accusation is not just unfair but irrelevant. Most Americans do not know enough about Islam to oppose it. (Yes, most Britons don't either, but that is not the point.) The opposition is based not on hostility to Islam, still less on hostility to Muslims, but on a sense of the sacred. Ben Macintyre in The Times:

Sixteen years ago, on a sacred patch of Virginia soil, a peculiar and bitter battle erupted between two unlikely combatants: Abraham Lincoln and Mickey Mouse.

The conflict started when the Walt Disney Company unveiled plans to build a huge theme park beside the Manassas Battlefield, where the Union and Confederate armies fought bloodily in 1861 and again in 1862, leaving more than 4,000 dead.

The scheme’s supporters pointed out that the 3,000-acre historical theme park, “Disney’s America”, would bring much-needed jobs and revenue to Virginia and stoke interest in the civil war among a younger generation of Americans.

Ranged in opposition were ranks of historians, commentators, local residents and ordinary Americans for whom the prospect of a gaudy theme park in such a venerated place was nothing less than desecration.

Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, depicting the battlefields as hallowed ground, became a rallying cry against the invasion of the Mouse. The forces of Walt Disney were finally driven off: the theme park was never built.

A similar, even more furious battle is now taking place in America over the plan to build a mosque and Islamic centre near Ground Zero in New York.

[...]

Intense political skirmishing has broken out as Republicans and Democrats manoeuvre for tactical advantage. Opponents of the project have been accused of Islamophobia; supporters are condemned as unpatriotic. Some point out that the proposed centre is more than two blocks from Ground Zero, a considerable distance by cramped New York standards. At its heart, however, the fight over the Ground Zero mosque, like the battle over Mickey Mouse at Manassas in 1994, is about the sanctity and sensitivity of America’s few patches of hallowed ground.

All countries have their sacred places. Sometimes these are holy, such as Stonehenge, Machu Picchu and the Temple of Apollo, and sometimes monumental and symbolic, such as the pyramids and the Great Wall of China.

Often they are consecrated by bravery and sacrifice, such as the Great War cemeteries and the civil war battlefields. But some of the most sacred places on Earth are memorials to horror and human vileness: Auschwitz is the most obvious example.

America — as a vast, young, historically forgetful, multi-faith nation in a state of constant self-renewal — has comparatively few sacred places, and as a consequence these few are held in acute and genuine reverence: Alamo, the Normandy graveyards, Gettysburg, Pearl Harbor, the National Mall, Ellis Island and now Ground Zero.

The elevation of such places to transcendent symbolic status may seem arbitrary and illogical. The site of John F. Kennedy’s assassination is a place of national pilgrimage. The aircraft that carried his body is a museum; the rifle that killed him and the hospital gurney he died on are in the National Archives. No one will ever be able to build on the grassy knoll. Yet, as The Times reports today, the site of Robert Kennedy’s assassination is about to become America’s most expensive state school.

Martyrdom does not automatically confer sacredness. On the spot in the Pentagon where 184 people were killed on 9/11 there is now a multi-faith prayer room where Islamic prayers have been read thousands of times since American Airlines Flight 77 smashed into the building. No one has ever voiced a word of protest.

Ground Zero, by contrast, became hallowed ground, sacrosanct and inviolable, from the moment the twin towers collapsed. To many, building anything on, or even near, the site smacks of sacrilege: emptiness is the most fitting monument.

In the aftermath of the First World War, some argued that the battlefields should simply be left as they were on the day of the Armistice, a livid scar running across France where the trenches had been and so many had perished. A similar sense of revered devastation attaches to Ground Zero, which explains why the debate about what, if anything, to build on the site has rumbled on so long and so bitterly.

This is what lies behind the storm of protest over the Cordoba Centre. The 70 per cent of Americans who object to the idea are not, on the whole, motivated by religion, let alone anti-Islamic prejudice, but by a feeling that a place hallowed in memory will be rendered less sacred by the proximity of a 13-story building dedicated to Islam, however moderate.

The site of the 9/11 attack is part of a shared national consciousness. As the columnist Charles Krauthammer puts it: “When we speak of Ground Zero as hallowed ground, we mean that it belongs to those who suffered and died there — and that such ownership obliges the living to preserve the dignity and memory of the place.” Ground Zero is not just another chunk of Manhattan real estate, but a national shrine. Unlike, say, the National Mall in Washington DC, the place was not chosen and deliberately consecrated by the nation but rendered sacred by a deliberate act of evil.

The battle over the Ground Zero mosque has exposed one of the oldest fault lines in American society. On one side are the legal rationalists, correctly pointing out that under the First Amendment Muslims have an equal right to practise their religion wherever they want; on the other is the majority, for whom this is not a matter of law, but of taste, feelings and propriety.

In his Gettysburg Address Lincoln transformed a few blood-soaked fields into sacred ground, a memorial to national mourning, sacrifice, and hope. “The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it.” Many modern Americans feel the same way about the dead of 9/11. In American history the only place with emotive power comparable to Gettysburg is Ground Zero.

Barack Obama’s error — perhaps the greatest mistake of his presidency so far — was to underestimate the level of emotion evoked by this sacred patch of American ground. As a result, he has been left looking isolated, vulnerable and slightly ridiculous, like Mickey Mouse on the Manassas battlefield.

Hugo Rifkind in The Times:

Unavoidably, when one writes about comments made in a language one doesn’t speak, one runs the risk of missing a vital nuance. Take Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the other day, as he unveiled Iran’s spanking new bomber drone. “This jet,” he said, “as well as being an ambassador of death for the enemies of humanity, has a main message of peace and friendship.”

Possibly, if you hear that in Persian, it’s obvious you’re supposed to laugh. As opposed to doing what I did, which was a sort of heaving, involuntary shiver. Very weird manoeuvre.

I’d take some convincing, though. He was standing next to the bomber at the time, you see, and he’d had it scattered with rose petals. No, really. Rose petals. As if he wanted to sleep with it. Where have all the flowers gone? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad nicked them to decorate Iran’s answer to Trident. We’re talking rose petals, here. On a thing created to drop bombs. He’ll be making it wear a nightie, next. The man is a nutcase.

Do they have any idea, the Iranian regime? Do they grasp, at all, why the world is so frightened of them? Tehran, please, listen. It’s not because you pose a lurking threat to our beloved US-dominated, Zionist hegemony. I know you like to think that, but genuinely, it isn’t. It’s because you’re lunatics. Proper, bomb-humping, women-hating, backward freaks. Guys, you may be the heirs to six millennia of Persian civilisation, but you come across, no offence meant, like the compulsive loony on the bus.

You issue theological proclamations about haircuts, for God’s sake. In almost any other situation in the world, this would be the behaviour of people who have lost their minds.

It is possible, if one is of a particularly angsty and self-loathing bent (and one is) to sometimes think that Iran gets a raw deal; to think that the bigoted West fears and misunderstands an actually quite modern and enlightened Islamic Republic, and so portrays it as something far more sinister than it actually is.

But then, then, while still agonising about whether or not to stone a woman to death (how long should that take?) they design a machine to kill people, and give every indication of wanting to dress it up like Liberace.

Every country has its share of mad people, sure, but in Iran they’re in charge. The world simply cannot trust these people with nuclear weapons. It’s bad enough we trust them with scissors.

Not mad, just Islamic. Not sure about the rose petals, though - that must be a frolic of his own.

Blah Feme watches - or listens to - the "sonic scene". Wake up and hear the coffee:

The difficulties we face in coming to understand the sonic relation and its relation, in turn, with the social relation more broadly are symptomatic, I suggest, of a crisis in the imagination of the common. The key to thinking the sonic/social relation is obscured precisely because it is interdicted by the forces that seek to hold us in thrall to the charm of property. Without property, we have come to believe, we will be excluded from political representation, destined to dwell in the twilight of the amorphous proto-d?mos, without demand, without voice, without future. To answer the first question I raised above, then (how, that is do we constitute ourselves sonically?), it is in the process of attaching ourselves to an ideal scene of pastoral calm, the private imagined acoustically, that we think ourselves to be whole. It is not that we are all dreaming of a rural idyll, or seeking to live a life like Edward Carpenter’s glorious peasant isolation, but, rather, that we have come to identify with a certain sonic scene in which we have full control over the boundary between the inside and the outside. In what John Picker has termed the ‘soundproof study’, in a model, that is, of a certain imagination of social autonomy, subjects have come to think themselves as authors of their own soundscapes. Noise has become, quite simply, the name we give to the failure of that authorial control.

Quite simply? I didn't understand a word of this, so I googled "sonic scene" and was none the wiser. In another post, Blah Feme appears to be a bit cross with her neighbour:

I have, for some time now, been waking to the realisation that there are some that I 'know', some that occupy space near me and who have seemed until now thoroughly benign, good even, that are, to put it no other way I can think of, profoundly malign. Being in proximity to malignancy such as this, malignancy that has taken a great deal of time to show itself, a great deal of time to make itself felt and to engage its sharp teeth, is like coming to a sudden knowledge of the most insidious sickness underlying everything you thought good, healthy and fair. The unveiling of that malignancy has been shocking and yet utterly banal in equal measure. And it is this banality that has unsteadied me the most. That one can ever get used to being in proximity to a creature without an ethical core, and find ways of being in the world in proximity to that creature, is perhaps the most deeply disturbing realisation that I have come to.

Oh all right, then, I'll turn the music down, but you leave my wheelie bin alone.

Spengler asks a question which should be re-phrased as "Why are most Americans suspicious of Islam"?

Iraq is the first American war in which soldiers stationed overseas are not fraternizing with the locals. Americans are not hostile to foreigners. On the contrary, American soldiers abroad used to fall for the local girls in huge numbers. American soldiers have brought three quarters of a million brides home since World War II. Only a few hundred American soldiers [3] have requested visas for Iraqi spouses or fiances, by contrast, a vanishingly small number. Unlike all previous American wars, American boys and Iraqi girls don't fall in love. Part of the problem is security - it's harder for Americans to fraternize with the locals than in previous wars - but the bigger issue is cultural. Americans and Arab Muslims come from worlds far less compatible than Americans and say, Vietnamese or Japanese.

The viciousness of war in the Middle East, in particular the easy sacrifice of civilian lives by contending forces. The Global Terrorism Database lists 1,868 attacks on religious figures and institutions through December 2008, including 848 bombings - all but a handful perpetrated by Muslims. It is not only that Muslims seem just as willing to kill one another as to kill Christians or Jews, but that they choose to do so in a fashion intended to horrify their enemies and the world.

Never in American history has the gap been greater between the experience of ordinary Americans and the picture of the world drawn by the intellectual elite. Hollywood has not distributed a film about Muslim terrorists for a generation. The major media go out of their way to portray Islam favorably. But when a line is drawn in the sand over a public gesture to Islam, we find a seven to three margin against.

We should conclude from this exercise that America remains a Christian nation in marrow and bone, despite the atheism of its intellectual elite (only a fifth of professors at elite American universities say they believe in God, compared with about nine-tenths of the general population). [4]

Most Americans do not confuse a God of love with whatever radical Muslims might worship. Former president George W Bush told them that Islam was "a religion of peace", and Obama adds that Muslims "excel in every walk of life" (Americans can't think of an example, excluding the stray convert among African-American athletes).

What Americans observe, though, is that Islam has produced a large number of individuals enraged enough to kill themselves in order to murder Americans as well as each other. Most Muslims, to be sure, are peaceable folk who want nothing better than to live their own lives undisturbed. But every religion must take ownership of a visible minority that favors violence, and the American public can to some extend be excused for holding Islam to account.

An opinion piece in today's Telegraph has nothing to do with Islam; it is about local councils' war on the motorist. Local councils waste money hand over fist, with their "outreach co-ordinaters" and "diversity facilitators", not to mention all the money paid to the skivers on "long-term sick". The answer: rob - sorry, tax - motorists who work in the productive private sector and pay their wages.

Whether or not you share Ed West's views on this topic, his piece is interesting for the analogy he uses:

Where there's green, there's gold, as far as the taxman is concerned, and so councils, using the language of environmentalism to squeeze drivers to the bone, are now utterly dependent on the car. Indeed, car drivers are now so burdened that their role is starting to resemble that of non-Muslim dhimmis in medieval Islamic societies – an outsider group officially despised, yet one on which the state relies financially.

I am pleased to see that the word dhimmi trips off the tongue so easily that it can be used as a point of comparison for something closer to home. Then again, dhimmitude is close to home. Perhaps if local councils spent less money "reaching out" to Muslim "communities", they wouldn't need to fleece the taxpayer.

Channel 4's Dispatches programme shows a readiness to offend Muslims by tackling the taboo subject of first cousin marriage in the UK. Labour MP Anne Cryer has spoken out about this, but she is one of the few. This is not the first time Channel 4 has offended Muslims - remember Undercover Mosque? - so I hope that it will take no prisoners. From the Daily Mail:

Sitting in the family living room, I watched tensely as my mother and her older brother signed furiously at each other. Although almost completely without sound, their row was high-octane, even vicious.

Three of my uncles were born deaf but they knew how to make themselves heard. Eventually, my uncle caved in and fondly put his arm around his sister.

My mum has always had a special place in her family because she was the first girl to live beyond childhood. Five of her sisters died as babies or toddlers. It was not until many years later that anyone worked out why so many children died and three boys were born deaf.

Today there is no doubt among us that this tragedy occurred because my grandparents were first cousins. 

My grandmother’s heart was broken from losing so many daughters at such a young age. As a parent, I can’t imagine what she went through.

My family is not unique. In the UK more than 50 per cent of British Pakistanis marry their cousins – in Bradford that figure is 75 per cent – and across the country the practice is on the rise and also common among East African, Middle-Eastern  and Bangladeshi communities.

Quite random, then, for these "communities" have nothing in common.

Back when my grandparents were having children, the med­ical facts were not established. But today in Britain alone there are more than 70 scientific studies on the subject.
 

We know the children of first cousins are ten times more likely to be born with recessive genetic disorders which can include infant mortality, deafness and blindness.

We know British Pakistanis constitute 1.5 per cent of the population, yet a third of all children born in this country with rare recessive genetic diseases come from this community. 

Despite overwhelming evidence, in the time I spent filming Dispatches: When Cousins Marry, I felt as if I was breaking a taboo rather than addressing a reality. Pakistanis have been marrying cousins for generations.
 

In South Asia the custom keeps family networks close and ensures assets remain in the family. In Britain, the aim can be to strengthen bonds with the subcontinent as cousins from abroad marry British partners.

Some told us they face extreme pressure to marry in this way. One young woman, ‘Zara’, said when she was 16 she was emotionally blackmailed by her husband’s family in Pakistan who threatened suicide over loss of honour should she refuse to marry her cousin.
 

She relented and lives in a deeply unhappy marriage. But others told me of the great benefits of first cousin marriage – love, support and understanding. To them, questioning it is an attack on the community or, worse, Islam.

At a Pakistani centre in Sheffield, one man said: ‘The community feels targeted, whether that be forced marriages or first-cousin marriages. The community is battening down its hatches, not wanting to engage.’

As a British Pakistani, I am aware of the religious, cultural and racial sensitivities around this issue and understand why people would be on the defensive when questioned about it.
 

At times I was torn between explaining the health risks while privately understanding the community’s sense of being demonised.

But I have also grown up in a family that has suffered the medical implications and strongly believe that people should have the choice to make an informed decision.

Throughout I had to remind myself that this is a health story – nothing more. It is not about religion or cultural identity. It is about avoidable suffering such at that experienced by Saeeda and Jalil Akhtar, whom I met in Bradford.
 

Actually it is about religion and cultural identity. Any reader of Jane Austen will tell you that cousin marriage is not exclusive to Islam, but Islam inculcates the tribalist attitudes and shunning of outsiders that encourage such marriages generation after generation. And who picks up the pieces? The British taxpayer.

Dispatches is tonight, 8pm, Channel 4. I'm going to be out, but will record it and report back.

Theodore Dalrymple explains that the word "evil" once referred to natural disasters as well as human wickedness. He goes on to write:

It is not surprising that the word should have undergone a change of meaning, for in the intervening period the proportion of human suffering caused by moral, as against natural, evil has increased dramatically, thanks to our growing mastery of nature.

Every silver lining has a cloud.

Kevin Myers raised the mean Irish IQ to double figures. Add Conor Cruise O'Brien and it's dublin. Add Cliona Campbell - that's like Fiona but with a Cl- and it's re-dublin. With any luck - not that I'd start from here at all, at all - they'll make 100, despite the proven stupidity of the rest of them.

Cliona Campbell supports, and understands Israel. That shows remarkable independence of thought, considering she is only nineteen and comes from a nation of blarney-mongers and EU scroungers who, generally, show predictable "solidarity" with the "plight" of the "occupied" "Palestinians":

Ever since the age of nine, I have been captivated by the Jewish people — a nation which has endured hatred, persecution and genocide, and yet still retains an unyielding will to survive, unifying them in an unbreakable kinship.

So I had always wanted to see Israel for myself. But why the army?

Because over the years, I had seen the Israelis suffer incessant rocket attacks from terrorists and, when they eventually retaliated, be castigated when the same terrorists placed their own civilian people in the line of fire as ‘human shields’.

I couldn’t stand by and see the people I had grown to cherish being discredited before the world, and wanted to show solidarity to the Jewish nation. So I decided to spend time with the Israeli army myself.

After sharing my dream with an American who spent a semester in my college, she suggested looking up an organisation called Sar-El, which organises groups of volunteers from various backgrounds across the globe to work on Israeli army bases. The minute I heard about it, I knew this was for me. I began an intensive course of online Hebrew lessons.

It wasn’t long before I was standing in Dublin Airport, my face streaked with tears from an emotional farewell to my family, as I wielded sunhats and a monstrous wheelie bag, ready to embark on my two-month adventure.

The moment I arrived in Israel, an announcement blared on the loudspeakers, politely requesting that passengers refrain from carrying guns in the airport terminal.

I was in Israel. And with that, I was bussed away into the unknown.

Volunteers in the Israeli army are not afforded preferential treatment. We wore the same canvas uniforms, slept on the same squeaky bunk beds, survived on the same sustenance of eggs, eggs, and a side order of humus, and carried out work that the soldiers themselves would otherwise be doing.

[...]

We giggled at the English mistakes of our newfound friends, such as Daniel’s solemn advice of “if you have a problem, just whisper in my eye and I’ll sort it out for you”. Everyone soon found their place on the base, and I felt a sense of pride when they would fondly call on me — their “gingit” or “gezer” (‘carrot’ because of my red hair) — to translate for them!  One night, I began to converse with a burly Russian soldier, who spoke of how he had always felt a sense of shame for not being legitimately Jewish due to his mixed parentage. “But since I came here,” he gestured to the floodlit base with its looming wire fences strangled by dry belong”. He went on: “In the Israeli army, there are Jews, Christians, even Arab Bedouin Muslims — it just doesn’t matter — we wear the same uniform, sleep in the same bunk beds and ask the same question — ad matai?”

I smiled at the familiar phrase which means ‘until when?’ This is the question on every

soldier’s lips as they eagerly await the experience that lies before them when they join the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).

That night, I gazed at the myriad of faces surrounding me. Moroccans, Russians, Yeminis, Ethiopians — a cacophony of races and origins, all sporting the same khaki green uniform, all calling each other ‘achi’ — ‘my brother’.

[...]

The final day of volunteering felt almost like a bereavement as we wheeled our bags towards the bus. Pulling away up the dusty track and through the security gates, the commander’s words echoed in my mind. “We have no oil, no precious metals, and a chronic water shortage,” he began, “The only resource we do have is our people.”

Predictably, this outbreak of common sense has met with hostility from dopey Irish lefties. Michael Weiss in the New Criterion:

 I've long been a keen observer of Hibernian sympathies for Zionism because my own heritage is as much Dedalus as it is Bloom. And so now to this esteemed company we can add the name Cliona Campbell, a 19 year-old girl from Cork who was so taken with the Jewish people and their plight that she went to Israel to volunteer with an international corps of the IDF. She returned home, wrote about the experience for the Evening Echo. The unsought reverberations of this article constitute one of the blackest campaigns of national obloquy ever heaped upon a writer in Ireland. According to my friend Ben Cohen, "Grown men have walked to up to [Campbell] in the street and abused her. Browsing in a clothes store, the security guard recognized her and showered her with insults. Threats have been emailed to her."  To say that this has been done in the name of Palestinian solidarity would be an insult to Palestinians.

It would be if there were such people as "Palestinians". But certainly, the people attacking this admirable young woman are motivated by Jew hatred rather than sympathy for the motley collection of Muslim Arabs - and that is all the "Palestinians" are - who live and breed, and breed, and breed, in Gaza. 

When it comes to polltics, especially Islam and especially Israel, singers should shut up and sing, actors should shut up and act - and artists should shut up and art. Harry's Place reports that a group of Irish "artists" are bravely boycotting Israel. Contributor Gene, who is a bit thick about Islam but spot on about Israel, comments:  "I admire your brave stand in the face of so much rabid support for Israel among 'artists' worldwide." Kevin Myers, who single-handedly raises the mean Irish IQ to double figures, writes:

[M]ost Muslims do not accept that such historical processes are irreversible. They believe that once land is Dar al-Islam -- the abode of the faithful -- it can never be relinquished. If taken by non-believers, it then becomes Dar al-Harb: the abode of war, and shall remain so until it is restored to Islam. And so Israel has for the past 62 years been Dar al-Harb.

Indeed, neither the 'secular' PLO nor the Islamicist Hamas sees a long-term resolution in the Middle East that will genuinely include the state of Israel. Even for many 'moderate' Palestinians, the twin-state solution is the merely the stepping-stone to the status quo ante the Balfour Declaration. Palestine will thus be restored to the Dar al-Islam and the Caliphate.

Now, if you oppose the right of Israel to exist, that's clear enough: you want the Jews of Israel either dispersed or killed, so there's not much to discuss, other than train timetables, methodology (gas or gun?) and corpse-disposal. It's been done before; maybe this time, you'll get it right.

But if you support the right of Israel to exist, but condemn Israeli methods for coping with Palestinian terrorism, then how do you propose to deal with the volleys of thousands of Hamas rockets into Israeli towns from Gaza? You want a proportionate response? Very well, tell us what is proportionate. If you are against suicide bombers, but are opposed to the wall that has successfully prevented suicide bombers from entering Israel from the West Bank, then what is your realistic and efficient alternative to the wall?

Emoting over the plight of the Palestinian refugees -- a fond pastime in this country -- begs the question: why are they still refugees? Why haven't they been absorbed by their Arab neighbours as the Muslims of the Indian Punjab have been in Pakistan; as the Hindus of Lahore have in Amritsar; as the Germans of Danzig have been in Hamburg?

Why? Because, quite simply, most of Israel's neighbours don't want a permanent, irreversible peace with the Jewish state. They want Dar al-Harb by terrorism and political instability until the day of jihad arrives, after which the Dar al-Islam will be restored. If this means keeping the people of the Gaza Strip confined in an open-air madhouse, so be it. Thus, Gaza is the paradise where Shariah law rules, where it is illegal for girls to ride bikes, where honour-killings are legitimate and where all the members of the 'secular' Fatah movement have been butchered by Hamas. And if Islamic fundamentalists do that to their fellow Palestinians, what have they in mind for the Jews, whom the Koran calls "pigs and monkeys"?

One-hundred-and-fifty Irish 'artists' have announced they are boycotting Israel. What, 150? That's about 140 more than I thought we had. Poor Israel! Being boycotted by Irish daubers it's never even heard of. Yet strangely enough, these 'artists' don't condemn the totalitarian Islamo-Nazism of Hamas, or the emerging Fourth Reich of Iran. No, instead, they obsess over the misdeeds of a democratic state the size of Munster in a democracy-free, Arab landmass as big as the US.

What's the magic word? From the New York Post:

Starbucks' strange vernacular finally drove a customer nuts.

Lynne Rosenthal, a college English professor from Manhattan, said three cops forcibly ejected her from an Upper West Side Starbucks yesterday morning after she got into a dispute with a counterperson -- make that barista -- for refusing to place her order by the coffee chain's rules.

Rosenthal, who is in her early 60s, asked for a toasted multigrain bagel -- and became enraged when the barista at the franchise, on Columbus Avenue at 86th Street, followed up by inquiring, "Do you want butter or cheese?"

"I just wanted a multigrain bagel," Rosenthal told The Post. "I refused to say 'without butter or cheese.' When you go to Burger King, you don't have to list the six things you don't want.

"Linguistically, it's stupid, and I'm a stickler for correct English."

Rosenthal admitted she had run into trouble before for refusing to employ the chain's stilted lexicon -- balking at ordering a "tall" or a "venti" from the menu or specifying "no whip."

Instead, she insists on making a pest of herself by ordering a "small" or "large" cup of joe.

Yesterday's breakfast-bagel tussle heated up when the barista told the prickly prof that he wouldn't serve her unless she specified whether she wanted a schmear of butter or cheese -- or neither.

"I yelled, 'I want my multigrain bagel!' " Rosenthal said.

"The barista said, 'You're not going to get anything unless you say butter or cheese!' "

Butter or cheese = please. Simples.

I wonder if Lynne Rosenthal has ever asked for a small Big Mac.