It was just a couple of days ago that the EU was ever so close to a deal with Iran on the nuclear program. The US went so far as to hold off on sanctions so that the EU could get more time:

How'd that work out, you ask? How do you think it worked out:

Here, we'll make this easy: Iran will not give up on their nuclear program no matter what you do. Does that help clear things up?

An Islamic terrorist group has declared a ceasefire, but the country where they bomb and murder civilians remains unimpressed:

The Kurds, of course, are a stateless Middle East peoples that have never been offered a state in any form. This distinguishes them from the Palestinians, who (a) have literal cousins in countries like Jordan and Egypt and (b) have been offered a state several times. And yet when they call for a ceasefire, it seems quite natural for Turkey to say 'actually, no - you're a bunch of terrorists and we know how to deal with terrorists'. Can you imagine the global din of outrage if Israel reacted the same way to a Hamas ceasefire call? There's international outrage when Israel doesn't give enough concessions fast enough to fake Palestinian ceasefire calls - just the hint of Palestinian moderation is enough to get Europe and the State Department clamoring for prisoner releases and 'goodwill gestures'. And here is the PKK - including their jailed leaders - calling for a real dialogue - and outrage is more or less muted as Turkey turns it down.
This is why we think that maybe - just maybe - there's more to this 'anti-Zionism' thing than just pure-hearted humanitarian concern for the oppressed Palestinians. When someone reacts one way in a situation but a different way in a seemingly identical situation, everything from logic to common sense to scientific inquiry screams that there must be some reason for the different reaction. There's at least two ways in which human rights activists treat Israel differently: (a) disproportionate focus on even minor Israeli actions (if you're a human rights group looking to devote your limited resources to combating the world's worst human rights abuses, there is quite simply no rational explanation for focusing on Israel... maybe one group, maybe two groups - but that doesn't account for the anti-Semitism anti-Zionism industry (b) differing reactions to Israeli actions (why does Turkey get to reject ceasefire calls while Israel has to free murderers just because Hamas says that they're moving towards maybe considering a very temporary halt to some of their bombings?) We think that the differences are accounted for by latent and not so latent anti-Semitism. If someone has a better explanation, we'd welcome hearing it.

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

... so we said: "sorry Rabbi, it's just because of the hunger and the headache." And he said: "the Yom Kippur fast is a joyous fast - for one day we get to be like angels. Instead of food, drink, and bodily pleasures we get to wrap ourselves in white and spend all our time singing praises to the Divine". And we said: "Hold on. Muslim heaven is 72 virgins and 80,000 servants. Are you saying that when we go to Jewish heaven we'll be like 'who do we have to blow around here to get a steak and vodka' and they'll be like 'there are no blowjobs in heaven' and we'll be like 'it's an expression' and they'll be like 'there are also no steaks or vodka'?" And then the Rabbi said: "Don't kid yourself. You're not going to heaven. Now get ready to stand back up - it's called the Amidah for a reason."

Here's your pre-Yom Kippur (J)Blog Roundup. G'mar Chatima Tova to our Jewish readers, and to our non-Jewish readers: have fun with your "good food" and your "fine wine" on Monday. Sigh.

* Some people might not know this, but before Richard Landes became Richard Landes of anti-fauxtography fame, he was (and continues to be) a leading US scholar on public and theological understandings of religious apocalypticism and violence. Which means that an article-length post by him about the historical and political dynamics of the Papal jihad is that rarest of all things: a qualified blog post.

* Lynn-B from Incontext has a video "for those who need a break from the heavy, flagellatory brand of pre-Yom Kippur sanctimony". Yes please (next up: Lynn-B versus Anne-L catfight. Hot).

* Speaking of Lynn: the Center for Jewish Values is urging Bob Casey, the candidate that she supports and will be voting for, to repudiate the vicious anti-Semitism that's been appearing on MoveOn.org. To our knowledge, he has yet to do so.

* RightWing Nuthouse goes nuts (get it?) about people making light of the fake anthrax letter than he got. Memo to idiots targeting left-wingers with fake terrorist tactics: that's what the other side does. Whoever did this should be found, arrested, and beaten to within an inch of his life. And that's just for making us put up with the DKos and DU avalanche that's going to go on for the next month. After that, the law can have him for milder sentencing.

* This a little out of character for us, but explain to us why it's not OK for Democratic Jews to support a Democratic Muslim Congressional candidate who has repudiated his over-exuberant nationalist past and now seems to be on the right side of the war against political Islam? We're sympathetic to the argument 'a Democratic majority in general is bad for Jews because the Democratic base not accepts virulent anti-Semites into its tent' - but that's not the argument being made. Is there evidence the Keith Ellison is being disingenuous about his positions?

* Let's play this game: If French UNIFIL tanks and Israeli tanks faced off, who do you think would win? Do you think it would be the side that uses its tanks to fight wars? And what the hell is UNIFIL doing confronting Israeli troops? Shouldn't they be busy not disarming Hezbollah or something?

* Israel is giving money to Nigeria to build a mosque. As Ed Lasky points out, that's like what Muslims do for Jews, expcept for the part where Muslims desecrate ancient synagogues.

* It's so cute to watch Israeli right-wingers noticing that Shimon Peres - a Founding Father, hawk who sat at Ben Gurion's knee, and the shepherd of Israel's air and nuclear programs - cares about Israel.

* In a similar vein, it's so cute to watch Israeli right-wingers noticing that Benjamin Netanyahu - the man who gave Hebron to Arafat - sometimes supports negotiating with Fatah.

* Neo-neocon has a troll infestation. Mere Rhetoric? No trolls. Sad.

* Van at KesherTalk introduces us to the story of Anne Murphy, an Irish Catholic impregnated by her Jordanian lover and sent on a suicide mission that she, pregnant with their daughter, was unaware of. He booked her on an El Al flight from London to Israel and gave her a bag with a false bottom - that false bottom was filled with enough Semtex to blow the plane, and its 375 passengers and crew, out of the water. Heathrow security let her walk right up to the terminal, but El Al personnel found her behavior suspicious enough for another search. They discovered the hidden explosives and saved four hundred potential victims from dying in the name of the glorious Palestinian cause.

* JPundit has the results of a survey on High Holiday sermons. Mostly traditional stuff, but 5 percent will be talking about the War in Iraq. Want to bet what strain of Judaism those rabbis are from, and which side of the debate they'll take?

* This Saudi Arabian anti-terrorism wall is going to be a lot of fun.

* Pamela's Global Jihad Roundup provides the usual depressing mix of jihadism and Western apologism.

* IRIS has a subscription to a news service we don't, and passes on this stat: "As a result of a religious dispute, nearly 5,000 Christians were displaced and six were injured on September 20th, when Muslim rioters destroyed and torched at least 18 churches, 20 Christian homes, and 40 Christian shops in Dutse, the capital of Jigawa state in Northern Nigeria." It's the Occupation's fault.

* Sol calls our attention to liberals who can't understand why there are all these anti-Semites in the anti-War movement. We think it has something to do with carrying signs that say Nazi Kikes Out of Lebanon during anti-war marches. But what do we know?

* AK Sommer is having a birthday. This makes her, what, 29?

After dealing with our inbox this morning (now: afternoon), we offer the following corrections and/or clarifications about this week's blog posts:

(1) Contrary to the implication that we may have made in this post, we do not think that Orthodox Jews will refuse to vote if a poll worker is menstruating. If a poll worker is menstruating on Shabbat, of course, we still maintain that Orthodox Jews will refuse to vote. But that's for a totally different reason, and we were inappropriate to imply that the blog title "How Orthodox Jews should vote" indicates otherwise. The writer, on the other hand, support Casey. So now there are two Jbloggers who you can blame when a 2007 Democratic Senate passes a nonbinding resolution that says "we don't know what you're talking about - we think the State Department is doing a great job!"

(2) Contrary to the implication in this follow-up post, AnnieGetYour from Jewbiquitous probably does not - in our words - think that "Jewish bloggers aren't allowed to have fun like everyone else on the blogosphere". If she does, she probably has better reasons than - again our words - "some transliterated Hebrew". Nonetheless, we will defend the part where we implied that Anne from Boker Tov, Boulder! linked a video so bad that it makes people want to go out and club baby seals. Sorry, it's true - we've seen studies on this.

(3) We certainly did not say that liberals who think that Evangelical Christians support Israel for apocalyptic reasons are "dumber than a sack of wet hair". We do think that they're quite wrong though.

(4) Contrary to the implication in yesterday's (J)Blog Roundup, workers at the Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles do not kill their pets. At least not until they've made their pets sit for 3 hours in the waiting room, called them up to the only open window, given them several totally unnecessary forms to fill out, forced them to wait twenty more minutes after finishing the forms, and then finally told them that nothing can be done right now because it's a Thursday in Israel and - since Wednesday was a holiday - no one will be at work till Sunday. So given the time zone change and the fact the Consulate isn't open on weekends, the forms won't get faxed to Tel Aviv until Tuesday.

(5) Contrary to the implication in this post, the good people at Vital Perspective do not blog just to one-up other (J)Bloggers. We don't even know how someone could fail to notice that we were joking, given the description of their posts as "clearer, more detailed, more accurate, and more nuanced". Sometimes we wonder about some of our readers.

(6) For about a month we have been getting progressively angrier about a woman that we've been calling "Karen Anderson", first when she made some of the worst arguments ever in excuse of jihadism and then when got dismantled by Daled Amos. We've been calling this woman "Karen Anderson" because we are very, very stupid. The woman we've been calling "the most insipid journalism in the world" is actually named Karen Armstrong (h/t to SoccerDad for this). Karen Anderson is the animal telepath who helped Demi Moore contact her lost dog, and we don't know anything about her positions re the war against political Islam.

What's that you ask? How many emails did we field this morning? A couple.

UPDATE: We give up. Email from How Orthodox Jews should Vote:

Looks like Lynn is back on her own. Unless we're misreading the email. Which is likely, given that we've been having trouble lately with things like, oh, the names of authors.

Of all the ignorant yet conveniently-stereotype-affirming arguments favored by the academic and cultural left, among our least favorite is the conceit whereby Salon and Nation journalists go deep into Christianity to uncover the deep, dark, apocalyptic motives that evangelicals have for their support of Israel. Everyone's heard this canard – supposedly, the only reason that fundamentalist Christians support Israel is because they want to get all the Jews back to Israel in preparation for a final war and the return of Christ. This argument is quite simply slanderous: evangelical Christians who support Israel are inspired by literal interpretations of the Bible, yes, but of a far more benign kind.

But the problem with this argument is that it's always teetering on conspiracy theory ground: demonstrate an alternative, non-Revelation-based motive, and leftists can claim that Christian leaders are just hiding their true motives. So the only real way to get at the debate is to just highlight obvious, undeniable good will and dare the left to spin it as all one pre-planned conspiracy:

Yes, they're obviously donating their time, money, and passion because they want to see all of the Jews wiped out. That makes perfect sense, and is totally compatible with everything we know about human nature and these people's behavior.

Two dolphins were born off the Israeli coast during Lebanon II. Awwww:

This may seem frivolous to you, but to us it screams "finally, something living in Israeli territory that Europe really wants to protect". Hezbollah, on the other hand, could care less:


Nasrallah probably thinks that it's Allah's sea anyway - the dolphins are just infidel occupiers.

This is a good illustration of how low our expectations of traitorous Israeli-Arab lawmakers have become. When we first clicked on the headline MK Taleb A-Sanaa calls for Marwan Barghouti's release we actually said to ourselves: "you know, he probably said that Barghouti is a strongman who will enforce a peace deal by any means necessary... obviously that's not really why he wants the terrorist Barghouti released, but at least the excuse is not a risible lie on its face... good for him!" And then it turns out that actually the excuse he used was just another stream of shameless demonstrable lies, and we were faced with the challenge of actually lowering our expectations to new depths:

(a) Actually, Hamas has made no significant progress toward recognizing Israel. We gleaned this obscure fact by reading the Hamas statements that went something like "some people are saying that we've come a long way toward recognizing Israel - but those people are wrong, since we are committed to never recognizing Israel"
(b) In fact, the very premise of the claim is as false as the claim itself - acceptance of the Prisoner's Agreement would under no circumstance imply that Hamas was accepting the existence of Israel. The Prisoner's Agreement, after all, demands that four million of the most radicalized anti-Israel Arabs in the world (aka fourth and fifth generation UN-fed and watered refugees) be allowed to flood into Israel. Which would mean the end of Israel. Which is the opposite of continuing to exist.
(c) We were going to sub-subpoint out and address all the dumb potential reasons that someone might make for why a Palestinian government uniting Al Aksa terrorists and the Hamas terrorists would be motivated to stop terrorism, but screw it. He didn't believe it when he said it, so proving that it's not true is kind of beside the point.

In other Barghouti news, he's now saying that not freeing Palestinian prisoners will cause more kidnappings and attacks on Israeli soldiers. This is to be contrasted with the rest of the known universe, which points out that freeing Palestinian prisoners also seems to inspire more Palestinian kidnappings and attacks. We strongly suspect that both of the those causes are true.

In Lebanon... For the better part of half a decade, oh-so-brave Lebanese citizens who wanted to throw rocks at Jews (or really any anti-Israel tourist who wanted to throw rocks at Jews) could have a little fun by tossing stones across the border at armed Israeli soldiers. The idea has been that, unlike soldiers from some countries we could name, the Israelis won't actually open fire at unarmed civilians. It's the best kind of liberal academic resistance - anti-Israel, vaguely thuggish, and totally safe (hey kids, you can be like Che!) Columbia professor Edward Said (aka the intellectual father of the New Anti-Semitism) was himself once photographed throwing rocks and Israeli teenagers who he knew wouldn't respond.

Well, that game ends now:

You'd think that this will put a stop to this once and for all. But the problem is that the stone throwers are very stupid, and so they might not get the memo. How do we know they're very stupid? Well... we don't have any really specific proof, but the throwing rocks at armed soldiers thing is kind of a giveaway, no?

In Gaza... As almost no one in the West knows, the Palestinians have been firing rockets into Israeli schools and hospitals for the last month or so. This distinguishes last month in no way from the month before, or the month before that. But now Defense Minister Peretz is saying that at some point something will have to be done to express the idea that randomly bombing Israelis just because they happen to be Jewish is not OK:

Frustratingly, Peretz is a liar. But it sounds nice.

At first, watching Lebanon grow up into a precarious teenage Arab country - full of newly found confidence and braggadocio - was kind of cute:

But now this whole 'we can send our army to almost anywhere in our country' thing is starting to go to their head. To extend the metaphor, they're like 14 year olds trying to act like adults. And so what's at least normal coming from uncouth Syria or Iran is just kind pathetic and annoying coming from Siniora:

Blaming Israel for endangering a ceasefire that he's already explicitly broken... check.
Issuing not-very-veiled but nonetheless-very-vague threats about what will happen if Israel breaks the ceasefire that he's already explicitly broken... check.
Dragging in 'the Palestinian issue' even though every single other thing that he's committed to was done on the pretext that he was acting as a Lebanese Prime Minister and not a grand Arab defender... check.
Ignoring the fact that it's the Palestinian government that refuses to make peace - and therefore de facto justifying endless war against Israel but blaming it on the refusal of Israel to make peace... check.
Calling on the US to become "more constructive" by accepting that all of these totally loony ideas are actually true or reasonable... check
Making said call as a plea to the EU... check
Pretending that if pressuring Israel to make itself vulnerable to attack will yield some sort of peace dividend from an Arab and Muslim public that shows absolutely no inclination to provide said dividend (and that is killing nuns and burning churches for reasons that have nothing to do with Israel)... check

And to think, just two months ago he didn't really have anything that he could call "Lebanese sovereign territory" without someone in the audience smirking. Just look how fast he's grown up.

Yeah, we could pass these on with extended and explicit commentary. But sometimes, you just have to place your faith in the readers' abilities:

Percent of Palestinians who support Hezbollah, an organization dedicated to the physical eradication of the Jewish presence in the Middle East: 63 percent.

Percent of Israelis who support negotiating with a Palestinian government, even one like Hamas that is dedicated to the physical eradication of the Jews presence in the Middle East: 67 percent.

No way this can go badly.

Obviously, in a historical conflict that revolves over who has a "right" to land, the historical presence or absence of Jews or Arabs in Jerusalem will matter more than an outsider might think it would. And so leaders and opinion makes in the Arab world occasionally try to run the argument that Jerusalem was not really sacred to ancient Jews and that the Temple was in some other city or country entirely. We're not hopeful that new "rational evidence" will slow down this obvious lunacy even a little, but for what it's worth:

There's simply no other way to account for the disproportionate presence of valuable metals except by admitting that Jerusalem was a political, cultural, and spiritual center for many, many decades. Again, this discovery obviously won't stop the conspiracy nuts (at worst, they'll just say that this scientist is a lying Zionist agent), but it's a nice little talking point.

Slow morning.

* Israellycool notices that there are a lot of Israelis in Los Angeles. We can confirm that this is indeed the case, and we even have a little fable to explain how it happened. In the mid-1980s, the Israeli state was in total crisis. A unique blend of bureaucratic imbecility, laziness, and self-righteousness had pretty much brought the country to a halt. Something had to be done, and quick. So in one fell swoop, Israel physically shipped off to LA 15% of its meanest, least helpful civil service professionals. And that, boys and girls, is how the Los Angeles Consulate was born. The End.

* Daled Amos fisks the new book by World's Most Insipid Journalist Karen Anderson. Holy hell, do we hate that woman.

* Some of the members of the Lost Tribe that's been hanging out in India for a couple thousand years are coming home. There are 7,000 Bnei Menashe still in India. We think instead of absorbing them, Israel should declare that they're 80th generation refugees. Then they should demand UN special treatment and open up negotiations with Italy and Iraq (cause whatever, you know). Israel should demand an unconditional right of return in principle and massive compensation in practice.

* Via MEMRI, we find out that Pirates of the Caribbean is a Zionist plot. Which is obviously not true, because if Jews were in charge we never would've let Disneyland change the ride just to market the new movie. There's a special circle in hell reserved for people who change Disneyland rides. It's right outside the betrayers.

* Meryl catches the Saudis being a touch hypocritical about building fences. Very unneighborly.

It seems like everyone in the world suddenly thinks that Israel should be handing out more land on the 1 in a billion chance that it will distract a single Palestinian terrorist or Hezbollah proxy-soldier. Everyone, that is, except many Israelis - who kind of like what little amount of land they've still managed to keep.

With the Palestinians... So you're Spain. Other than being the WWII bad guy that everyone always forgets, your biggest claim to recent fame is being the boss on the Iberian Peninsula (not that Andorra was putting up much of a fight). So rather than being satisfied and resting on their laurels, the Spanish are suggesting that Israel should revive the utter failure that was the 1990s Israeli-Palestinian land-for-peace. How dumb is this argument? Not even Labor chief Amir Peretz thinks that's a bad idea - and he's so committed to his commitment to insane peace deals that he was talking about them during an election where Labor needed to go right. Shilo Musings is genuinely impressed. Why is it that whenever any decadent European wannabee wants to do something "relevant", pressuring Israel to endanger Israelis always seems to be near the top of the list? And incidentally, the fact that Labor is still expressing some semblance of normalcy makes the Meretz proposal for a Meretz-Labor merger that much funnier. Because nothing screams "we're trying to reestablish our credibility after our idiot primary voters elected an idiot teamster and then he lost a war" more than merging with a party to the left of you.

With the Syrians... People who think that Israel should negotiate with Syria: YNet's Sever Plocker, who's brain will allow him to publicly argue that the Golan Heights is different from the West Bank because, unlike the West Bank, the world is opposed to Israel's occupation of the Golan Heights (?!?!) People who think that Papa Assad blew Syria's golden opportunity and that if Baby Assad wants to come to the Golan he can damn well apply for an Israeli tourist visa like everyone else: Israeli Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shimon Peres (or as the IHT describes it: "Israel vice premier says Israel open to peace talks if Syrians offer realistic proposals"... because that's the perfect way to sum up the main point of a speech dedicated to explaining that Assad will never, ever, ever make a realisic proposal).

It's beyond hackneyed to point out that technology is a precarious and unpredictable thing. Coulter constantly talks about Lexis-Nexis, but it's the availability of Google and Google Cache - free to tens of millions of energized individuals - that has dramatically increased the risk of any kind of dishonesty. And if you're a controversial ex-President talking about the single most important issue of our age, it's a very bad idea to throw around accusations of conspiracy when someone implies that you may spent eight years kicking the can of Islamofascism down the road. First, the blogosphere will fact check your ass [insert too-predictable-to-be-funny punch line about Clinton and ass-groping]. Then the blogosphere will follow up their fact-checking of your ass by gleefully posting video of really smart judges fact checking same. And then a major blog will arrange for your former adviser Dick Morris to describe to a bunch of other bloggers qua megaphones that (a) you probably were being a little intellectually dishonest and (b) even the maybe-excusing-your-behavior-possibility that you were overwhelmed by your emotions is just a cynical and calculated ploy (apparently Stephanopoulos has worked out an entire taxonomy of how Clinton pretends to lose control in different ways for different situations).

And so, yesterday was the latest OneJerusalem.org conference call - it put political uber-guru Dick Morris in the center of a gaggle of enthusiastic bloggers ("enthusiastic" is a serious understatement - given how people on this call were and are talking about him, the conference should have been a meltdown of people excitedly trying to ask questions all on top of each other... that it was actually probably the best behaved OJ.org conference call in the last two months suggests that there is something deeply flawed about our current understanding of the human psyche). And for once, we can actually give you a complete list of participants (which we only have because we sandbagged finishing this post and stole the list of the One Jerusalem writeup). Participants: Allen Roth (OneJerusalem.org), Jim Hoft (Gateway Pundit), Pamela (Atlas Shrugs - a blog that Dick Morris can recognize by name, for those of you considering whether it's worth your time to RSS it), Don (Liberally Conservative), Anne Lieberman (Boker Tov, Boulder - aka "the woman who will never talk to us ever again"), Jerry Gordon (Israpundit), Michael Illions and Hank Butehorn (Conservatives With Attitude), Banagor (Broadsword - make sure you read his mid-month concise and brutal dismantling of Papal Jihad apologists), Kim Priestap (Wizbang), and Chad (GDLL).

Many of these people have written summaries of the call, and some of them are actually quite extensive (One Jersualem on background, Pamela on Dick Morris and blogging, Kim Priestap on Hillary vs. Gore and Bill vs. Hillary, Jim Hoft on just about everything). We want to focus on a few things that we think are still being somewhat underemphasized, and we'll do it over the next several posts to keep things from getting unwieldy.

One of the most successful political minds on the planet stated unequivocally that he believes that electoral trends will see Democrats taking control of both chambers of the US Congress in November. He built up to that conclusion after we asked him to offer midterms predictions, but he began by talking the more fundamental underlying dynamic: "the country wants to vote Democrat". This is a structural reality that can be maybe mitigated if Bush emphasizes terrorism, but it's significantly more complicated than being 'just another issue'. Rather than Bush limiting the general sense of anti-GOP dissatisfaction, that dissatisfaction also limits how much he can do: "every single day" Bush has to emphasize terrorism just to keep the Republicans from losing ground. Jim Hoft is the only person we noticed even passing these phrases along, but that was a later part of his post so he never really explored the full magnitude of what's at play. It's not just that the political dynamics present Republicans with an uphill climb: it's so powerful that it means that they can only go in one direction - down. The Republicans can't climb up the electoral hill - the very, very best they can do is not slip and tumble. Even accomplishing that much requires enormous will and luck - for them to hold their ground at all the Democrats will have to continue they current practice of almost willfully fumbling the terrorism issue - and Morris thinks they'll get their act together. But even if he's wrong on what the Democrats will do, notice what his very compelling description does to the hopes-against-hope of many conservatives: it means that Democratic misplays don't really matter because the national mood will sweep everything along anyway. Just about everyone has pointed by now that it's folly to underestimate the Democratic aptitude for wresting defeat from the jaws of victory. What Morris explains is that even if Democrats do everything in their power to lose, even they can't screw this up. The fundamentals are just too overwhelming - the frustrations of voters at GOP Congressional scandals (and subsequent near-total failures to reform) have pretty much hardened into a weight that will sink the GOP.

One of the most astute political observers on the planet declared with crystal clarity that, next to Bill, President George W. Bush will be the man most at fault if Hillary Clinton is elected President. Not because Bush's blunders have hurt the GOP, not because Bush isn't fighting the Clintons hard enough, and not because Bush is helping them in minor ways - Morris was explicit that this Republican President has single-handedly put the Democratic Clintons back within striking distance of the White House. The way that his term ended made Bill was an albatross around Hillary's neck (the White House china, the pardons, etc). But President Bush rehabilitated Bill Clinton and therefore the Clintons: he saved Bill's image by linking it to Bush I after the tsunamis, he prevented the Justice Department from giving Sandy Berger anything but a wrist slap, and he was presumably involved in the decision to have stratospherically-popular Laura Bush speaking at Clinton's summit. The scariest part of Morris's description? His surreal admission that he just outright doesn't understand what Bush could possibly be thinking - of tens of hundreds of political scenarios that Morris can game play, he can't see a single way that President Bush's actions make sense. And that's enough to transform Bush's inexplicable helping hand from frustrating to scary - it suggests something in the way irrational myopia or sentimentalism , something that in turn bodes poorly for the prospect of the President doing what needs to be done in the next six months.

The man who helped sustain the political fortunes of a President who was eventually impeached (and so is no stranger to the dynamics of political scandals) announced that a suspicious business arrangement involving a former President, an oil sheik, and a creepy billionaire will be the "dominant scandal" in the candidacy of the presumptive Democratic nominee. Untangling all of the tangled players in all of their opaque roles is way too much to write about when you can just go and listen to his description. There's two parts to this scandal, each alone really bad for the Clintons - together they combine in all of the wrong ways for the Democrats.

The first scandal is about Bill's close relationship with the Emir of the United Arab Emirates, Sheik Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum. We're not going to say that the UAE is a theocracy, because self-declared sophisticates get very huffy when that happens - so how about we all agree that for the purposes of a Presidential campaign, any distinctions between "radical Muslim theocracy" and "complicated multi-layered state where a fully-functioning and state-supported sharia court system just happens to control several layers" are totally irrelevant? It is easy to all but prove that Bill Clinton seems to exercise a strong influence on how the Emir tries to financially influence US policy-making. It is also undeniable that the Emir has given Clinton and Clinton's organizations significant financial disbursements. It would significantly help Hillary if anyone would ever believe that these two things are unrelated.

The most immediately suspicious evidence involves the attempt by the UAE firm to take over day to day operations for a number of US ports - the US firm that Dubai hired to guide them through the process just happened to be the one that provides Clinton with the only thing that can be reasonably called regular employment (and below we'll get to how Morris transforms this potential awkwardness into the makings of a career-ending scandal - but right now, just focus on Clinton and the Emir's connections). It was noted by not a few people at the time that while Hillary was threatening to take legislative action to shut down the UAE takeover on national security grounds, her husband was advising the Emir on how to navigate the scandal (and Hillary's initial claim of ignorance on that point became all the more untenable when someone pointed out that she had just finished disclosing that her husband was paid almost half a million dollars to give speeches in Dubai).

And after the ports deal fell through, the Emir didn't give up on acquiring US assets. He then targeted two US defense firms. This time, he hired a new firm to steer him through the deal. So instead of the company that Clinton de facto works for, he choose... another company that Clinton has incredibly deep ties to. The Glover Park Group is a consulting firm of / club-house for Clinton administration ex-pats. It's headed by Joe Lockhart, it has lots of late Clinton staffers throughout the ranks, etc). So some eyebrows were raised when the Emir choose this firm to help him acquire the US defense firms. We imagine that said eyebrows will arch a little bit higher if/when connections are established - as Morris implies they will be - between this second deal and Clinton familial relations. At the very least, this is an obvious public relations disaster and a genuine public policy problem - as Morris said, Hillary would be running under the shadow of a foreign head of state paying enormous sums of money to husband of then-sitting Senator, and the husband then directing that foreign head of state's excess largess toward financial and professional friends.

Now the other distinct scandal that may not be distinct much longer: the connections between the Clintons and disgraced supermarket billionaire Ron Burkle. Burkle's Yucaipa firm provides Clinton with the only thing that he has that can really count as employment, and he's supposed to get them donors. We'll talk about what kinds of donors in a second, but by now you see where this could end up. But the Clinton/Burkle connections are damaging even without the media folding in dealing a foreign billionaire easily caricatured as a de facto representative of militant Islam. As Mickey Kaus and almost no one else repeatedly pointed out, the Burkle/Clinton relationship stinks plenty on its own. We never really read a comprehensive investigative roundup (we don't really think one was ever produced), but there were plenty of hints of Democratic cronyism - a trend that seems to be developing across these scandals which will not make them harder to fold into each other.

But the real nightmare scenario for Hillary occurs if it turns out that there is a real and demonstrable connection between these two already very shady financial / personal / political relationships. Bill Clinton gets paid a lot to get the very creepy Burkle financers and in return Burkle distributes money to Clinton's friends - damaging but spinnable as right-wing conspiracy mongering. Bill Clinton gets paid a lot to handle the UAE Emir's domestic political palm greasing and in return the Emir distributes money to Clinton's friends - damaging but spinnable as reactionary Arab-baiting.

But if you combine the two scandals, then Hillary is facing the prospect of a politically disastrous scandal that has the relatively singular virtue of being more or less grounded in fact. The connection isn't even particularly convoluted: at some point after Clinton became employed by Burkle's Yucaipa company, it so worked out that Clinton's good friend the Emir ("good friend" being "pays him $450,000 for a couple speeches good") hired Yucaipa to run his financial investments... including, obviously, the port buyout deal. You could argue that these two events were unconnected, but you'd have a tough time actually convincing anyone (Morris: they're "not coincidental"). This would be the same port buyout deal that Hillary opposed as a major terrorist risk.

The perfect storm: Bill Clinton was willing to put a company that his wife more or less called a terrorist risk in charge of US ports because he was being paid to do so by Ron Burkle on one hand and the Emir of the UAE on the other. The ways this impacts campaign strategies are staggering: it super-charges Republican attempts to paint the Democrats as a War on Terror disaster, it super-charges claims that the Clintons are corrupt, it super-charges claims that Hillary can't be relied on to tell the truth / reveal her genuine personal beliefs. Even Hillary's increasingly strong anti-terrorism credentials now become the frightened overcompensation of a candidate for her spouse's politically damaging connections to people she brands potential terrorists. Above all else, it's so ugly and tangled that Hillary couldn't talk her way out of it - the public sense that some kind of massive impropriety that's been covered up has occurred is the definition of a scandal that a politician can't disprove.

Rick Richman unloads on the Council on Foreign Relations about their inexplicable decision to grant elite legitimacy to this decade's (and perhaps this century's) wannabe Hitler:

We used to think that there was more or less a precise answer to this:

... but that was before the CFR invited Ahmadinejad. This is just irresponsible - ideology and myopia and investment in sophistication is one thing. But it must have occured to them, as they were mulling this decision over, to ask themselves: "what would we say if we were asked 'would you give Hitler a podium?'" But this is a confirmed trend among foreign policy sophisticates: the CFR tin ear is after all just a more severe version of the WaPo giving Hamas arch-terrorist Ismail Haniyeh column inches to make his case. We understand that there's value in hearing radical advocates of genocide pretend to not be radical advocates of genocide - but that doesn't outweigh the effects of treating these people as reasonable points on a spectrum of how Arabs react to Israel. Jeanne Kirkpatrick knew that almost twenty years ago - giving terrorists legitimacy makes them more, not less, radical and intransigent. And if you're still in doubt, ask yourself how every single person on the right could be so overwhelmingly sure that bringing Arafat to the White House would make him more likely to jerk Clinton's chain. Or how every single person on the right could be so overwhelmingly sure that giving Haniyeh a column in one of America's great newspapers would at best fail to moderate Hamas. What, they just keep getting lucky? (hat-tip to David Gerstman on the Kirkpatrick article).

First, people start declaring that Jewish bloggers aren't allowed to have fun like everyone else on the blogosphere (apparently because of some transliterated Hebrew... honestly, we kind of lost track pretty early in the post). Then we make fun of those people and click "upload" - an action almost immediately greeted by an email dinging us because our post was kind of wildly unfair (a defensible characterization, but one that is totally beside the point). So we upload an acknowledgment about our imputed over enthusiasm, and hop on this afternoon's One Jerusalem conference call with Dick Morris.

Which was awesome. And somewhere around the middle of said awesomeness, Boker Tov Boulder's Anne Lieberman pretty much started a feeding frenzy about a former Clinton official who may or may not have violated several federal laws by destroying documents with handwritten margin notes attesting to Clinton-era anti-terrorism negligence. Total feeding frenzy - follow-up questions from different bloggers, leading to electoral considerations, Dick Morris handing out his email address, general pandemonium (we might be exaggerating a little - but the general description is apt). Anne did what she did because (a) Rick Richman asked her to and (b) she's a badass. Except now we - and you - have to live with the knowledge that Anne's a badass who nonetheless couldn't resist joining the rising chorus of people who are trying to use Yom Kippur to ruin our week. Or as we like to call it: people catching the anti-blogger, anti-fun train to "and in other news, the NYT is still biased"-bloggingville. If you don't believe us, click on the link and see for yourself. It goes to a video... a video that literally spins out of the screen and forms a vortex of slow-talking, illustrated, patronizing sanctimony that physically pulls your will to live out of your body. Luckily, we had just finished reading this morning's LA Times Max Boot article, where he criticizes groups who don't oppose violent jihadists (this would be Max Boot of the Council of Foreign Relations... yes, that Council of Foreign Relations). So we really didn't have much that the vortex could take. But if you're thinking about puppies or something, be careful.

Listen, obviously yes - Yom Kippur. Obviously and definitionally of impossible-to-exaggerate importance. And we're not even denying that reconciliation with the Other is a necessary prerequisite for reconciliation with the divine. But none of that changes a very basic fact: if Juan Cole was slightly less confused by his own confused claims to intellectual grandeur, he would be no more than your very basic, garden variety, cheap fraud. And that's as true this week as it is any other week.

Adloyada has discovered the existence of John Dugard, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian territories (aka a UN-employed de jure spokesman for Palestinian terrorists). Adloyada seems to be somewhat less happy with reality than she was before she discovered existence of said UN employee. Welcome to the club Adloyada:

Meetings once every two months. And as soon as CafePress stops censoring our designs, we'll have t-shirts too.

On a just slightly more serious (but no less surreal) note: it can't be pointed out enough that the United Nations has a job where someone is literally paid - year to year and decade to decade - to be an international advocate for civilians and armed groups that are explicitly trying to destroy a UN member state. But look for the silver lining: before you knew who John Dugard is supposed to protect / work for, you were confused about how he could possibly come out for the de facto destruction of the Jewish State. Now that confusion - and any resulting anxiety - has presumably been settled. And now everyong can walk away from this post reassured - as is always the case - that United Nations employees are humanitarians of the highest caliber.

Assad can go eff himself:

And of course, he'd know about how to treat tumors, being a skilled doctor and all. But seriously, he can go eff himself. There is not a single incentive - not a single one - for Israel to trade the Golan Heights for a peace deal with Syria. It's already giving them too much credit to go over the reasons why not, but it'll have to be done at some point:

(1) Economic normalization - the country is a third world backwater
(2) Cultural normalization - hasn't worked with Egypt, which is far more modern than Syria has ever been
(3) Political normalization - it's a joke. Not even Jordan hesitates to pull their ambassador whenever the mood strikes them, to obviously say nothing of the cold peace Egyptians
(4) Military normalization - please. Last time Israel decided to roll up a newspaper and smack Syria on the nose by bombing Syrian radar stations, Syria didn't even bother scrambling their jets. Because they like their jets, and didn't want to lose them.
(5) Hezbollah - the only good argument that's ever existed for giving the Golan to Syria. Syria held Hezbollah over Israel's throat for years and years. The single best justification for leaving Lebanon in 2000 was to remove this card from Assad's deck - and Israel had to put up with Nasrallah's insufferable crowing as the least of the costs. The other cost, of course, was the deterrence hit that Israel took and the deployment of Hezbollah and its rockets to South Lebanon. But - and there's no nice way to say this - giving up the Golan is not worth the slim possibility that Hezbollah will stop trying/managing to kidnap five soldiers every five years. Additionally, we frankly don't think that Hezbollah can get away with dragging Lebanon into another war. The next Prime Minister will either be a general from Kadima or a Likudnik (or a Laborite that can't afford to look like she's getting pushed around) - the invasion will come much sooner. Plus, Damascus can't call Nasrallah off - he answers to his masters in Tehran now.

So Syria has absolutely nothing to offer Israel in exchange for the incalculable strategic and cultural value of the Golan. Obviously, given that fact, peacenik Yossi Beilin supports land for peace negotiations with Syria. Because he's a total clown.

In grade school, there are the kids who always raise their hand to answer the teacher's question. Everybody hates those kids. But there's another group of know-it-alls that's even more annoying: the kids who wait until the first kids have finished answering, and who then one-up the first kids by giving better answers. Clearer, more detailed, more accurate, and more nuanced answers. Obviously, everybody hates those kids too. Are you listening, Vital Perspective?

Because apparently the posts from Yourish.com, MR,, BtB, and Smooth we're good enough - just because they didn't "provide all that information" or "help readers understand the situation as well".

"The rockets also damaged a water tower, a greenhouse, an elementary school, and a college." Oh did they? Showoffs.

Not a single mention of Juan Cole yesterday - MR's brand recognition is on the line. We've got something special to make up for it though. People often criticize Cole for the close proximity with which the following three things appear in his posts: (a) absolutist statements about what Islam and the Koran really mean (b) implicit or explicit mockery of people who disagree with him for not being experts like he is and (c) having said interpretations of Islam and the Koran be the opposite of what hundreds of millions of Muslims seem to believe and what influential Muslim scholars explicitly say. So for instance, Cole sniggers at unsophisticated 'neocons' and warlike 'Likudniks' because they don't know - as he's patiently explained over and over again - that the Koran is case-closed, full-stop peaceful. Yet millions of Muslims and not a few clerics say that the Koran actually compels them to riot, burn, and murder. Well, if you dig deep in one of his posts (smugly titled "Quran Quote of the Day on Peace), you get the explanation:
You see - the Koran is inherently peaceful. It's the people who lived in "militaristic, feudal societies" that screwed the whole thing up. And they screwed it up (this is really beautiful - he can't avoid being a pretentious academic even to ancient Muslims)... they screwed it up because they "lack[ed] the techniques... typical of contemporary academic writing". You see, the readings of the Koran that are used for "much Muslim law and practice" - those readings are just too unsophisticated to be taken seriously. Because they "lack[ed]... contextual and causal thinking".

This absurd "technique of the hermeneutical circle" excuse is presumably his preempt against people who point out that what he says the Koran means is sometimes exactly the opposite of what the hadith says the Koran means. This is a problem for Cole, since Muslim theology holds that the hadith is a recording of divinely inspired interpretations (which is why it serves as the basis for sharia for the vast majority of Muslims).

So it's not that he's "wrong" or "lying" or "desperately looking for any possible reason why the West should lower its defenses against radical Islam". No, it's that he's "deploying the technique of the hermeneutical circle" (and have you ever heard anything more insufferably pretentious). But that begs a very fundamental question: if his interpretation of the Koran has nothing to do with how the Koran is actually interpreted by anybody but him, why should we care about his interpretations?

He's outright and explicitly admitting that the interpretations that guide Muslim law and practice (practice (!!(!!))) are unrelated to the interpretations that he's passing off as sophisticated insights. He's got a "contextual and causal" interpretation of the Koran: good for him, but there are hundreds and millions of Muslims all over the planet who (a) have a different interpretation and (b) have an interpretation that tells them that they should violently protest when public figures deny that the Koran is revealed and literal truth (i.e. when public figures insist on "contextual and causal" interpretations). So it's not only that the 'understanding' he presents about the Muslim world is the understanding of a world that would be nice but is not this world - it's also that if certain people (like, say, the Pope) were to pop off that Muslims should embrace this new interpretation, they would very likely take it as an insult.

But let's ignore all the ways that Cole's interpretation of Islam is contrary to the basic tenets of Islam (after all, who are we to criticize him for being "academic"). Just focus on the one overwhelmingly important implication of this post: everywhere else on his site, Cole is inexplicably insisting that contrary to appearances, there is no unique link between political Islam and violence. Here he admits that what he really means is that there's no unique link between his ideal version of political Islam and violence. Which is very nice, but not useful for dealing with really existing Islam - and he ought to stop implying otherwise.

We know, we know. Late for the second day in a row. We're sorry, but we're out of ideas for getting more productivity out of the interns. We've started just randomly hitting them on the head with yardsticks (only on the head, of course, so you can't actually see the bruises - thank you 4th grade teacher). But even that's not helping. Stupid interns.

* Spare us benevolent Arab peace plans. Israellycool takes apart the newly-minted Pakistani initiative

* Kesher Talk uses the phrase Kinky Jews. Obviously, that's enough to get a link.

* Jihadists are now threatening to riot over operas. Next up: the immodesty of Mona Lisa's uncovered hair. To our two liberal readers: wanna bet?

* Israel Matsav thinks it's important to note that only 32 percent of Israelis think that Dorit Beinish is qualified to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. We're totally under whelmed. All that this poll proves is that 68 percent of Israelis firmly believe that they themselves are the most qualified to be appointed Chief Justice. Not exactly news. You can play this game all day: percent of Israelis who think that urban planners are qualified... percent of Israelis who think that their bosses are qualified... percept of Israelis who think that any public figure in any sector in any part of the country is qualified... percent of Israelis who think that people in charge of Israeli beach environments are qualified... and so on. And actually, that last group in all honesty pretty much is comatose-level useless - but you get the point.

* For some context about yesterday's Tony Blankey interview, you'd be well-served to go read his article about Kissinger and the Pope.

* Pamela - and we're quoting her now - breaks the taboo. Not a direct vlog reference, but close enough for the obligatory link to Phish Bowl bikini vlog remix. Which is taboo, making the link context-appropriate.

* Also from Pamela, Paul Belian is a personal hero of mine. He might not be a personal hero to you, but he's reporting on the third straight night of Ramadan-related rioting in Brussels. Which seems like something that people should be talking about a little more. Anne does more digging on the subject.

* Anne is also posting kiddie porn on her site. Question: is the joke itself super creepy? Answer: obviously and overwhelmingly, yes. Also, there's something about how Ivy League schools have been inviting Jew-hating anti-Semitic lunatics for the better part of a century now. If you're interested in that sort of thing.

* Shlemazl has a depressing-in-its detail post about upper-curst British anti-Semitism.

* Mainline Truths has a headline that reads Presbyterian leaders meet with Ahmadinejad - and you won't be pissed off after you read it. Unless, like us, reading anything about Ahmadinejad pisses you off. In which case you'll be more pissed off - but less than you'd think from hearing about the headline.

* Get off of Allah's land, Britain. This bulletpoint brought to you by Citizens for the Preservation of Pre-HA Allahpundit Slogans.

* Thomas Lifson suggests that Pope Benedict XVI is a YouTuber. Sure we've just stolen neurons from you by suggesting that Pope Benedict is a Lonelygirl15 groupie. But look on the bright side: Lifson comes down firmly on the MR side of the "of course the Pope knew exactly what he was doing" debate.

* George Allen might not be a racist. Don't care. As far as campaigning, the Senator still makes John Kerry look like Alexander the Great. Total disaster. A pox on all their houses.

* New post at Augean Stables about Le Monde and how much they suck. More or less. And so MR continues our transformation into a very badly coded RSS reader for anything Richard Landes publishes.

AnnieGetYour at Jewbiquitous is doing some pre-chatima tikkun-ha-blogosphere by going all preachy on the Jewish side of the blogosphere. She says that JBloggers should try to be less mean, and she furthermore ropes in a not particularly short quote from Jewschool's even more preachy Jewish Bloggers Campaign for Responsible Speech Online:

That seemed reasonable to us for about 10 seconds, during which all we could think about was how happy our professors are going to be and how much we're going to miss blogging. Then we realized that this is totally backwards. There's nothing wrong with us pointing out, sometimes at length, that Jewish hipsters in New York are douchebags and that Jewish Hasidim in Jerusalem are insane. Why should we change? They're the ones who suck.

But just to show that we're in the sprit of the season, we're willing to make this one-time concession to fellow tribespeople: we're not going to write a post discussing the various answers that come to mind in response to the title of newly-minted Blogger blog How Orthodox Jews should Vote. How's that for avoiding lashon ha-ra? And we're going to go even further: we're going to partially agree with these self-appointed schoolyard monitors (don't say we never did anything for you).
They're not only more or less right about the potential harms of incivility - if anything, they're underestimating how rhetorical ugliness seems to consistently accompany genuine analytical and social pathologies. It's not coincidental that disgusting sexist, heterosexist, and bigoted insults appear in direct proportion to the degree to which the netroots are incensed by some real or imagined slight. And it was inevitable that excusing or celebrating those insults as 'telling it like it is' would mainstream the kind of vulgar sexism that Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter are now being subjected to - literally on a daily basis.

Luckily, we have two ways to distinguish our charming wit from nutroots vulgarity: (1) we are fighting the good fight, while they are smug, condescending, shrill, and often not very bright terrorist apologists (hint: if you're a leftist inclined to indignantly point out that this begs the question, you should know that your unreflexive indignation is actually proof of our point... it'll take you a while to figure out why, but we're confident you'll get there if you apply yourself) (2) they're heavy-handed and not at all funny, while we are objectively sparkling (hint: ditto).

Besides, Jewbiquitous and Jewschool don't have MR blogrolled. So screw em, ya know (kidding, kidding... we 100 percent take that back. Until after Yom Kippur).

UPDATE: Yeah, yeah, we know. There was no way we were going to get away with that "How Orthodox Jews should Vote" crack. It took SoccerDad David Gertsman like fifteen seconds to ding us:

Fair. But come on - like fairness would have stopped us from writing a post that goes something like: "... sure, some people will point out that 'How Orthodox Jews presents both sides'. But whatever, we've got some ideas about how they should vote..." But we're not going to write that post - because we're thinking about chilul Hashem. Obviously.

How is this not a damning indict of the very possibility of Muslim moderation:

Follow the logic here for a little bit (not too far - general warning about aneurysms apply): according to Musharraf, Pakistan can serve as a useful advocate in the task of bridging the Muslim world and the West. But Pakistan can only be useful if it rejects the right of Israel - which is, last we checked, a Western state - to exist. Which seems, when you think about it, like a poor way to start off bridging the Muslim world and the West. One of two things is true:

(1) Musharraf is just lying, which we actually don't really think is what's going on.
(2) What he meant was "the rest of the West" - mostly Europe - which seems willing to (a) accept Pakistani mediation under these terms and (b) embrace a virulently anti-Semitic and in many cases openly genocidal Muslim world.

Say what you will about him, Musharraf is not stupid. He's not exactly on the side of civilization all of the time, but he's not stupid. And we don't even think he was being intentionally vague or duplicitous here - he just assumed that everybody knows that when diplomats and statespeople say "the West", Israel doesn't count.

Papal rage death count in Iraq is up to two.

The Pope met with Muslim leaders to try to calm the rage. Here's the information you're looking for:

And you know what that means:

Good old Al-Jazeera. So no apology, and "protests may continue" (and of course we know what "protests" mean. Still, their "protesting" sure doesn't have the flourish that their early non-violent church bombings and nun murderings did. Some Gaza preacher said that the flag of Allah will be raised over the Vatican. Sure, it sounds threatening - but maybe this guy should focus on getting out of the Gaza Strip before he makes threats to people in countries that he can't find on a map. Although actually, now that we think about it, he's more than welcome to leave Gaza. And then there are the Pakistanis:

This is the parliamentary opposition? Shouldn't they be busy making sure that rape victims get executed for adultry? If the Palestinians had half of their energy, they'd have a state by now. Instead, the Palestinians spent the last few days drawing imbelic cartoons implying that the Pope is an American and Danish Nazi. Don't try to figure out the logic - your brain will start bleeding.

From Google Canada: "Pope said cross is Jewish tool of execution".
First reaction: wtf?
Second reaction: no way the Pope says that - crosses are 100 percent Roman.
Third reaction: Canada really needs to crack down on Islamist extremists.
Fourth reaction: oooohhhh... this is a Christ-klling reference... got it.
Fifth reaction: Wow, Canada really needs to crack down on Islamist extremists.

Two rockets out of Gaza. And then (maybe) a third one. And of course, terrorists were so eager to take credit that two different groups each claimed that they fired two rockets. All this has caused Sderot Mayor Eli Moyal to complain - quite rightly - that the government is neglecting his town, which is the main victim of the rocket attacks. He should take the AP's implicit advice and just calm down - it's not anyone's getting hurt... all that often.

It's OK though - Defense Minister Peretz is all over the situation of Palestinian terrorism. He doesn't know whether his navy is still blockading Lebanon (they're not, obviously), but he does know that there have been 10 attempted terrorist attacks stopped in September. Memo to the Labor primary voters who picked him over Peres and brought down the Sharon government: you people are idiots. Memo to the Gil general election voters who decided to spite "the Establishment" and not vote for Kadima, thereby putting him in the Defense Ministry: you people are also idiots.

Israel Matsav has another Palestinian civil war watch post up:

Our views on this are well-documented. Every couple of months, the Palestinians tease us with a civil war - and just like the parts of Oslo where they promised to stop publishing textbooks calling Jews pigs and apes, they inevitably fail to deliver. Now it is true that Abbas is saying that the unity government is off the table because of the whole "Hamas won't pretend that they don't want to destroy Israel" thing. But it's not like Abbas is confronting Hamas or anything - quite the opposite, he's settling for being huffy and passive aggressive:

The irony of Fatah getting pissed off because Palestinian terrorists keep reneging on agreements is something we leave as an exercise for the reader. But it's gotta be frustrating for a relatively smart guy like Abbas to watch Hamas be too stupid to go through the motions of even pretending to consider recognizing Israel. We are honestly shocked he hasn't just snapped at them.

But we've just been burned too many times on these civil war watches to fall for this trick again (it's like Iran moving toward suspending uranium enrichment - come on). In the final analysis, we just don't think that the Palestinians have the drive or commitment to go through with a real civil war. If they had that kind of attention span, they'd have a state by now. But Hamas is expressing hope for reconciliation:

Dialogue, huh? How's that working out for the Pope? Oh, Hamas called the Pope a Nazi and called him "ignorant and stupid"? And they published cartoons implying he's the stooge of conspiratorial Danes and Americans? That's awful strong for people who are counting on dialogue to help them get a not-openly-terrorist fig leaf. And yet hope springs eternal:

The "problem" with the initiative is that it only calls for a de facto destruction of Israel. While that's happening, Hamas would have to pretend that they're not out to destroy the Jewish State. And they are so pathological that they can't stomach even faking not wanting to wipe out all the Jews between the river and the sea.

This morning's OneJerusalem.org conference call brought together a large group of bloggers to talk to Tony Blankley, Washington Times editorial page editor and author of The West's Last Chance. A very large group of bloggers: Allen Roth (One Jerusalem), Jerry Gordon (IsraPundit), Jim Hoft (Gateway Pundit), Lynn-B (In Context), Rick Richman (Jewish Current Issues), Anne Lieberman (Boker Tov, Boulder, Thomas Lifson (The American Thinker, and maybe one person that we didn't catch (we either rudely talked over a ninth person while we were introducing ourselves or we rudely talked over Jim Hoft, who then patiently introduced himself again). As always, audio will soon be up soon on the OneJerusalem.org frontpage, probably before the end of the day if they stay true to form.

One thing emerges very quickly: Tony Blankley is not an academic. Which is not to say that he or his new book aren't careful or smart. More than one participant has commented by email about how it takes less than ten seconds to notice that Blankley is quite unassumingly brilliant, and the book itself is nothing if not rigorous (and if you haven't already purchased it, you should ask yourself why you don't have game on a book that Allen Roth and Thomas Lifson think it's important that you have game on). But The West's Last Chance is not an academic book, and Blankley explicitly tries to avoid getting bogged down in "academic" questions in any sense of the phrase.

Not that his scholarship and opinions aren't based on robust theory. There's theory underneath everything he says, and sometimes it slips to the surface. For instance, his acceptance of conventional wisdom ("if you can't say it in a couple of words, you can't communicate it") comes from obvious academic training (it's basic "mass comm" that confirms that belief -"mass comm" being mass communication, which will make our professors happy). And it's not that he's uninterested in the 'grand questions' or that he doesn't appreciate context - he locates the source of today's crises as far back as the 1920s founding of the Muslim Brotherhood. But as a matter of sensibility, he almost always spins back to very grounded examples and explanations. He followed up the mass comm point by illustrating how "No Blood For Oil" creates a general impression that Bush is driven by cynical economic reason. He was also quick to point out that the exact historical source of political Islam doesn't really matter since it's now undeniable that it has "metastasized" into millions of people's justification for violence.

An academic approaching the Clash of Civilizations defines terms and then approaches the tangle of dynamics by picking out a set of historical and contemporary trends that add up to a compelling expalantion. Blankley explicitly rejects this approach. In response to Thomas Lifson's question about the rhetorical stakes of the conflict - one of several 'naming' questions that came up (Jerry Gordon had another one) - Blankley insisted that people "should be careful not to" approach questions of civilizational clash through "extensive scholarly analysis".

Instead, Blankley thinks and acts like a policy-maker. That's not exactly surprising news given that he spent several years as a top aide to Newt Gingrich and still works as a political adviser, but in this case it has a very precise effect on how he frames the challenge of political Islam. It's not really about dynamics and trends (and even less so about definitions) - what he focuses on is what will happen on the ground should things go one way or another. His basic position:

[A] Europe is sliding into a horrific civil way between "a substantial number" of jihadists inside and outside its own borders
[B] "Responsible governments" should start taking actions to address this slide
[C] If "responsible governments" do not step forward, "irresponsible governments," like the neo-Nazis in Germany and the Nationalist party, will take control of the situation and bring it to a head.

This point can and has been made in certain forms by leftist academics (reactionary responses to open border, etc). But there are several things that might potentially recommend Blankley's more grounded approach over abstraction - we might not have time for theoretical niceties, theoretical niceties might not matter if Europe goes reactionary, etc. But you can get most of that from abstract academic analysis. What Blankley's a-theoretical approach does is suggest something new in the realm of day-to-day political life.

This is us extrapolating and not Blankley necessarily endorsing: but it seems like his description becomes uniquely valuable because it hints at a new way of articulating common ground between the right and the left. Bipartisan political alliances came up in all kinds of places during the interview: the nature of relationships in the media, the problem of "Americans going to their own news sources" (aka the echo chamber effect), and the way that bloggers have formed alliances around specific issues.

But political common ground becomes particularly scarce - and particularly important - in the context of the war against political Islam. Blankley was quite explicit on this point in answer to one of Anne's questions, when she asked why it seems like there are people who just get it and there are people who just don't. Blankley blamed political polarization: when opponents of political Islam point out that this should be a liberal cause - religious intolerance, enslavement of women, murder of homosexuals, etc. - the political left invariably comes back with "root causes" or "it's Bush's fault". This exchange only leads to deeper cultural divisions between activists who think that Bush is needlessly creating conflict and critics who think that ignoring jihadism is tantamount to global suicide. Political polarization is both the cause and a result of deep disagreements between the right and the left on the issue of militant Islam.

But Blankley's way of describing Europe's next decade suggests a new way of this cul-de-sac. Articulating the battle as a fight against reactionary Europeans is a new way of articulating anti-jihadist public policies as liberal causes: the impending disaster might not be caused by Muslims, but by hysterical and bigoted Europeans. It takes the left's anti-Western gut-check and makes it a reason to start combating European spinelessness.

We're not being sarcastic about this - political alliances are as often as not matters of how a particular advocacy first 'strikes' a particular activist, and that's determined by all kinds of deep-seated inclinations and assumptions. There might actually be real potential in explaining how the right and the left can work together to prevent the empowerment of European reactionaries - which is something that can only be done if Europe's center-right and center-left parties take public action against the jihadists in their midst. It's not the most important reason to resist radical Islam - reactionaries do not threaten the very fabric of the Western heritage. But it's certainly as good as any other reason if it genuinely brings political activists and resources to the cause. This way of looking at the conflict is why Blankley's work and sensibility needs to have a place at the table. At the very least, it's a new way of understanding the staggering and terrifying dimensions of what's happening in the hearts of Old Europe's greatest cities. More optimistically, it might light the path to a united Western front against Christian Europe's most persistent foe.

At some point, we're going to have a talk about how the Lebanese army is doing more to interfere with Hezbollah than UNIFIL is. Obviously, that conversation will require substantial alcohol, since we're going to have to come to grips with two very strange facts: (a) we're actually talking about the Lebanese armed forces as something other than the punchline of a joke that involves the phrase "... I mean the Syrian army... I mean the Lebanese army... I mean Hezbollah" and (b) Lebanon is technically at war with Israel and still doing more to protect Israel than the UN, which Israel is a member of and gives dues to. Ted Belman comments that the "UN Force in Lebanon is defined more by what it cannot do than what it can", while Anne has some pictures for the visual learners in the crowd.

But as Israel Matsav points out, the Lebanese army's deployment near the southern border isn't all that exciting given that Hezbollah is now moving their rockets to newly built bunkers further north - in Palestinian refugee camps:

Carl also cites Nasrallah's boast that Hezbollah still has 20,000 rockets, and notes that Israel has not denied the claim. Obviously, this boast is a little exagerated. Hezbollah never had 20,000 rockets (wasn't the number 13,000 give/take?). Even if do have that many left, Nasrallah's boast is still empty - most of Hezbollah's arsenal will have a hard time hitting Israel from that far north. But it'd be nice if more people would note that Hezbollah is now transforming some of the densest civilian areas in the world into military bases - because when they do get longer-range missiles from Iran and Syria, the historical odds are about 100 percent that they'll use them. Israel is eventually going to have to do something about that, and the screams about human rights atrocities are going to be literally deafening no matter how careful they are.

Lebanon is so psyched to actually have an army that kind of sort of matters. They've gone so far as to rattle their sabers in Israel's direction, and they're threatening to attack the IDF. That would be mind-bogglingly stupid idea on their part - if they don't understand why, we're sure that Syria can explain the relevant details to them.

In a disturbing sign of our inability to hop on to blog trends (and then pretending that we were ahead of the curve the whole time), we failed to blog the Krauthammer "Everyone's Jewish" article yesterday. Which means that we didn't get to comment on this:
Actually, it's closer to 27 percent of Nobel Prize winners. Also 25 percent of Turing Award winners, 50 percent of chess champions, and an IQ 12-15 points above the mean. But who's counting? The downside? Tay-Sachs, Gaucher's, Niemann-Pick, and cancer:

Dr Cochran, however, suspects that the intelligence and the diseases are intimately linked. His argument is that the unusual history of the Ashkenazim has subjected them to unique evolutionary pressures that have resulted in this paradoxical state of affairs. Ashkenazi history begins with the Jewish rebellion against Roman rule in the first century AD. When this was crushed, Jewish refugees fled in all directions. The descendants of those who fled to Europe became known as Ashkenazim... Most of the dozen or so disease genes that are common in them belong to one of two types: they are involved either in the storage in nerve cells of special fats called sphingolipids, which form part of the insulating outer sheaths that allow nerve cells to transmit electrical signals, or in DNA repair. The former genes cause neurological diseases, such as Tay-Sachs, Gaucher's and Niemann-Pick. The latter cause cancer.

So that's kind of a downer. Blogs that caught the article the first time around: Boker Tov, Boulder (neat picture included), IsraPundit, Israel Matsav (who will not be talking to us in... oh... about 30 hours), and IRIS.

UPDATE: The suggestion of a race-specific, genetic source for intelligence will not be the most controversial thing that we post this week. So that's kind of neat.

If they're not being oppressed, they're being used as cannon-fodder:

If she was a male Muslim, she'd be looking forward to getting 72 virgins in exchange for her life (we assume that sharia jurisprudence resembles US jurisprudence to the extent that intent follows the suicide belt - the defendant is still dying in the attempt of blowing up civilians, so it's still martyrdom). But since she's female - well, what she gets is a little different:

Then again, if she was a male Muslim then she'd already be worth literally twice as much as she's worth as a female. But at least when she gets executed, she gets to be "head virgin". Inquiring minds want to know: in heaven, does the hair of women martyrs still emit death rays?

Finally! Olmert is putting his foot down and insisting that Egypt - the world's most dangerous country, minus one disgruntled general - can't be allowed to develop a robust nuclear program/virtual arsenal... oh wait, it's exactly the opposite. Not like it's going to matter. We've now reached the surreal point where Ahmadinejad is using his UN speeches to allude to and/or welcome the Apocalypse - and we're not even exaggerating! The NY Sun noted this, but neglected to mention that an Iranian nuclear reactor is going online in about six months. The Russians, who are building it for them, say that it'll take a couple months more - but just a couple. At the beginning of the month, in response to news reports floating around about how Russia was going to cut off nuclear aid, we wrote:

From yesterday morning:

See? Never contradict us in front of the kids again.

UPDATE: Virtual arsenal:

One disgruntled general away. Seriously. A war with Egypt would make Lebanon II look like the Six Day War.

UPDATE: It's not just that Olmert doesn't see any way that an Egyptian nuclear program could go badly. Now he's delegating stopping Iranian nuclearization to the United States. Any day now, the State Department is going to issue a strong condemnation - and then, Iran better watch out!

It's later than usual. We know. Sorry.

* Memo to Anne Lieberman: stay away from our turf. If people want to find out about rhetorical terms, they can come here and we'll be more than happy to direct them. Until then, back off (please... we already have so little... don't take this away... please?)

* Incidentally, Anne invited Ned Lamont to speak with Jewish bloggers, and his campaign turned her down - because he's apparently too busy to discuss the stellar relationship that the netroots have been building with the Jewish community. What with their anti-Semitic DKos and MoveOn posts... and their anti-Semitic anti-war marchers... and their anti-Semitic foreign heros... and their anti-Semitic Congressional candidates...

* Imshin has translated a Ma'ariv article that evicerates the blood-libel-ish accusations of genocide that are routinely leveled at the Jewish state. You really ought to go and read it.

* Speaking of the anti-Semitic-ish, dual-loyalty-ish accusations in the House of Lords.

* Alexandra of the eponymous All Things Beautiful about Clinton: "Since when do we give a hoot about what that monster of a human being says or thinks, unless it's to rearrange his sorry anatomy?" Yes, we're linking because of the phrase "rearrange his sorry anatomy". Which is inherently funny. The only part of the Clinton meltdown that we find genuinely interesting is how he may have publicly admitted to breaking the law on national television. Again.

* Speaking of hotties, via JPundit - Miss Israel, Yael Nezri. Rick Richman calls her hot (which he puts in awkward little quotes... awww), and then he posts a picture of Caroline Glick... awww!! Speaking of the inimitable Ms. Glick, her Rosh Hashana article includes the phrase "... as Elie Wiesel once explained to me". Which is why she's Caroline Glick and you're not. (PS - we're pretty sure that Rick put "hot" in quotes because he was quoting other contestants talking about Yael... which makes it not even a little less funny).

* Meryl on the failed attempt to demonize Israel in the UN... this week: "That’s right. It’s Israeli Double Standard Time." A great line, but like all possible sentences in the English language, simply not as elegant as AbbaGav's Ahmadinejad "Holocaust Envy" line.

* Anne got a real nasty troll who ruined her New Year. Asshole. Also, for the second day in a row, we're begging the trolls to troll Mere Rhetoric. What, we're not offensive enough?

* VP has a poll showing that the Palestinian street is turning against Hamas. Hamas insiders are said to be unworried, since they can always just kidnap or kill Israelis if they need a popularity boost. We made that last part up. Kind of.

* Carl in Jerusalem: Muhamad Al Duras was not killed.

* American Thinker has some not at all comfortable observations about the history of Catholic and Irish anti-Semitism. This is in response to Ireland's stunt from yesterday. We think that our credibility on this issue is pretty sound given the nearly 100 pages we wrote defending this Pope as the last leader seriously trying to prevent Europe from sliding into Eurabia - but there is nothing in this article that is not true.

* Pamela has been blogging for Bolton.

* We didn't know about the asylum case of Isaac Schrodinger. Thanks to Israellycool, now we do. A genuine human rights case.

* Neo-neocon has a new picture up ("woman in my fifties"... yeah right) and a post welcoming the return of toothpaste to the on-flight experience.

* Why must the CIA leak like a sieve? Inscrutable. And why must David Horowitz's blog refer to permalinks as "linkable locations"? Also inscrutable.

* We spend multiple posts mocking liberal Jewish hipsters. Jewlicious swoops in and makes it funny.

Did you catch it? TigerHawk did:

We, of course, do blame him for making that decision. Anyone not encumbered by the myopia of State Department sophistication or blinded by the prospect of a Noble Peace Prize knew that Arafat's decade-long cheating meant that he was never going to make peace. It's not that he wasn't strong enough - he had a decade's worth of US-funded guns and troops allowing him to do whatever he wanted on the Palestinian street. He turned those guns and troops against Israel not because he had to, but because he wanted to - and anyone honest enough to examine his behavior knew that that's what would happen.

There's something about this that doesn't seem very smart to us. Mostly, it's every single thing about this:

When - exactly - do you think Britain decided to just give up? Was it before or after the Hezbollah flags hung around Parliament? We think before, but our sense of the timeline is a little fuzzy. This is too bad. We really liked all the paintings and artwork in the hallways on the way to the House of Commons viewing area. Come to think of it, we also kind of liked the House of Commons.

Remember when Marwan Barghouti was captured and tried, and everyone (ok, mostly just us and a couple of left of center news outlets) was like "Sharon's just giving him street cred because he's actually a moderate, and he'll release him soon"? Except it turned out that exactly the opposite was true, and Israel was just locking away a mass murderer? Now it looks like Abbas wants to spring him from jail, along with Palestinian Liberation Front Secretary-General Ahmed Saadat. Israel told Abbas to go eff himself:

Nice to see this Israeli government has standards: only low-ranking terrorists get traded for kidnapped soldiers. Anyway, the sticking point probably isn't Barghouti. We still tend to think that an Israeli government could more or less get away with releasing him. But the thing with Saadat is personal: he ordered the murder of Tourism Minister Rehavam Ze'evi and then ran like a little girl to hide behind Arafat's skirts. Israel of course tried to go after him, but they couldn't get him since any operation would have endangered Arafat - and harming even a hair on Arafat's angelic head could have ignited World War III, because the Arab Street loves its terrorist heroes. So a compromise was reached, and Israel said they'd back off as long as American and British monitors promised to keep Saadat and some of Ze'evi's other murderers "locked up" in a Palestinian jail. "Locked up" is in quotes, because the jail was more like a clubhouse where Saadat and his friends laughed and played boardgames all the time.

Then the peace-loving and not at all terrorist supporting Palestinian public elected Hamas. Hamas, being Hamas, immediately announced that they were going to free Saadat and his terrorist cronies. The international monitors, being international monitors, bailed on the jail. Israel, being Israel, rolled in to make sure that Saadat didn't escape. The UN, being the UN, condemned Israel's actions (because really, why should Israel be allowed react when the Palestinians break binding agreements?) Anyway, Saadat is sitting in an Israeli jail where he belongs, and we seriously doubt that Olmert has the political capital to let him out as part of a prisoner swap. Then again, our record with predicting prisoner exchanges is only slightly better than our record at predicting which fauxtography conspiracy theories turn out to be true - so odds are about even that tomorrow we'll hear the announcement that Saadat has been freed as a unilateral good-will gesture.

The Democratic Party is a big tent. So big that both Jews and anti-Semites fit comfortably inside. Ed Lasky thinks maybe it's time that American Jews stopped playing the blue dress to the Democratic Party's Bill Clinton:

And Ed doesn't even mention the yeoman's work being done by Bill Levinson, who has practically had to quit his job and rely on the IsraPundit community for food and shelter just so he can find enough time to keep track of MoveOn.org anti-Semitism. Our concern with the party is more structural, and has to do with what their elites think counts as nuanced and sophisticated. But don't let that stop you from being disgusted by their base's grassroots enthusiasm for the terrorist-funding anti-Semitic President of Venezuela.

While we're on the topic, it's been over a month since we've linked to Zombietime's pictures from the San Francisco Lebanon II peace rally. That means it's been over a month since we reminded you that Nacy Pelosi's liberal base marches with signs reading "Nazi Kikes Out of Lebanon". But keep voting Democratic, kids - because the Republicans are spooky and dangerous!

We took this out of the blog roundup and put it in its own separate post. Because, frankly, it is just that good:

It's not Holocaust denial, it's Holocaust envy. Done and done.

Indonesia executed three Catholics for... you're going to love this... starting riots. The International Christian Concern says that more than 10,000 Christians died in four years of Christian-Muslim fighting, but the Indonesian government felt that these three had to be shot two days ago because they were somehow responsible. In other news, Egypt has banned some French and German newspapers because those newspapers insulted Islam - something about Muslims murdering Christians which the Egyptian government insists has no basis in fact.

Yeah, so this is going to happen:

Iran will be there, huh? Wonder if this will come up:

Of course, few have pointed out that Iran's supreme leader openly called for attacks against the United States. Because why would that matter - it's not like Iran is seeking nukes or anything. Also, nobody has pointed out how totally and obviously right we were:

Seriously, we picked out his exact words. And yet, our inbox is mysteriously congratulation-free. Fine, fine - go back to paying attention to "important" things like Iranian nuclearization and Palestinian terrorism. Pretend we never said anything.

Kesher Talk's Alcibiades (who has one of the blogosphere's best, if creepiest, monikers) follows up on Columbia University's Ahmadinejad invitation / cancelation of invitation. Turns out, the invitation to this decade's Hitler wannabe came from Lisa "how was I supposed to know that getting perks from Saudi Arabia isn't OK" Anderson, Dean of the School of International and Public Affairs. It's cool though - it's not like New York has a reason not to like Islamist fanatics or anything. Or like Columbia and its associated schools can't find other terrorist apologists to speak to their students.

This Ahmadinejad thing is really actually getting kind of bothersome. Can we focus - just for a minute - that this 'interesting' and 'fascinating' guy is actually a genocidal lunatic? He has openly - openly - threatened to nuke 40 percent of the world's Jewish population. It's not like there's a debate about this. Academics are oohing and ahhing over a man who is literally a modern-day Hitler in every sense of the word. How are people not more outraged by this? Mike Wallace interviewed and had a laugh with an unapologetic nuke-seeking anti-Semite, and everyone on the left was like 'wow - that's so sophisticated':

Or the obligatory faux bravado of declaring that you're brave for saying something that everyone reading you agrees with:

(It's 'more' not 'less' than a grain of salt, but whatever... this guy has read quite a bit!) And finally:

Yes, yes he certainly does sound like the Democratic base, doesn't he?

UPDATE: Yeah, so about Columbia:

Juan Cole used to be the president of the US Middle East Studies Association (MESA). We're not saying that he had anything to do with this, we're just saying that there seems to be a deep strain of anti-Semitism in Middle East departments. Departments that elected Juan Cole to be the face of their national organization.

UPDATE 2: Iran won't commit to the arms embargo on Hezbollah. No information yet as to how this will affect France's position that Iran is a stabilizing force in the Middle East.

Marianne Meed Ward from the Toronto Sun is quite simply an idiot:

Notice that the irony of Muslims murdering nuns to express their outrage at the suggestion that Islam is violent is not one of the two ironies that our sophisticated Toronto Sun columnist cites. No - it's that the Pope's comments have "contributed to violence" (violence by whom, praytell?) and that the Crusades happened. Oh, also that jihadists are so insane that they think the Crusades are still happening, because in their understanding of Islam Christians and Jews will be perpetual enemies until literally the end of time. Now, that may seem insane to you or us - but that's because we don't have the incisive understanding of Western jurisprudence that Marianne Meed Ward has:

See, this is what we mean when we say that terrorist apologists are not smart. Take, for instance, the idea that "an eye for an eye" is a particularly Judeo-Christian concept and is foreign to the Arabs of, say, Iraq. Now to a third grader, this might seem like a compelling argument, because the phrase "an eye for an eye" does actually appear in Exodus (good job, Toronto Sun fact checkers!). But this is obviously stupid. "An eye for an eye" actually predates the events in Exodus by a minimum of five hundred years. It of course appears as law 196 in the Code of Hammurabi. The Code of Hammurabi, of course, was written in the middle of the 1700s BC in Babylon - and Babylon, of course, is also known by its more contemporary name, Iraq. So instead of proving that Bush is exporting Christian values to Iraq, what Marianne Meed Ward demonstrates is that Bush is doing the exact opposite. And instead of that proposition being "harder to discount than it seems at first", it turns out to be exactly as easy to discount as it seems at first. Unless you're a pathetic and pretentious intellectual desperately looking for any way to excuse rampaging jihadists who shoot nuns and burn churches. Then maybe it's hard to discount.

Untangling these apologias for terrorism is becoming like trying to potty train a two year old. Every time you reason with them, they come up with some new excuse why it's OK to soil their pants.

UPDATE: And of course, how could Marianne Meed Ward's article be complete without the least credible argument ever, our old friend 'it's not any particular religion that's the problem, it's religious fundamentalism of all types' (and she even uses those words (!!)):

Now explain this to us: how does a semi-literate human being look at a paragraph and say to themselves "'excommunication in our country; death by stoning elsewhere' - yeah, those seem to be close enough that it's reasonable to write as if they're the same thing". And then she finishes with a flourish - first, the pro forma condemnation ('sure, violence in the name of religion is bad')...

... only to be followed up by the inevitable "BUT"...

"Maybe that's what the Pope was getting at". Oh you think so, do you? We're actually kind of disappointed that Ms. Ward fell into the easy 'we all agree that... but..." form for the end of the article. Up until that point it had seemed like a genuinely original contribution to the annals of terrorist apologizing. As near as we can tell, the 'an eye for an eye is implicitly Christian, ergo there's some justification for the claim that the US-led liberation of Iraq is a Crusade' is totally original. At least we haven't seen it before. So five points awarded for originality, but two off for the laziness there at the end. Still, +3 total. Well done Ms. Ward.

You know what, screw Ireland:

No similar calls for boycotts were made against Iran (in violation of UN resolutions), China (impervious to moral appeals), Syria (in violation of UN resolutions), Russia (impervious to moral appeals), Sudan (in violation of UN resolutions and impervious to moral appeals). In fact, no similar calls for boycotts were made against any other country on the planet. If we were Irish, we'd be a little more circumspect given that our country had supported the Nazis during World War II. And no, we're not saying that countries that were complicit in the Holocaust should have to avoid sounding anti-Semitic when criticizing Israel (although it'd be nice). We're saying that countries that were complicit in the Holocaust should have to avoid BEING anti-Semitic. Unless there's a different explanation for why some 'progressive' parts of the international community disproportionately target Israel and make up human rights atrocities in order to discriminate against the Jewish State and its residents - which we don't think there is. Maybe jealousy...

... but that's pretty much the only good excuse.

* Are you a moderate Muslim in charge of a newspaper in a Muslim country? If so, you might have to die.

* Augean Stables Al Durah trial roundup.

* Pamela passes on this disturbing news from YouTube. Crusader18 tried to post an admittedly not-exactly-nonviolent "US Marines vs Insurgents" video, and YT pulled it and suspended his account. Which is exactly what happened when Jihad4U posted videos of jihadists murdering American soldiers, except without all that inconvenient video-getting-pulled or account-getting-suspended stuff.

* Speaking of Pamela: little bit scary. Just a wee bit. Wonderful and wholesome and fighting the good fight. But li'l bit scary. Obligatory link to Phish Bowl bikini vlog remix. * Boker Tov Boulder's got a story that's not getting enough attention:

Anne wants to know "who's lying?" We think they're both lying.

* Well sure it's an animated Happy New Year from people who want to nuke Israel. But is it art?

* There is exactly one group of people on the planet who have not heard that Reuters Green Helmet photos are not examples of massive Israeli atrocities, but rather examples of massive anti-Israel bias. That group of people is the United Nations. We suggest to you that this is not a coincidence.

* JPundit UN rally roundup. Might as well go and read it (and follow the links and read those posts too). It's not like you're going to find out about it by reading the New York Times. One Jerusalem has tape.

* Militant Muslims are now threatening Norway. Why Norway? Oh, dear readers, how misguided you are. The better question is: why not Norway?

* Liberal Jews are such effing idiots sometimes.

* CITGO = HUGO. There will be a test on this later.

* Why do all the really good trolls hang out on Meryl's site? She gets idiots rolling 'God takes no position for or against Hitler wannabes', and all we get is email about how Jews who love Israel should get out of the US. Lucky girl. Lucky girl with a potty mouth, but a lucky girl nonetheless.

* Islamists are threatening to crucify the Pope. Mel Gibson is so confused right now.

* Israel at Level Ground on female infantry soldiers who help bust extensive sex-slave networks of suppliers and smugglers. No, we're not going to make the joke about how that's a good chunk of the Muslim world. You racist.

* Islamic women who have to cover themselves in black from head to toe (even their eyes (!!)) want you to know that they think the Pope is evil for claiming that there's something anti-modern about Islam.

* We are going to link to an American Thinker article that is not by MR-first-alternate-stalkee Clarice Feldman. It is by Michael Curran, and it is about why the Electoral College is a good idea. Don't worry - we're sure it's just a phase we're going through.

It's getting harder and harder to tell the difference:

The best part is how the entire thing reads like the screed of a petulant, semi-literate third grader, but he/she/it hits almost every talking point in the Walt-Mearsheimer-Duke-MoveOn playbook. The only thing that's missing is the preemptive "I know someone will call be anti-Semitic, but they're just trying to stifle my legitimate criticism of Israel" faux bravado.

It. Is. True:

Here's the thing about the brainwashing of Muslim children thing. Everyoine thinks that the big problem is like the "you should hate non-Muslims because they hate Allah" Hezbollah-TV thing. And sure, having five year old girls say "the Jews are pigs and apes" on international satellite TV is a little disturbing. But let's not underestimate the obsessive, pathological, deeply, deeply disturbing levels on which brainwashing occurs:

That's the stuff that scares us. It's not the eruptions of ideology as in the streets, and it's not even the banality of hate on the TV stations. It's the obsessive fascism that tries to seep into every knock and cranny that hasn't already been drowned by religion. It's the attempt to suffocate every single breath with the most clumsy religious dogma - that's what's really scary.

We more or less understand and agree with most of the arguments for why, given tactical political considerations, (domestically) left of center pro-Israel voters have to hold their noses and vote for Republicans. It's the "let's beat the folks who drop houses on homosexuals and gang rape women for going to college - we'll figure out the rest later" argument. That's an argument we're quite sympathetic to, although we think that we're kind of in the center on this position. On one side there's Lynn, who will not allow herself to be single-issue bullied (our phrase and characterization, not hers) into voting for Santorum over Casey even if Santorum is fantastic on the war against political Islam. On the way, way other side there's Pamela who feels kind of relieved that Chafee won not because Chafee has even one redeeming personal quality, but because he's a means to the end of preventing the Democrats and their interest groups from gaining legislative power (our phrase and characterization, not hers). Our position is that you have to weigh what a Senator wants to do by what a Senator is able to do, and the Supreme Court is still around to check anything really excessive (assuming that such a thing could even get out of Congress). On the other hand, playing around with Foggy Bottom's budget allocations until they don't stop sucking up to dictators is a real, grounded effect that someone like Santorum can have.

That said, will somebody please tell George Allen to just shut the hell up? Credentials on not being a fan of Iran: A+. Knowing how to campaign: D-. And the only thing that keeps it from being an F is that we think he was ambushed. But wow, does he suck at this.

Richard "the Left's not so keen to prosecute the Plame leaker for treason now, are they?" Armitage wants you to know:

Apparently the exact wording of the threat was that the US would "bomb them out of the Stone Age". Small miscommunication there, apologies to everyone.

Muslim man says something not very nice about Jesus. Christian woman says something not very nice about Mohammed. Muslims burn churches and attack Christians across the country:

It's collective punishment! Where's AI, HRW, and the UN?

Here's a game everyone can play at home. You're a Reuters editor. There's been a vicious attack by Muslims on Jews or Christians. You need to fit it into a "cycle of violence" frame, but there have been no similar attacks by Jews or Christians on Muslims. How do you do it? Correct answer: predict - despite said lack of a retaliation - that a retaliation will happen at some indefinite time in the future anyway:

So any day now, we're sure that we'll see reports of 11 Nigerian mosques burned by Sudanese Christians. After all, tit-for-tat cycle of violence, right?

To all of our readers: shana tova u metuka, and may the coming year bring only blessings and happiness to you and all those you love.

Earlier this week, in rant 1 of 7 about that morning's Guardian article on the Pope, we asked:

Turns out, there's an answer. MR reader David points us to this WaPo article from last May:

But as we went through the textbook descriptions, we realized that there was just too much good stuff in there for one post. Also, it's a pre-holiday Friday and most of you could care less about the most recent Israeli opinion poll (which the right is of course screwing up - hint: count the Kadima/Labor percentages versus the Likud/Yisrael Beiteinu percentages... or just subtract 42 seats from 120). So although this is a pretty old article, we're going to split it into multiple posts for clarity and edification. Plus, (a) if it's true it's new and (b) we're in a really generous mood because we're pretty sure that we get to be the apes:

See here's the thing - we were feeling pretty solid at the beginning that we got to be the apes, but then in the middle it implies that we might be pigs or apes. Unless Christians also could as "people of the Sabbath", in which case they're obviously the pigs and the Jews are the apes. Which is sweet, because sure pigs are smart and get to talk to spiders and everything - but apes get to hang out with Helena Bonham Carter. Who is hot. And with Charlton Heston. Who is Moses.

Anyway:

Happy new year.

Yeah, we were also shocked - shocked - to find that there are high-level Muslim scholars who interpret Islam as endorsing non-defensive violence. Shocked:

When they say that Islam "arose through jihad" and that "through jihad... its banner [was] raised high", that's meant metaphorically. When they said that "jihad is the path of God - which consists of battling against unbelief", that's meant metaphorically too. As rhetoricians, it warms out hearts to know that millions upon millions of kids are being taught so much about metaphors:

Two words: job market.

This is very, very pretty. Last March, Juan Cole posted a smug collection of talking points about "Peace and Love in the Quran" (the better for DKos denizens to smugly quote). The first link is to a pedantic discussion of Koran 25:63:

Somebody needs to tell that to the publishers of Saudi Arabian textbooks, because they're teaching millions of kids the total and exact and precise opposite:

All standard disclaimers about our ignorance of Muslim theology apply, but we very strongly suspect that what's going on is that Cole is as usual quoting a passage from early Islam that is abbrogated by later passages. The exact same thing happened with the "no compulsion in religion" slieght-of-hand that Cole (and Hitch) tried to pull against the Pope. The "no compulsion" passage comes from a period where Mohammed had to say that because he was too weak to militarily conquer his enemies. The passage that Cole is citing to prove the Koran's inherent message of peace and love is from a period even earlier than that. We're beginning to suspect that maybe the problem is that Juan Cole just never finished the Koran - he got to somewhere in the middle and concluded, just like with everything else in his life, that he already had it figured out.

The people who write Saudi Arabia's textbooks seem to have read all the way to the end. Which makes this extra comforting:

Someone should tell all these Muslim scholars how it's racist to imply that Islam isn't egalitarian.

Are you from the Guardian or the New York Times? Are you confused why interfaith dialogue keeps not working. This is being taught to Muslim six year olds across the world:

Here's the money question: what happens to the kid who screws up and puts "Judaism" in the first blank? Or like "a modern medical system" for the second one? Our problem is that we thought this was a madlib, and came up with "Every religion other than Sherlock Holmes is false. Who dies outside of Islam enters bubblegum". Which obviously makes no sense. Fifth grade clears up all our confusion:


Yeah, so not so much with the interfaith dialogue:
Christian / Jew: "We'd like to begin by expressing our belief that there are rays of Truth and the divine in every way of relating to God"
Saudi first grader: "You will burn in hellfire, you enemy ________ (insert as necessary: pig/ape)"

But Juan Cole says that Muslims respect ethical Christians, going so far as to say that they have nothing to fear in the afterlife:

Juan Cole's commentary on the Koran: "It is not saying that non-Muslims go to hell". That's an interesting interpretation of the Koran, since the interpretation of the Koran presented in what Muslims believe is the divinely-inspired hadith is completely and precisely the opposite:


Are you beginning to get the sense that maybe (just maybe) Juan Cole is not telling the whole truth about what Muslim holy scriptures teach - or that he's (at best) telling what he thinks they mean and not what the vast majority of Muslims think they mean (which begs the question: what good is he for explaining them?) Good thing for the sanctity of Islam that his potentially heretical interpretations of the Koran - "non-Muslims [don't] go to hell - quite the opposite" vs. "the Jews [and]... the Christians... will fall down in Hell" - aren't being taught to millions of schoolkids around the world. Those kids are being taught good solid Saudi interpretations:

And just in case you were hoping to try some kind of dialogue divide-and-conquer strategy, don't even think about it:

Maybe if the Pope engaged them in a dialogue they'd change their minds.

We think we might have identified the reason that Hamas thinks it's their Islamic obligation to keep trying to kill Jews. It turns out that contrary to what Western apologists say... shockingly... it might have something to do with Islam after all:

In a way, you have to admire the logic in Saudi educational methods. They build you up slowly: Jews and Christians are false (first grade), they are enemies because they are false (fifth grade), and you have to fight a true jihad against their falseness (sixth grade). By the time you get to ninth grade, it seems more or less natural that you're going to have to fight them "until the hour of judgment". If American schools built concepts up this way, kids would actually learn how to think. Maybe Americans can send their kids to some of the readily available Saudi schools all over the planet:

We kind of agree with OBL about this touchy-feely corruption of school curricula. How stupid is it that American kids no longer have to memorize the Gettysburgh Address because some busybody with a Masters in Education tricked a second-tier journal into publishing her thesis about the hegemony of the American classroom (no doubt written by 'bringing Foucault, Althusser, and Nietzsche into dialogue with each other')? The Saudis have a more rigorous educational system than we do, and millions upon millions of kids are benefiting from it:

Back to the Ad Herennium!

On Tuesday, insipid Guardian journalist Karen Anderson tried to defend murderers and bombers by writing that "at a time when European social order was deeply hierarchical, despite the egalitarian message of the gospel, Islam was condemned for giving too much respect to women and other menials." Looks like Islam's fixed that problem:

Which makes this Juan Cole summary of why the Koran is a book of peace extra-special funny...

... and begs the obvious question: if you kill an infidel women, does that mean that you only have to do one-fourth of your repentance, faith, and good works in order to get "a transformative effect"? Because that seems like a really sweet offer - we get to transform and reorient our will for one-fourth the time and effort. Why aren't Muslim missionaries pushing this awesome deal to get people to convert, instead of having religious, jihadist terrorists hold guns to people's heads? Which Juan Cole also says is not allowed. Except the religious, jihadist terrorists haven't gotten that memo (ditto for their religious, jihadist imams (ditto for their religious, jihadist scholars)). Maybe Cole can find somewhere to take a refresher course on the Koran - it's not like there aren't plenty of schools available:

We're actually kind of supporting this part of the Saudi textbook. Anything that gets those kids learning a little math or physics is a plus:

Ruth is an Jewess who's life is worth 6 dinars. Yassin is a Muslim male. Calculate how much Yassin's life is worth. Show your work.
For extra credit, calculate how many beautiful and virtuous maidens Yassin gets if he becomes a martyr by blowing up Ruth and her kids on a Haifa bus.

We've been getting some of our photos hotlinked for the last two or three weeks (so pretty much since we started really putting photos up regularly). That sucks but, you know, these things happen - and seriously, it's not like we're losing ad revenue.

That said, cursory examination of our log files recently revealed that some 9/11 lunatic had hotlinked the poster that we put up a long time ago to demonstrate the existence of conspiracy theory groups on the USC campus - and he was actually using it as proof of a conspiracy and having people get contact information off the image! So, in a kind of sad testament to what we've been reduced to for amusement:


Eh. It's Friday.

Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni made the following points at the UN: Iran doesn't deserve a seat among civilized nations because they deny the Holocaust; Iran doesn't deserve a seat among UN nations because they threatened to wipe out a member-state; Iran doesn't deserve a seat among peaceful nations because they're building nuclear weapons with the announced intention of using them. The biggest impact of her speech was that anti-Iranian interests became despondent because now they think that the anti-Iran movement won't get anywhere because the Jews are involved:

Three things: (1) Anti-Iran diplomatic pressure is the opposite of credible right now. (2) We think that people in the world already had an inkling that Israel would rather Iran didn't nuclearize. (3) If Israel can't say out loud "we think you people should take a stand against this country because they're threatening to wipe us out," then the cause is doomed anyway.

Here's the thing about Iran though. Crazy:

Yeah, ummm. We're not trying to be perpetual downers or anything, but we're not really hopeful about the chances of "dialogue" with the guy who thinks that Bush is trying to kill the Mahdi - a personage who, let's remember, still doesn't technically "exist" in this dimension. As such.

Israel won't withdraw before the Jewish New Year. We think - and we're just guessing - that it has something to do with a combination of two things: (1) Hezbollah's announcement as long as a month ago that they were already preparing to rearm and (2) the fact that Kofi Annan reacted to said announcement by getting Syria to promise to help prevent Hezbollah from rearming. There's just something about Syria's motives that the Israelis don't trust.

And you know, we couldn't figure out why Israel distrusted the Syrians so much. At first we thought that it had something to do with Israel getting intel that Syria would make a grab for the Golan in late August, and then Syria seemingly confirming that by threatening to go to war with Israel last week. But then we read the international press and realized that it's because the Israelis are racist. So that was actually kind of helpful, because it cleared things up for us.

We've said it before and we'll say it again. Egypt is one disgruntled general away from becoming the most dangerous country on earth:

And really, why wouldn't Washington help? It's not like Egypt is unstable or anything.

MR's SERIES ON THE ANTI-PAPAL RIOTS
MR published a series of over 40 posts about Pope Benedict XVI's speech and the ensuing anti-Papal riots. These posts included an extensive unpacking of the speech itself, as well as criticism of academic and media reactions to the controversy. 39 of those posts are categorized and indexed here.


ORIGINAL POST


We know what you're thinking. You're thinking that we're being hysterical, and that there's no reason why people can't have as much leeway as they want in deciding their faith for themselves. Well, it might surprise you to learn that you're wrong and we're right. Again, religions are social institutions. There's a give and take with individuals, but too much permissiveness and they get stretched too thin - and then they snap. Before last week, we would have been hard-pressed to convince you of the practical viability of this theory - it's coherent and robust analysis, but it's difficult to really imagine it playing out.

And that's how you get statements like the New York Times line that we just will not drop because it is just. that. stupid: "a doctrinal conservative, his greatest fear appears to be the loss of a uniform Catholic identity, not exactly the best jumping-off point for tolerance or interfaith dialogue". Because they understand very little about the lived realities of religious communities, their tensions and practices, they don't really see why you need everyone to have a 'uniform Catholic identity' just to have Catholicism. And they'd undoubtedly find our explanation a little shrill and pedantic [stop nodding please - it hurts our feelings].

At some point, the idea that the way to save a crumbling Christian Europe is to make everyone more Christian stopped being self-evident. We have no idea when this happened, but we have pretty good theories on what the consequences will be. Of course, theories are really beside the point ever since the Church of England decided to run a clinic on how to make your religion die:




This, ladies and gentlemen, is what happens when the tension between individual and social norms break down, and permissiveness is the rule of the day. Of course he recited pagan chants while celebrating the Eucharist - he believes both. How can he possibly believe both? Because he 'feels' it (trust us - it is not because he has discovered a rigorous way to merge Hinduism with Catholicism... no, we don't have to check - just take our word for it). It's so rare that you get photographic evidence of an ostensible Judeo-Christian holy man actually violating two of the Ten Commandments at the same time. We close this post having realized that yet again, our best efforts to come up with an absurdly unrealistic example of Leftist "multicultural tolerance" and "interfaith dialogue" are shipwrecked on the shoals of their real-life mind-boggling stupidity.

The phrase you're looking for is "he used it as a wife":

This is like it was in Catholic Europe. Except the stuff about equating goats with women. And the part about pathological and sick religious councils doing icky stuff with bestiality. And the disregard for civil authority. The rest of it proves beyond any doubt that, indeed, it's not anything in Islam specifically - it's religion in general that's the problem!

We provide the following links as a public service to Juan Cole, CAIR, and the Guardian. We know that they hate it when anyone implies that any part of Islam endorses forced conversions. They must have missed these people, and we know that they take every opportunity to condemn people that would dare to imply that Islam isn't entirely peaceful.

Sol managed to find this news about a Gaza group. Juan Cole, CAIR, and the Guardian must not be reading the same newspapers he is:

"Citing the words of the Prophet Mohammed"? Oh dear, that can't be right. They must be using a different version of the Koran than everyone who says that it never justifies forced conversions. You know who else apparently hasn't read the Koran and doesn't know that it discourages coercion? Gaddafi's eldest son:

Someone should send them copies of the Koran STAT so that they know that there's no way that Islam can mean anything but peace (seriously: how can you fix a religion if you don't acknowledge that there could ever, by definition, be a problem?)

Yeah, and Hilter could energize a crowd better than Churchhill. That doesn't mean...

Can we just focus for a second on how Ahmadinejad is a Holocaust denier who wants to get a nuclear weapon and wipe out millions upon millions of Jews? That has to mean something, right? Even a little? "But it goes deeper". "It's like diplomacy". Holy shit. What is wrong with these people?

Seriously, they really, really just pathologically hate women:

Now everyone go to Google News. Type in "catholic islam medieval women". A little over half of the articles point out that there's nothing especially wrong with contemporary Islam because during the Middle Ages the Church treated women badly. The articles will usually have contact information.

It's been a rough week, it's not Friday yet, and you undoubtedly have some frustration to take out on someone. Feel free to also incorporate yesterday's story about the Pakistanis who gang raped a mother and daughter for 12 days because the daughter was getting a Masters degree. Don't hold back anything - the journalists are stupid and vapid and insipid, and they deserve to know that. You're welcome.

Looks like the wannabe martyr (but not *that* much of a wannabe, if you know what we're sayin') has stuck his head out of his Iranian-funded bunker:

This, of course, understands Israeli society precisely backwards (psst: they're scapegoating the politicians). But we're more concerned with the shamelessness of the boasting. After all, we're only about a month out from this breakdown:


We originally got that picture off of Rantings of a Sandmonkey, who got it off of someone else. It's genius.

MR's SERIES ON THE ANTI-PAPAL RIOTS
MR published a series of over 40 posts about Pope Benedict XVI's speech and the ensuing anti-Papal riots. These posts included an extensive unpacking of the speech itself, as well as criticism of academic and media reactions to the controversy. 39 of those posts are categorized and indexed here.


ORIGINAL POST


If a liberal Catholic got elected Pope, then he could make the rules.

Many people - Jews, Catholics, and Muslims - really do treat their religion as just one more subculture that they occasionally participate in. We've got names for them: High Holiday Jews, Cafeteria Catholics, Ramadan Muslims. And the way that they want to participate is obviously not something that anyone outside of friends and family should really be concerned about - for all the fact that it's a big planet, things seem to go badly every single time a country tries to start regulating how often people pray.

But the self-esteem idiocy of the 1970s and 80s has created a situation where literally millions of people nonetheless insist that they are being religious even though they're not really praying or taking sacraments / mitzvoth or studying canonical texts. Rather, they're doing whatever they want but still insisting that because they 'feel' like it's part of their religion, it is part of their religion. We've heard justifications like: (a) it makes them feel closer to something they don't understand or (b) because 'God is always present in everything they do' or (c) because they have a special relationship with the divine and this is how they and God communicate. These are all incredibly stupid things to believe.

Some religions hold that followers establish a personal relationship, no doubt. But that doesn't mean that any religion supports your ability to choose how to go about establishing that religion. In fact, it is exactly. the. opposite. The entire point of organized religion is that there are revealed truths about the proper way to commune with the divine - so while you're welcome to come up with your own little rituals, and while it could well be that no one will particularly mind when you do, you can't unilaterally decide that you're participating in the religious life of your religious community. The trick here, of course, is in the irreducible tension between an individual and a community (irreducible because every time you try to get rid of it a couple million people die and suddenly there it is again). Religions are social institutions that have a life of their own, albeit one that is constantly being pushed and pulled by individuals. How much can an individual get away with and still be part of that community? It depends on the community, the individual, and what they're trying to do - but as a theoretical matter, it can't be that anything goes just because it 'feels right' to you.

Seriously, don't pretend that you can decide for yourself what's part of your religion based on what 'feels right'. Or rather, feel free too, but don't make the rest of us cringe when you insist that you get to declare what you're doing part of an age-old set of norms, guidelines, and beliefs worked out painstakingly over thousands of years. And certainly don't write something like this...

You have to ask yourself where he "learned" that such a comfortably tolerant and wonderfully accepting concept was Catholic. Not from the New Testament (no one shall get to the Father etc etc). Not from the Hebrew Scriptures (Chosen People, etc). It's nice that he has a bond that nobody understands with the divine presence, but we usually have a name for people who go around asserting the "uniqueness" of their personal relationship to God (old: prophets, new: lunatics). Where did people get this idea that they could just have any old relationship with the divine and declare that it fit within their religion and so they were a devote x (Catholic, Jew, Muslim, etc)? How did this happen? Because before, there were very large books written by very smart people who said 'there are only certain ways to have what we could reasonably call a Catholic (or Jewish or Muslim) relationship with God'. They didn't define those ways, but they sketched out their limitations and contours. If you have a relationship with a God that is both all Good and all Evil, you do not have a Catholic relationship to God. We don't care how 'intuitive' Manichaeism, sounds to you, you can't take it and then declare it Catholic - they call that 'heretical'. Do multiculturalists who claim to be Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and Muslim claim to fall outside of these basic frameworks, established by the best thinkers that Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, and Islam have produced? Or does this guy think that the Catholic framework does not require the belief that God favors one faith over others?
And just to definitively end the debate, productive interfaith dialogue is more or less impossible on a large scale for... er... logistical reasons:

Oh we dunno - maybe you can have successful dialogue with crazed and illiterate mobs that are burning you in effigy because of something someone told them that you said. It could happen.

What the hell is wrong with these people?

These people are totally insane. Just way beyond the reach of sanity or rational argument. There's a game among American high school students which is kind of related to this - it's a game of chicken, and the winner is the one who is willing to say "penis" the loudest in inappropriate situations, and of course the purpose is to make everyone snigger. Games like this have been undoubtedly been played by schoolboys everywhere since well before the invention of writing - and these petty, pathological tyrants are handing out decade-plus prison sentences and 4,000 lashes? Umm, hey everyone, we've been playing around with this idea, and we're just going to throw it out there: we're not so sure that the West has much in common with these people.

Good morning and happy Thursday. Good news: Pamela from Atlas Shrugged got some MSM love. Bad news: that does nothing to change the fundamental truth that we are all totally effed. If you've ever wanted to know what Syrian, Iranian, Venezuelan, and Argentinean thugs do in front of the UN General Assembly, today is your lucky day. * Palestinians still using little kids as human shields. Welcome to a world in which nothing is ever surprising any more.

* Pamela gets a shout out from FOX for her blog. Totally, incredibly awesome. It's like the shoutouts she gets for her vlogs, only significantly less artistic.

* If you want more about Hugo Chavez than our insightful "total effing clown" analysis, James Lewis at American Thinker has some stuff. But come on - total effing clown pretty much covers it, no?

* VP (ViPe?) has the speech from the Syrian representative to the UN:

We're going to go out on a limb: we're not sure that the UN is a productive space for rational dialogue.

* Hot Air has tape of the Holocaust Denier in front of the UN. The rest of the world thinks he's effing Cicero, you might as well tune in.

* You know what makes our "is Chavez gonna walk to the podium in dreadlocks and a Che shirt?" less funny? Turns out Che was once allowed to speak to the UN. What an august institution. Really, a beacon of freedom to all the world's oppressed.

* Daled Amos asks if AI is maybe reconsidering their officially unofficial 'demonize Israel' editorial policy. We know absolutely nothing about the specifics of the claims that he's relaying, but we're going to say "no". Because the news article that he found that suggests that AI has broken with the Left is from the Boston Herald, a newspaper that has to turn to its right to find Noam Chomsky. But hey, we're willing to be surprised.

Think AC360 will ask him about Iran's discrimination against gender minorities?

UPDATE: Allahpundit, praise be upon his snark, says Cooper wasn't all that bad. You know what we'd like to see? People not treating that taxi-driving Holocaust denying genocidal maniac like a respected head of state just because France has decided that he should get nukes.

Then again, we'd like to see energy efficient cars, a smogless summer day in LA, and a competent Israeli Cabinet. We've learned that we don't always get what we want.

Jonah Goldberg totally stole our idea:

That's fair. And of course, the rest of this blog is the "not funny" part. To be totally honest, we forgot why we thought that this was a substantive post. Sorry. Click through the link though - hell of an article.

UPDATE: From the article, the "not funny" part:

It is ironic, isn't it?

As the world grows both more depressing and more totally batshit crazy, we think we're going to have a lot more entries in this, our newest Mere Rhetoric series. So for instance, "Ahmadinejad thinks that the 12th imam is a personal friend who's sitting on his shoulder whispering advice". Objectively funny. "Ahmadinejad thinks that the 12th imam is a personal friend who's sitting on his shoulder whispering advice, and that advice is to nuke Israel". Significantly less humorous. "Hugo Chavez is standing on the stage of the UN holding up a Chomsky book." Hysterical. "Aproximately 30% of the US and 90% of the planet thinks that this is an incredible act of truth and bravery". Buzzkill.

Today's entry comes courtesy of Col. Qaddafi, one of the many, many funny/not funny treasures that the Muslim world has been kind enough to bequeath to the rest of us. Funny:

Not funny:

Maybe it's time to consider that the UN isn't really the bastion of freedom that we're sure everyone in the crowd thinks it is.

Liar, liar, Holocaust denier. Coverage at Pamela's, Israel Matsav, and LGF . Seriously, eff that guy.

This seems like something that we would want to know:

In retrospect, not surprised. A guy can leave a note saying that he's a Muslim and is attacking Jews because of their ties to the Jewish state, and getting the press to even mention his religion is like pulling teeth. So the news that a Muslim general has taken over a country and intends to negotiate in good faith with Muslim separatists doesn't really seem like the press would think that we ought to know.

Youthful militants in Paris:

What kind of youths you ask? We don't know - the article doesn't say. Maybe Methodists?

Oh - incidentally - no arrests. Because seriously, you don't want to antagonize them. They might do something crazy. Like beating police officers. The best part is how this police officer is just so clueless, and he's like "these youths fear nothing". Hey, do you think it's because they know that they can beat police officers and not get arrested? Do you think maybe that might have something to do with their lack of fear of being arrested? Could that possibly have anything to do with it?

UPDATE: So that comment about arrests and fear - same line every other person made. Pamela, Anne, Barak.

Where do they even come up with this stuff?

Shut up. No one's going to have anybody else liquidated, unless it's Israel and they're too busy right now trying to figure out how to free prisoners and give away land. This is just a headfake so that Mashal can get more compromises out of Abbas during unity government negotiations (there are still one or two obligations to Israel that Hamas hasn't firmly said they will never, ever meet). "Liquidated". Where do they come up with this stuff?

Well, Abbas promised Livni that the new unity government (if it ever gets on the ground) will recognize Israel and fulfill past treaty obligations. So it looks like some bluffs are going to be called soon one way or another. Our best guess: there will be a unity government, it won't not recognize Israel but it won't recognize Israel, and no one in Hamas is going to kill anyone else in Hamas. Unless it's about like a sister's honor or a stolen car or something. Then people might die. Otherwise, no.

Livni and Abbas also apparently talked about Shalit. Or didn't, depending on who you ask. We do like how Livni is pressing for the "unconditional release of Gilad Shalit" at the same time that the Israeli government is negotiating over whether they have to release 800 prisoners or 1,000 prisoners to get him back.

MR's SERIES ON THE ANTI-PAPAL RIOTS
MR published a series of over 40 posts about Pope Benedict XVI's speech and the ensuing anti-Papal riots. These posts included an extensive unpacking of the speech itself, as well as criticism of academic and media reactions to the controversy. 39 of those posts are categorized and indexed here.


ORIGINAL POST


We're losing to clowns. Very primitive, irony-challenged clowns.

Annoying moral equivalence variation #542 is about gender. Both the Christian tradition and the Muslim tradition (and, for that matter, the Jewish tradition) marginalize women. The conclusion of feminists, then, is that the problem of sexual marginalization is a problem of religion - and that more so, the conditions of gendered slavery that women throughout the Muslim world face requires a non-religious solution. We're not fans of faith-based organizations for a few reasons, but this miserable excuse for thinking is not one of them... Of course a woman is better off being in a fundamentalist Catholic household than a fundamentalist Muslim household. Of course that's true. How far gone into pedantry and banality do you have to be for that to cease to be a self-evident truth? Answer: as far as the Guardian's Karen Anderson (actually, she's probably way farther than you have to be - she's kind of a lost cause we thinkg).

Not to brag, but we want to point out that we were way, way out in front of this 'the Pope is not pleased with Islam' thing - and for the right reasons:


People should not be allowed to say 'the problem isn't any particular religion, it's religious extremism itself' in anything but a sarcastic way. The effects of religious extremism differ to such a degree between different religions that it's perverse not to recognize those differences as differences in kind. You sometimes hear conservative commentators describe political Islam as a medieval religion (9-12th century-ish). And you sometimes hear liberal commentators decry Pope Benedict's conservative theological commitments and compare him to the Taliban (or you see people like the NYT editors take snide potshots at him that don't have to be defended because they're not explicit).

Listen, this is easy: the most extreme form of actually existing 9th-century style political Catholicism said that killing your daughter was bad. The most extreme form of actually existing 9th-century style political Islam says that killing your daughter is required to keep your honor. This is not a difficult concept. First graders could get this concept.

This concept can be metaphorically and actually illustrated with the pictures above from this week's protests. The question must be asked: are these women existence more or less ironic than having Muslims threaten to kill the Pope because he suggested that Islamic societies merge defenses of faith with violence? We think more, because irony requires a certain kind of freshness that's simply lacking from the "kill people who criticize you for killing people" modus operandi.

* "France proposes 'compromise deal' for Iran nuclear standoff" - Iran only gets half of Czechoslovakia, and that's the final offer.

* "Quartet throws support to PA unity government" - You didn't actually believe them when they said that they'd never fund terrorists, did you? You did? What are you, stupid?

* " Haniyeh: We won’t recognize Israel" - You didn't actually believe them when they said they'd stop being terrorists, did you? You did? You're not very bright, are you?

* "British minister infuriates Muslims" - He told them not to let their children become terrorists. That's not a joke, that's really what he said and it's really what pissed them off.

* Bush calls Abbas 'man of peace'" - Follows it up with "not like those 4.9 million other Palestinians".

* "Bush to Abbas: I'll push for Palestinian state" - Abbas to Bush: that's nice, but you know we're going to need a lot of money to set up mosques in Haifa.

* "Peretz: We won’t close our eyes to Iran, Syria" - All those newly-freed prisoners need somewhere to go.

* "Halutz: I don't need a lawyer" - All Peretz's fault anyway.

How bad are Jewish-Arab relations in Israel when liberal mouthpiece Ha'aretz says maybe Arab-Israelis should consider maybe being loyal to the state that cares for and protects them :

It's the Occupation that makes them do it. Amnesty International told us so. What Occupation? The one of Tel Aviv.

Remember, it's not anything specific to Islam - the problem is religious extremism in general:

Nothing to do with Islamic-specific religious laws at all:

Some day very soon - we're 100 percent sure - a historian will uncover documents that demonstrate conclusively that things were just like this in Catholic Europe too, and that there's absolutely no difference between the implementations of political Islam and the implementations of political Christianity.

He held up a Chomsky book? Are you kidding? What next? He's gonna walk to the podium in dreadlocks and a Che shirt? How do you even respond to these people. It's like we just want to roll up a newspaper, hit on the nose, and say "no" until he stops peeing in the corner.

And this part is just beautiful: we just got a text message from a friend. We'll quote it in its entirety for you, because what's ours is yours:

We can't find confirmation on this 12th imam story, but it sounds exactly like something that that lunatic would do. Hey Europe, great job! Clowns. Total clowns. Clowns with nukes.

Who is this guy? When he's not falling into feel-good Leftist bromides he's condescending to people for not making sense when he just plain out and very evidently does not understand their arguments, the basis for their arguments, or the significance of their arguments. And of course, the entire thing is layered with a pretentious air of satisfaction and superiority.

(1) Mindless Leftist feel good imbecility -

Here's the thing about words that are comparisons (better, superior, worse, inferior): you actually need two things to compare. you can't just have one. Then it wouldn't be "superior" to anything, it would just be "good". And the whole point of religion is to demonstrate that joining a faith provides a superior way of living (or knowing) than other faiths. That's why we have systems of thought. Yes, it would be really nice if everybody was as good as everybody else and everything was as good as everything else. But back here, where we don't live in the idiot affirmation 1980s, that's not how things work.

(2) Pretentious and incoherent philosophy -

If you're keeping a spreadsheet, this part goes under "the amateur walking into a debate and figuring out the one, easy, obvious thing that everybody else missed". If only Pope Benedict would have known that "there aren't any essences", we could have avoided this whole ugly mess to begin with. Except, of course and obviously, Cole has ascribed to the Pope the position that he'd like the Pope to have - not the one the Pope does have. The Pope's position, of course and obviously, is the exact opposite of what Cole thinks it is - it's not that there are essences in religion, but rather tensions and forces that make it likely to go in one direction or another. This is actually a philosophical error - Cole doesn't understand that what the Pope is dealing with here are styles of thought that are historically developed, not any "essence" of a religion. For the same reason - that he's two arrogant to consider the possibility that maybe there are at issues in play that he doesn't understand - Cole thinks that he's being oh-so-clever by pointing to counterexamples:

(3) Counter-examples that actually prove the Pope's point -

This, you will not now be surprised, is the Pope's point. That the initial texts of Islam (and the way that the texts tell readers to read them) make it unlikely that theological traditions like the Mu'tazili school or the Egyptian reformers will succeed or survive. Which they haven't. Which is the Pope's point.

Look, this guy is either dense or intentionally missing the point, and it's getting really hard trying to untangle which is which. The Pope's point was about the resources that particular theological traditions provide scholars who are trying to move them in one direction or another (this morning Dr. Donuhue referred to this as the amount of "wiggle room" in a religion). People who want to reform Judaism or Catholicism and make them modern find a lot of resources in their tradition - so many resources that historically they've actually be able to pull off long-lasting reforms. People who want to reform Islam find very few resources in their tradition - which is why the vast majority of the Muslim world seems to have significant trouble modernizing. Condescendingly pointing out that the Pope refuses to recognize that there have been efforts at reform and Enlightenment in the Muslim world (this is the second or third time that Cole has brought up the Mu'tazili school) spectacularly misses (and kind of proves) the Pope's point.

Cole's got a bunch of "blog expert" awards on the left side of his blog. It's a good thing that he already knows so much, because he's obviously concluded that there's nothing left for him to learn from anybody else - and that it's a waste of his time to even try to understand what other people are saying.

MR's SERIES ON THE ANTI-PAPAL RIOTS
MR published a series of over 40 posts about Pope Benedict XVI's speech and the ensuing anti-Papal riots. These posts included an extensive unpacking of the speech itself, as well as criticism of academic and media reactions to the controversy. 39 of those posts are categorized and indexed here.


ORIGINAL POST


The more we think about it, the weirder it seems to us that people just assume that Europe and the Islamic world will get along. And the reason it seems weird to us is because there is zero - zero - empirical reason to believe that these two civilizations can exist without attacking each other. There are at least some reasons to think that Europeans can go more or less postnational among themselves - the cosmopolitanism of the pre-WWI era shows that a Continental culture can at least be talked about seriously. But Europe has been going at it with Middle East Muslims (who used to be the Ottoman Empire (that used to be called the Persian Empire)) for a good couple thousand years now. And the only time that stopped even for a time was when the Europeans forcefully defeated or forcibly colonized their opponents.

Europeans may not know that Muslims have been in an unceasing war with Christians, but certain Muslims seem to be aware of it. Now they're attacking churches in the Palestinian areas because Pope Benedict hurt their feelings. And of course it was a previously unknown group:

Do you think that Hamas used UN, Iranian, or EU to buy the new uniforms for this previously unknown group? We told you they're learning fast - maybe there really was something like the conversation we imagined where Abbas explained to Hamas how Arafat had stretched this out for years.

Talk about the Pope and the attacks that Catholics are suffering because the Arab Street has chosen to blow things up in response to the assertion that (a) Islamic revelation asserts the utter transcendence of Allah and (b) 14th century Europeans thought that the Muslims who had been trying to invade Europe on and off for 1,000 years were warlike. So we're expecting newspaper stories right... about... now... about how the Pope's speech triggered Muslim violence against Christian holy sites. And of course, in a very trivial news, those stories are true - the excuse that Palestinian terrorists are using this week is that the Pope's speech made them do it... caveat: how many of the ones burning things in the streets know what Pope Benedict said... or where Rome is... or who Plato and Aristotle were?

Palestinians have been attacking Churches in Gaza and the West Bank for years and years. Probably the most famous involved their invasion of the Church of the Nativity, after Sharon finally had enough and ordered the IDF into the West Bank in Operation Defensive Shield. The gunmen stayed in the Church for 38 days, using the 40-some odd priests and nuns as human shields. In a violation of every law of warfare ever, they used the building as a military installation - and the desecration that they committed to one of Christianity's most sacred sites was such that the bodily waste that they left everywhere was a footnote. Using Bibles as toilet paper, however, did get some attention. And then again a lot of people focused on the use of the Church to store weapons - but here we think there's a fair argument to be made that they were treating the Church no worse than they treat their own mosques. Israel restrained its troops almost entirely, knowing that if anything happened to the Church they'd get blamed. One morning two Palestinians took advantage of Israel's inaction, climbed to the bell tower, and shot at and wounded two Israeli border police officers. Israel returned fire and suddenly, totally by coincidence, fire broke out in an area that wasn't so much where the Israelis were shooting as near it. Eventually, the prisoners were all sent to Europe.

Yet somehow today, despite the near total absence of Israeli occupiers, Christians continue to flee areas under Palestinian control as fast as they can. They've been persecuted until they are now just 1.7 percent of the population in the Palestinian territories. This time last year, Christian Palestinians had documented - documented - 93 incidents of anti-Christian abuse and over 140 illegal land grabs. And then there's this charming trend of interfaith 'closeness':

It's almost like their new explanations for targeting churches this week is a pretext. But the New York Times made their "anger" seem genuine enough, so now we're not sure.

And this AP story is exactly what we're talking about:

Replace "over" with "using as an excuse" and you might be somewhere in the ballpark of the truth.
It's a lovely excuse that these people have this week:

But they're not violent! And you know what - if well-meaning idiots think that bringing up the Crusades is sufficient to demonstrate that Catholicism is violent then, uh, why can't people who think that Islam is more violent add in things like the "Muslim conquest of the whole Middle East and Africa". Because after those balance out, all that's left is the virtual contemporary monopoly that Islam holds on religiously-inspired political violence.

* One of the most popular Palestinian music videos is about a martyr going up to heaven where he's greeted by all of the hot virgins that he gets for dying gloriously in the cause for Allah. They're all wearing identical long white gowns and frolicking in water. Which should be hot, but somehow isn't. Because it's about death. And they're all wearing white robes that cover their entire body. These people are so pathetic.

* Lynn covers the TIME Ahmadinejad interview.

* Dave Bender has a video of terrorist bloopers. Just because they're trying to commit mass murder doesn't mean that they don't have a sense of humor.

* Looks like Jesus is here/back. He says that he's got some "business" to "take care of" before he can usher in a new age where lions lie with lambs. One of his people leaked the list to the press, and it includes: Tehran, Cairo, Mecca, the US State Department, Damascus, Tehran again, south Lebanon, Gaza, the inner city of Paris, Sudan, Tehran a third time, Amman, and Islamabad. Weird that the thinks that Amman is a problem.

* You know how you've heard that Hezbollah wasn't near Qana? Of course they were near Qana.

* Why haven't we been reading the Brussels Journal, and why have none of you told us about it?

*Iraq the Model: turns out, not only is jihad sometimes violent but Islam was at one time spread by the sword! Who knew? Someone should tell Juan Cole:

Only Cole would defend Khamnei as the reasonable, non-hateful one in a debate between the guy who thinks that we need more Aristotle in the world and the guy who thinks that Jews are pigs and apes.

* Somebody named Mobius was complaining about this picture. Judith doesn't actually call Mobius what Meryl called the Brits, but if you look it's kind of between the lines. We clicked through, and apparently Mobius is concerned that images of "Sheikh Nasrallah’s severed head dripping blood" being held in the palm of a bad-ass Israeli soldier will make "militancy and even 'evil' itself attractive to [Israel's] youth". Which we think we can all agree is everyone's biggest concern right now.

* Soccer Dad: "There is nothing noble in ignoring Jews as canaries while simultaneously feeding them to the alligators". That's not the way the expression goes, is it?

* Pamela's got the Papal Jihad roundup.

* The Jewish religious right is celebrating because this smartass 14 year old settler chick got let out of jail after she refused to recognize the right of the Israeli court system to judge her (because it wasn't a religious court). Maybe they shouldn't have thrown her in pirson (whatever Israel's equivalent to juvi jail would've been better), but come on. You don't get to unilaterally decide that you're not going to to obey Israel's civil authority. That's not how we play this game.

* Eh. This probably can't hurt:
That's nice and everything, but we don't think that Hamas is going to actually hand over their funds. And we're quite sure that the EU won't either. But still, a nice gesture all around.

Sometimes we get exasperated questions from readers and friends. They'll call us and ask "Mere Rhetoric, how can it possibly be the case that European civilization - the civilization of Nietzsche, Napoleon, and Churchill - how can it possibly be the case that this civilization refuses to recognize that primitive, illiterate barbarians are mere years away from rampaging through and destroying testaments to human greatness that have been standing for two hundred, five hundred, two thousand years". And in response, we often say "well first of all, it's not nice to call them barbarians - that makes them angry, and then they act like barbarians... ditto for 'illiterate' - when you call them illiterate, they respond by forgetting to read - it works the same way... anyway, in answer to your question, we've actually figured it all out... you see - " and then we make the static noise and pretend that the cell phone reception cut out.

Anyway, here's a healthy serving of "we're all doomed", the breakfast of bloggers. How do you say bon bon appetit in Arabic?

* Hamas... you're never going to believe this... Hamas says... seriously, total surprise... Hamas says that they're backing out of the Arab League peace initiative. It turns out that they don't want to make peace with Israel after all.

* The Palestinians are still firing rockets at Israeli civilians, and Israeli civilians are still being wounded. HELLO? Is anybody listening? Rockets. Civilians. Every couple of days. Like in a war, except routinely.

* New AWACS enhances IAF's vision. Now they can see even more Hezbollah targets they're not allowed to fire at. Awesome.

* Off the Ha'aretz ticker: "11:26 Annan: Failure to end Mideast conflict will harm UN efforts to end other conflicts (AP)". Well maybe we could make some progress on that front if he'd stop feeding and housing a population of radicalized, intransigent, terrorist-supporting, fifth-generation "refugees" who think that if they wait long enough they'll get to overrun Israel. Tool.

* Military coup in Thailand. Tourists were taking pictures of the soldiers as they rolled into town to set up checkpoints and destroy democracy. JPost covers the coup, musing out loud that 'coups aren't that bad... sometimes they're useful... especially if your civilian government is corrupt and useless... if we were living like that, we'd sure want the army to coup...' It's not explicit, but it's in the rhetoric of the article.

* Israel's Jewish population has decreased in the last five years. We're going to be very skeptical the next time someone quotes that stupid "there's no demographic time bomb" study at us.

* Seriously, this anti-terror raid on West Bank terrorist financers happened two weeks ago, but they couldn't print it till now because of military censors. Which means you couldn't know about it unless you live in Israel, have a cell phone, and have ever been in the army.

The former Archbishop of Canterbury is defending the Pope:

Sigh. We really liked Westminster Abbey. He also used the term "Westophobia," which is funny but misses the point where it's not fear but hatred that's driving these lunatics.

This article says that the Pope is going to speak again this morning. It also looks like the riots have quieted down in most places, so we're not really sure what he's going to talk about. With any luck, he'll say something like "I knew you couldn't sustain your riots for more than a week - you've gotta get hungry, and those UN aid packages aren't going to open themselves up and put themselves on a plate for you."

We'll have the speech when we have the speech, but we doubt it's going to be anything spectacular. Probably more of "I'm sorry you're so stupid. There, I said it. Please stop shooting my nuns".

So we were trying to figure out what part of Prophets was being referenced by Israel's testament to the wisdom of decentralized religion, and we came across this passage from Muslim scripture. Now, we will admit and emphasize and insist that we know next to nothing about the theology surrounding Muslim scripture. We know that the Koran is supposed to be literal word of Allah and we know that the hadith (which is where this comes from) is commentary that is divine but not actually the word of God. That's about it. So if someone emails us and says "actually, this passage has no practical significance" we'll take it as noted (although hadith is a basis for Sharia law, so we doubt we'll get that email). We're not actually all that concerned with its legal force as much as the approach it takes to distinguishing Jews and Christians from Muslims. This is from Volume 9, Book 93, Number 532s (which is almost certainly not the 'proper' way to cite hadith, but you can find it). We first found this archived on a message board titled "Boycott Israel [IslamCity]", and under discussion is how Muslims will be able to recognize Allah during their Revelation. Apparently he has some kind of sign on his shin and when he lifts his pants and shows his followers that sign everyone will prostate themselves to him.

At first we couldn't figure out why we kept getting hits for this passage when we were searching for a phrase from the book of Prophets in the Jewish Scripture. And then things got very, very funny. The Rabbi was trying to justify Jewish-Muslim reconciliation and interfaith cooperation, and to justify it he quoted from the Prophets: "every nation will go in the name of its lord". This passage gets repeated at the beginning of this hadith... because Mohammed (or whoever the passage refers to as "the Prophet") is mocking it!! Really, this couldn't be more perfect. It's the exact same quote. The Rabbi says that Jews and Christians should heed the announcement that they should let every nation worship their own God. Holy Muslim commentary says that Jews and Christians heeding the announcement that they should let every nation worship their own God will get them banished to Hell forever because it's hateful to Allah.
Really, we'll say this again - this couldn't be more perfect. It's like a meptahor for the entire battle between Islam and the West. The West says that we need to embrace religious pluralism and tolerance, and extremist Muslims say that our pluralism and tolerance makes us hateful because it allows nasty things like women who drive. Wow. Good job Rabbi.

Preempt: Someone is going to make the glib observation that Catholics have this kind of imagery in the Book of Revelations. This is actually an interesting point, but only because it exactly proves the Pope's point. The Book of Revelations has a ton of really nasty apocalyptic imagery. And a lot of really smart Catholics have thought for a long time that there's no way that that kind of imagery can possibly be meant literally, which they're allowed to since they don't take the Bible literally. Revelations almost didn't make the cut into the New Testament because Chuch leaders were pretty sure that if they did people would try to take it literally. Even Pope Benedict - who, remember, is too conservative for the NYT, So for instance:

St. Augustine himself had to spend not a little bit of time untangling all of the confusion caused by Revelations, and at some points got so frustrated that he just resorted to outright mocking people who thought that it was meant as literal prophesy. And what was at stake? PRECISELY what Pope Benedict's speech was about - the mistake of reading Scripture literally as an exhortation to create a religious utopia on Earth. In other words, instead of demonstrating the stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid argument that 'the problem is not any particular religion, but religious conservativism in general', what this demonstrates is that Catholicism provides the resources for avoiding the excesses of religious extremism while Islam's demand that every letter of Scripture be treated literally may not. If you think that this isn't true, you're welcome to walk into a mosque anywhere in Saudi Arabia and express your belief that the hadith is meant to be interpreted metaphorically - and then see how metaphorically it gets interpreted by the Sharia court you'll get hauled into.

MR's SERIES ON THE ANTI-PAPAL RIOTS
MR published a series of over 40 posts about Pope Benedict XVI's speech and the ensuing anti-Papal riots. These posts included an extensive unpacking of the speech itself, as well as criticism of academic and media reactions to the controversy. 39 of those posts are categorized and indexed here.


ORIGINAL POST


Careful and smart scholars, almost as a rule, avoid being condescending to people who outclass them intellectually. It's just dangerous. You can think that you're walking into a debate where the other scholar has missed a really obvious objection, but in fact what's happened is that the scholar has (a) already accounted for your objection and (b) has presented a subtle distinction or solution that you just didn't know about or understand. This is a mistake that undergraduate and young graduate students make all the time - there is not a philosophy class on the planet that doesn't have some kid who thinks that some very, very sophisticated thinker has missed something obvious that collapses their whole system. Post-adolescent male Objectivists are notorious for doing this crap in undergraduate philosophy classes. In graduate humanities seminars, you hear it from shrill feminists or insufferable deconstructionists. At economics conferences, it's pretty much anybody from Chicago.

Most people either leave the academy or learn to be very circumspect in approaching new arguments and nuanced scholars. We tell our students that if they think that some very powerful thinker has 'just missed something' or is 'just wrong', then what's actually happened is that the student has not understood some move or distinction. There is no doubt about this - it is an ironclad rule. While scholars do sometimes miss simple things, the debates and positions that we're talking about are hundreds and thousands of years old. The student who assumes that he's noticed what every other person has missed ends up being wrong (and, yes, it's almost always a he). The student who is arrogant or flippant his ostensible discovery ends up not just wrong but chagrined. And thus does University life tend to instill caution in good scholars.

Almost paradoxically, however, this entire process of developing caution requires that you're already dealing with scholars of a certain intelligence. You can't convince someone that they've missed a critical distinction unless they're able, once that distinction is pointed to them, to understand why missing it the first time around mattered. But sometimes students just can't wrap their minds around distinctions - and so instead of appropriate chagrin what you get are students who literally can't see why they're wrong - and therefore fail to experience the chagrin appropriate to someone who has been publicly exposed as not just self-important and not just wrong, but self-important because of precisely what they're wrong about. And so they go through academic life, supremely confident in their ability to contribute incisively to any conversation - only because they've never really developed the sensibility that allows them to kind of feel out the outlines of what they don't know, and why that's significant.

Enter Juan Cole. Not only is Prof. Cole seemingly convinced that his contributions range exclusively from the significant to the staggering (cf. people who think that everyone else has missed what they had as a brilliant first impression) - but he faces the additional handicap of being liberal and pretentious. Two parts: liberal (making him think that spouting off irrelevant details in the interest of terrorist apologizing makes him intellectually superior) and pretentious (making him think that his sophisticated insights are also of nontrivial moral worth). When the discussion turns to academic trivialities intertwined with ethical lecturing - as when he denied any imputation of fanaticism to the anti-Pope rioters and church-burners, arguing instead that postcolonialism made them do it - the smugness can become literally suffocating.

It's not perfect and you'll miss out on some nuances (the way that the liberal community reinforces the sense of specifically moral superiority underneath the bad arguments), but you can get almost the entire sense of what we're talking about if you imagine a 15 year old who's been both spoiled and doted on: not only does he reserve for himself the privilege of acting inappropriately because he thinks that whatever's going on in his mind is the most crucially important thing ever, but more often than not we're talking about parents and teachers who have made extensive efforts to convince the child of his intellectual acumen because objective reality wouldn't.

What does all this have to do with the Pope? Easy. From the Friday night New York Times editorial that suggested that the Pope needs to reexamine his priorities on 'Catholic identity' because it was hurting interfaith dialogue to the BBC idiot who insinuated that the Pope was naive because his life in the Vatican has been too sheltered to every pissant staff writer in the middle of rural Blue State America - everyone seems to think that they know more about Islam than Pope Benedict. Before we really start to insult Cole (that up there was just groundwork), let's examine the claim that he's naive in respect to Islam:


We've already commented extensively on the irony of imbecile journalists suggesting in one breath that Pope Benedict doesn't understand Islam and in the next breath suggesting something staggeringly stupid like "it's anger at poverty / the US / Israel / etc". Or stating aloud - as almost every story did - that it was uncertain whether the Pope's apology would stem the anger (yeah, real uncertain - you have to listen to what jihadist leaders are saying to figure it out - the mystery is almost overwhelming in its incomprehensibility). The spectacle of the apologist press suggesting that conservatives like Daniel Pipes or Robert Spencer don't understand Islam has reached "Muslims are killing people to object to being called violent" levels of irony.

We specifically want to kill this "the Pope doesn't know anything about Islam" meme that Juan Cole kicked off his 'analysis' with:

Note the conceit of simply assuming that one of the greatest theologians of the last 50 years got something "wrong, just as a matter of fact". Note the self-important tone of the short, punchy, journalistic style. And broken at the end with parenthesis - of course - because what's inside kind is something that anyone 'with training' should know, but just in case you don't he'll kind of offhandedly jot it down in a little Arabic-to-English show of erudition on Medina's pre-who-gives-a-flying-xxx name). And really, the quotes marks are priceless - even if they're not technically scare quotes, they still have just that little bit of condescension. And then the subtle insult-but-not of repeating the Pope's assertion but calling it a product of his imagination, plus the simplistic restatement at the end of the enthymeme that he assumes we were too stupid to catch. This is the kind of writing that you only get see if you're lucky enough - and we are - to work at a place where the dissident campus newspaper regularly frontpages 'news reports' written by unwashed socialists who, while high/awake, alternate between giggling nervously at their own courage and talking about how they just have to take a stand and attack Bush in every article, but they have to be subtle. Because of censorship. No other way to explain this - if you know, you know. And anyway, we're getting beyond the scope of this post. Relevant running summary: Juan Cole is a total douchebag.

To be honest, we weren't going to include this forced conversion issue in the Benedict series because it's basically just a different flavor of the way that he drops irrelevant details to build his ethos - a habit of his that not a little bit of MR's bandwidth has been spent describing.

But then Chris Hitchens - in his soon-to-be-exposed-as-a-hoax-(or-forgery) Slate article - looks like he may have cribbed the argument from Cole. As if that's not enough evidence that Hitch didn't write that article himself:

Obviously, this has to stop. Juan Cole can lie to his liberal DKos groupies all he wants, but people listen to Christopher Hitchens. He matters. He actually matters quite a bit. And so when Hitch suggests that the Pope was just being stupid - because his Holiness choose to say something wrong about Islamic forced conversions (that the ban on them was a result of Mohammed being powerless) instead of just quoting later violent passages - there's a real risk that people might begin to get the impression that Benedict XVI is out of his depth. And that would be unfortunate because, of course, Cole is a pretentious mediocrity and Hitchens is very confused right now. At issue here is Koran 2:256, and here's how it enters the Pope's speech:

At issue here is what caused Mohammad to go from "no compulsion in religion" early in his campaign (specifically sura 2:256) to 'pagans must convert or be executed' and/or "struggle against the unbelievers and hypocrites and be harsh with them" (suras 9:5, 9:73; 9:5 is also one of the sources for the "People of the Book"/infidels distinction that Benedict alludes to). The Pope suggests that Mohammed consistently and increasingly lost his live and let live attitude as soon as his military power increased.
Cole is of course condescending on this issue, observing (now watch the language closely) that Mohammed already "was in power" as the "leader" of Medina. That's quite true, as far as it goes. But the distinction here is between being militarily powerful (powerful in the 'can pull off forced conversions' kind of powerful) and being 'in power' (as in leading a city). Here's where Cole cheats a little bit - yes, Mohammed was in power in Medina. But he was not powerful. He was in Medina because he had to flee from Mecca or be assassinated, so he joined Muslims in Medina. Eventually he rose politically and became leader of the city - but in the meantime, most of his efforts to get Medina's Jews to recognize him as a prophet were failing. So he's running this city, and he's got these Jews - but he's not strong enough to totally dominate them. So what does he do? He compromises and says that the Jews of 7th century Medina get to follow their own religion - no compulsion in religion etc etc. But that's the Pope's whole point: that this was a tactical, not a theological, concession. So in a surprise to absolutely no one, Cole has made something that sounds like an answer by referencing something that is technically true (that Mohammed "was in power") but totally irrelevent to the Pope's point - which is that when he actually got power as in became powerful, things changed. And you can feel quite confident that that's true, since Rudi Paret, one of the greatest Koran scholars of the 20th century, says it's true:

Maybe - at worst - the Pope should not have described the Mohammed of 2:256 as "powerless." But the fundamental point is still obvious and being avoided: Mohammed's ban on forced conversions seems to have experienced into a precarious decline more or less in inverse proportion to the strength of his Muslim hordes. And listen, we certainly make no pretensions to being able to debate out the intricacies of Koranic interpretation. Anyone who's genuine and knows even a little could wipe the table with us - let alone someone like Cole who would make factually true statements that seem relevant but collapse when you actually check if they're relevant in the way that he pretends they're relevant. So if you're one of the people that we know - we know - is about to pen us an email saying that we're ignorant kafirs who don't know that there was already the beginnings of a military formed and that later there was a military defeat but Mohammed didn't take back forced conversions or some such nonsense, save it - it's not that specifics don't matter or that we're not open to disproof. It's that you're answering a claim isn't at issue. What's at issue is the general tone of religious movements, especially religious movements that believe in the absolute authority of Scripture - and whether those movements seem to find ways not so much to "interpret" (because we know that there's no interpretation going on - it's just the manifest word of Allah)... not so much to interpret as to discover new passages justifying exploitation of the power that a deity from beyond has seen fit to grant them. This, incidentally, is another reason why Cole's darling pretensions toward 'debunking the Pope' are evidence of either a dishonest or weak mind - the net amount of power that Mohammed had when the suras banning or mandated coerced conversions isn't at issue. The relative amount of power across those periods is obviously the issue.

Hitch has obvious overreached by describing Mohammed's time in Medina as one of "relatively high confidence" - again, there's no way we'll stake personal credibility or be at all defensive about these issues, but certainly we can imagine arguments as to why Mohammed's confidence was relatively low when he was holed up in Medina compared to when he had successfully conquered Arabia. But that's beside the point. Come home Hitch... please?

As for Cole - this is argumentative dishonesty masquerading as argumentative arrogance (or is it the other way around). We don't know if he's right or wrong - but we do know that there's no way that he's as right as he either thinks he is or that sounds like. For him to be mocking the leader of world Catholicism - not just mocking, but belittling - there had better be absolutely, positively, demonstrably no debate about what Cole is claiming. And we know that there's debate about his views of Islam, because he's committed to the claim that 'jihad' is peaceful and Islam forbids forced conversions - and we know of not a few prominent Muslims scholars who disagree with him on both those counts.

Previous: They Called Europe 'Christendom' For a Reason --- The Imbecility of Interfaith Dialogue --- Juan Cole As a Study In Pro-Jihadist Faux Liberal Sophistication --- Confused? We'll Translate: He Believes in God --- So Catholic That He Actually Thinks Catholicism Is True --- On How to Really Believe (Without Blowing Things Up)

It's early, but there's no way that this is going to get topped. Someone searching from Islamabad, Pakistan on Google's Pakistan flavor stumbled onto a MR post from two years ago about how touching women makes you unclean even if you're a doctor. His search terms, you ask? watching nude pictures invalidates wudu islam. Awww... the poor boy wanted to know if looking at naughty pictures means Allah won't like him anymore.

Just got off the phone of the most recent OneJerusalem.org conference call, this time with Catholic League President William Donohue. The discussion, obviously, was about militant Islam's reaction to the Pope's remarks. Also in on the call were Pamela of Atlas Shrugs, Jerry Gordon of IsraPundit (who used the word kerfuffle not once but twice), and someone from St. Louis who we didn't catch and that you can be sure that Pamela did. Allen Roth, emcee, reminds us to remind you that as always audio will be up shortly. If you listen very closely you can hear us not at all understand how our new Treo headset works.

First reaction: why is this guy being hosted by OneJerusalem:

And we remember thinking: wow, this guy is going look really stupid if Mel Gibson ever gives definitive proof that he's an anti-Semite by doing something like driving drunk down PCH, sexually harassing a female officer, and then blaming all the world's wars on Jews (or at least we thought something along those lines - we can't remember the exact phrasing). Also we were a little confused about the Jews supporting abortions thing, because for the bread you need healthy babies. But we figured, hey, they're secular, so they probably just don't know any better.

So why is Dr. Donahue on with One Jerusalem?

We can think of a couple of reasons:

(1) Things are really bad out there right now. Like really bad. Two or three years ago it seemed like things could only get so bad - few were seriously entertaining that possibility that the jihadists might be able to make good on their threats to overrun the West. And now, five years out of 9/11, it looks like it might actually happen. Iran called on Muslims to "protest" against the Pope (and we know what "protest" means) and nobody really seems to care. Major swaths of the Western press are writing the dumbest things imaginable by man or beast. Even if the worst characterizations about this guy was true, he'd still be valuable to talk to. Civilized people are simply going to have to get used to having to run shoulders with allies that they don't totally agree with. Chris Hitchens, line 1.

(2) He doesn't seem like all that bad a guy. Maybe a little too careless in tone and passion when talking about homosexuals, but - and here's what the advocates of moral equivalence just can't get around - he still says stuff like 'abortion bombers are criminals who should be jailed' and 'homosexuals shouldn't be persecuted'. And we don't care if he means it or not (although we think he does, bracketing that we have a significantly lower threshold for what counts as 'persecution' than he does) - the point that we can't lose sight of, the point that is absolutely crucial, is that we live in a society and that he is an active member of a polity where you have to at least pretend to believe those things to get through the door of public discourse. That's what matters and what has to be fought over - that there are public spaces in a good civil society where there are unspoken norms about what you can and can't say that decent people enforce and obey. More speech is an excellent solution in theory, but in lived reality societies are governed not just by laws but by norms. Grant everything evil you've ever heard about William Donahue, and it's still the case that in his democracy you have to publically oppose bigotry. In Ahmadinejad's democracy, you get to say Jews and Christians are pigs and apes.

Donahue said repeatedly that what he's fighting for are "Western values" and "tolerance". Done and done.

Also, he seems quite smart, which means that all things being equal he gets a pass. The sense that he has for approaching other religions according to the 'wiggle room' they give to interpretation is much more sophisticated than it sounds and is a very pat way of putting a difficult concept. His immediate instinct to examine the problems of theological systems by whether they try to create a utopia on Earth shows a solid grasp of what was really at stake in the Pope's speech. He is distrustful of interreligious dialogue for the right reasons, and he frames the problem as "dialogue has to be a means to an end" rather than an end in itself. In a way this is question begging - the problem isn't that multiculturalists think it's an end, it's that their assumptions about how it is a means to peace are incoherent. But the "means / end" thing does end up conveying exactly the impression about what's wrong (it becomes a de facto end).

This call actually ended up being a reason for optimism. He puts his trust in this Pope's intelligence, awareness of history, and commitment to protecting Christianity against Islam - three things that are certainly all reasons for confidence. This is becoming a litmus test for someone serious - does he get it? He insists - insists vehemently - that this Pope does get it, that he will not apologize, and that he will not crumble in the face of jihadist threats. And that, at least, is something to take comfort in.

As always, our sincere thanks to David, Allen, and One Jerusalem for a fantastic opportunity.

More evidence that the police should be investigating where Christopher Hitchens is. They can start by tracking down who's been publishing articles in his name. This is absurd:

(1) The real Christopher Hitchens rarely makes bad arguments. We refer you to this morning's chapter length exploration of bad arguments this Christopher Hitchens made.

(2) We know you're not supposed to write posts this way, but we also know your time is valuable. So we'll put our unbeatable proof of foul play right here. Quote unquote:

Describing 'solidarity with the Palestine' as an attempt to "ventriloquize Muslim grievances"? No chance. We could win this case in court. Who are you, and what have you done with Hitch?

(3) This Christopher Hitchens makes the 'the Crusades prove that Catholics are violent too' argument to flatten distinctions between contemporary Islam and contemporary Christianity. We have never seen anyone with an IQ over 90 make that argument. The real Christopher Hitchens has an IQ well over 90. QED.

(4) This Christopher Hitchens cribs from Juan Cole - and they're both wrong (see post below). The real Christopher Hitchens finds Juan Cole distaste, and he would need significant warrants for agreeing with him. At a minimum, Cole would have to be right in content and in tone before the real Hitchens would deign to associate himself with the caution-impaired professor.

(5) The real Christopher Hitchens has an abiding respect for great literature, and would never insult authors like CS Lewis by implying that experiencing the presence of the divine - even in a vision - is comparable to claiming that you went "into a trance and took dictation from an archangel". Because there's a difference that makes a significant difference on levels of judgment and theology (aesthetic vs. epistemic, etc) that the real Christopher Hitchens would find obvious.

(7) This Christopher Hitchens opens with an embarrassingly weird cheap shot:

No man of letters would voluntarily chose to defend the absurd proposition that the Bishop of Rome has no claim to being a privileged representative of the West. From "Rome" we go to the "Holy Roman Empire" and from there to the spread of Catholicism and papal control over much of Europe. Eventually this structure yields monarchies that begin to form the contours of the West - all in the shadow, under the instruction, and with blessing of Rome. Also, the real Christopher Hitchens would never suggest that the existence of popes in the East would undermine the Bishop of Rome's claim of leadership in the West. Because the real Christopher Hitchens can read a map.

(8) This Christopher Hitchens fails to comment in any way on how Muslims are being violent to protest being accused of being violent. The real Christopher Hitchens would never pass up the chance to just pour acid on that irony, coining some staggeringly sublime understatement that we could steal and reuse two weeks from now.

MR's SERIES ON THE ANTI-PAPAL RIOTS
MR published a series of over 40 posts about Pope Benedict XVI's speech and the ensuing anti-Papal riots. These posts included an extensive unpacking of the speech itself, as well as criticism of academic and media reactions to the controversy. 39 of those posts are categorized and indexed here.


ORIGINAL POST


Four paragraphs into his article on the Pope, we were still hoping that Christopher Hitchens would suddenly announce that the whole thing was a parody and that of course there's a historical precedent for the Vatican leading Europe against political Islam. It's depressing enough that he seems to have concluded that the most worthy breech to those himself into is on the front lines against the only man doing anything significant to shake the somnambulist Europeans. And you'd think that his careless and frankly awful arguments would make this the most uncomfortable article ever, given the almost universal respect with which his mind is held on the anti-jihadist right. But no. The worst thing about his attack was that it was scarred throughout by a combination of style and tactics that we have never - never - seen Christopher Hitchens use. There are weird stylistic quirks, shady quotations, and unusual fragments. But the most inexplicable thing is the total and complete abandonment of circumspection and caution in his treatment of the Pope's statements - not Benedict XVI's statements about Islam. His statements about Catholicism. Christopher Hitchens - one of the most intellectual men on the planet - thought that it was defensible and appropriate to spend just under a full paragraph flatly contradicting the Pope's expressed views on Catholic dogma. Both the conceit of the effort and the conceit of manner are just outright staggering. But there's a silver lining, and that is that they're useful as a foil for explaining Benedict's views on Catholicism (or at least some of the ones at issue in this controversy). What makes Hitchens so appropriate? Well, he was so incredibly arrogant that he not only took on the Pope's views on Catholicism, but he tried to reverse the Pope using the Pope's own words. So the Pope says "X means Catholicism is A" and Hitchens says "X means Catholicism is not-A". It's disrespect piled on conceit, but at least it's useful. Keep in mind the most basic positions. Benedict: there is an insurmountable theological gap between Catholicism and Islam. Hitchens: there is no relevant theological gap between Catholicism and Islam.

Not so far back, Hitchens vowed to his readers as part of an article that he would never put ellipses in a quote if the editing meant that the quote's context was changed. Presumably, the spirit of this vow also extends to any editing of sentences that causes direct quotes to be taken out of context. That's one of the things that's so depressing about going through this article - the entire argument is built on quotes that are exactly backwards, and they're exactly backwards because the front of back of them have been chopped off. The innocent explanation (or the naive explanation) is that he genuinely didn't get why those parts of the sentences mattered to the context, but we're skeptical. He was rushed is really all we can think about.

Again, remember what's basically at stake. The Pope is trying to demonstrate that Christianity and Islam have fundamentally different approaches to understanding God, and toward that end he makes two distinctions (Islam vs. Catholicism):

(a) self-evident understandings of Scripture vs. interpreted understandings of Scripture

(b) literal readings of Scripture vs. potentially symbolic readings of Scripture

Hitchens in turn has to undermine the Pope's demonstration, and so he has to attack both of these distinctions. Again, the way he does it is by trying to take the very words that the Pope uses to make his argument and turn them against him - in the interest of demonstrating the snarky point that "if [Benedict] had chanced to be born [Muslim, he]... could have become a perfectly orthodox Muslim". Also keep in mind that this is about styles of thought more than it is about actual dogma - Hitchens's point is that while Benedict doesn't believe in Islamic dogma, the way he thinks is perfectly compatible with it. We think that this line of reasoning is incorrect and we'll get to why (at length, unfortunately, a little below).
But at least the suggestion itself - that Benedict's distinctions between Catholicism and Islam aren't as robust as he thinks - isn't in any way untoward. The same can't be said for the totally baffling lack of caution in Hitchens's inappropriate 'I guess I put him in his place'-style gloating: "the familiar problem is that, if you question another religion's 'revelation' and dogma too closely, you invite a tu quoque in respect of your own... which is just what has happened in the present case". Here's what's baffling: there is no way that Hitchens can possibly think that he can win his little game of gotcha with the Pope. There is no way that he thinks that in less than a paragraph, he'll be able to prove that the Bishop of Rome does not actually believe that the Bible is interpreted (i.e. he can't think that he'll demonstrate that the Pope fell into a Protestant heresy and just didn't notice). Keep in mind that this Pope also happens to be one of the greatest theologians in the last half a century - and that just before he was Pope it was his job to stamp out heresy. There's just no way that Hitchens can think that he can make his argument credible, let alone true. So what's he doing flirting with insufferability by crowing about a sound thrashing that he knows he didn't deliver? Is Nasrallah editing Slate columns for style now? It's all just weird and worrisome.

We'll deal with the first distinction first: self-evident readings of Scripture vs. interpreted readings of Scripture. This is the debate that the Pope refers to as sola scriptura, which is more or less that the Bible is not only literal truth (we get to that below), but that it is literal truth that reveals itself as literal truth pretty straightforwardly (this is also the Catholic vs. Protestant divide). The Catholic view is that the Bible only makes sense when you read it against a ton of previous interpretations, scholarships, things we already know, rational deductions, etc. Everything turns out the dual meaning of the word 'logos' in Greek - it means 'word' and 'Reason'. Benedict says that this proves that at the very birth Catholicism, the word of God in the Bible was not just self-evident, but required humans to use Reason to figure it out and interpret it. Hitchens says that the use of logos requires no such thing, but before he even gets to that he plays a little gotcha with the Pope's discussion of the use of logos in John. Two quotes from Hitchens are to the point here. In the first he mangles Benedict's words to make them sound like the opposite of what Benedict said and in the second he makes an irrelevant argument that betrays either deliberate misdirection or fundamental misunderstanding:

... and ...

This is poorly argued and frankly it's a little unseemly. This first quote only gets close to what Hitchens wants it to say because he's gone ahead cropped off the last half of the sentence - the exact part that helps to distinguish logos in its various meanings. The full context for the first Benedict quote under discussion (the "final word" quote) is:

It's obvious that Hitchens is being at a minimum a little deceitful here. Benedict does not mean that John set in stone the nature of what God is - he means exactly and precisely and entirely the opposite. The Pope says that John intentionally (not "by chance") chose a single word (logos) to highlight the dual importance of the text of the Bible (logos as word) and the use of rationality to continually interpret and reinterpret that text (logos as reason). It's not that he gave the "final word" on any one interpretation of God - it's that he gave the "final word" about the fact that you have to keep going back to the Bible again and again to interpret and reinterpret - that there is no "final word" in the sense of one meaning!

At best for Hitchens, all that he's guilty of is humorlessness: 'logos is the final word' is a bit of pun ('word is the final word'), but it's a pun that goes to the heart of what Benedict is trying to convey. 'Logos is the final word' has the pun part, but substituting the other meaning of logos demonstrates exactly the dynamic that's at issue: 'reason is the final word' means there is no final word in this world. And then abstracting, you get a tantalizing him at Benedict's suggestion for a Catholic model of communication: 'word is the final reason'. Benedict was having a little fun and showing off a little at the same time, and Hitchens not only churlishly took him to task on the dogmatic significance of his words, but he did so in a slightly unsavory way.

The second Benedict quote (the "logos... in the Bible" quote) isn't really out of context as much as it's just a really bad argument - but bad in a way that implies that Hitchens is just not taking this argument seriously. Hitchens goes after Benedict in a rather ugly way: "he pretends that the word logos can mean either 'the word' or 'reason', which it can in Greek but never does in the Bible" ("pretends" still not as bad as Cole saying that the Pope "imagines"... but still). Here's what's so very frustrating about this attack - it's the second time where Hitchens is not only rhetorically over the top, but it's the second time in which that excess seems to be a mechanism for covering up the weakness of his article.

There is a very precise way to characterize Hitchens's accusation that the Pope is falsely characterizing logos as both 'word' and 'reason' in the Bible: it is an out and out straw argument. That is definitely and demonstrably not the point that the Pontiff is resting on. It could be somewhere in the presentation, who knows, but certainly it's not central to either the Pope's argument or his speech. The Pope could not be more explicit on how the idea of logos as word and the idea of logos of reason work together - and it's not because both meanings are found "in the Bible." It's just not. That's not the argument. The argument (again, this comes from the section that Hitchens excised) is that in logos John finds "the encounter between the biblical message and Greek thought". Not that both meanings - word/heavenly truth and reason - are found in the Bible. But because one is the kind of logos that is in the Bible (word/heavenly truth) and the other is a cultural, extra-biblical way of reading the bible. This isn't even hard to prove: the Pope tells you exactly why he thinks each meaning is significant. He's explicit: one is the "biblical message" and the other is "Greek thought". It's the Greek way of thinking that helps to understand the biblical message - that that's why logos is the "final word", because it sets the terms of all future debates by telling Catholics how to approach the Bible in the most general sense.

But it gets worse. Now that we kind of know how rationality works to help understand Catholic scripture, let's go back to Hitchens's blanket assertion that 'logos' never means 'reason' in the Bible - because that debate is not closed, and the fact that Hitchens thinks that it is exposes another fundamental problem in his attack on the Pope. Again, we can be precise: this is begging the question. Whether logos means 'reason' in the Bible depends, well, how you approach the Bible. Here's why it's question-begging: the Catholic viewpoint is that (a) you apply reason to the Bible in order to discover the nature of God and (b) what you discover is that God's nature is reason [there's also (c), which is that the reason you discover reason by using reason is because God is reason, but that's a little much and we don't need to discuss that - and real quickly, we should probably also mention in case we get taken to task that 'reason' and 'rationality' are not being used in any rigorous sense, just more as the crudely empiricist/neo-Platonist sensibility that Benedict talked about]. But one more time: Catholics use reason to discover God's nature, and what they discover is God's nature is reason - the application of Catholic exegesis reads 'logos' a different way than Hitchens does. The meaning of the Bible, according to this understanding, moves with how you interpret it. If you read the Bible literally and transcendentally, then yes, Hitchens is right and logos means only heavenly truth But if you read the Bible rationally and metaphorically, then no, Hitchens is wrong and logos not only means both word and rationality but it also means word as rationality and rationality through word and all kinds of fascinating things. The point is that you can argue that Catholics are wrong to interpret the Bible non-literally - but you can't simply assert a meaning of a Biblical passage and pretend that there is no other justification for any other way to read it. This is undergraduate stuff - what's wrong with Chris Hitchens?

Again, to assert that Pope Benedict XVI thinks that John is the "final word" on the nature of God is to assert that the Bishop of Rome is too stupid to know that he's a heretic. To do it by cutting out the part of the sentence that would be used to explain why he's not a heretic is unsporting at best. Then, the second quote not only begs the question of whether interpreting the Bible literally or figuratively is appropriate, but it also makes it pretty hard to even recognize that what's at stake is how to interpret the Bible. This is not the way a public intellectual is supposed to comport himself.

Now for the second distinction (for any of you still following along at home). That distinction, remember, is between a literal interpretation of Scripture(Islam) vs. a potentially symbolic interpretation of Scripture (Catholicism). This one is actually pretty easy to untangle, although it's really hard to avoid thinking that it was a pretty slimy move. At issue is Hitchens claiming that Catholics are just as superstitious (and irrational) as Muslims because they literally believe 'preposterous legends':

But the full context for the St. Paul passage in the Pope's remarks makes this comparison absurd:

In other words, Hitchens says 'Catholics interpret preposterous legends as true just like Muslims' - and then his evidence is an example where the Pope interpreted the legend... symbolically (!!) The Pope very, very explicitly reads the story of Paul as an metaphor for how the biblical stories of the Jews (logos as word) had to be reread through the lens of Greek rationality (logos as reason) to make sense of Christ's revelations (logos):

Benedict has Paul (representing biblical faith) being called to realize the meaning of his mission in Macedonia (representing the Greek way of thinking). There is nothing about the Ride to Damascus that is not metaphorical in this speech, but Hitchens nonetheless implies the exact opposite. In contrast to the Catholic interpretation, the Muslim interpretation of Allah's dictation is of course literal - denying its plausibility is a blasphemy punishable by death. And let's be honest, Benedict probably does really believe that St. Paul actually had a vision on the road to Damascus. But (a) that evidence is certainly not in the speech that Hitchens suggest it's in and (b) that doesn't mean what Hitchens is suggesting - that the Pope believes that the Bible is meant to be taken literally. Again, we think that we would have heard something if the Pope was engaged in open heresy.

And that, ultimately, that's one of the things that's really bothersome. Was Chris Hitchens going to prove that Pope Benedict XVI had become a Protestant without knowing it? No. Was he going to be able to be so over the top that no one would notice? Probably not, although he gets close. Was Hitchens under a different impression for either of these two questions? Doubtful - but that didn't stop him from lacing every use of "Ratzinger" with as much disrespect as he could (he actually used the same trick for years by referring to Prime Minster Sharon as Gen. Sharon).

This is a disaster - this jihadist outburst may be one of the last dramatic chances that the West has to confront militant Islam before the world spirals totally out of control. And now one of the most eloquent defenders of civilization is engaging in sophomoric argumentation tricks instead of paying attention. The only thing that we can think of is that trying to adhere to the anti-desist insistence that 'it's not any particular kind of religion, it's religion in general' is so traumatic and so damaging to sound reasoning that it literally burns away parts of the brain just to make a space for itself. We're still holding out hope that tomorrow we'll wake up and Hitchens will have posted an article crowing that he's written a better anti-Benedict article than anyone else could have, and that it was still an absurdly bad article.

Hitch. Listen: we know you don't think that religion is a very good thing - and we recognize the irony of what we're about to say – but this is no time to stand on principle. Not to try to revive rhetoric that's become self-caricaturing, but you're either on the side of the people who want to look up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or you're not doing anything to stop the people who want to blow it up. There have been far more odious strategic alliances made under the compulsion of necessity than siding with and defending a bookish, withdrawn, and intellectual Bishop in Rome. The luxury of wishing a pox on everyone's house has long since been something that the West simply can't afford for you to indulge in. All's forgiven. Isn't about time you came home?

Previous: They Called Europe 'Christendom' For a Reason --- The Imbecility of Interfaith Dialogue --- Juan Cole As a Study In Pro-Jihadist Faux Liberal Sophistication --- Confused? We'll Translate: He Believes in God --- So Catholic That He Actually Thinks Catholicism Is True --- On How to Really Believe (Without Blowing Things Up)

Full court press at the Guardian this morning. This is like an overflowing cornucopia of self-caricaturing, terrorist-appeasing, incoherent, root causes stupidity. It's like the Guardian is doing a drill today, where everybody is practicing what it will be like when Sharia law is finally imposed. Except women are still writing, so they can't be that serious about it. Also, in an earlier article they were allowed to admit that the Holocaust happened - can somebody say 'death by hanging for being a Zionist spy'? It's nice to see that the Guardian management is always thinking about the day after the day after. So we've got two wonderful articles for you, but really it's a giant waste of time because there's no way that anybody is going to vote for the first one. The second one - Karen Anderson - is going to win every prize for dumbest terrorist appeasing garbage for like the next year. It's going to be like Jeopardy, where we'll have to retire her after a while. And the depressing thing? We linked to the first article earlier this morning and implied that it was the best example of terrorist appeasing incoherence and doublethink that anyone would ever read. So that lasted like 2 minutes.

Do you think this article...

... is better because it says at that top that there is no basis in current events (none (!!)) for believing that the Islamic street is more violent than, say, the Quaker street - but then at the bottom it says not to offend Muslims because they'll kill you? Or do you think that the top prize goes to Karen Anderson who - by coincidence - works for the Guardian and came up with the exact same editorial spin as the Guardian:

Go back and read that again. Seriously. The reason that they shot a nun four times is because we haven't stopped victimizing them in our heads, ever since... the CRUSADES!! We've always thought that the Palestinians were a little unreasonable for still being pissed off about their refugee status five generations out. But these people are burning churches because Christians are projecting disquiet on them and they're a little jumpy because they were victims of the CRUSADES!! Best. Root. Cause. Ever.
Seriously, how does this stuff get printed? Not editorially. Like physically. The universe has laws. It has regularity. It even, according to some philosophers, has a certain telos tending toward sensibility. How does this happen? How does an adult of sufficient physical dexterity and mental acumen to type out the sounds her head... how does this happen? Shouldn't the brain shut down as a self-defense mechanism long before it ever gets to this point? OK, this is all we've got left for you. It's 4:46am, and we've pushed off drinking during the last 15 minutes to prove to ourselves that it's we who control the alcohol, and not the other way around.

Well, that settles that then. Islam and Christianity have the exact same problems with women, because 1,000 years ago the Christians were not providing women with respect (what does that even mean?) and today Muslims kill women for touching men. You know what, screw the sarcasm. This is obscene.

If you tried to treat a farm animal in Catholic Europe the way that women in the Muslim world are treated every single day, you would get hauled up before a court of some kind and tried. And during that trial, you would still get a more impartial and fair hearing than a 13 year old Pakistani girl who was married off at 10 to her 45 year old half-uncle and now is about to be stoned for adultery because she just got raped by her 18 year old cousin. But at least we've got Karen Anderson, moralist extraordinaire, explaining to us that the little girl needs to have rocks thrown at her head because "the habit" of Christians "projecting subterranean disquiet" on to poor and innocent Muslims "has persisted" since the Crusades. It's not much help, since this hypothetical little girl is being stoned to death for getting raped - but hey, at least we know that it's our fault and that it has nothing to do with anything in Islam.

It's like they just say things that sound liberal, and they assume that they don't have to prove them because everyone will be too scared to bust the open secret and admit that maybe - just maybe - one of the three monotheistic religions in the world has been a little bit of a grumpy gus lately:

Gosh, we don't know you terrorist appeasing sacks of Guardian... paper scraps. Sacks of paper scraps.

Seriously, we don't know. Muslim minorities in Catholic countries - they have to be really on edge this week. Especially in all the countries outside the Philippines where there might be organized attacks. Like. Uh. Well, you know, all those rampantly Islamophobic countries, with their lunatic Christian governments that persecute Muslims, like... whatever, stop asking questions. The world persecutes Muslims. They only riot when they're persecuted by the world and they're rioting now. QED.

Other fun stuff about this paragraph:

(1) It's in the same article that has the sentence "It was a gratuitous reawakening of the most entrenched and self-serving of western prejudices - that Muslims have a unique proclivity to violence, a claim that has no basis in history or in current world events (a fact that still eludes too many westerners)." Let's see if we can come up with a basis. In countries where Christians are the minorities, nuns are getting murdered and Churchs are getting bombed. In countries where Muslims are the minorities, Muslims are being made to feel "uncomfortable" Check us on this because maybe the mental anguish is clouding our ability to reason, but isn't that, you know, kind of basis for suspecting a proclivity. It doesn't have to be a good basis - remember, the Guardian says NONE.

(2) Is it just too much to point out that they're blaming the Pope because temper-tantrum inclined Muslims shoot nuns? That's how far we've gone. The Guardian does not think that it is either analytically or socially or rhetorically problematic to belittle the Bishop of Rome - to refer to him "this man", to call him and his Church "bigots", and to talk about "papal stupidity" - because it's being done in the context of explaining why there is no basis (none (!!!)) for suspecting that contemporary Islam has proclivities towards violence. None!! They even make of you if you think so - it's a prejudice. If you think so, it's because the fact "elude" you.

Under Sharia the Guardian wouldn't have a web license, right? Why are we asking? Uhh... no reason.

Yeah, we've honestly got nothing:

There is no basis - none (!!) - in history or curent world events (!!!!!) for believing that Muslims have a unique proclivity to violence. Except that for all of them "reverence to the Prophet is a non-negotiable" - "passionate deveotion and commitment" - that if you cross they just might have to kill you. ARE THESE PEOPLE INSANE? HAVE THEY TOTALLY LOST WHAT LITTLE OF THEIR MINDS THEY EVER HAD? THOSE TWO SENTENCES MEAN THE OPPOSITE OF EACH OTHER.

So in order to really demonize Benedict, the Guardian tries to rope in the Jews:

We remember that and we thought it was overblown, but what-evs. At first, this looks just like any old moral equivocation or distinction-denying flattening: "The current anger of Muslims is comparable to the anger and disappointment felt by Jew". But think about this for a second - if the Jews felt exactly as angry as the Muslims feel, then... yeah, we won't insult you by finishing the thought. You see the obvious conclusion. We will lay out the alternatives two of three steps down the line, as an exercise if nothing else. One of the following must be true:

(1) Jews didn't riot and Muslims did because Muslims are actually angrier right now than the Jews were. In which case, the Guardian would once again have been caught making a glib but false comparison between Muslims and another group in an effort to deny that there's anything going on in Europe that anybody needs to worry about

(2) Jews didn't riot and Muslims did because Muslims tend to be more violent at the same level of anger. This is what you've got if you conclude that the Guardian isn't lying to you.

So according to the Guardian, either they're lying to you or Muslims tend to be more violent when provoked than other religious groups. Now obviously, the Guardian will say that this is a misprint and Muslims are actually angrier (with whatever cause they make up) than Jews, which is why they just seem more violent. And the Guardian will totally fail to admit that the reason that they got in trouble in the first place is because they are so automatically and totally used to just using the moral equivalence template that they didn't realize that this time it pretty much admitted that Muslims are the most on-edge people on the planet.

Hey, the last Pope got along with Muslims. Why can't you?

Yes, that was an AWESOME visit. The Pope really did a fantastic job bringing together people of all faiths under one roof during his Syria 2001 visit. It's not that these sanctimonious liberal failures have short memories that bothers us. They don't have short memories. They have selective memories. See, some people think that the reason journalists like the ones who work at the Guardian deny a pattern of terrorism is because they're appeasers. That's so unfair. The reason that they deny that there's a pattern of terrorism is because they're so ideologically retarded that they block out any instance of Arab or Muslim lunacy. Like the one on the Pope's trip to Syria:

That's what the world hasn't had enough of lately. Muslims and Catholics coming together over Turkish coffee and long, sometimes rambling, sometimes chatty, occasionally serious discussions of how the Jews are Christkillers. It's a recipe for world peace! Sign us up for two.

Sometimes, the failure to defer to one's betters is the result of being in a situation where social norms are actually working in some way to enforce hierarchies - say race, gender, class. So you need to be inappropriate, because propriety itself is what's at stake. Other times, it's just a sign that you were raised in an overly permissive society where your undoubtedly overweight and illgroomed British mother doted on you until you thought that you were the bestest and most cleverest socialist in all of Liverpool. opening paragraph:

"This man". "This man"?!?! You mean His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI, Bishop of Rome and Servant Among Servants, charged with the spiritual welfare of one billion people? "This man." You know who the Guadian would never dare to refer to like this? Even the most insignificant London street Muslim preacher who has two or more followers. No, to them the Guardian show respect.

More disrespect for the Pope:

Internationalist liberals who think that they can solve the world's social problems through interfaith dialogue are lecturing a genius for being too 'clever'. How do you untangle that? Where do you begin? The irony of not knowing that the basis for their criticism relies on their own kind of arrogance, and arrogance which unlike the Pope's isn't backed by several book-length treatises? Or anything? Do you go after the general idea that being clever is bad because people who aren't clever beat you with their fists, like back in the orphanage with Pip and John from the Guardian spent their childhood (yes, we know... the childhood raising things are just general insults though... they don't have to be consistent). Remember: don't make the bully angry. We don't think so. Audiences have short attention spans, and you have to go for the jugular: if one more terrorist appeasing pit of a hole of a British newsroom talks about the triumphalism of Catholicism or Judaism while they literally have jihadists declaring the ascendancy of the caliphate on their doorstep... Yeah, we actually don't have the ability to make a threat. Maybe if we had some checkered headwear we'd be intimidating.

Anyway, we're done with this piece of work. We leave you with a parting thought. These guys are douchebags:

It's almost a pity that, should the time ever come when the Guardian loses its ability to publish, many of the people that they attack daily will not be there to see it because they will have died trying to protect them.

Why yes, it is particularly cloudy outside. How'd you guess?

There was a time on this blog when we didn't say things like "douchebag" or "retard" because we still believed that in a civilized society those seeking to contribute to deliberation ought to, even in the worst situations, write forcefully but always with aplomb. Those times were really nice, and everyone talked about how funny it was to photoshop pictures heads of frogs on cats. Nowadays, it's wall to wall with these kinds of retards:

We are happy to see that journalists - who, for those of you keeping score at home, are publishing articles like 'we just don't know if the Pope's apology will soothe the lunatics' - have stopped accusing multilingual 180 IQ theology scholars of being naive and sheltered. Doesn't mean that we don't want to see the condescending little pricks from the NYT...

... and the BBC...

... hung up by their smugly superior fingernails until they can successfully recite the recitations of faith of Judaism, Catholicism, and Islam in at least two different languages each. Because you know that Benedict can at least do each of those prayers in one language, and they're smarter and more cosmopolitan than he is, right? So hang them by their fingernails, and six prayers, one in each language. Good luck with the Shema.

Now the new meme. Old meme: weak and stupid. New meme: cunning and evil. Children take note: there are only so many ways to demonize a human being or group of people, and the Jews have seen them all. This "weak/strong" thing is old hate. Wait until they accuse him of running the US government and seducing Arab women. THEN he'll be in trouble.

The Guardian is pissed off because Pope Benedict XVI - the spiritual leader of a billion people - suggested that he thinks that his religion is superior to Islam. This is like every single Friday in the Muslim world, where worshipers are told in sermons that they are superior to the Jews and Christians, who are pigs and apes (query: is it that the Jews are pigs and the Christians are apes... or the other way around... or are there pigs and apes who are Jews and pigs and apes who are Christians?... and is the ape thing like a Darwinian thing, or did they just guess?). Anyway, pigs and apes every Friday in the Muslim world, Pope says "in the 14th century, the Muslims sure did try to conquer Europe a lot", global riots. Guardian says that it's his fault because he's not trying to appease the barbarians at the gates. What does the Guardian suggest?

Wow. This is spectacularly stupid on just so many levels. This is really like a caricature of the European mindset applied to everything on the planet, from interpersonal relationships to religion to diplomacy on Iran: talk a lot to reduce hostility, when that doesn't work get other people and talk some more to reduce hostility, and when that doesn't work all that's left to do is to pray. Of course, they don't actually finish that cycle, since during the prayers you get slaughtered by incoming hordes who think that your prayers are actually reasons that they should hate you. But these things happen. Let's go from the end to the beginning:

(1) "pray for world peace" - the Guardian is upset because Benedict hasn't had prayers for world peace recently. We're not sure how to break it to them, but we're going to try to let them down lightly. Guys, the praying for world peace thing: it didn't work. That's why Benedict had to get up and make everyone understand that jihadist Muslims are coming for Europe. More prayer: unlikely to help.

(2) "dramatic gestures to rally world religious leaders" - and hasn't that paid off bloody dividends! Good think JPII got all those religious leaders on the same page, huh? If he hadn't, he might have missed the opportunity to set up some sort of stable and long-term understanding between religious leaders. You know, we made fun of JPII back then - but all his efforts have really paid off in the form of all those Muslim clerics coming forward in recent days to tell their followers that while anger is justified, violence against other religions never is. Seriously, let's have some more "dramatic gestures to rally world religious leaders" - see if you can get the African animists to come back too. They were exotic and really made everyone in the 1990s feel like it was a small world and soon we would all just get along.

(3) "significant departure from the previous pope's stance on interreligious dialogue" - you know, we appreciate that sometimes our diatribes get the better of us, and maybe the invective becomes a little much. We recognize that, and we're working through those issues. But there's a special spot in our "are you effing kidding" hearts for suggestions that interreligious dialogue can do anything to stop anybody from attacking anyone. It's not just the absolutely unbeatable argument that religious hatred occurs prior to belief rather than a result of belief - people believe that the Jews were responsible for 9/11 because they're anti-Semites; they're not anti-Semites because they believe that the Jews were responsible for 9/11. Seriously, it's an unanswerable argument - but you know, that's not even why interreligious dialogue is stupid. Interrelgious dialogue is stupid because WE ALREADY KNOW HOW THEY FEEL ABOUT THE POPE. For the love of everything that's holy, we don't need to know about their feelings any more. We've heard enough about their feelings. They want to kill him. Seriously, he said that in the 1300s Muslims were trying to conquer Europe and now they want to kill him. That's how they feel. We don't need dialogue to tell us that. This is so infuriating, seriously - in the Guardian's mind, what exactly would an interreligious dialogue between the Pope and a jihadist look like?

Pope Benedict XVI: Good morning, and thank you so much for coming. I've really been trying to take as much as much time out as possible from shepparding the BILLION people I'm responsible for so that I can meet the obligations for dialogue that the international press says I owe everyone, ever since my subtle and elegant discussion of Aristotle and Plato caused so much anger in the Muslim world. So let me begin today by saying that, as Juan Cole reminded me because he's a better Catholic theologian than I am, Vatican II compel me to open my heart to the rays of truth in your great religion. And I hope that maybe we can come together, as Isaac and Ishmael did, in the shadow of our mutual father Abraham.
Jihadist: Convert or die, kafir.

And that's it! We're done. There's no more to go after that. Seriously, we've just spent another two days reading these absurd articles that throw in recommendations for interreligious dialogue as if it was an unquestioned good. We have not read a single explanation - not a single one, we've been trying to pay attention - that goes so far as to even hint at an explanation for why it's good.

We, on the other hand, think it's bad. And we have a reason. Here's the argument:

(a) Muslim fanatics get angry and burn things when they realize that other religions think that Islam is not good or true.
(b) Any genuine interreligious dialogue will eventually come to the part of "what do you think about Mohammed". And Jews and Christians who are telling the truth have to go: "honestly, kind of misguided. Killed a bunch of folks, thought the voices in his head were God. Truth be told, not high on the Sunday school role model list"
(c) At this point, jihadists might - we don't say 'will', we say 'might' - might be inclined to obey recent exhortations to kill anyone who insults Mohammed on the spot. And that would be bad, because contrary to what you see on British TV murder in the name of the Prophet is not an ethically defensible way to go through life.

Now we're going to play the game of "how could a human being possibly be so stupid or confused that they could think that interfaith dialogue could possibly help anything"? Well, if you think that our little (a)-(b) narrative isn't true, you have to explain why it isn't true. Let's go step by step.

Step (a): Is it possible that Muslim fanatics don't get angry and burn things when they realize that other religions think that Islam is not good or true? Not outside of the newsrooms of the NYT, the LAT, the SF Chronicle, the BBC, Europe, the Middle East... this joke just got too depressing. Answer to question: no, it's not possible that they don't get angry and blow things up. Let's move on.

Step (c): We know it's out of order, just trust us. This step: is it possible that no jihadist will kill Jews and Christians specifically because of some other Jew or Christian's insult to Allah. No? OK, good talk.

Step (b): So now we're essentially back to the really bad question for the interreligious dialogue junkies: what do you actually want people to talk about? Is it possible that interrelgious dialogue will go on forever, without a Jew or Christian eventually having to point out that have to point out that, no, their religion does not allow them to believe that God was really talking to Mohammed? Well, obviously, no - because it's an article.. No. We're not explaining why Jews and Christians can't recognize that Mohammed was a prophet. If you don't know, go read USA Today and never leave your house again. So it doesn't look like interreligious dialogue solves anything.

But here things get interesting, because we (and you, and honestly even the people advocating this) don't think that they're really interested in people exchanging what they really believe. What they're interested in is having everybody just kind of giving lip service to multicultural bromides about how everyone has their own way of getting to truth (which is the opposite of REVEALED religion, but we're past 'logic' at this point). But here's the thing - even in the ideal circumstance where they have a fake religious dialogue and it goes on for a while, all that's doing is setting us up for more violence later. Why? Because eventually the jihadists are going to figure out that actually, we're lying to them and actually, Jews and Christians aren't so much on the "God talked to Mohammed thing". And how will they find out? Because someone who's actually Christian or Jewish will be talking one day, and they'll say - as if it's obvious, because it any normal society it'd be obvious - that of course they think that their religion is the true one. Could be someone as important as Benedict. Could be someone as unimportant as a newspaper cartoonist. Either way, we're off to the races. Or the streets. Or whereever fine effigies are sold and burned.

Time for a little vocabulary lesson. Pay close attention.
"Condemn", as in al Jazeera's report about "the shooting of an Italian missionary nun... just hours after a Somali cleric condemned the pope's speech". Condemn:

"Protest", as in Juan Cole's update that "there were protests by Palestinians in Gaza". Protest:

These are all sins of omission of course - they aren't actually using the words in this way, they're just not giving you enough details to let you know what's really going on. So neither of them are as bad as yesterday's NYT article, which actually did seem to define shooting a nun four times as a "protest".

* AK Sommer says they're throwing a tantrum. Meryl says to call them the Religion of Whiny Children (with weapons). Muqata says they behave like two year olds.

* Speaking of infantile schoolyard tactics, a little while ago the United States has suggested that maybe Iran shouldn't be allowed in the UN (mostly because Iran violated the condition for entry into the UN, which is that you don't threaten to wipe out other member states). In response - we couldn't make this up - Ahmadinejad said "I am rubber, you are glue" and is demanding that the US get thrown out of the United Nations instead. Finally, American conservatives and Islamist lunatics find common ground.

* Unlike Pamela, we do think that Red Hot Chili Peppers is torture. Her post is super cheerful. We especially call your attention to the part where Bernard Lewis commented last week that "I can't help thinking that if Churchill had to face the obstruction and opposition that Bush now faces, that we probably wouldn't have won the war". Bernard Lewis has never been wrong. About anything.

* Another pro-Israel blogger falls for the old Hamas/Fatah civil war tease. Not gonna happen. We don't care if the unity government is on hold - even they're not dumb enough to screw this up.

* With due respect to rightist Israeli bloggers - an Olmert-Peretz-Livini land-for-peace deal? Seriously, this is what we're worried about? And it's going to pass a referendum in what country? Massive terrorist enabling prisoner exchange maybe. And that's just maybe.

* We've been remiss in not linking to Israellycool's ongoing gallery of lazy clusterfucks that is the new UNIFIL force structure. And when they're not doing nothing, they're providing LGF with powerful visual metaphors.

* We don't want to jinx anything, but some non-Muslim religious leaders in some places are starting to wake up. Alas, the Jews are being punished for something. We think you really far right Jewish lunatics wrong - Sharon's illness wasn't punishment for disengagement. Chief Rabbi Amar is the punishment for disengagement. It's the extra eight days of rice in their diet - the carbs just go right to the brain.

* Soccer Dad: Firestorm. Seriously, someone give the Palestinians East Jerusalem. They + Christian Holy Places = Awesome.

* Ed Lasky with links and analysis about the daughter of Rep. William Delahunt (D-MA). The lobbyist-employed-by-the-Saudi-government daughter of Rep. William Delahunt (D-MA). If the Walt-Mearsheimer-Duke thesis about Israeli control was based on argument and rationality, this news would really be a problem for them.

* Vital Perspective is always a source for intriguing questions. Reading this article, for instance, made us ask ourselves "what does someone even do with 2,200 of Ammonium Nitrate"? Turns out, you make bombs out of it. Really big bombs, apparently.

* Nasrallah says he's coming out of hiding because he intends to join the global jihad against the Pope. No, just kidding. But wouldn't that have been awesome? He is coming out of his rathole though.

* Meryl compliments the AP on discovering Middle East Christians. The AP is a little late to the party though - in the West Bank towns that witnessed Jesus's ministry, the Christian presence has almost been eliminated. Last figures we saw - and we don't know how accurate they are, but they're probably quite close - is that Christians are down to 1.7% of the Palestinian population.

* George Allen - this guy makes John Kerry look like Ronald Reagan. Seriously, wtf?

If you think that we're using Jew-baiting in a negative way, you're obviously new around here. We were on the fence, but now we're 100 percent sure that he's doing it on purpose:

Number of riots being conducted by Jews: 0
Number of Catholic nuns shot by Jews: 0
Number of Churches burned by Jews: 0
Number of 'we're going to bomb the Vatican' threats issues by Jews: 0
Number of representatives recalled by Jewish states: 0
Number of expected Sabbath sermons advocating death to the Pope: 0

We dare you to suggest that he's not deliberately trying to make European Christianity wake up and realize that they've not only let the barbarians through the gates, but are paying them welfare. The man is a tactical genius, and we for one are willing to forgive him a little rhetorical playfulness and latitude in the cause of saving the entire effing world.

And if nothing else, seriously, we kind of deserve it... [this is where you say something like 'we're just kidding' -- ed... whatever - the Catholics have the guy who's trying to save civilization from savages and we've got some dense busybody of a Chief Rabbi sucking up to Qatari clerics - was this guy a Democrat in a past life or something?... you're still going to get in trouble for that 'we kind of deserve it' thing... eh - Benedict's a tactical genius and Amar is an idiot - done and done...]

You know how you were told in the last election to vote or die, but that wasn't true. This is just like that, except the stakes of this protest actually involve millions of lives. Iran's lunatic President Ahmadinejad is coming to New York get a tour and see Broadway before Al Qaeda nukes the whole thing a couple weeks afterwards. In response, a massive - massive - rally is being planned to point out that threatening to nuke Israel is not nice. Pamela has more details:

In the meantime, the Council on Foreign Relations has invited the Man Who Would Be Strangelove to hang out with them and a bunch of their closest friends. You ask: why would they do such a thing? Let us answer your question with another question: why would they say regarding the Pope that "reviews in Christendom were" poor, and then cite only one German newspaper and Juan Cole as proof? And why would they specifically quote the part of Juan Cole's post where he quotes from the Koran to imply that Muslims don't think that Christians and Jews are inferior? Answer: we just don't know.
Anyway, the good people at One Jerusalem have come to the conclusion that legitimizing Ahmadinejad by letting him make genocidal threats one month and meet with major civic, business, and political leaders the next month is a poor idea. They've helpfully given you background and contact information, and you should avail yourself of both to left CFR know that being nice to anti-Semitic Holocaust deniers is bad.

You've been hearing that all weekend that the Pope should tell the truth or clear up falsehoods about Islam (see, e.g. here).

Pope: Mohammed gave a "command to spread by the sword the faith he preached".

Ansar al-Sunnah, an Iraqi jihadist group: "You will only see our swords until you go back to God's true faith Islam".

Obviously.

Regular readers of this blog know that we're not "good" and proofreading. We sometimes push posts live before they're technically "spellchecked", let alone "proofread". And when we reread our posts or readers email us corrections, we fix our errors and repost. The same thing happens, it turns out, in the New York Times news room. Those interested in such things now have the opportunity to see how this morning's NYT article got made (our reactions to that article are here and here and here and here and here). We'll try to narrate what we think was going on as the article got processed:

Old headline: Pope Apologizes for Uproar Over His Remarks
New headline: In a Rare Step, Pope Expresses Personal Regret
Explanation: old headline didn't properly reflect NYT "Pope humiliated himself like we told him to" news frame

Old body: "His apology came amid much worry in the church about violence and any erosion of the status of the papacy as a neutral figure for peace among faiths."
New body: "His statement came amid much worry in the church about violence and any erosion of the status of the pope as a neutral figure for peace among faiths."
Explaination: we're not sure that the bloggers will let us call it an apology [triumphalist much -- ed it's been a long weekend... we're out of snark]

Old body: "Although Benedict’s predecessor, John Paul II, issued several apologies for the historical failings of the Roman Catholic Church, experts said it appeared to be the first time in recent memory that a pope had made such a direct, personal apology for his own."
New body: "Although Benedict’s predecessor, John Paul II, issued several apologies for the historical failings of the church, experts said it appeared to be the first time in recent memory that a pope had made such a direct statement of personal regret."
Explaination: see above. Also, grammar.

Old body: "Several Vatican officials said they had expressed concern before the speech was delivered that it might be negatively received by Muslims or be misconstrued by the news media as an attack on Islam."
New body: "Several Vatican officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the issue publicly, said they had expressed concern before the speech was delivered that it might be negatively received by Muslims or be misconstrued by the news media as an attack on Islam."
Explanation: editor asked "how are we going to explain why there are no sources on your quotes?"

Old body: "And for many conservatives here, fearful of terror attacks in the name of Islam and rising Muslim immigration in Europe, the remarks of the pope - despite his own denial that he meant to criticize - amounted to a rare public discussion of a delicate question: whether, in fact, Islam is at the moment especially prone to violence."
New body: "And for many conservatives here, fearful of terrorist attacks in the name of Islam and rising Muslim immigration in Europe, the remarks of the pope - despite his own denial that he meant to criticize - amounted to a rare public airing of a delicate concern many of them share: whether, in fact, Islam is at the moment especially prone to violence."
Explanation: "discussion" assumes that anyone felt safe enough to engage the question

Old body: "The officials said there was concern in the Vatican before he delivered it, both about the reaction among Muslims and how the news media would portray the passages relating to Islam."
New body: "The officials, speaking anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss this publicly, said that there was concern in the Vatican before he delivered it, both about the reaction among Muslims and how the news media would portray the passages relating to Islam. "

So let's review what we've learned: (1) the NYT really wants you to think that the Pope abased himself (2) the NYT will explain the notable absence of actual, confirmable sources for their blind quotes - blind quotes which just happen to confirm what the NYT believes - by telling you that the officials had to remain anonymous. Which wasn't a fact that they knew during the first draft of the story. All the news that's fit and so on.

MR's SERIES ON THE ANTI-PAPAL RIOTS
MR published a series of over 40 posts about Pope Benedict XVI's speech and the ensuing anti-Papal riots. These posts included an extensive unpacking of the speech itself, as well as criticism of academic and media reactions to the controversy. 39 of those posts are categorized and indexed here.


ORIGINAL POST


Probably nothing to worry about.

The last time that Europe was seriously threatened by the forces of Islam was September of 1683, when the Polish King Jan Sobieski responded to the banner of Pope Innocent XI and led a force to free Vienna from the Ottoman siege. Western leaders were divided both by geopolitics and intrigue, and the Pope had to get his hands dirty with internal Polish politics to secure the consent of the Polish nobility for Sobieski's march. But with Christendom in the balance, the Vatican used its considerable resources to rally opposition to Muslim invaders - because someone had to.

For centuries upon centuries, European history was the history of the Church. So when the Vatican seeks to protect Catholicism it seeks to protect the identity and legacy of modern Europe. That's why we were the exact opposite of 'concerned' by all the talk about the Pope's conservativism when he was appointed. The only way that Europe will be saved is if Europeans find their way into belief system other than the shallow, ironic postnationalism that passes for European identity. And since there's not really enough time for them to develop a new and relatively stable non-appeasing, non-multiculturalist identity, if they're going to get one it's going to have to come ready-made. Since we think religions are attractive precisely to the extent that they actually insist on the truth and rightness of their belief system, we were quite happy to see a Pontiff who would tell Europeans that they should be Catholic because Catholicism was truer than other religions - which is, of course, what the Pope is getting in trouble for. And which is, of course, why the condescending NYT statement that "a doctrinal conservative, his greatest fear appears to be the loss of a uniform Catholic identity, not exactly the best jumping-off point for tolerance or interfaith dialogue" is outrageously stupid on so many levels (not least of which is that 'uniform Catholic identity' is either redundant since collective identity is more or less uniform or contradictory in its implication that the Pope should let Catholics believe whatever they want without being rude and telling them that they're violating Catholic dogma).

There's something else that Western journalists are having trouble understanding, and the tone that the Times took with the Pope is both a symptom and a cause of it. Since the 1990s, the West has been used to having religious figures like the Dali Lama - globetrotting mystics who write self-help books about openness. There's a very, very long book to be written about how part of the problem with Western journalists is that they simply don't appreciate that jihadists are driven by religion because they're lost the ability to conceptualize religion as something that people genuinely believe. And that short-sightedness is true also in the case of the Pope: we don't think that many people appreciated that the serious underside to Pope John Paul II's quip that he couldn't retire because he had no one to hand his resignation to. A deeply devout Pope like the last one and this one genuinely believes that the Holy Ghost has designated him to shepherd souls in a sacred mission of redemption, and that his office is one endowed with divine mandate by the living Christ himself. And so Pope Benedict doesn't really consider Muslim sensibilities to be of that significant when the task he's faced with is to prevent Christian civilization itself - the bolt of the Kingdom of God into temporal existence - from crumbling and sinking.

That's one of the longer ways to get at why the Pope didn't apologize on Saturday. The other way is to approach this more viscerally:

The New York Times demanded that a man who is in every way the intellectual heir of Augustine and Aquinas apologize to that. If the West loses this war, it won't be because of a lack of bravery - it will be because decades of stupefying insistence that there's no difference between a scientist and a savage have killed its sense of taste and shame.

Previous: The Imbecility of Interfaith Dialogue --- Juan Cole As a Study In Pro-Jihadist Faux Liberal Sophistication --- Confused? We'll Translate: He Believes in God --- So Catholic That He Actually Thinks Catholicism Is True --- On How to Really Believe (Without Blowing Things Up)

MR's SERIES ON THE ANTI-PAPAL RIOTS
MR published a series of over 40 posts about Pope Benedict XVI's speech and the ensuing anti-Papal riots. These posts included an extensive unpacking of the speech itself, as well as criticism of academic and media reactions to the controversy. 39 of those posts are categorized and indexed here.


ORIGINAL POST


Maybe if we talk to radical Muslims, we'll be able to figure out how they really feel about Pope Benedict.

It's a common trick for people trying to sharpen our thoughts to put themselves in the place of argumentative opponents and try to think of what they might say. When we try to do this for advocates of interfaith dialogue - when we try to imagine an argument for why it might reduce global religious tension - we can think of literally not a single coherent argument. And so we looked around for the 20 or 30 readily available articles all advocating interfaith dialogue, but they just asserted that Benedict should embrace it. Even the vaunted and condescending New York Times didn't bother to actually explain why they think that the opportunity for interfaith dialogue is worth giving up the ghost on unifying the Catholic Church (must be a really good reason though!)

Where did this idea come from? More or less the same place that gave the international community the idea that Israel should negotiate with Palestinian terrorists as if the terrorists really wanted peace - so that the process that relied on two peace-seeking parties was supposed to work even without two peace-seeking parties. Because negotiations are good, because they lead to peace. Better not to think about how they only lead to peace when they're the result of two parties that already want peace - down that road lies the realization that Israel might have been forced to give away vast tracts of land and security for nothing.

And it's the same with interfaith dialogue. Who could object to dialogue, right? Dialogue causes understanding, understanding is good, etc etc. That you need two parties looking to actually gain from dialogue before it becomes productive is ignored - the focus is on the dialogue itself. Like any fetish that substitutes an object for the cause of the object, this kind of thinking can be reduced to simpering stupidity simply by describing it.

Let's assume that Benedict really believes that coherent Islamic doctrine requires a transcendent view of God or that 14th century Islam was somewhat less than a peacefully agrarian. No reason to assume that he doesn't - we know that the Catholic theology endorsed by Benedict heavily emphasizes the Kingdom of God as an interventions of the divine into time, rather than as a goal. We know that Benedict is deeply suspicious of religious ideologies that merge the secular and the sacred (anyone want to claim that there's not a 'political' element to Islam?) So what good would explaining that to more Muslims do? As it is, the Pope seems to have already reached a significant number of them. Please explain how having the Pope offer more proofs for God as logos is going to calm down the Arab street.

And let's assume that Muslims object to these points? Do you think anybody is under the impression that they're not? At this point, the only way they could be clearer involves trucks loaded with explosives.

There's a mistake that makes interfaith dialogue seem so good that it doesn't even have to be examined - and it is, of course, the idea that religions are just opinions that can be swapped like any other multicultural group therapy session. You have your view of art, we have our view of art, no reason for us to fight. But religions, of course, don't work that way. Rather than being opinions themselves (the result of sensibilities, thoughts, calculations, etc), they function as the sensibilities and prejudices that later on become opinions. They're just much deeper - they're not something like fashion sense, which every person has and every person can change. For truly devout people (or people who have literally nothing else to orient themselves other than religion), religion is not an opinion, it's the way of looking at the world that gives rise to opinions.

This also helps to explain why interfaith dialogue is at the very, very best a distraction when it comes to reducing anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is not the result of misunderstandings about Judaism - it is the set of prejudices and assumptions that lead to those misunderstandings. People don't hate Jews because they believe that Jews flew planes into the World Trade Center - they believe that Jews flew planes into the World Trade Center because they already hate Jews for deeper, more pathological reasons. Deep prejudice is not the result of false beliefs - and so disabusing people of those false beliefs will have no effect on the prejudice. That's why you observe bigots who jump from one explanation to another to another when you push them on their beliefs - in the crudest sense, anti-Semitism and racism are prejudices in search of justifications. And anti-Semites and racists will find those justifications, no matter how many specific ones you identify and refute.

Now you can obviously have intellectual discussions between theologians of different faiths. And lay people can exchange ideas with each other, just on the level learning new things. But in those cases, there's already a generosity and an intellectual curiosity going into the conversation, and the conversation isn't really about faith per se. If the Muslim on the street thinks that Catholicism is a perversion of Allah's will, demonstrating all the ways that Catholicism is different from Islam is not going to make him more kindly predisposed to Rome. And demonstrating all the ways that Catholicism is similar to Islam will in the best case just create a situation where illusion is used to mask over genuine disagreements, since at bottom Catholicism and Islam have different conceptions of God (you don't think so? Well one of the best theologians on the planet has just explained why he thinks that is the case, and since he gets to decide what Catholicism is you're at a structural disadvantage here)

So again - how could it possibly be the case that someone could seriously suggest that clarifying how much they disagree with each other could bring Catholics and Muslims closer together? It's certainly not possible if you think that they hold these views as matters of utmost faith - the presumption is something along the lines of 'they'll modify their views if they just sit down and talk'. And that, gentle readers, is what we have after fifty years of the most unsophisticated kind of feel good, relativist, multiculturalism. And meanwhile, that New York Times editorial continues to frustrate our abilities to fully plumb its depths of incoherent and stupidity. We've reread it a couple of times, and we really can't get over the line "a doctrinal conservative, his greatest fear appears to be the loss of a uniform Catholic identity, not exactly the best jumping-off point for tolerance or interfaith dialogue". It's just insane. No wonder these editors thought that the Fox reporters being forced to renounce their faith was the same as "unharmed".

Previous: Juan Cole As a Study In Pro-Jihadist Faux Liberal Sophistication --- Confused? We'll Translate: He Believes in God --- So Catholic That He Actually Thinks Catholicism Is True --- On How to Really Believe (Without Blowing Things Up)

* First, if you're trying to catch up on what jihad scholar Andrew Bostom is calling the most important address commemorating 9/11, we recommend starting here and just using the forward button at the top of the screen to go from post to post. Don't stop until you're done reading what top bloggers are calling "more voluminous and insightful analysis of this issue than most other sources combined". How awesome is that quote, by the way? You can't buy that kind of endorsement. At least not with anything but an endorsed cashier's check for not less than $250, sent by registered post.

* The Non-Aligned Movement thinks that Jerusalem must be given to the Palestinians. Because the Palestinians take very good care of Christian holy places.

* We'll take things we can't write because this is a family blog for $500, Alex.

* Andrew Bostom provides a shortened version of his book-length explanation for why people who say either (a) jihad is supposed to be peaceful or (b) the Koran bans forced conversion are either ignorant or lying. Juan Cole, they're playing your song.

* VDH on Oriana Fallaci and the decline of Europe. If you don't have time to read it all right now (a) make time (b) the takeaway is "go to the Louvre before the Mona Lisa gets burned because Allah hates immodest women who smile". More or less.

* The only people actually working to create any kind of centralized clearinghouse for pro-Israel blogs, GIYUS wants us to remind you that those kidnapped Israeli soldiers still haven't been returned. IRIS comes up with a slogan: Free IDF Captives - Not Terrorists. Heavy-handed, but to the point.

* Israel Matsav is following Syria's increasingly not eye-roll-inducing threats to go to war with Israel. They've been emboldened by Hezbollah. Carl says that you should keep in mind that Syria had the chance to get all of the Golan back six years ago. We say that they should keep in mind that (a) Hezbollah had better weapons than they do and (b) they can't hide Syrian infrastructure in Lebanese villages, and the IAF still exists.

* Meryl thinks that if you think that Hamas is moderating than you're an idiot. Our words, not hers.

* So this AP guy got caught hanging out with terrorists.

* Samizdata reports: Britain Channel 4 ran an expose on the a secret apocalyptic plot by religious extremists to end the world. A plot by American Christians. Only the UN can stop them.

* If you're really naive, you'll want to know how journalists can possibly imply that Somali Muslims were made violent by the Pope's statement when they those same Somali Muslims were shooting Christian converts weeks ago. A Christian convert who apparently needed to die because "he refused to join a crowd chanting Quran verses in honor of the lunar eclipse". Here's the thing about lunar eclipses: they kind of put Muslims on edge:

The Pope reads from a 14th century rhetorician that they consider offensive? They riot and attack churches. Newspapers publish cartoons that they consider offensive? They riot and attack churches. A lunar eclipse happens? They riot and attack churches. So here's how things stand: anybody who wants to appease Muslims and prevent them from attacking Christians needs to get the Pope to apologize, censor newspapers, and make sure that the Earth never ever passes in between the Sun and the moon.

Playing dumb so that the public can't figure out how extreme terrorists are is not nice:

Yeah, the way they came down on that is just laden with doubt. Totally impenetrable:

But really, this is the best part:

Let's see... is Islam "at the moment especially prone to violence". If only there was some sort of evidence we could point to in order to settle this debate. Maybe examining the ongoing conflicts in the world and seeing whether Muslims appear to be overrepresented. Or, alternatively, you could read a little further down in the article where he answers his own question by writing that "meanwhile, protest continued around the Muslim world". Usually, of course, "protests" isn't necessary the same thing as being "prone to violence" - but he's the one counting 'shooting a nun four times' as a "protest". All we're asking for is a little consistency.

Of course, we've got a series of (very nicely illustrated) posts going on about this the entire week, so this is something to be expected. And yet, we'd be remiss if we didn't point out the uniquely stupid liberalism implied in this statement. First of all, look at how they're crowing thatthe Pope abased himself in front of Muslims:

We're not sure that this is an accurate characterization of the Pope's sentiments (which we think were closer to "wow, you people are insane... I'm really sorry you're primitive" variety). But that's not the debate we want to have right now. Check out this line:

Here's the thing - the Pope isn't supposed to be a neutral figure. It's like political rhetoric has just been emptied of any content, and all adjectives are now just synonyms for "good" or "bad", and we all know that being absolutely "neutral" is good. So they needed an adjective, and since this is vaguely about the Middle East "neutral" (of 'as the UN, we can't condemn terrorists because we're being neutral' fame) was the first thing that came to mind. Which was a particularly poor, because the Pope isn't really supposed to be a neutral figure for anything - and what's more, we're pretty sure that the NYT agreed with that when this Pope and past Popes criticized Israel. But that's besides the point. Who do they think this guy is, the Dali Lama? He's the POPE. If Islam is attacking Catholicism, it's not his job to be neutral. If Catholicism is attacking Islam, it's STILL not his job to be neutral. He's the POPE. This is what happens when you let blue-state elites talk about religion - they write idiotic things like this.

This post is just a little less ranting and a little more analysis, but this "maybe the Pope just didn't know" theme has been bothering us all weekend. First it was the BBC, who had their guy suggest that maybe the Pope has just been too sheltered the last couple of decades and so he didn't know better. And then there was the end of the NYT article (discussed more below) where Ian Fisher takes a not very subtle pot-shot at the Pope's cosmopolitanism and suggests (through quotes, of course!) that the reason this happened is because there wasn't anyone on hand trained in the mysterious ways of the Islamic world. One of the quotes is "They have nobody to really ask.. Whoever looked at it and let that go through is someone who doesn’t understand Muslims at all."

Now correct us if we're wrong, but isn't Pope Benedict being criticized for not realizing that Muslims would violently riot if he read the speech (and that specifically they've grown far more inclined to riot violently in the last few years). Seriously, is there any other way to read these smug and condescending passages other than as "the Pope is just so naive - you can't say things like that about Muslims any more - if you try they'll riot wildly". And is there any other way to understand the smugness and condescension except as evidence that this is how sophisticated people think - that they accept the current geopolitical environment, and that only people who lead "sheltered lives" and don't have "experts on Islam" around are stupid enough to think that you can just say whatever you really think out loud.

The New York Times is so sophisticated and Pope Benedict XVI, one of the best-known theologians in the last half century, is so not:

Most of what we have to say on this subject was covered in our post from this weekend about the BBC explaining that poor Pope Benedict just doesn't understand Muslims because he's "led a sheltered life in the Vatican" (post: "No Seriously, You Blithering BBC Idiot, Explain to the Poor Sheltered Pope How Islam Works"). And now we've got the New York Times suggesting that the reason that the Pope read from a 14th century manuscript was because no one told him that Muslims have become dangerous. The conciet is just mindblowing. You have to think to yourself: "given the man's intimate familiarity with Islam, his years spent as a theologian, and his 170 IQ points, should we conclude that he knew what he was doing or not?" And if you're the BBC or the NYT, you're actually answering: "no, he must be so stupid that he didn't know what he was doing".
The other thing is that the Pope isn't the only one confused about Muslim intentions, even if you believe the NYT. For instance, the New York Times themselves seem really confused:

Hmm... gosh, we just don't know. Maybe the NYT should "bring back" their Arabist and he can help them decode whether or not global jihadists will milk this for another couple of days, blow up some more churches, and see how things go.

In the NYT's world, this is perfectly acceptable journalism:

We don't really have anything significant to add to the self-evident sliminess that's already so obvious. Theoretically we could point out the phrasing "though the Vatican issued a response" is designed to make the Vatican look defensive about it, but that's a stretch. The line "it was unclear if the attack was retribution for the pope's remarks" is obviously idiotic and irrelevent, and there's something to be said about the motive of people who suggest things that they know are wrong and just kind of leave them hanging. The only possible reason to do that would be to introduce a genuine question and present facts on both sides of an issue to allow readers to figure it out for themselves. In which case you'd think that he'd mention that a prominent Somali cleric had within the previous 24 hours called upon Muslims to go on murderous rampages - because that's the kind of thing that could help you figure out for yourself if the attack was retribution for what Benedict said. Since he doesn't do that, we're not really sure why he'd include that sentence except to raise doubt in readers' minds as to the nature of extremist Islam and then withhold the facts that would clear up that doubt.

UPDATE: Our bad. We forgot to point out that in all the un-clarity of the shooting, our intrepid reporter neglected to tell us anything about the gunmen. Maybe they were Episcopalian. You never know - it's totally "unclear"! Honestly, we didn't really mention it because we just can't imagine that journalists aren't including that because they honestly think that maybe if they don't mention it, people won't know... we think it's probably just a habit they picked up writing stories about domestic terror attacks on Jewish centers where the motives and religion of the attackers are always apparently 'unclear' (except the attackers are always 'mentally disturbed' - that's news that gets reported immediately! Every time!)

Sad news to deliver boys and girls. Two of Israel's most important rabbis have been kidnapped and replaced by mentally challenged versions of themselves:

This will of course be news to the Iranians, who think that the war between the Jews and the Muslims is the work of the 12th Imam.

And while we don't want to give the appearance that we're violating our "don't be an arrogant idiot" rules and contradicting a Jewish theologian on Jewish theology, we were kind of surprised to learn that as Jews it is "our way is to honor every religion and every nation according to their paths". Because, you know, we've read Exodus. And the entire rest of Judaism that commands you to defeat your enemies if they intend to kill you. Anyone want to make the suggestions that vast swaths of the Muslim world aren't gearing up to destroy Israel?

As for Maimonides, please. From earlier this afternoon:

But remember, "Islam is named after peace". Written by a West Bank rabbi - who right now may even be able to look out his window and see smoke rising from the West Bank churches that have been firebombed today. Firebombed peacefully.

UPDATE: Our lovely readers inform us that Froman is not exactly normal. Google's quick guide to the (J)Blogosphere guide on this charmer:
Lynn - pictures, links, and analysis on Froman and Arafat being quite friendly.
Israel Perspectives - Froman was the lackey that Amar sent out to beg forgiveness from West Bank Arabs after the 2005 bus shooting
Israellycool - Froman got himself in trouble when Arafat's people reported that he condemned the IDF for ending the reign of Hamas terror master Sheikh Ahmad Yassin. He had to walk it back.

Hezbollah, here's a roundup of some other things that the Israel Lobby and the Jewish media are trying to hide from you:

* The Jews shot a 70-ish Somali nun four times. They did this to make you think that Muslims are obeying the