The defeat in Somalia, the tsunami in Aceh, those ferry-sinkings in Indonesia, those earthquakes in Pakistan and Iran, are all signs that Allah is angry. He is angry because the Muslims have taken the wrong text, have believed the wrong doctrines. The real text was that given earlier, not the one that came later. Those Indonesians, those Pakistanis, those Persians, those black African Muslims, have all been fooled by the Arabs, who promoted Arab Imperialism through the clever vehicle of Islam. Now God is expressing his displeasure. And every trembling of the earth, every famine, every flood in Bangladesh (caused by the Arabs pushing their addictive oil on the world), every levelling earthquake, is a sign to those calling themselves "Muslims" to give up on Islam.

Is it true?

Does it have to be, in order to be used by a Department of Propaganda, in order to confuse or win over tens of millions of primitive people?

NAZARETH – Islamic groups held a large militant march down the main streets of Nazareth this weekend, highlighting for some here the plight of Christians in this ancient city where Muslims have become a majority and members of the dwindling Christian population say they suffer regular intimidation. --from this news item 

Those doing the marching and intimidating would, if the Israeli government had sense, be promptly expelled for such deliberate infliction of terror. And perhaps an open invitation could be made to Christians, Believers in and out of the Middle East, to come to take the place of all Muslims so expelled. A Christian presence in Bethlehem and Nazareth is particularly important; it could consist of some Arabic-speaking Christians, or of others, from the Philippines or India or sub-Saharan Africa or Western Europe or Latin America or North America, who will come to live, either permanently or on a rotating basis, to maintain that Christian presence against the intimidations and threats of local Muslims and of Islam.

This is not an impractical idea.

"some wrongly accuse the Palestinian Christians of Islamo-christianity, it is Israeli policy that has forced them into this untenable situation..."-- from a reader

Have some of those clever "Palestinian" islamochristian parishioners been winning you over? Because what you now say -- backtracking on previous views -- is wrong. Any "Palestinian" Christians who say, with a straight face, that the real problem is Israel and the Israelis, is simply reflecting several things. These are, again:

1. A lifetime of trying to curry favor with Muslim Arabs and to fit in, or at least to deflect their hostility, by parroting their views.

2. A belief in the importance of "Uruba" or "Arabness" as connected to Islam, so that even a Christian Arab, or at times even an Arabic-speaking Christian non-Arab, will convince himself, or have grown up in a setting suffused with the assumption that to "be an Arab" is necessarily to adopt and promote the Muslim worldview, including that of the Lesser Jihad against Israel.

3. "Palestinian" Christians such as Hanan Ashrawi, Naim Ateek, and Michel Sabbag have a history of loyal collaboration with Arafat, the PLO, and Arafat's successors. They have promoted the anti-Israel cause, and weakened the only state, Israel, that stands in the way of a complete Muslim takeover of the Holy Land. And what good has it done the local Arab Christians? For all that pro-"Palestinian" work, they have been driven out of Bethlehem, and instead of constituting 80% of the population now constitute 30%, and are now beginning to be terrorized in Nazareth, and elsewhere.

Don't listen to those smooth "Palestinian" operators whose behavior and attitudes can be explained by #1, #2, and #3 above.

Following Ted Kennedy's lead in the Washington Post on Saturday, today the New Duranty Times bemoans the fact that America is allowing in so few immigrants (refugees) from Iraq:

...“We’re not even meeting our basic obligation to the Iraqis who’ve been imperiled because they worked for the U.S. government,” said Kirk W. Johnson, who worked for the United States Agency for International Development in Falluja in 2005. “We could not have functioned without their hard work, and it’s shameful that we’ve nothing to offer them in their bleakest hour.”

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat who is taking over the immigration, border security and refugee subcommittee, plans hearings this month on America’s responsibility to help vulnerable Iraqis. An estimated 1.8 million Iraqis are living outside Iraq. The pace of the exodus has quickened significantly in the past nine months...

"Commentary, here as elsewhere, that the US can blithely mount an invasion, then after three or four years say, "Oops! That didn't work out so well" and withdraw, is naïve in the extreme...
 Flood the joint with Bibles, beer, talkshows and porn."
-- from a reader 

Neither part makes sense. Let's take #2 first. "Beer, talkshows, and porn" are not exports to be inflicted on others, but rather are something to try to cut down on in this country, and the notion that "exporting" these to a Muslim country would cause intelligent people in those countries to become less fervently Muslim is crazy. Infidels should intervene as little as possible, avoid the busybody temptation of attempting, vainly, to transplant this or that without a consideration of whether this or that can be transplanted given the tenets, attitudes, atmospherics of Islam. Instead, force others to recognize the link between those tenets, attitudes, and atmospherics, to the failures, political, economic, social, moral, and intellectual, of the peoples and polities of Dar al-Islam. But in your series "Bibles, beer, talkshows, and porn" only the first is of value, and missionaries in Muslim lands have not been very successful, and in any case, the threat to those distributing or reading those Bibles is now great.

As to the other notion, a false one, that having lost 3,000 men and with 23,000 wounded, having spent or committed nearly $500 billion to people in Iraq -- not the non-existent "Iraqi" people -to free them from Saddam Hussein, who had ruled for thirty-five years and whose regime was prepared to rule for at least another thirty-five, at least 80% of those in Iraq, the Shi'a Arabs and the Kurds, are glad to have been freed. The Sunnis are not so glad, because even though Saddam Hussein favored Sunnis, he was still mercurial and murderous, and began to favor a smaller and smaller group, based in Tikrit, often related to him, and could at the end not be said to represent "the Sunnis" even if now, with the Shi'a dominance being so obvious and so menacing, many Sunnis have forgotten that and become wistful about the ending of Saddam Hussein's rule. The United States owes the "Iraqis" nothing. It is not "naive in the extreme" to say it is time to leave, or rather was time to leave three years ago. Your comment is the kind of thing one expects from Sunni Arab propagandists, and those who in the West, while they until yesterday were agitating for America to withdraw from Iraq, have suddenly discovered that we "owe" the Iraqis a continued presence in order to "prevent" that sectarian strife which was inevitable, and that has its roots not only in the entire reign of Saddam Hussein, not only in the history of modern Iraq, but in 1300 years of Sunni persecution of the Shi'a, which persecution can be observed today in Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, and everywhere that a Shi'a minority has endured Sunni Arab rule.

It is "naive" rather to attribute the sectarian strife, which the Americans have been trying unsuccessfully to dampen, and trying by sacrificing American lives in this impossible task, this fool's errand, to something the Americans have done -- unless of course you mean it would have been preferable to keep Saddam Hussein in power. Preferable, perhaps, for the Sunni Arabs who constitute 19% of the population, but not for the Kurds and Shi'a Arabs who constitute about 80% of the population.

"Amurath an Amurath?" --from "Kay" commenting on this post

Henry IV, Part II, scene 2:

Warwick
Here comes the prince.

Enter King Henry V, attended

Lord Chief-justice
Good morrow; and God save your majesty!

King Henry V
This new and gorgeous garment, majesty,
Sits not so easy on me as you think.
Brothers, you mix your sadness with some fear:
This is the English, not the Turkish court;
Not Amurath an Amurath succeeds,
But Harry Harry.

In other words, in England the English are blessed by having one good English king Harry followed by another, the kind of kingly fellow who in Henry V will visit the troops in disguise the night before they will do battle -- "a little touch of Harry in the night" -- with the French, on St. Crispin's Day. But the Turk, with his despot, his Amurath succeeded only by another Amurath after some bloody warfare among half-brothers, until one of them finally kills enough of the threatening others to take power,and then his mother becomes the valide Sultan, and he’s a new Amurath.

And that was my point: those who executed Saddam Hussein are not those “ordinary moms and dads in the Middle East” that Bush prates about, and may even believe exist. He knows nothing about Islam and refuses to try to learn, and to learn not only by reading once or twice, but by reading and studying and living with the material until he has made it his, has managed to assimilate it, has managed finally to understand. He can’t. He’s not smart enough, and he hasn’t enough time, and no one around him apparently will force him to do it or at least tell him, forcefully, what to think. And others – all of us, beginning with our hapless soldiers – are paying for this inability to learn, and failure to recognize that learning about Islam is no longer a choice our rulers can make, but a duty they must fulfill.

In Iraq, Saddam Hussein, that Amurath, will in the end be succeeded by another Amurath. That next Amurath may be a bemedalled general, or a street leader of brigades of Kalashnikov-toting black-balaclava-ed bezonians, goose-stepping along the boulevards of Baghdad. In Egypt, the Amuraths are the military men, vainglorious King-of-the-Arabs Nasser replaced by vainglorious King-of-Egypt Sadat, being replaced by merely exceedingly corrupt Friends-and-Family-Plan Mubarak. In Saudi Arabia, the Al-Saud family cannot be dislodged, but one line of succession can be replaced, in a war of succession, by another. And elsewhere it is the same thing. In Algeria assorted corrupt generals in the FLN line. In Syria, Assad and baby Assad, perhaps to be replaced a disaffected Alawite Air Force general waiting in the wings. Even in Jordan, there was a brief moment, when King Hussein died, over whom he had chosen, what baby amurath, to succeed him as uneasy-lies-the-head ruler of that baby kingdom, and ultimately plummy-voiced Prince Hassan, Hussein's brother, was passed over for the thick-necked Abdullah. Still, by Western standards of parliamentary democracy, Amuraths all.

That's what "Amurath" is all about.

And the motto here, from a song in a celebrated Shakespeare-based musical the title of which I suddenly cannot recall -- but I think it’s something like “Kiss Me, Kay” – is: Brush up your Shakespeare.

"Isn't there a Sunni King available to turn into a "strongman"? It seems to me that clinging to the majority Shi'ite in Iraq is coddling the Iranian puppet. Why are we doing so? The next in line is Sharif Talal, I believe, and is a Hashemite, a direct descendant of Mohammed, which many would accept in Iraq. That would make him an ally along the line of the moderates in Jordan, and he is in fact, a cousin of the present King of Jordan. Sunnis in Iraq are tolerant, even of the Christians, didn't Saddam have a Christian sidekick?"-- another letter from "Kay"

No and no.

The transfer of power to the Shi'a Arabs cannot be undone. The notion of setting on some throne of Iraq a Hashemite king was unrealistic when Bernard Lewis allowed himself to co-sign (with James Woolsey) an article for The Wall Street Journal suggesting just that. In Lewis's case it was merely a political advertisement for his friend, patron, and Amman host, Prince Hassan (who has helped prevent Lewis from seeing many things clearly, or seeing them clearly when it is very late), the very candidate whom you offer up. And the suggestion is even more unrealistic today. The Shi'a are not going to sit still for a Sunni ruler, a king or, for that matter, a Sunni "strongman" (one commentator on Islam seriously suggested a Sunni member of the Al-Dulaimi tribe might be acceptable to the Shi'a. There was and is no evidence for this.) What makes you think the Americans, who cannot stop the Shi'a militias, cannot stop Moqtada al-Sadr, cannot get the Najaf ayatollahs to support them when they wanted to hold off on the execution of Saddam Hussein, can now call the tune?

The Americans are in trouble in Iraq. They are going to have a very difficult time withdrawing, without suffering all kinds of attacks, from Sunni and Shi'a Arabs alike, and the only locals they can count on are the Kurdish pesh merga, and the pesh merga cannot come down to guard or escort the Americans as they leave in the south -- so it is unclear what the routes of withdrawal will be. America has far less power with the Shi'a than you think, and just possibly it has dawned on the generals, if not yet on the nearly-hopeless Bush, that the American troops will not have it easy, removing the equipment and men -- it is in fact a very dangerous situation for them, which is one more reason for them to get out now, before complete chaos reigns.

As for this business of the Sunnis being nice to the Christians, it isn't true. The Christians of Iraq, if they are quite sincere (some like to gloss over all the unpleasantness, as do some of the Baghdadi Jews whose memories of pre-1948 childhoods dim, and they never did know the full extent of the precariousness of their existence), know that they were tolerated by Saddam Hussein but only just, and Tariq Aziz (that is his islamized nom-de-cabinet) was simply a single tame Christian, useful in his post (foreign affairs) for meeting, wooing, and winning over foreigners -- a symbol of a hollow tolerance of which he was the misleading facade.

So what about that kiss?

As the Bush administration squanders a trust, Democrats prepare a new “Sister Souljah Moment.”

So what about that kiss?

"Heavens, no.No kisses without Awschylus or Euripides, Homer or Sophocles, Sappho-ho or the Bard on Avon. No taming for this shrew!" --from "Kay"

"No kisses without Awschylus..."

Sometimes a typo is more than a typo. Sometimes it is a Greco-Freudian slip. No one writes "Awschylus" for "Aeschylus" unless that someone is actually thinking of the homophonic (in its two initial syllables) "osculation," which means "the act of kissing, a kiss," a word not to be confused with "occultation" which is what Hidden Imams like to do, and we should be happy to let them, because it keeps those Hidden Imams off the street.

You know the line from that old song: "Her mouth said "no, no" but her eyes said "yes,yes." You may think you have been insisting "no, no" but that typo says "yes, yes."

I rest my case.

Dear Derb—-I'm not an expert in this particular field but I am a social scientist and can read statistics. ... As far as I can tell in skimming the article, the methodology appears to be generally sound. In particular, they do include race in the model. Not only do they specify race as a control variable, but they also experimented with removing blacks from the sample to see whether they were driving the patterns. Whatever flaws the study may have, a PC refusal to consider race is not one of them.

The only big drawback of the study is that it's based on a sample of college girls who may not be representative of the general population. While I can't think exactly how this might introduce measurement error on the covariance, nonetheless in a perfect world they would have had a random sample of girls.

My reader kindly attached a copy of the actual study, which I can forward to anyone who's interested. A couple of other readers who work in or near the field emailed in to tell me that while dogmatic "blank slate" nurturism and lefty "social construction" pomo-babble are still very much in evidence in developmental studies, they are in retreat, and real science is being done.

Derb—-According to a December 27th article in the London Times, England has made its last payments to the US and Canada on its World War II loans - $83,250,000 as the last payment to the US, and $22,700,000 as the last payment to Canada.  That only took 61 years.  I wonder how much interest we charged them, or if we let them pay it in 1945 dollars or took account of inflation, etc.

There's kind of an unspoken assumption that they're not really Dutch, not really Danes, and so forth," reasons one senior U.S. official who follows the phenomenon. "Europeans are uncomfortable with Islam, and they see it as an alien body in their midst. ... Europe's got a huge problem, and they're just getting their minds around it now." -- from this article

The tone of this "senior U.S. official who follows the phenomenon" is troubling. He appears to think the problem is that of the Europeans, who are "uncomfortable with Islam" -- as opposed, perhaps, to Americans, who have such a much more extensive experience with Islam than do the people of Europe? When he says of the Europeans that "they see it as an alien body in their midst," does he think that is wrong? Does he think it is the fault of those bad old Europeans, or does he think they made a terrible, a colossal, a life-threatening error in their heedlessness about Islam, when they let Muslims in in such numbers?

And does he think that there is a lesson here for the United States? And does he think that perhaps the doctrines of Islam itself might be worth looking into? After all, they uncompromisingly divide the world between Believer and Infidel, and between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, and preach the doctrine of endless war -- not necessarily by open combat, for the money weapon also comes into play, as well as "pen, speech" and Da'wa, and now demographic conquest (discussed endlessly at Muslim sites and in the Muslim media, for everyone is keenly aware of this instrument of conquest in the Camp of Islam, even as they are amazingly unaware of it in the Camp of the Infidels). They view Europe as a land to be taken over, won for Islam, not a place where Muslims are to embrace, in the slightest, the doctrines or beliefs or legal and political and social institutions of permanently inferior Infidels. Does this "senior U.S. official" understand that?

The distant, almost unsympathetic tone, suggests that he does not. And if that is true, he needs a short but intense course in Islam and in the history of Islamic conquest -- and not from John Esposito, and not from Karen Armstrong, and not from anyone certified as a "Muslim Sensitivity Trainer" by CAIR.

But the course he would most likely take, or has already taken, would probably be like the one now being given in a Virginia public school. That one is taught by one more useful idiot with the usual nonsense about "finding out about Islam" -- and then limiting that finding out to the most obvious and the most innocuous: the rituals of worship that tell non-Muslims nothing about the effect on Muslims of the texts of Islam. Students will get the Shehada (and possibly be asked to recite it), the five daily prayers, the zakat or charity (but only toward fellow Muslims), Ramadan and other dietary rituals. What fun not to eat this, not to eat that! What fun, and how completely worthless as a guide to what Islam is all about, unless the students are told that in Islam everything is regulated, not merely food: including hairdos, wiping yourself, and of course how to speak to Infidels. They’ll also learn about the hajj, with pictures of a million pilgrims as they walk widdershins round the Magic Wonderstone, but no discussion of the Stoning of the Devil and what that is all about.

There will be no real study of the Qur'an, no look at 9.5 or 9.29 or 5.82 or a hundred other key verses. No discussion of why the date of Sura 9 matters (it was either the last or the second to last to be composed). No discussion of "naskh" or abrogation. No discussion of the hadith -- why, I'll bet the poor students in Virginia never find out what the Hadith are, much less will be given a website or two where, to their increasing horror, they can read a few hundred of the most important. Nor will they learn the real details of Muhammad's life, or his significance as the Main Actor in Islam, far more real to Muslims than distant and whimsical Allah, and a guide, a Perfect Man, uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil. None of that.

It will be a guide to nothing and nowhere. Possibly the students will come out radiant that they have "learned all about Islam." Possibly some self-satisfied parents or some ACLU group or some school committee panjandrums will offer self-congratulations all around for this exercise in "dispelling myths" and "ending stereotypes."

And a good time, an idiotically good time, will be had by all.

And nothing will have been learned. Nothing.

It will be a worthless course by an ill-informed naif. It should be condemned by everyone. Instead, it is very likely just the kind of thing this “senior U.S. official” has attended.

For a change, instead of Pseudsday Tuesday, I'm going to feature a skewerer of pseuds and mangler of memes: Mark Goldblatt. Many thanks to Colin Bower for telling me about him.

It is easy and fun to mock postmodernism. We all know it's ridiculous, but why exactly? In this article, Goldblatt explains, in formal terms, why humanists - roughly translated as intelligent but normal human beings - can't talk to postmodernists. The article is mainly serious, but has funny bits too. For example, here is Terry Eagleton:

Thus, for male-dominated society, man is the founding principle and woman the excluded opposite of this. . . . the 'other' of man: she is non-man, defective man, assigned a chiefly negative value in relation to the male first principle. But equally man is what he is only by virtue of ceaselessly shutting out this other or opposite, defining himself in antithesis to it, and his whole identity is therefore caught up and put at risk in the very gesture by which he seeks to assert his unique, autonomous existence.

And here is Goldblatt:

The category "non-man" encompasses all things that are not male and human; it includes mandrakes and mannequins, black holes and blond wigs, coyotes and road runners. Does man, thus, also subjugate a peanut butter sandwich in order to preserve his own identity? Does a shoehorn, like a woman, stand "as a sign of something in man himself which he needs to repress, expel beyond his own being" (ibid)? Why not? Both a peanut butter sandwich and a shoehorn are as much members of the category "non-man" as a woman.

In another article, Goldblatt takes a potshot at Derrida:

[Derrida] is not now, nor has he ever been, a philosopher in any recognizable sense of the word, nor even a trafficker in significant ideas; he is rather a intellectual con artist, a polysyllabic grifter who has duped roughly half the humanities professors in the United States — a species whose gullibility ranks them somewhere between nine-year-old boys listening to spooky campfire stories and blissful puppies chasing after nonexistent sticks — into believing that postmodernism has an underlying theoretical rationale. History will remember Derrida, and it surely will, not for what he himself has said but for what his revered status says about us.

I'll drink to that.