Two others were also killed in the attack on Brig. Gen. Francois Hajj, a top Maronite Catholic in the command, military officials and media reports said. Hajj, 55, was a leading candidate to succeed Gen. Michel Suleiman as army chief, if Suleiman is elected president.

The blast is the first such attack against the Lebanese army, which has remained neutral in Lebanon's yearlong political crisis and is widely seen as the only force that can hold the country together amid bitter infighting between parliament's rival factions.

The political divisions have paralyzed the government and prevented the election of a president, leaving the post empty since Nov. 23. Under Lebanon's sectarian division of political posts, the president must be a Maronite, like the army commander...

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich delivered the following remarks to a Jewish National Fund meeting Nov. 15 at the Selig Center (thanks to Alan).

I just want to talk to you from the heart for a few minutes and share with you where I think we are.

I think it is very stark. I don't think it is yet desperate, but it is very stark. And if I had a title for today's talk, it would be sleepwalking into a nightmare. 'Cause that's what I think we're doing.

I gave a speech at the American Enterprise Institute Sept. 10^th at which I gave an alternative history of the last six years, because the more I thought about how much we're failing, the more I concluded you couldn't just nitpick individual places and talk about individual changes because it didn't capture the scale of the disaster. And I had been particularly impressed by a new book that came out called “Troublesome Young Men,” which is a study of the younger Conservatives who opposed appeasement in the 1930s and who took on Chamberlain. It's a very revealing book and a very powerful book because we tend to look backwards and we tend to overstate Churchill's role in that period. And we tend to understate what a serious and conscientious and thoughtful effort appeasement was and that it was the direct and deliberate policy of very powerful and very willful people. We tend to think of it as a psychological weakness, as though Chamberlain was somehow craven. He wasn't craven. Chamberlain had a very clear vision of the world, and he was very ruthless domestically. And they believed so deeply in avoiding war with Germany that as late as the spring of 1940, when they are six months or seven months into they war, they are dropping leaflets instead of bombs on the Rohr, and they are urging the British news media not to publish anti-German stories because they don't want to offend the German people. And you read this book, and it makes you want to weep because, interestingly, the younger Tories who were most opposed to appeasement were the combat veterans of World War I, who had lost all of their friends in the war but who understood that the failure of appeasement would result in a worse war and that the longer you lied about reality, the greater the disaster.

And they were severely punished and isolated by Chamberlain and the Conservative machine, and as I read that, I realized that that's really where we are today. Our current problem is tragic. You have an administration whose policy is inadequate being opposed by a political Left whose policy is worse, and you have nobody prepared to talk about the policy we need. Because we are told if you are for a strong America, you should back the Bush policy even if it's inadequate, and so you end up making an argument in favor of something that can't work. So your choice is to defend something which isn't working or to oppose it by being for an even weaker policy. So this is a catastrophe for this country and a catastrophe for freedom around the world. Because we have refused to be honest about the scale of the problem...

the rest is here

The problem that Israelis have with the outside world is the same one that they have with themselves: an ignorance of Islam, compounded by a reluctance (possibly based on fear), of what one might upon, further study, find out, and what the obvious implications of such study, if conducted properly, for the formulation of policy. The whole absurd peace-processing search for that "solution" that seems always to evade those in its hot pursuit, and they tend to console themselves with such hoarinesses as "well, we didn't try hard enough" or "the Israelis and the Arabs really have to want to do it" or "we have to sit them down in a room and present them with what 'everyone knows is what the final outcome will have to look like'" and so on.

The possibility, or the certainty, that there is no peace-process, that the Arabs are jockeying for every advantage, every possible way to weaken and undercut what they regard as their permanent enemy, and the permanent affront of that enemy's existence. Yes, sometimes smiles are used and sometimes frowns. Sometimes Muslim Arabs, even "Palestinians," may fight amongst themselves over who gets what spoils, especially the largest slice of the disguised Jizyah of Infidel aid. But there is no disagreement, none, over the ultimate goal, when it comes to the Infidel nation-state of Israel, but only disagreements over strategy, over timing and tactics.

If this were understood, and if the Muslim world-view were understood, Israel would no longer pursue, or have pushed upon it, the will-o'-the-wisp of agreements that, on the Muslim side, are made only to be broken, and every "peace" treaty is in reality merely a hudna, a truce treaty, that will necessarily be broken at the first opportunity, by the Muslim Arabs emulating Muhammad, their great exemplar, in his own treaty with the Meccans in 628 A.D. Simply because non-Muslims find such ideas preposterous and prefer to disbelieve that Muslims would actually wish to model themselves, for all time, on everything said or done by a seventh-century Arab, shows how impoverished is their imagination, how limited their experience, either immediate, or through books, how limited their knowledge of men and events, through time and across space.

On NPR Condoleezza Rice's biographer, Elisabeth Bumiller, describes her, when she was at Stanford, at telling a clerk who made the colossal error, when she asked to see jewelry, of showing her the costume jewelry, as offering in response to the putative racism of this terrible offense: "You stand behind that counter and make $6 an hour, while I am on this side, and make considerably more." A telling remark, and Rice does not come off well.

Nor does she come off well when she pushed so hard for the Iraq venture, without bothering to study, calmly, Islam, its texts and tenets, and how Iraq, how the regime of Saddam Hussein fit into the Camp of Islam, and what its disappearance would mean for Iran, and what, given the history of Iraq and its makeup, was almost certain to happen once that regime disappeared, and why the Light-Unto-the-Muslim-Nations Plan doomed to failure, and in any case, represented exactly the wrong goal for Americans and other Infidels to pursue.

She was "amazed" and flabbergasted that Hamas won the election -- an amazement that tells us a good deal about this dutiful Kremlinologist who cannot speak Russian (she tried to do so, in an interview for Russian television, and the result was deeply embarrassing and she had to rush back into English after demonstrating her complete confusion as to what the interviewer was saying in Russian).

Rumsfeld, according to Bumiller, regarded Rice as a "glorified Russian-studies graduate student." Exactly right. Rumsfeld had his points.

"Six books are scheduled to be published [translated into Arabic]  early next year, their eclecticism reflecting what Nagy deems “the real gaps in the Arab library.” They are Umberto Eco's The Sign, a history of semiotics; The Halo Effect and the Eight Other Business Delusions that Deceive Managers by Philip Rosenzweig; The Future of Human Nature, an examination of genetic engineering by the noted neo-Marxist philosopher and sociologist Jurgen Habermas; Stephen Hawking's A Briefer History of Time;, Kafka on the Shore, a novel by Haruki Murakami; and Charlemagne, Muhammad and the Arab Roots of Capitalism by Gene W. Heck. So far four publishers, most based in Beirut, have signed on as partners for the program, including Centre Culturel Arabe and Arab Scientific Publishers." -- from this news item

What a strange hodge-podge those first half-dozen titles are, and how unsatisfactory if they represent what is to come:

For example, Umberto Eco on semiotics, for an Arab audience that, even if it is a small and select audience, has nothing at all available by way of mental preparation, no Thomas Sebeok, no C.S.Pierce, nor a few dozen others, nothing to show the history or the development of the subject. It would be like suddenly offering John Rawls in Arabic, or the latest answer to Rawls, for an audience that has never read, never heard of, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau.

"The Halo Effect and the Eight Other Business Delusions that Deceive Managers" sounds depressingly as if it is one more of those Business Book Club things, the kind of thing that might be sold at a bookstore, if that bookstore is the campus bookstore of Babson or Harvard or Wharton or some other such place, or bought by would-be tycoons, the kind of people who like such words as "dynamic" and "organizational."

Is such a book one of the first that needs to be translated into Arabic, for people who have all the money in the world, obtained in the easiest way possible, and who are not about to start working if they don't have to? Should one not translate books that are not intended to make them money, but to save their souls, or at least to offer them the possibility of beginning to think, beginning to question?

And what (the) Heck's book, "Charlemagne, Muhammad and the Arab Roots of Capitalism" is doing on the list is anyone's guess, except that it is obviously designed to make "capitalism" palatable by appealing to self-esteem of Arab readers, as if they need to be pandered to, told (inaccurately) that capitalism originates in the practices of the Arabs, if they are to accept the idea, or at least to buy the book. But this simply reinforces what such a translation project should up-end: the Islamic supremacism within which is Arab supremacism, and which needs not to be reinforced but weakened and undone.

[The title, of course, is a play on Henri Pirenne's "Charlemagne and Muhammad," a book written about 1920, in which the Belgian historian argued that the conquest of formerly Christian North Africa by the Muslims, and that conquest sealing off Europe from its former trade with Africa and Asia, helped to push northward the center of economic (and political) gravity in Europe. (The "Pirenne thesis" has in turn been disputed by later historians, notably by Robert Lopez.)

As for Murakami, if something Japanese is wanted, by start with a brand-new author when Japan is, like almost all of the rest of the world, hardly known even to educated Arabs? What about Blyth on Haiku, just to start with? Or still better, Murasaki Shikibu, to make sure a woman writer is prominently given her due, and some sense of history, rather than up-to-date manga-and- pachinko-parlor Japanese in their encounter with the equally up-to-date West?

There is no evidence of thought or plan or system behind this list.

But here's a different half-dozen:

Henry Osborn Taylor, Freedom of the Mind In History

Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian

Ibn Warraq, Why I Am Not A Muslim

Rousseau, The Social Contract

Mill, On Liberty

Barzun, From Dawn To Decadence

The word "Syria" and the word "Syrians" hides, keeps hiding, the reality of the Alawites, and the Sunnis. The Alawites rule Syria, even though they make up only 12% of the population. If they ever lost their grip on the military, they would be wiped out by the Sunnis. How the Alawites came to power (the story begins when the French chose their Troupes Speciales from the minorities, the Alawites, the Armenians, the Druze, to help control the Muslims -- the Alawites are not, by the local Sunnis, considered to be real Muslims), how they maintain that power, and how the Western world could, if it chose, use its understanding of the vulnerability of the Alawites and play upon their fears (fears which the West does not understand, because it talks of the Alawites as if they are Muslims). But the Americans have relied on such clownish ambassadors in Damascus , as Edward Djerijian, who never understood a thing, and still does not, about Islam, and therefore about Muslims and Alawites in Syria, nor about Muslims and non-Muslims in the Middle East. This didn't prevent him from having a career as a Middle East expert in the State Department. It didn't prevent him from being appointed, by James Baker, as the head of Baker's very own and modestly-titled "James Baker Institute" at Rice University. It hasn't prevented Djerijian from continuing to assure us that "everyone" (!) "knows what a final settlement between Arabs and Israelis will look like" (by that he means more or less pushing Israel back to the pre-1967 armistice lines), when, as anyone who knows about Islam understands, the Arabs have no intention of permanently accepting the existence of an Infidel nation-state in the midst of Dar al-Islam no matter how much tinier it becomes.

The Alawites will never, and should never, be made to give up control of the army. Why? Because if they really are without power, then not only every Alawite village will be destroyed by marauding Sunni Muslims, but the Christians in Syria will, similarly, suffer what Christians in Iraq are now suffering. But that does not mean that the Alawites need to maintain permanent control of the civilian authority, and it certainly doesn't mean that the particular Alawite in power, Bashir al-Assad, needs to be permitted to continue his rule. He, and his henchmen, are expendable. There are other Alawites who may be appealed to, appealed to by the Americans to stage a coup, a coup to save the Alawites from their own, overreaching current dictator.

And then will there be hope for a semi-civilized Syria to emerge? Possibly. Meanwhile, let the Americans establish a Radio al-Shams, directed by, and with a staff and programs chosen by, Wafa Sultan -- and not the kind of staff members who, foolishly, have been chosen a bit too carelessly for other American-financed Arab-language stations.

This is probably the first ever interactive and pro-active musical interlude on New English Review. Other interludes have been passive, nay, "re-active". Now you've got to sing it yourself.

First I should explain - the other evening I attended a birthday party in an East End boozer. Not a gastropub or anything poncy, just an honest-to-goodness rub-a-dub. And - would you Adam and Eve it? - we ended up having a sing song. Not round the Joanna, and not "Knees Up Mother Brown", or "My Old Man Said Follow the Van". Disappointingly, not Marie Lloyd's "She Sits Among the Cabbages and Peas" either, but a song I remember hearing from a close relative many years ago.

The song is sung to the tune of "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean". Sort of, except you don't sing the chorus. If you don't know this tune, listen to it in Windows Midi or QuickTime. And the words? Here they are. Come on, sing along. You know you want to:

My father's a lavatory cleaner
He works both by day and by night
And when he comes home in the evening
He's covered all over in Shine
Up your buttons with Brasso
It’s only three ’apence a tin
You can buy it or nick it from Woolworths
But I doubt if they'll have any in

Some say that he died of a fever
Some say that he dies of a fit
But I know what my father died of
He died of the smell of the Shine
Up your buttons with Brasso
It’s only three ’apence a tin
You can buy it or nick it from Woolworths
But I doubt if they'll have any in

Some say that he's buried in a graveyard
Some say that he's buried in a pit
But I know where my father is buried
He's buried in six feet of Shine
Up your buttons with Brasso
It’s only three ’apence  a tin
You can buy it or nick it from Woolworths
But I doubt if they'll have any in

Osama bin Laden's pronouncements on economic warfare on his tapes have received no attention. Why not? After all, he has succeeded, hasn't he? We have spent, squandered, a trillion dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with more on the way, all in a crazed effort not to split apart or weaken the Camp of Islam, but to bring, at American expense, new schools and roads and hospitals and bridges and all the rest of it, in the belief, an idiotic one, that this somehow will limit the appeal of Islam, or of violent Jihad, which depends not on the economic wellbeing of those being appealed to, but on the level of their commitment to Islam, and to participating directly in violent Jihad rather than doing so indirectly, and supporting the other instruments of Jihad.

The economic jihad is being won by Muslims. It is being won not only, however, by the fantastic sums wasted, tossed about, spread like confetti, in Iraq. Just how many Iraqis have made out like gang-busters, and have taken billions and billions abroad, where some now live like pashas in Paris, while the American taxpayers who supplied that money, without having a say, are forced to endure, most of them, lives not at all like those led by those American-supported pashas, in Paris or anywhere else.

What is the cost to Infidels of all that Jizyah? Why is it the United States that has supplied Egypt with more than $60 billion in the last few decades, which began as a payoff for "peace" -- wasn't the entire Sinai, with its oil and infrastructure, enough of a payoff? -- to Saint Sadat, and then continued, because the Americans have no idea, none, how to turn off the spigot to Muslim countries once that spigot has been turned on. But Egypt is not, contrary to the epithets helpfully supplied by journalists in The Times and The Bandar Beacon, an "ally" or a "friend." It should be seen clearly: a malign country, that mistreats the Copts. Mubarak, with his family-and-friends plan, siphons off for himself and his cronies much of that disguised Jizyah of foreign aid that provides just that extra bit of cash. A regime corrupt beyond belief ensures that the future belongs to the Ikhwan, the Muslim Brotherhood, which may be less corrupt but is even more malign than Mubarak's pack.

Of course the Americans who come to Cairo are always reassured, and soulful looks, terribly sincere, telling them that the Egyptians are doing their best, to "promote peace" between "Israel and the 'Palestinians'" -- when Egypt has for years allowed all kinds of arms to be smuggled into Gaza, has conducted a campaign of incessant vilification of Jews and of Israel, in the Egyptian media, and supports the Slow Jihadists of Fatah over the Fast Jihadists of Hamas, but shares the same goal: to weaken Israel. Egypt does not wish Israel well, but works just like other Muslim Arabs, and possibly more effectively than many, to undermine Israel in every way it can, and it will not stop as long as Muslims rule in Egypt, unless those of the "Egypt-First" school can return the nation to something like what it was before the coup of Nasser and his fellow colonels. Meanwhile, Egypt has been the cleverest supporter of the Khartoum regime, pretending to be horrified by it, but behind the scenes working to stave off any Western intervention or pressure strong enough to make the Sudanese rulers change their behavior. And Egypt continues to threaten Ethiopia over any diversion of the headwaters of the Nile for irrigation purposes.

Suppose the United States had not supplied that $60 billion? Egypt would have been far less able to cause mischief. It might have been much more pliant, less capable of protecting the Sudanese regime, and even possibly seeing its Egypt-First future as requiring it to give up its active support of the Lesser Jihad.

Or another possibility presents itself. The Saudis and other rich Arabs, undeservedly and sickeningly rich Arabs, who have done nothing to merit their wealth, would have been asked by Egypt for aid. Indeed, they should be asked. If anyone is to support Egypt, Jordan, "the Palestinians," Pakistan, and all the other Muslim basket-cases, let it be other Muslims, fellow members of the Umma. Why, for god's sake, should Americans, or any other Infidels, ever be supplying billions to Muslims who do not, and can not, wish them well, and whose lives, if they become improved, will not become one whit less hostile, murderously hostile, to Infidels but, possibly, even more so?

The foolishness of Western transfers of wealth to Muslims, beyond that made necessary by energy needs, is a result of having leaders, of tolerating and even electing leaders, who are unembarrassed in their ignorance of Islam, and make pronouncements about, for example, policy in Iraq that never hint that they might take Islam into account, might start thinking about the belief-system of Islam, and the Camp of Islam, and of how to divide and demoralize that Camp, rather than of how to supply still more money, build still more roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, repair over and over those oilfields and pipelines whenever they are attacked, and all the rest of it that is being done, so expensively, and without making Infidels safer, or weakening that Camp of Islam.

WND: A Hamas-sympathizing juror may have misled U.S. prosecutors about his neutrality during jury selection in the nation's largest terror-financing trial, investigators familiar with the case say.

The juror's "browbeating" of fellow jurors during deliberations in the Holy Land Foundation trial led to a mistrial, they say. The Dallas-based charity and its leaders are accused of funneling more than $12 million to Hamas suicide bombers and their families.

WND has learned that prosecutors, who are preparing to retry the case next year, considered investigating the juror for perjury after hearing complaints from other jurors about his pro-Hamas, anti-Israeli bias and obscenity-laced bullying in the jury room.

"One guy caused all the trouble," said an investigator involved in the case, which charged several U.S. Muslims with conspiracy to support terrorism. "He browbeat other jurors favoring convictions."

He said the bearded 33-year-old juror – who voted not guilty across-the-board – made statements in the past that are at variance with his answers to prosecutors' questions about his bias during the jury selection.

"He clearly wasn't honest on his voir dire examination," the source said.

Voir dire is a pretrial process lawyers use to object to prospective jurors with strong opinions – in this case, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – which might preclude them from weighing the evidence objectively.

Juror William Neal, a Dallas graphic artist, has not tried to hide his opinions on the subject since a mistrial was declared Oct. 22.

His ideological remarks in the media – including suggestions Israeli intelligence officers can't be trusted and their government is guilty of occupying Palestinian lands and oppressing the Palestinian people – have raised alarms at the Justice Department.

Neal also has a hard time calling Hamas a terrorist group, even though the U.S. government has listed it as a terrorist organization for the past dozen years.

He told the Dallas Morning News "it's a political movement. It's an uprising."

Asked by the Investigative Project on Terrorism to clarify his statement about Hamas, Neal said: "It is marked as a terrorist organization. My personal viewpoint, I see it as a political struggle."

"Our country was founded on a terrorist act," he added. "The Boston Tea Party wasn't a tea party, dude. It was a rebellion against the king's wrath. They fought back against an oppressive government."

Terror expert Steven Emerson of the IPT features a video clip of one juror who said, "I was pressured into voting the way they wanted me to vote."

In a recent Dallas radio interview, Neal revealed he actively sought a seat on the jury to sway the verdict against the government. He boasted that he fooled federal prosecutors into believing he would be sympathetic to their case.

Neal explained that he noted on his pretrial questionnaire that his father works in the military.

"My answers looked like I was a pro-American, you know, flag-waving American," he said on the Ernie and Jay show. "They thought I was not going to be able to think for myself and just go on the facts that these were Muslims." ...

Can HLF juror Neal be charged with a crime? What about obstruction of justice? Perjury? Jury-tampering? All of the above? He should be made to pay. And those who conducted the voir dire need to learn about Islam, about the pathologies of those non-Muslims who sympathize, because of those pathologies, with Islam, and about deception as a way of life. A little less innocence, apparently in this case that of supposedly tough-minded hard-bitten Federal prosecutors (just like those supposedly tough-minded hard-bitten American military men who have been played for suckers by Iraqis inveigling money and weapons and all kinds of other things out of them).

Very few members of the Mafia, or the 'ndrangheta or the camorra, or members of a Chinese or Russian crime, or Colombian interns and residents hoping to become full-fledged "medicos de Medellin" can compete, are as adept, at using or abusing the American system of criminal justice, with its touching faith in jurors, and in judges unschooled in the meaning and menace of Islam.

Federal authorities have charged the international student with "possession or receiving of a firearm by a person admitted to the United States under a non-immigrant visa."...

Moussaoui's father, Hamou, spoke to reporters after the hearing.

"America is a country of justice," he said. "My son loves America. Since he was a boy, he loves America." -- from this news item

"the international student..."

For "international student" read "foreign student"

"My son loves America. Since he was a boy, he loves America."

What about it did he love? What he saw on television programs and magazines in Morocco? Was it the girls in the swimsuit issue, was it all the stuff that is flogged in the ads, was it the cars and the bustle? What was it? I doubt if he fell in love with the legal and political institutions of this country, and wanted deeply to have Morocco emulate them. He doesn't sound as if he was someone who came from the multi-national ideological police-state of Islam, and was delighted to embrace the mental freedom of the advanced West. He was no Ibn Warraq or Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

As for the father's absurd statement, it reminds one of the mother in "Scarface" when her son is caught by the G-men: "My boy's a good boy."

Cut the crap.