"one thing this whole Islam business has taught me is just how negligent so many people are about doing their homework."-- from a reader

And not just about their "homework" about Islam, though certainly the training of those who enter the government and the so-called think-tanks, those who pullulate in Washington at Centers for ThisandThat, or if they can't get a job at this or that Center for ThisandThat, find a few sugar daddies to set them up in their own individual centers, where they are set, and never have to really set to school. (Say, anyone want to endow a nice little one-man Center for someone who loves doing homework, has done it all his life, and has the evidence to prove it?)

No, the crew on the S. S. Narrenschiff consists of those who go to the Kennedy School or the Woodrow Wilson School or the Johns Hopkins School, or somehow happen to be the figlio di papa of a well-known "conservative" who helps set things up, or following another tenure track, go to a good law school (Harvard and Yale will do nicely) and then, "not wanting to make money" (i.e., having a trust fund or some such safely in the background) decide they want to go into "public policy" so it's the government or an NGO that is, by its very nature, incapable of making moral distinctions because that would be ultra-vires, that would be unacceptable if one is in the busy business of Helping Humanity (and the apotheosis of these Hamburger-Helping-Humanity types is the unctuously and piously sinister and morally intolerable Jimmy Carter).

Now, about that One-Man Center I'm proposing...

One of Iran's most senior clergymen has issued a fatwa on an Azeri writer said to have insulted the Prophet Muhammad. -- from this news item

If some Persians wish to be lackeys and slaves of the Arab religion, some radio station sponsored by Infidels can point out, that is their affair. The Azeris, on the other hand, that same Azeri-speaking broadcaster can say, have fortunately put Islam "in its place" in the purely religious sphere, and are too advanced to be kept back by the troglodytic Islamic Republic of Iran. And that goes for the Azeris oppressed in Iran, and they might be better off, and their "sacred Azeri soil" in what is now "northern Iran" better integrated into, the Republic of Azerbaijan.

Ideas whose time has come, are coming, will come.

In regard to that word it is not Lady Mondegreen, that quick fiction, but rather Humbert Humbert, recalling Valeria, Valerochka, in Paris, as "a glorified pot-au-feu, an animated merkin," who deserves pride of place. He should, given that pride of place, come first, with that place being a particular endroit or detroit, but right now tais-toi, please, there are ladies present. Anywhere else he'd gang agley.

As for the aural malapropism that explains Lady Mondegreen's existence ("Laid him on the green"), to which you make chain-linked reference, whatever her doubtful origins, now that she has been endowed with life she should be allowed all the privileges of it, including use of a libertine line ("No red nor white was ever seen/So amorous as this lovely green") to hide behind, and once suitably hid, to lie down on that now-amorous green, smoothed in advance by a rake's progress, without having, if she turns out to be the girl one hopes she is, to think -- quite unlike poor Rabbie Burns who often had to keep in mind the sassenach audience, and in standard English to compose lyrics for it -- of England.

This explains a lot. From the BBC

In a small village, in the foothills of the Himalayas, a group of men are discussing the challenges faced by Pakistanis when they go and live in the UK.

Should they integrate? How much should they take on the values of their new homeland?

We are several thousand miles from Bradford and Birmingham. But nearly everyone here has a relative in Britain. And the debate there about multiculturalism has clear echoes round this table. . . If you want to understand the culture of Pakistanis in Britain, you have to understand Mirpur.

It is conservative, even by Pakistani standards. Rural life here has not changed much over the years. And families are not only a source of rigid hierarchies, but also the guiding influence behind everything from marriage to business. Alliances are built, deals negotiated, all with an eye to how this affects relations between the different households.

I asked Rashid if he had experienced any difficulty adjusting from this, when he went to work in the Midlands and East London for eight years, selling cosmetics and serving in a restaurants.  "No trouble at all," he said. "It was all a pleasure." But it turned out that he faced no challenges to his values, because he never mixed with anyone who lacked them. 

Rashid reckoned that 80% of his customers in Britain had been Mirpuris, the rest from other sub-continental backgrounds. He is a sociable man, lively and entertaining. But he never made a single white, British friend the whole time he was there.  "I regret it," he says, "but there was no chance. I did not go anywhere I could meet English people."

It is one way to avoid the difficulties of confronting cultural difference - to avoid cross-cultural contact altogether. And it seems to be the route taken by many people of Pakistani origin.

I also explains why the Moslems  who came from East Africa first have done better (although still not as well as the Hindus and Sikhs who were expelled at the same time)  than the more recent arrivals direct from Pakistan.

And that, and these are not the only words that sound rude but aren’t. Greenmamba in the comments has been cogitating and speculating:

I wonder how large a supply of these you have. Is there any chance you might run out?

To paraphrase Burns – whose love works are second to none – when all the seas gang dry, my dear, when all the seas gang dry. Greenmamba adds:

Here are some that come immediately to mind.

Thespian

Sects

Proselyte

Formicate (a favourite)

And of course, homophone

You might also want to delve into words that don't sound rude but are:

Merkin

Merkin is indeed an innocuous sounding word for something really quite saucy. Lady Mondegreen, of whom there is more here, first used it in an entreaty to her lover, Earl Amore: “Buy, buy me some merkin pie.”

"There is...something far worse, more evil than Nazism, than Hitler even that is staring us in the face.  (from a reader)

I don't agree that something "worse than Nazism, than Hitler even" is "staring us in the face." The problem is that Islam is far more resilient, and with much greater, possibly even a universalist appeal even if it is a vehicle for Arab supremacism. And its own followers exhibit a kind of sliding-scale of adherence that makes it more difficult to combat, or rather, to persuade others to combat, because those others among the non-Muslims keep mistaking this or that personable or outwardly friendly and sweet-seeming Muslim for the doctrine of Islam, and possibly even, very likely even, the real feelings of that smyler with the knyf under his cloke.

But there is no need to make such pronouncements as "Islam is worse than Nazism." Few will be convinced, and many will be repelled, by such inaccurate hyperbole. Islam, as a doctrine, is dangerous for all non-Muslims, and for the mental freedom of Muslims as well.  It is more effective and potent in its appeal than Nazism, but not worse in its ideology.

After all, one could not save oneself from the Nazis by becoming a Nazi if one was not an Aryan (and had the Germans succeeded, it would not have been the Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs alone who would have been declared, step by step, to be untermenschen). One always has the option of submitting to Islam in order to save one's life or to get out from under the condition of the dhimmi. That's where Pakistanis come from. That's where Bosnian Muslims come from. Not a good fate. But not what the Nazis had in store for those they decided were permanently inferior (or in some cases, seen as not inferior but as too gifted, and dangerous), who were not permitted to live.

"Moderate" Muslims are simply the Velvet Glove which surround the Iron Fist of Jihad.

The Iron Fist says "We want to subjugate and kill you."

The Velvet Glove says "We are peaceful -- and if you don't agree, this Iron Fist I'm working so hard to conceal will punch you very hard."--from a reader

The Iron Fist in the Velvet Glove described by the reader above reifies the phrase "fortiter in re, suaviter in modo." As a tactic for Muslims, it had some early success, but such success is not capable of being sustained.

Things, you see, are not quite working out. The messages by the Akbar-Ahmeds and others desperately trying to disguise or camouflage ort explain away or distract Infidel attention onto the trivial isn't quite up to the world-wide task at hand. Not only do Bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri and Nasrallah and other terrorists get in the way, but so too is Sheik Al-Qaradawi, and so many other Muslim clerics, from Tantawi the former Sheikh al-Azhar to all kinds of people in Saudi Arabia and Iran and Pakistan, each more blood-curdling than the next.

Problem for Muslim apologists (and their well-paid running dogs, such as Esposito) is that as more and more Infidels begin to read and study and observe and make sense of what they observe, they  discover - a bit too much fortiter, and not nearly enough convincing suaviter, in that particular re. One is playing fast and loose with the Latin here, but what else is to be expected of someone who demonstrates a liking for the adverb of manner "fast and loose"?

CAIRO, Egypt - Al-Qaida in Iraq on Wednesday denounced Pope Benedict XVI's visit to Turkey, calling it part of a "crusader campaign" against Islam.

In Istanbul, Vatican officials said the remark shows the need for faiths to fight "violence in the name of God."--from this news item

This trip is working out after all. And despite the idiotic headline in today's New Duranty Times, swallowing whole, and then regurgitating for readers, the business of the Pope supposedly "supporting Turkey's entry into the E.U." What The New Duranty Times did was to willfully ignore the source of such an interpretation (Erdogan, and not the Pope's spokesmen), willfully ignore many instances of the Pope clearly setting down, when he was Cardinal Ratzinger, his opposition to Turkish admission, and even willfully failing to figure out what, if the Pope did indeed at one point (it is unclear) express a hope or a wish that Turkey might be admitted, what he meant by this was that Turkish society will meet the E.U.s demands and, furthermore, become the kind of society, with genuine pluralism that does not favor Islam in any way, and a complete separation of church and state, that would enable Turkey to be seriously considered for admission to the E.U. And that would require putting Islam back in the Kemalist bottle, with a much sturdier stopper.

"since America came into Iraq uninvited, it should not leave Iraq uninvited."  

But America was invited in. It was invited in by all the Iraqis in exile -- Allawi, and Chalabi, and Kanan Makiya, and Rend al-Rahim Francke, and all the others who had fled the regime of Saddam Hussein. There wasn't an Iraqi in exile who didn't ardently wish for the Americans to come in, and did all they could to assure those naive Americans that afterwards, the "Iraqis" (still de-emphasizing or ignoring altogether that the overthrow of the Sunni despotism and subsequent inevitable transfer of power to the far more numerous Shi'a would lead to all kinds of unintended-by-the-Americans consequences) would offer heartfelt and permanent gratitude to their "liberators."

They can leave any time they want. They should not stay to help the local Sunnis, and thereby be inveigled, this time by the Sunnis in and out of Iraq (with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia most forceful and sly of all). They can go to the rescue of their own co-religionists. They can keep the Land of the Two Rivers safe from the "untrustworthy" (Mubarak) Shi'a, the "Rafidite dogs" (Al-Zarqawi) who are now being aided by those Persians in Persia, and those horrible Hezbollah, putting the kibosh on  the Hariri-Saudi plans for Vacationland Lebanon.

No, it's all up to them. The Americans must stop playing the fools to every Muslim "moderate" or enemy disguised as "staunch ally" and keep their eye on the only goal: to divide and demoralize and bring into Infidel disrepute, the Camp of Islam, and to do it always and everywhere by first exploiting whatever natural divisions, sectarian and ethnic and economic, already exist and hardly need any action by Infidels, merely a little pointing out in interviews, Op/Ed pieces, broadcasts on radio and television and satellite television, to get the message across.

The Saudi rulers, all smooth-talking semi-Westerners when they meet with Western political figures and journalists, are in fact far more primitive at home, when they can tell each other the truth, let loose with their daggers-and-dishdasha tribal dances, with those familial sneers of cold command, and show that you can take the boy out of Saudi Arabia, take him to Marbella or the Avenue Foch or McLean, Virginia, but you will never take Saudi Arabia out of the boy.

Why not?

Because of Islam, Islam, Islam.

 Nawaf Obaid in the WP explains it all to us:

In February 2003, a month before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, warned President Bush that he would be "solving one problem and creating five more" if he removed Saddam Hussein by force. Had Bush heeded his advice, Iraq would not now be on the brink of full-blown civil war and disintegration.

One hopes he won't make the same mistake again by ignoring the counsel of Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States, Prince Turki al-Faisal, who said in a speech last month that "since America came into Iraq uninvited, it should not leave Iraq uninvited." If it does, one of the first consequences will be massive Saudi intervention to stop Iranian-backed Shiite militias from butchering Iraqi Sunnis.

... if American troops begin a phased withdrawal from Iraq. As the economic powerhouse of the Middle East, the birthplace of Islam and the de facto leader of the world's Sunni community (which comprises 85 percent of all Muslims), Saudi Arabia has both the means and the religious responsibility to intervene.

And the downside for infidels is?

Excerpt from a previous posting at JihadWatch  that dealt, in words close to those in the posting below, with Akbar Ahmed given his due in the second and third paragraphs :

"In a recent Jihad Watch post, Robert Spencer dealt lucidly with the treatment of women, adducing the unambiguous Qur'anic texts, explaining the hierarchy of both muhaddithin and of the hadith assigned rankings of authenticity by those same muhaddithin (and keeping in mind that Qur'anic passages cannot be trumped by hadith). In doing so, he offered exactly the resource needed for those who are tongue-tied, or not quite able to come back when, as talk show hosts or as guests, they are forced to endure the nonsense of some apologist for Islam.

Those apologists include the greedy Esposito; some pseudo-fighters-for-women's-rights in Islam who keep telling us that the "problem is entirely cultural" and "has nothing to do with Islam" (Fatima Mernissi and Leila Ahmad in their recent much more defensive incarnations, Sherin Ebadi who is not quite the heroine to Iranians in free-throated exile that one might have been led to believe); and the plummy-voiced Akbar Ahmed, who prides himself on his own "moderation" but who is objectively furthering the Jihad when he utters nonsense about Islam. He once denied flatly that Ibn Khaldun ever mentioned Jihad until presented with the clear text from Ibn Khaldun mentioning Jihad -- not what one should expect from the "Ibn Khaldun Professor" at American University.

Ahmed is objectively furthering the Jihad even more when he takes his "American students" on "field trips" to Pakistan. Once there he puts on a great show for them, taking them to a mosque, ostentatiously demanding that they be treated well, for they are "guests" and so on. The American students, already entranced with his way with words, fall for this hook, line, and sinker. He can now tell them that Islam is whatever he says it is and those innocent students will believe him -- a nice example of Daniel Pipes's bizarre attempt to hold out hope by telling us that "Islam is whatever Muslims say it is," instead of what the Qur'an and Hadith say it is.

A few more such handy guides such as that provided by Spencer here are needed: on the permanent duty and definition of Jihad, on the treatment of non-Muslims when first encountered, and then after they are conquered, and another few topics. Then every talk show host and every Op/Ed editor will be mentally prepared to take on those apologists. And so will, eventually, even the slow and dimwitted among our rulers, who will have to stop uttering hopeful banalities or pretending that Islam is something it isn't, as if we could wish away a grim reality."

One has a few questions for Prime Minister Olmert:

What do you know about Islamic teachings?

How seriously do you think Muslims take those teachings?

Do you have any reason to think that the way Muslims are suffused with the teachings of Islam, a system of Total Regulation and Complete Explanation of the Universe, is different from the way that either Judaism or Christianity impinges on, or organizes the life of, Jews and Christians?

What do you know of Muslim teachings regarding non-Muslims?

Have you ever read the Qur'an and at least a few hundred of the hadith, possibly directed by a scholar of Islam?

Are you acquainted with the life of Muhammad, as written and read by Muslims, and do you realize the role that Muhammad plays as the Perfect Man, uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil?

Do you know about the decapitation of the prisoners of the Banu Qurayza? The attack on the Khaybar Oasis? The murders of Asma bint Marwan and Abu Akaf for mocking Muhammad? The marriage to little Aisha?

Are you familiar with the agreement that Muhammad made with the Meccans in 628 A.D. when, feeling not yet strong enough to attack them directly, he made an agreement for a truce, a period of ten years, and then eighteen months later, broke that truce on a pretext and, now with stronger forces, attacked the Meccans?

Are you aware that in the entire history of Islam, this behavior by Muhammad is hailed as being exceptionally clever, and has been taken as a model for all agreements and treaties made between Muslims and non-Muslims?

Are you aware, for example, that all of the Muslim commentators on the law of war and peace in Islam are in universal agreement that no permanent peace treaty can ever be made between Muslims and Infidels, only temporary agreements made necessary when the Muslim side is too weak?

Have you read, for example, or has anyone brought to your busy attention, Majid Khadduri's War and Peace in Islam, with its discussion of the Treaty of Al-Hudaibiyya?

These questions, and your answers to them, will be published in the five leading newspapers of Israel.

Please, Mr. Prime Minister, think carefully before answering.

And come to think of it, why shouldn't this little quiz, which so clearly will elicit for us information about the comprehension of Infidel leaders everywhere, be given, in one form or another, all over the world, beginning with those in Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, and Madrid?

Why shouldn't we all demand that those who presume to protect and instruct us (they go together: protection must be accompanied by instruction on what one is being protected against, and how, and why) take this test?

This is not a multiple-choice examination. It will not be graded by some computer, measuring the little lines who shaded in with a No. 2 pencil.

No, this test requires the ability to put a few sentences together. It does not supply the pre-fabricated answers.

And it will not be graded by a whirring machine in Princeton, New Jersey.

It will be graded, instead, by all of us. And we are in no mood, the publics of the Western world, to indulge or overlook in any way. Too much depends on the understanding of these matters.

Olmert, I'm afraid, has already failed with the surpassing idiocy of his every statement and move. Bush, in his messianic missing-the-point fervor -- he had an idea and now the idea has him -- to create a Light Unto the Muslim Nations instead of exploiting the situation to weaken the Camp of Islam -- has not done much better. Almost all of the known leaders of the Western world have similarly failed.

But there are others, waiting in the wings. They should all be asked to take the test above -- all those hoping to be the next Republican or Democratic candidate. We want to know, more than anything else, what they understand about Islam. We want to know if they are fooled, or foolable, or unwilling to state things, even if not with the full freedom that one has at this website, but slightly more obliquely (that may at first be necessary, and if undertaken only for tactical reasons, may in some cases be understood and forgiven).

But they need to take the test.

We need to see the results before we support them or give them money or cast our votes for them.

It is a shock for Americans, thinking of Monrovia (originally Christopolis) and the origins of Liberia, to realize that Islam, too, is in Liberia. It may not be the full-fledged affair of the Arabs and Pakistanis; it may be softened by local customs, the syncretism (compare the “candomble” of Brazil that mixes Christianity with West African pagan practices and rough-hewn divinities) of the marabouts which provides a gentling admixture to the sharp practice of Islam. But wherever in sub-Saharan Africa Islam has been practiced fully, the results for the non-Muslims have not been good. The Jihad of Usman dan Fodio, declared 1804 and lasting six years, was not a soft affair to those non-Muslims who were on the receiving end. The Jihad conducted by the Muslims of northern Nigeria, who began the whole thing with wholesale massacres of Christians in Kano and elsewhere in the north, and neither crosses nor hush-hush Juju amulets could turn away their murderous wrath.

A little more on Islam and the Jihad in West Africa from a posting of June 7, 2005:

"Two centuries before the current American foreign policy, or before there was Zionism, or "Iraq" and "Palestine" to blame, long before "poverty" was pulled up as a root-cause, and the why-do-they-hate-us brigade not only did not exist, but would have been impossible to come into being, Muslims in West Africa were on the Jihad warpath.

A Muslim cleric, or mallam, Usman dan Fodio, led a Jihad against local non-Muslim rulers from 1804 to 1810 that lead to the establishment of the so-called Caliphate of Sokoto, and to the spread, enforced spread by military conquest, of Islam.

The results of that can be seen in West Africa, where one can find, well-tended, neat, prettified even with simple touches (a few flowers) the Christian neighborhoods, and then the sullen, dirty, rundown areas of Muslims which are on view. The comparison is remarkable.

And everywhere Christians are under assault. They have been under assault, most famously, in Nigeria, where in 1967 the Christian Ibos, far more advanced and industrious than their Muslim overlords, rebelled and declared the independence of the State of Biafra. The proximate cause were the mass murders, by Muslims, of Christian Ibo all over northern Nigeria. But the Western world did nothing to help the Christian Ibo, while the Muslims -- including Egyptian pilots and planes that strafed Ibo villages, killing tens of thousands of helpless villagers -- did provide aid. Only two countries in the world recognized Biafra - Israel, and Ghana (Kwame Nkrumah, Osagyefo, if he did not always understand economics, did understand Islam). In 1969, in his famous Ahiara Declaration, the leader of Biafra, Colonel Ojukwu, listed as the main reason for the Biafran fight was to defend the Christians against, as he put it, the "jihad" being conducted against it. That jihad by the Muslims who control the military, and have largely stolen the oil wealth of Nigeria (with a little help from some islamochristians willing to collaborate) continues today.

Elsewhere the Christians are under siege --as in the Cote d'Ivoire, or in Togo, where the more advanced southerners, often of the Ewe tribe that, like most tribes in coastal West Africa, cuts across national borders, are leaving -- not only because the crooked son of the previous crooked leader is back in business, but because of the Islamic menace.

Black Africans are enslaved in Mali and Mauritania, but not a syllable of protest has come from the Arab League about this, though both countries are members of that league. For decades black African Christians and animists have been slaughtered or starved to death in southern Sudan, and now black non-Arab Muslims (or nominal Muslims) are being killed, their cattle destroyed, their huts and houses burned, their women raped, their men all killed. And every single person who has lived to testify has talked of how the various Arab marauders say that "they are black and must be killed." Imagine, just imagine, if there were not a hundred thousand such incidents (as have taken place in Darfur) or a million(as in the southern Sudan) but even one such event, anywhere in the Western world, by a Western government.

Then ask why there is such a different standard, such fear of telling the truth, about how Islam is a vehicle for Arab supremacist ideology, and Arabs among the supreme racists of history, who persuade those they conquer to abandon, forget, despise their own pasts, and to assume pseudo-Arab identities, and to take as their own models some Arabs who lived -- if they existed at all --in 7th century Arabia.

Is the American government fully aware of the jihad that Ibos remember well, and does the American government have any plans should the notion of a free Biafra (with all the oil in the south, among the lands where various Christian tribes live) be revived? Does the United States understand that in the Ivory Coast, Laurent Gbagbo has been demonized by the French government, but that the fears of the Christian ivoiriens that they are being asked to give citizenship to Muslim migrants in the north are justified? Does the American government know about Egypt's bullying of Ethiopia in an attempt to prevent Ethiopia from diverting just some of the headwaters of the Nile for vital irrigation projects, and of how Egypt sees a Muslim Sudan not as an enemy but as an ally in the future conflict with Ethiopia? Has the American government actually talked to Christians from Ethiopia, worried -- like people in Western Europe -- about the growing Muslim population, and the demands it makes to change the very nature of Ethiopia?

Given the entirely predictable paralysis at the U.N. -- where the Islamintern International calls the shots, and focuses attention on "Palestine" and keeps it always off the local expressions of Jihad -- over Darfur, and given the predictable collapse sometime in the future, of that famous "peace accord" recently "achieved" for the southern Sudan, one which will last just as long as the government in Khartoum thinks the West is paying close attention, and not a minute longer, why has the United States not used the excuse of rescuing the people in Darfur to send in a few thousand troops, to seize both Darfur and the southern Sudan (claims of government violations of the peace accords with the southerners can easily be justified).

What would an American presence do? And who could object? Not Nicholas Kristof -- he is calling for such intervention in Darfur (he seems strangely uninterested in what happened to the non-Muslims of the southern Sudan over the past 20 years). Not the leftists everywhere -- how can they oppose coming in to rescue black villagers, whose pictures, with them swarming around and smiling at somewhat abashed American soldiers can be displayed worldwide. Not to black African Christians who will rightly take this as a sign of muscular American interest in confronting those who conduct Jihad, and who will be bucked up, from Kenya to West Africa.

And who will be mad? Muslims everywhere will realize that the game is up, that the Jihad can be opposed without invoking Al Qaeda, and that everywhere the Muslims have been on the offensive (slowly swallowing up, and arabizing, most of the Sudan when, a hundred years ago, it was largely un-islamized and un-arabized). Two can play this game, but the Infidels have not -- they have simply allowed the conquest. They did nothing to help the Biafrans in their fight for independence after repeated widespread jihad-massacres of Christians. They have failed to recognize that demography is a weapon of jihad, and the cross-border infiltration of Muslim populations in West Africa is a reasonable thing for local Christians to worry about. They have shown not the slightest foresight about the coming clash, over water, between Ethiopia and Egypt (which acts as if the Ethiopians have no right to that water, or only to the amounts that the Egyptians grandly will allow them). Everywhere we can, we should take the side of those threatened by Jihad, and in black Africa, the point of obvious entry, and obvious gain with little pain, is the Sudan.

Let Saudi Arabia, where slavery was still officially allowed until 1962, and where unofficially it flourishes, sputter. Let the various Arab League states in which blacks are still enslaved wax indignant. Let Libya, where there are routinely murderous riots against black Africans (in one of which a diplomat from Chad was hung from a pole in Tripoli and left dangling for the edification and delight of spectators), try to complain.

Any and every place where Islam is clearly, obviously, in the wrong, and can be confronted at little cost (unlike, say, the miasma of Iraq at present, where the post-invasion and post-destruction-of-weapons-and-the-regime makes no sense), should be investigated.

This is a war of containment, and of wearing down the morale of the other side. We have right on our side. Islam is a primitive and unpleasant belief-system. There is little or nothing to admire about it. Everywhere Islam has conquered, those conquered have emerged, when left with their lives, to live lives that are far more impoverished, in every important way, either as non-Muslim dhimmis, or as converts to Islam, and Islam limits artistic expression, stifles the free and skeptical inquiry without which real science is impossible, cripples the lives of women. Islam stunts mental growth. We need make no apologies to others or to ourselves for coming to this melancholy conclusion, so much at odds with the official ideology that we have been subjected to -- that everyone is the same, that all religions and peoples are equal in every way, that no one must ever ever challenge the self-evident truth of any of this.

Iraq offered one kind of opportunity -- the opportunity, that was taken, to destroy the military capacity (and too much may now, foolishly, be done by the Americans to build up Iraq's military and restore that capacity, undoing what was so usefully done) and to lessen those very fissures. The best policy in Iraq would be to cease all these plans for $590 million dollar American embassies, or American bases that can be closed at a moment's notice through the whim of local Muslims, or to force the American officer corps to blandly follow the bland, in repeating mantras about "success" and "bringing democracy to Iraq" that show an absence of the simplest and most obvious strategic thinking -- simplest, and most obvious, as long as one keeps in mind that the tenets of Islam, and not the absence of "democracy," are and will always be, a problem for Infidels as they have been for the past 1350 years. In Iraq, 139,000 American troops should be pulled out, or at most, 20-30 thousand temporarily in Kurdistan, where they will be welcomed, or perhaps in the desert to keep out foreigners -- but always ready to pick up and leave quickly.

Yet, at the same time that leaving Iraq now makes sense (and not least because of the effect it is having on the long-term recruitment of the kind of people the army and the Reserves and the National Guard need -- a squandering of morale, and of resources, that cannot be forgiven and that shows a criminally negligently attitude toward the growing disbelief in the current Iraq venture that, in fact, is well-founded, and that comes most feelingly not from those who think there is no problem with Islam, but those who think, who know, that there is a very great problem with Islam, and Iraq, while far less important a matter than preventing the islamization of Europe, or Latin America (where sustained efforts by Tablighi al-Jamaat are bearing fruit), or sub-Saharan Africa, could if the fissures were exploited by American withdrawal, contribute its mite to helping the Infidels to contain Islam, to disrupt whatever unity it has, to cause consternation and damage morale of the enemy, not by spending a hundred billion dollars a year, but rather by not lifting a finger.

Please, let's use Iraq properly. Let's stop pouring in men, matériel, money. Let's not lift a finger. And let's turn our attention to Da'wa in Mexico, Muslim immigration in France, Italy, Germany, Belgium, and -- which is where this posting began and by rights should return -- to the besieged black African Christians, pursued by jihadists from southern Nigeria to the southern Sudan, and to Kenya, and even to the bombed-out "immoral" cafés of Capetown.

By the way, if you want a musical interlude, go to a Virgin Megastore, or for that matter an Extra-Virgin Store of your choice that contains every CD known to man. Go to the classical music section. Riffle under the B's which start with the best-known -- Bach, Brahms -- and then end with those not enjoying such instant world-wide name recognition, such  as Boccherini, Buxtehude, and finally, bringing up the rear, Byrd. Find the William Byrd (not of the FFV Virginia Byrds) CD with "Peccantem me quotidie" on it.  Buy it. Take it home and listen. And you too will hear that very line which has  been not played but played upon repeatedly here.

And one word of advice. When you see the word "motet" on the CD, please don't think immediately of the word "motel" and what goes on in those places.

Try to control yourself. Please. 

WASHINGTON: The Glories of Islamic Art, a three-part documentary presented by Dr Akbar Ahmed, is to be screened by Britain’s Channel Five later this month...
Dr Ahmed, a professor of Islamic studies at the American University here, said old prejudices about Islam were resurfacing..

Dr Ahmed said, “If you think I am exaggerating, take a look at the Amazon.com website and read the blurb of books, such as The Sword of the Prophet by Serge Trifkovic or The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam by Robert Spencer, who is also the editor of a huge anthology of articles entitled The Myth of Islamic Tolerance, and whose latest book, The Truth About Muhammad: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion,..--from this news item

Akbar Ahmed is a plummy-voiced, smooth-talking "snake" (the noun, I believe, comes from Ibn Warraq). He managed somehow -- he's not the first anglophone, pseudo-"moderate" Pakistani apologist to do so, nor the last -- to get a position filling an academic seat that might, were he not sitting comfortably in it, be given to someone who might enlighten rather than buffalo his naive students.

About those naive students: that plummy voice, those English tweeds (child of zamindars? what is Akbar Ahmed's history as a most unrepresentative representative of Muslim Man), and above all the little business of taking his students to Pakistan (who pays for those airfares?) where they then go to a mosque, and see their champion, their soft-voiced teacher-hero, confront those "immoderate" Muslims and tell them they should "welcome" these Christian guests and so they do, and the students, impressionable and very impressed, come away thinking what a swell guy, what a wonderful guy, what a guy to be trusted, is our own Professor Akbar Ahmed.

A crock. A predictable crock.

"Timor mortis conturbat me"

And I suppose the alluded-to change would enhance the alliteration in the line which otherwise depends more on the mor-mor assonance, whereas that assonance could be enrolled by that change in a more inclusive figure of sound in which alliteration predominates.

On the other hand, alliteration has always been more of a virtue in English verse than in Latin.

More, or no more?

Mas, o no mas?