Around half of it is on YouTube. If I come across any more, I'll post a link to it:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

A chilling and deeply pessimistic article by Benny Morris:

The Nazis, of course, industrialized mass murder. But still, the perpetrators had one-on-one contact with the victims. They may have dehumanized them, over months and years of appalling debasement and in their minds, before the actual killing. But, still, they were in eye- and ear-contact, sometimes in tactile contact, with their victims. The Germans, along with their non-German helpers, had to round up the men, women and children from their houses and drag and beat them through the streets and mow them down in nearby woods or push and pack them on cattle cars and transport them to the camps, where 'Work makes Free', separate the able-bodied from the completely useless and lure them into 'shower' halls and pour in the gas and then take out, or oversee the extraction of, the bodies and prepare the 'showers' for the next batch.

The second Holocaust will be quite different. One bright morning, in five or ten years' time, perhaps during a regional crisis, perhaps out of the blue, a day or a year or five years after Iran's acquisition of the Bomb, the mullahs in Qom will covoke in secret session, under a portrait of the steely-eyed Ayatollah Khomeini, and give President Ahmedinejad, by then in his second or third term, the go ahead...

With a country the size and shape of Israel (an elongated 8,000 square miles), probably four or five hits will suffice: No more Israel. A million or more Israelis, in the greater Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem areas, will die immediately. Millions will be seriously irradiated. Israel has about seven million inhabitants. No Iranian will see or touch an Israeli. It will be quite impersonal...

And, as with the first Holocaust, the international community will do nothing. It will all be over, for Israel, in a few minutes - not like in the 1940s, when the world had five long years in which to wring its hands and do nothing.

Many many thousands if not millions are not so secretly salivating at the prospect of putting a quick end to Israel, a.k.a. "Little Satan"  And many millions more here in "Big Satan" are inured to daily TV images of huge crowds screaming for Holocaust, misdiagnosing this collective religio-psychosis—if they even bother to examine the disease—as caused principly by economic factors, to be cured by generous nation states of the West.  They are wrong.

Debbie Schlussel takes down an apparently politically correct new season of "24" "because it looks like American Muslims (and even "former" terrorists) will be portrayed as terror-fighting superheroes, beginning tonight [last Sunday]."  (I've got the first four hours on tape and will take a look tonight.) 

Interesting comment to her post: "Did you know that Kiefer's [Sullivan's] grandpa was Tommy Douglas, the great Canadian socialist who created Canada's health care system?"

On the revelation yesterday that in 1956 the French Prime Minister proposed a merger between Britain and France, Richard Morrison has this to say:

[This] must be the weirdest news of the week. As someone on the radio said yesterday: “Liberté, egalité . . . er, cuppa tea?” But the more I think about it, the more the idea appeals. Just imagine a nation that mingled British work ethic, humour and music with French climate, wine and culinary skills. A world-beating combination. The trouble is that you can just as easily imagine a country that combined French work ethic, humour and music with British climate, wine and culinary skills. Good grief, we would all have to emigrate to Germany.

On the other hand, if we switched to French cricket at least we wouldn’t have to play the Aussies.

He's right about the climate, but the best wine tasters in the world are English, not French, probably because we can't make our own, and the best restaurants in the world are in London, not Paris. For food, wine, and of course football, I'd rather merge with Italy, though the Italians would need to shout less and start paying a few taxes. Still, to be fair, France has all those philosophers, with so much to teach us about felt tip pens.

A NY Post editorial today makes quick work of its quarry:

Anyone who still labors under the delusion that U.S. colleges, particularly in New York, are free-speech havens should gaze at the adjacent letter by Pace University's President David Caputo.

Read the rest here .

According to a NY Sun report today,

"The NYU Center for Multicultural Education and Programs runs [...] -ISM Project, a competitive arts program in which six to eight students are given up to $500 to complete projects in film, music, video, photography, texts, installations, and performances addressing various 'isms' in society."

Given contemporary politically correct, multicultural higher-educationism, this project somehow doesn't sound promising.

Nevertheless, I'd like to see what competing students (and their professors) might do with non-ismism, the tendency to mistake thought fragments for ideas.

Liz Porteus updates an apparent case of agressive Federal non-enforcement of law:

Two Texas Border Patrol agents who shot a Mexican drug runner in the backside on the U.S. side of the border are hoping a last-ditch pardon from President Bush will save them from serving more than a decade in prison.

Ignacio Ramos and Jose Alonso Compean are scheduled to turn themselves in to authorities Wednesday to begin serving 11 and 12 years, respectively, for the February 2005 non-fatal shooting.

Several groups, including Friends of the Border Patrol, The Minutemen and Grassfire.org, have been trying through petitions to keep the agents out of prison — through either a motion to U.S. District Judge Kathleen Cardone to allow them to remain free on bond during an appeal or through a presidential pardon from Bush. About a dozen rallies took place across the country in support of the agents last week.

"Grassroots support for these gentlemen is just through the roof," said Grassfire.org spokesman Ron De Jong. He said people signing the petitions are saying to themselves, "'something just doesn't add up' and they're starting to make great waves."

"We are extremely hopeful that the light of justice will shine and this wrong will be right, because otherwise it would be an absolute travesty if these gentlemen had to go to jail for doing their jobs," De Jong added.

Compean and Ramos were found guilty in a jury trial of violating the civil rights of Osvaldo Aldrete Davila when they shot him in Fabens, Texas, about 30 miles east of El Paso, then tampering with evidence by picking up shell casings from the shooting.

The ex-agents say Davila had a gun, and that's why they fired at him, but a gun was never found.

In exchange for his testimony against the two agents, Davila was granted immunity from prosecution by the U.S. government for attempting to smuggle nearly 750 pounds of marijuana — which had a street value of over $1 million — into the United States on the day he was shot.

Read the rest of this morale-sickening story here.

This week's column is a variation on my usual Pseudsday Tuesday piece. If truth be told, it is not the same kind of thing at all but just an excuse for a bit of a snigger.

Credit reference agencies are notorious for stereotyping according to postcode (American zip code). Just living in a particular street can get you blacklisted when it comes to applying for credit cards, or can mean you pay more for contents insurance. And socially, if you say you live in Gas Street or Back o'th' Boneworks Road, it can put people off.

How fortunate we are, however, not to be living in the thirteenth century. It is a common misconception that society is coarser than it once was. Tell that to the residents of Milton Street in Southwark, London, or Grape Lane in York. These names are genteel innovations; originally both streets, and a few others were called Gropecuntelane.

One imagines the streets devoid of females and full of predatory, disappointed males.

More on this, and other related matters from Martin Samuel in The Times. New English Review is a respectable website, so Samuel's hilarious musings are concealed in the decent obscurity of a hyperlink. But his article is well worth a read, if only for one of the funniest Peter Cook jokes ever - a joke that really sorts the sheep from the goats.

John Derbyshire alluded some time ago to Richard Burton's classic retort to an American who pronounced Celt as if it started with an s-.  If you find this kind of thing funny, click here. If you don't, you're a goat.