Contrary to John Derbyshire's reaction to Theodore Dalrymple's new article at City Journal, I think it is one of his best pieces. An excerpt:

The thinness of the new atheism is evident in its approach to our civilization, which until recently was religious to its core. To regret religion is, in fact, to regret our civilization and its monuments, its achievements, and its legacy. And in my own view, the absence of religious faith, provided that such faith is not murderously intolerant, can have a deleterious effect upon human character and personality. If you empty the world of purpose, make it one of brute fact alone, you empty it (for many people, at any rate) of reasons for gratitude, and a sense of gratitude is necessary for both happiness and decency. For what can soon, and all too easily, replace gratitude is a sense of entitlement. Without gratitude, it is hard to appreciate, or be satisfied with, what you have: and life will become an existential shopping spree that no product satisfies.

A few years back, the National Gallery held an exhibition of Spanish still-life paintings. One of these paintings had a physical effect on the people who sauntered in, stopping them in their tracks; some even gasped. I have never seen an image have such an impact on people. The painting, by Juan Sánchez Cotán, now hangs in the San Diego Museum of Art. It showed four fruits and vegetables, two suspended by string, forming a parabola in a gray stone window.

Even if you did not know that Sánchez Cotán was a seventeenth-century Spanish priest, you could know that the painter was religious: for this picture is a visual testimony of gratitude for the beauty of those things that sustain us. Once you have seen it, and concentrated your attention on it, you will never take the existence of the humble cabbage—or of anything else—quite so much for granted, but will see its beauty and be thankful for it. The painting is a permanent call to contemplation of the meaning of human life, and as such it arrested people who ordinarily were not, I suspect, much given to quiet contemplation.

After three days of networking and political speeches, Arab Americans who attended a national conference in Detroit say they went home committed to continuing their fight for constitutional rights and restoring the United States' image in the world...

The conference reflects the growing clout of the Arab-American community, which not too long ago was avoided by presidential candidates: In 1988, Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis rejected the endorsement of a major Arab-American group. This year, Democratic party leaders gave the candidates permission to address the conference despite a campaign boycott of Michigan because legislators moved up the date of the state's primary.-- from this news article

They are confusing, and have been led to confuse, the ethnic designation of "Arab" (or, in the case of many Maronites and Copts, the forcible identification with "Uruba" or "Arabness" that does not correspond to the truth: Copts were in Egypt, and Maronites in Lebanon, before the Arabs arrived, with their gift of Islam and of the Arabic language, both imposed on a great many Copts, a great many Maronites) with the more important matter -- that of Islam, that is of identifying oneself as a Muslim with all that that necessarily means or certainly implies, including an acceptance of everything written in the Qur'an (9.29 and a hundred other Jihad verses) as the immutable Word of God. No Muslim in the advanced West can claim ignorance of the contents of the Qur'an, of the Hadith, of the Sira -- not in the way that an illiterate villager in a mountain valley in Afghanistan might be able to claim it.

Those who express such diseased sympathy ought rather to express sympathy for those who, in the case of many Lebanese-Americans, having ancestors who came not as "Arabs" (their Ottoman-Empire passports often read "Siriano" or "Turco") but rather as "Christians" who also happened to speak Arabic, use Arabic, even have Arab names, but were not Arabs, and whose organization of Arab-Americans has been successfully taken over by Muslim Arabs and collaborating islamochristians of the zogby variety, eager to exploit the good reputation of Lebanese-Americans and Coptic-Americans for their own purposes, which purposes means the agenda of promoting, and protecting, and deflecting all criticism from, Islam, Islam, Islam.

That is what it is all about. Richardson, Kucinich and Paul either know this and do not care, or do not know it, in which case they have been grossly negligent. They deserve, on this basis alone, to be opposed. It is clear that their opposition to the Iraq War is for the wrong reasons. They oppose it not because it squanders American resources, not because it attempts to attain an unattainable goal, not because the goal sought to be attained makes no sense from the Infidel point of view, but because they are perfectly willing to refuse to recognize the threat of Jihad, and the instruments of Jihad other than terrorism. Bush's continuing obstinate folly in Iraq simply gives such people a temporary plausibility that they haven't earned and do not deserve.

"unites this unique and diverse group.."
-- more from Kurt Nelson's handout

Note that "diverse." "Diverse" is good. Diversity Day. Diverseness everywhere you look. Always good. But here it has another purpose. It is the "don't you dare say anything about Islam because"

1) Islam is not "monolithic"
Or, expressed otherwise:
2) Muslims are diverse.

What this means is that some Muslim men wear the Central Asian tubeteika and choban, and others wear business suits in Dearborn, and some women wear the kalwar shameez, and others a burqa, and others go the full-fledged route, burqaed and niqabbed, while still others merely the scarf or hijab.

But this misses the point. The same Qur'an, with the same passages, the same Hadith (that is, the same "authentic" Hadith in the collections of the most "authoritative" muhaddithin, such as Bukhari and Muslim), the same Sira with the same examples of Muhammad's behavior, Muhammad who is the Perfect Model of Conduct, uswa hasana, and the Perfect Man, al-insan al-kamil.

In that respect there is no difference. There is no "European" Islam, no "American" Islam. The texts and the tenets remain the same. Superficial differences having to do with food and clothing are not enough to make Islam -- as opposed to Muslims -- "diverse." It is not surprising that this would escape the attention or be beyond the wit of Kurt Nelson and those who have an unshakable vested interest in Interfaith Feelgood as a substitute for study and thought.

But imagine if students at Dartmouth took the same tack, and offered the same unexamined and baseless and confused notions of what they should believe, as the same substitute for study and thought, in their classes on physics or history or anything else, for that matter. Those who long ago endowed the Tucker Foundation would, one suspects, not be happy with how it is presently being run, and for what purposes, and with what assumptions, the assumption for example that ideas don't really matter, ideologies don't matter, and we are not to inquire into them too deeply, but merely assume, with the Higher Bomfoggery (Brotherhood of Man, Fatherhood of God) that Everyone The Whole World Over Wants The Very Same Thing, and we are all God's chillun', and why oh why can't we get along, and we would get along, wouldn't we, if only those sinister people insisting that we study just a bit before parroting a prefabricated worldview would just shut up, just go away. Not exactly what campuses are supposed to be for: the active discouragement of thought. But that's it. That's the way it is, and not only being spouted by self-preening sinecure-holders at Dartmouth -- see Scott Appleby, Defender of Tariq Ramadan, see the scandalous destruction of Islamic studies at Columbia, where Arthur Jeffrey and then Joseph Schacht once walked the halls. See See See.

Green, Green Grass Of Home

I'll Fly Away (Live with the Willis Brothers)

Holdin' On To Nothin' (Duet with Dolly Parton)

"West Bank Story: A musical comedy about competing Hummus restaurants in the West Bank. A must see."
-- from Kurt Nelson's missive to "the Dartmouth community."

Imagine you are Jacques Barzun. Imagine you are trying to explain what is wrong with the American university today, as part of a a newchapter to be appended to a re-issue of "Teacher in America."

You could do worse -- could you do better? -- than start with the sinister sentimentality -- captured in that repeated word "folks" -- of Kurt Nelson, and of his treacly reductionism, including that "West Bank Story" which he so highly recommends as a "must see" in which one learns nothing of what prompts the Lesser Jihad against Israel, but the viewing of which is, no doubt, a lot less taxing than becoming familiar with Qur'an and Hadith and Sira, or for that matter with the Hamas or PLO Charters, or a thousand relevant documents, including the League of Nations' Mandate for Palestine and such works as "Islam and Dhimmitude." No, stick with the tragicomic tale of "competing Hummus restaurants in the West Bank." According to Kurt Nelson, it's a "must see" -- for all the "folks" in what is not merely an institution of higher learning, but rather a "community."

Gush. Gush with a purpose. Sinister gush.

Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah has accused Britain of not doing enough to fight international terrorism, which he says could take 20 or 30 years to beat.

He was speaking in a BBC interview ahead of a state visit to the UK - the first by a Saudi monarch for 20 years.

He also said Britain failed to act on information passed by the Saudis which might have averted terrorist attacks. --from this news item

By this "failure" King Abdullah means two things:

He means that Saudis opposed to the Al-Saud family and its courtiers are allowed to live in Great Britain and have not been returned to Saudi Arabia for "re-education" or sent elsewhere in the Middle East where it may be harder to conduct their campaigns of propaganda.

And he also means that by failing to give the Arabs what they want elsewhere, by not agreeing to completely throw Israel to the wolves, Great Britain is not doing what it should to "fight international terrorism."

He does not mean that the political elite in Great Britain has not sufficiently studied Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira. He does not mean that the British have admitted too many Muslims into their midst. He does not mean that they have failed to tell him to stop funding mosques and madrasas and Western hirelings all over the Infidel lands. He means: give us what we, the Arab Muslims, demand so that the "appeal" of "terrorism" will diminish (and somehow the doctrine of jihad, that has no sell-by date, will disappear at the same time), and furthermore, give us, the Saudi ruling family, all those who currently operate and plot against us from their flats off the Edgeware Road.

"As word of the Darfur genocide was first spreading, U.S. ambassador John Danforth was in Khartoum putting the finishing touches on a North-South peace deal. This peace deal could have been better enforced on both sides, but so far, it has held. It would be best for everyone in Sudan to keep the peace."
-- from a reader, who is horrified by the idea of a small American force quickly destroying Sudan's airforce and holding Darfur and the southern Sudan until a referendum on independence can be held

No, you are wrong. The "peace treaty" in the south has not, as you put it, "held." The Khartoum government never intended to honor it, and it has not. In the last six months that government has violated that agreement, and its many violations are known to members of Air Force intelligence monitoring the southern Sudan. That this has not been reported in The Times means nothing.

Your comment about the anti-black remarks of the Janjaweed shows you missed my point. For those comments do not show that Islam is irrelevant here; they show perfectly that Islam is a vehicle for Arab supremacism, and that Arab Muslims will, whenever they feel like it, seize the lands or otherwise oppress -- culturally, linguistically in the case of the Berbers of Algeria -- non-Arab Muslims. Who do you think killed the Kurds in Iraq? Who do you think punished the Berbers (until recently) even for speaking the Berber language? And shouldn't the behavior of the Arab government in Khartoum, and the Arab regimes that are openly or secretly backing it, and Osama Bin Laden who attacks the Khartoum regime now, not for supporting the Janjaweed, but for appearing to yield, however cosmetic that yielding may be, to some outside pressure?

Finally, you make an idiotic remark about my being an agent of Osama bin Laden because he sees Sudan as a place where Islam and the Infidels are clashing, and so do I. And he also thinks that Islam teaches Muslims to remove all barriers to Islam, and to work for the spread of Islam, the rightful dominance of Islam and Muslims, everywhere. And if I -- or Robert Spencer, or Senor Fulano de Tal -- agree that Islam does indeed teach "Muslims to remove all barriers to Islam, and to work for the spread...and rightful dominance of Islam and Muslims," are we then "agents" of Bin Laden?

Several readers object to what they see as support for "humanitarian" intervention to save Muslims from other Muslims. They are missing the point. The Muslims being saved are, potentially, those who might be willing to abandon Islam, and the main reason for an Expeditionary Field Force (shades of Suakin) is to put a stop to the Muslim conquest of Sudan, south and west, and a further thrust southward. More Halford Mackinder than Mother Teresa, though in this case they may be considered to be usefully coupled. Geopolitics makes strange bedfellows.

If the administration could only see that the best way to save face while withdrawing from Iraq would be to send some troops to save the southern Sudanese Christians and their nominal Muslim brethren in Darfur from Muslim aggression, we could change the equation in the overall war radically. Our policy should be focused on stopping Islamization period. Bringing democracy to Muslim countries only serves to exacerbate the problem. It's long past time to institute plan B.

Tv isterica, genera ansia e depressione

Sotto accusa l'allarmismo in talk show e telegiornali,
ma anche nelle trasmissioni sportive e nei reality

MILANO - Ansia, depressione, insonnia e persino attacchi di panico. Questo genera la tv, secondo uno studio promosso da Meta Comunicazione e realizzato da un pool di 60 psicologi e psicoterapeuti. Le trasmissioni caratterizzate da continuo allarmismo (58%), toni che rasentano l'isteria (51%), continue polemiche (46%) alla lunga rischiano di causare delle vere e proprie patologie, come quelle sopra elencate. In media, persino in un talk show, ogni 6 minuti vengono utilizzati toni e termini che alzano il livello di ansia e aggressività, oltre al fatto che gli stessi temi trattati affrontano ciò che di più inquietante avviene quotidianamente.

STRESS E ANSIA - Lo studio ha analizzato, per quattro settimane, i contenuti, i toni e il lessico utilizzato nelle diverse tipologie di trasmissioni, per individuare il livello di ansia generato dalle stesse. Da intrattenimento e svago, secondo il 73% degli esperti intervistati, la tv è diventata un collettore di stress (63%), ansia (55%) e aggressività (49%). E ad essere sotto accusa non sono solo le trasmissioni legate all'attualità e alla cronaca, come talk show e tg, ma anche contenitori che sulla carta dovrebbero essere di puro intrattenimento, dove, secondo gli esperti (47%), il carico d'ansia è ancora maggiore, perché lo spettatore ha meno difese.

TONI ISTERICI - Sotto accusa l'allarmismo (58%), ormai utilizzato in ogni tipo di trasmissione, dalle news ai contenitori di costume. Anche i servizi più normali vengono annunciati come se si trattasse di una gravissima notizia. Per il 51% i toni isterici che ormai dominano nel piccolo schermo rappresentano una delle maggiori cause dell'ansia di chi resta troppo tempo davanti alla tv. Una situazione che non viene certo aiutata dalle continue polemiche (46%). Nella classifica del grado di ansia catodica proprio i talk show sono al primo posto, come sottolinea il 58% degli esperti e conferma l'analisi dei programmi andati in onda nelle ultime 4 settimane. Subito dietro i tg (52%) in cui, in media si raggiungono alti livelli di stress ogni 12 minuti.

SPORT E REALITY - Lo stesso vale per le trasmissioni sportive, dove l'ansia sembra la costante per cercare di fidelizzare gli spettatori (45%, i picchi di ansia catodica che hanno una frequenza media di uno ogni 15 minuti). Seguono le trasmissioni di servizio, dove si vogliono tutelare i consumatori o dirimere controversie (41%, uno ogni 20 minuti). Ma sotto accusa sono anche le trasmissioni di costume e di puro intrattenimento come i contenitori pomeridiani (38%, dove i toni fanno impennare il livello d'ansia in media ogni 21 minuti). Seguono i reality (36%), che seguono lo stesso principio delle trasmissioni sportive e dove il livello d'ansia sale in media ogni 24 minuti.

Maybe this isn't such a good idea...From The Times (with thanks to Alan):

THE Foreign Office has cleared dozens of Iranians to enter British universities to study advanced nuclear physics and other subjects with the potential to be applied to weapons of mass destruction.

In the past nine months about 60 Iranians have been admitted to study postgraduate courses deemed “proliferation-sensitive” by the security services. The disciplines range from nuclear physics to some areas of electrical and chemical engineering and microbiology.

Additionally, figures obtained by David Willetts, the shadow secretary for innovation, universities and skills, show that in 2005-06, 30 Iranians were doing postgraduate degrees in subjects covering nuclear physics and nuclear engineering...

Charles Johnson over at Little Green Footballs is kicking up some dust over the Flemish party Vlaams Belang which helped put together the Brussels Counterjihad Summit last week. He is worried about racism. 

Today, there is a response from a Danish correspondent at Gates of Vienna who says Johnson has gone overboard and knows nothing about European politics.

I don't know where the truth lies in this controversy, but it seems to me that in America at least, the extreme neo-Nazis are avidly allying with Muslims groups because they share a common antisemitism and desire to overthrow the government.

"It's all right to feel sorry for the suffering people in Darfur, to send them food and medical supplies, but we should know by now that our soldiers would be welcome as liberators for about one week, and after that, they'll be Infidels and crusaders soiling the sacred land of Islam."
-- from a reader commenting on this post

The reader has ignored two things.

First, the black African Muslims of Darfur have been on the receiving end of Arab Muslim supremacism, expressed in terms that would make David Duke blush, and murderous behavior that would make Johannes von Leer proud. They know they must identify themselves, think of themselves, as "Muslims" but beyond that, a number of Darfurian refugees in the West, in their willingness to listen to Christian missionaries, suggest that the commitment of black Africans in Darfur to Islam is not unwavering -- and why should it be, after what they have endured at the hands of Arab Muslims, or those who think of themselves as Arab Muslims? These black Africans are very different from the meretricious and grasping Sunni and Shi'a Arabs playing the Americans for all they are worth, and exhibiting not the slightest real or permanent gratitude.

Second, the humanitarian mission is not confined to Darfur but should also, and necessarily, for logistic reasons, must, include the southern Sudan, which also is peopled by black Africans who are, however, not Muslims but Christians and animists. And the two groups have more in common, or can be made to feel more in common, as the common recipients of murderous treatment at the hands of Muslim Arabs.

What could be better, what more intelligent a use of American power -- and not very much power -- than a mission that, no one save the Arab League can deny, has great and obvious humanitarian goals? And at the same time, such a mission will be geopolitically astute, for it will clearly signal the American or even, possibly, the Western will to halt the steady advance of Islam down through East Africa. Egypt has only pretended to be serving as a brake on the behavior of the Sudanese government, just enough fakery to satisfy the ever-credulous American officials who cannot quite see Egypt as the malevolent force it is (it's much the same game with Egypt's supposed usefulness in putting pressure on the "Palestinians"). Egypt's Muslims, and other Arabs, are delighted that over the past half-century they have steadily islamized, largely through murder and deliberate starvation, so much of the Sudan, so that its demographic makeup has changed, and Egypt looks beyond Sudan to Ethiopia, the famous Christian kingdom, and its steady demographic changes in favor of local Muslims, and of course the coming Water Wars in East Africa, in which Egypt will try to prevent Ethiopia from diverting any of the headwaters of the Nile (a river to which Egypt lays virtual claim, from its debouchment at the delta in Alexandria, all the way back beyond the fifth, the sixth, the seventh cataracts, all the way to its source in the lakes, that old-fashioned African couple named Victoria and Albert Nyanza. Calling a halt to this, in such a way that cannot be convincingly opposed -- unless the Arabs claim a divine right to continue persecuting and murdering black Africans, which might be a little hard even for the BBC and The Guardian to swallow (though don't worry -- they'll do their unlevel best to make the Arab Muslim case) -- could be a significant measure.

It would drive Bin Laden, and Al-Qaradawi, and the Sheik al-Azhar, and all the Arabs mad. And it would rip the veil from Islam a little bit more, exposing it as merely a vehicle for Arab imperialism. And that will be useful among the Berbers in both North Africa and in France. It will be useful as far away as Indonesia. And in the Infidel lands, it can be a source of great discomfort among Muslim missionaries now carefully conducting their Da'wa, virtually unopposed, among black prisoners, and other minorities whom those Da'wa campaigners have targetted for their efforts.

Think of that "country Muslim from Norfolk, Virginia" Mahdi Bray. He'd have a little explaining to do, wouldn't he, if he chose to denounce an American effort to rescue black Africans from Arab Muslims in the Sudan?

Wouldn't he?

SHE 's GONE GONE GONE (Live performance)

If You've Got The Money I've Got The Time

Don't Stay Away ('Til Love Grows Cold)

What a dope Ford was. But his dopiness reflects a more general dopiness.

The very idea that behavior that has been going on since time began should be called an addiction and treated therapeutically, when it just the usual behavior of a large number of men -- the womanizer, tombeur de femmes, donnaiolo, okhotnik do bab -- annoys.

Not an "addict" deserving of clinical treatment or sympathy, Clinton was unseemly in his behavior, and cruel in his indifference to his victims, always chosen -- perhaps that was the best he could do -- from those far beneath him in status, and whose lives, or at least some of them, have been permanently ruined by him. That is quite unlike the womanizing of Kennedy, who picked on women his own size, women who knew what they were doing.

Ford's "sex-addiction" represents the Triumph of the Lack of Will, the Triumph of the Therapeutic. Back to Deep Biology  and hormones, but that too is not an excuse, for not everyone behaves like Bill Clinton. Behavior is modified by civilization. Men -- and women -- learn to keep things in check, to make things more interesting, to slow things down, to make them part of an elaborate system. and, as well, for all kinds of reasons that make sense, to control their impulses, should they have them.

We need not mimic the cavemen. Instead of the club, or the palaeolithic come-on -- say, want to see my wall etchings? (see Lascaux, see Altamira), over time other ways have developed. In the Western world, romantic love. See Denis De Rougemont. Horace and Propertius. The troubadours. Cours d'Amour. Lancelot and Guinevere. Petrarch. Elizabethan sonnet-cycles. The 1930s tenor who rhymes "moon" and "June." The shy boy carrying the shy girl's books back from high school. The soda-fountain date, with the soda jerk watching Andy Rooney and Judy Garland. The tango, Argentinean, Polish, Russian. The Personals Columns: "Love long walks on the Vineyard.  Weekends in Umbria and Normandy. Bouley and Nobu. Pachelbel Canon by candlelight." All of it.

Clinton was more like a caveman, that's all. A smooth-talking and plausible caveman, and apparently a crowd-pleaser, but a primitive caveman nonetheless. No need to consult the Handbook of Psychiatric Disorders.  The language employed in, say, 1940, or 1840, or 1740, meets the case.

Jacques Barzun wrote clearly in his book, Darwin - Marx - Wagner - A Critique of Heritage, how the concept of biological evolution became melded to the concept of natural selection during the 19th Century. The conflict between evolution on the one hand, and evolution solely by the mechanism of natural selection on the other was clear during a time when philosophical depths were more widely plumbed. The ethical implications for the idea that man is nothing more than a biological machine created by mindless forces is abominable and thus the conflict keeps returning. Writes Barzun:

"...the error which dogs evolutionists, the error of believing that if you isolate the elements or label the beginnings of a process you have thereby grasped the process in its entirety. Because living things depend on certain chemico-physical things, therefore human beings are physico-chemical combinations and nothing more. This error is the so-called "genetic fallacy"...It is a common error and the very one, incidentally that both sides fell into when disputing over the origin of species...

Both should have known that becoming or growing, if is means anything, must mean a change not reducible to the stage before, much less to the original stage of the process. Something exists at the end which was not there at the beginning. An oak may come from an acorn, but it is not identical with an acorn, nor even with an acorn plus all that the oak has absorbed of moisture and food in the process of growing upwards. This problem of Becoming was the staple of discussion for the whole half century of Romantic thought before Darwin and Spencer. To the Germans particularly - Hegel, Schopenhauer, Schelling and Fichte - we owe the establishment of the basic evolutionary notion that Being is Becoming and that fixity is an abstraction or an illusion. Unfortunately, this view was linked in biology with the principle of vitalism, or life force, which though it inspired very fruitful researches into the nature of living cells, ultimately proved untenable. The difficulty is that if there is no superadded life force in living beings, seemingly nothing but matter is left. Remove the mysterious, "metaphysical" soul or controlling power and mere physical an chemical units remain behind. From these everything else must now be explained in "positive" terms."

In other words, the living cell differs from the dead cell in some fundamental qualitative way and the living cell cannot be reduced to its component parts without killing it - removing its metaphysical component. By removing the metaphysical component of philosophy, we likewise kill it, by destroying the source of its vitality.

The Daily News:

Gerald Ford was disturbed by Bill Clinton's skirt-chasing ways - and thought he should check into a sex addiction clinic.

A new book on the late 38th President reveals he had strong views about the Clintons: He thought Hillary wore the pants and that Bill couldn't keep his zipped.

"He's sick - he's got an addiction. He needs treatment," Ford told Daily News Washington Bureau Chief Thomas M. DeFrank, author of "Write It When I'm Gone: Remarkable Off-the-Record Conversations with Gerald R. Ford."

And Ford had this to say about Hillary:

"She's stronger and tougher than he is," he said. "When she takes a point you're gonna have to be damn sure you're well informed because she won't compromise as quickly or as easily as he.

"She's very bright. She's strong, and I think he defers to her. When she gets her dander up, she ain't gonna roll over."

And he had no doubts about her ambitions. "Hillary is gonna be on the ticket in '04 or '08, one or the other, you can write that down," he said in 2002.

Yet he didn't think she would win - "I don't think the country is ready for a lady President," he said - and he didn't live long enough to find out if he was right.

The Clintons, through spokesman Howard Wolfson, declined to comment about the book.