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In his latest column ("Just Leave Christmas Alone") Charles Krauthammer makes glowing reference to this quote from George Washington's 1790 letter to the Newport synagogue, the oldest Jewish congregation in the United States:

"It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights."

Powerline, Time Magazine's blog of the year, quotes the Newport congregation's 1790 response to Washington:

"Deprived as we heretofore have been of the invaluable rights of free Citizens, we now with a deep sense of gratitude to the Almighty disposer of all events behold a Government, erected by the Majesty of the People ~~ a Government, which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance ~~ but generously affording to all Liberty of conscience, and immunities of Citizenship: ~~

"deeming (sic) every one, of whatever Nation, tongue, or language equal parts of the great governmental Machine: ~~ This so ample and extensive Federal Union whose basis is Philanthropy, Mutual confidence and Public Virtue, we cannot but acknowledge to be the work of the Great God."

What a sad reflection it is on Europe that the historic experience of Jews should have been such to have given rise to the feeling conveyed here.

By the same token, what a deserving tribute to the ever-evolving engine of freedom that is the founding philosophy of the modern United States.

Back in March you might have heard about the "assassination" attempt on the Taiwanese president, which I blogged about as follows:

Word on the ground is that Taiwanese President ("John Fitzgerald") Chen gained tremendous sympathy and political benefit from surviving an "assassination" attempt just before the recent election he won. Consider:

- Immediately after Chen was shot, he was photographed with blood coming from his stomach region and had no apparent idea he had been struck by a bullet;
- It is being said that the bullet found in his jacket after he was rushed to hospital had not entered his body and did not match the wound;
- Chen gained tremendous sympathy from the incident and surprisingly defeated his KMT opponent by just 20,000 votes in an election that had 80% turn-out;
- the would-be assassin has not yet been identified or caught;

The PR of China - as well as nearly half the Taiwanese electorate who passionately disagree with the incumbent president's policies - can be expected to be hopping mad at the re-election of Mr Chen, an agitator for Taiwanese independence. In the cauldron of Taiwanese politics and Taiwan-China relations, this would not seem to be a good omen.

Taiwanese news reports are now saying that investigators fingered three suspects in the assassination. One suspect, the owner of the factory that makes guns identical to the "assassination" weapon, is dead. Cause of death: gunshot suicide.




The second suspect, thought to be the would-be "assassin", was an employee in the said factory. He is also dead of a drug overdose, also an apparent suicide. Investigators believe this gentleman was a gambler desparate to pay off accumulated debts.

The third suspect has disappeared.

Randomly and appropos of nothing, I wonder what Bill Clinton thinks of all this?

Fabulous developments have continued in Arab-Israel relations these last few days.

Under cover of a rash of sinister sneak murder attacks, the lack of television attention is a good thing, despite the likelihood that some in the media are at pains to ignore or belittle what has been a happy chain of events.

This attitude may be because

(a) of their own partisan feelings; or of the perverse dread that
(b) the Israel-Palestinian conflict may somehow not continue to be a golden source of violence headlines; and that
(c) loathed figures like the US (to Europe), Mubarak (to Islamist fanatics) and Sharon (to Euro-media) might win and deserve kudos for any outbreak of peace, such as was not achieved at the European city of Oslo.

The media hypothesis is speculation, but is anyone really fooled? The glum face of the BBC presenter last night as she reported the new - and thoroughly amazing - Egypt-Israel Trade Agreement was obvious for all to see.

Simultaneous to this agreement we hear Arafat heir-apparent Mahmoud Abbas calling for non-violence, fresh after his apology to Kuwait for Palestinian support of Saddam's attempt to swallow it.

Meanwhile prison inmate and radical Marwan Barghouti pulls out of the Palestinian presidential race, while Abbas exerts pressure to bring Palestinian military and "security" forces under one rule and one banner.

Underlining all this, Israeli PM Sharon finds himself in a battle royale with (erstwhile) Likud allies, Islamist and Palestinian nutcases are of course doing their violent (and snuff film fueled)) best to rock the apple cart, and President Mubarak's Egyptian government is taking heroic steps to bring the view of the nation's body politic into aligned focus, as previously blogged about here.

A recent example of the latter is an article in the leading Egyptian Government daily Al-Ahram ("Relations with Israel" ) in which columnist Hazem Abd Al-Rahman urges that Egypt throw off the chains of pan-Arab "prohibitions" against relations with its neighbour, and develop these as a means of exerting its own independence and of leading and influencing the process of change necessary for improvement of the Palestinian situation.

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While Egypt expands trade ties with Israel, US churches are considering massive divestiture in that country because of the "failure" of the US government to curb Israel's "aggressive" policies (like building a security barrier to stop murder lemming attacks).

You can vote now in an on-line Christian Science Monitor poll on this issue. The poll is adjective-loaded, as described.

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Mahmoud Abbas's calls for demilitarisation seem to be resonating amongst Palestinians:

"(A) survey of 1,200 Palestinians this month found that 52 percent opposed "military operations" against Israel, believing that they were harmful to Palestinian interests.

"That was nearly double the figure in June, 27 percent, according to the Jerusalem Media and Communication Center, the Palestinian group that conducted the poll, and it was the first time in four years that a majority of Palestinians opposed attacks."

From a Middle East Forum briefing by Gal Luft
October 27, 2004:

"Every time an American goes to a gas station, he is sending money to America's enemies.

" ... Electricity can power vehicles. On an electric battery, a vehicle may drive between 20 and 40 miles before the battery needs to recharge, which can be done easily overnight.

" ... Alcohol fuels such as ethanol, made from corn or biomass and methanol, made from coal, can also power a vehicle. ... Ford Taurus, Dodge Caravan, and Mercedes C-320 are all flexible fuel cars. In addition to decreasing U.S. need for foreign oil, flexible fuel will also aid the economy because it will bring new jobs to the American farmers and the American coal miners.

" ... Essentially, America will not be able to win its "War on Terror" if energy security is not at the top of its agenda."

Truly, for many of us an odious smell wafted through MSM reports (celebrating the latest US military embarrassment) even before the email boast of Chattanooga journalist Pitts was printed in Drudge. The email's most amusing part was the description of journalist hordes flocking to the complainant soldier. Like rats to a money cheese.

They're joking in Israel, says Ha'aretz, that Arafat deserves a (second) Nobel Prize for having died.

And much of the hopeful news - since Arafat died there is an amazing amount of optimism - seems to be generated via Egypt.

The atmosphere seems not dissimilar to that when Anwar Sadat made his famous visit to Israel 35 years ago. Israelis say that when Sadat made peaceful overtures they were felt, genuinely and at a visceral level, by the population at large, as this item shows they are being felt right now.

Mubarak's brave initiative continues

Love the take on the New York Times' latest "top secret" CIA leak in Scrappleface, linked by James Taranto in WSJ.

One suspects that, regarding smug pretensions of credibility, the diminishing hourglass of time starts to beckon for its namesake New York newspaper, now that breathless front page pessimism is so easily made the butt of jokes.

This even while the laughed-at item finds syndication through the usual channels, themselves derisively identified (in fast-response new media land) as liberal axis "MSM".

Following the wheels of history back into the 19th century, the establishment media in New York was manifest in newspapers known as the (New York) "Herald" and "Tribune". The sparkling wheels of those publications have of course long since fallen off.

At the dawn of the 20th century there were 50 nation-states. Today there are 194.

Given such symbolic growth and change, does the United Nations need a makeover, or perhaps an enema?

A CNS News report seems to indicate as much.

Of 191 UN member nations, 56 are members of the Organization of Islamic Conferences (OIC) and most OIC countries are also part of the 115-member Non-Aligned Movement, which constitutes an automatic majority in the United Nations.

Last week the UN General Assembly (where Brunei's vote, of course, carries identical weight to that of Japan or India or the United States) defeated a resolution condemning human rights violations in Sudan. At the same time, it adopted 9 resolutions condemning Israel.

According to some reports, a million people have been displaced in Darfur, Sudan - women raped, people abducted, their relatives killed, villages burnt and looted, torture carried out by security forces with impunity and with tacit and overt support from the Sudanese government.

Not a single resolution condemning human rights violations has ever been passed against 75 percent of U.N. members, including states like Syria, Saudi Arabia, China and Zimbabwe.


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One of the OIC's leading lights was former Malaysian Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, whose regime jailed Dr. Mahathir's old political opponent - former deputy prime minister, Anwar Ibrahim - after he accused the government of rampant cronyism and nepotism.

After Dr. Mohamad's recent retirement as PM, Ibrahim's 6-year-old conviction on charges of "sodomy" was finally quashed by the Malaysian Federal Court and, physically unwell, he was released from prison.

Dr. Mohamed remains defiant."My conscience is clear," the former prime minister said after the court's announcement. "As far as I am concerned, I'm convinced that what I know is right. I still believe he is guilty."

Also since his retirement Australia, who Mohamed aggressively regaled many times during his prime ministership, has started participating again in the ASEAN (Association of South-East Asian Nations) summit, of which Malaysia is an integral part, after an absence spanning the entire duration of Mohamed's tenure.

Malaysia's twin towers in Kuala Lumpur are now the world's largest, following the immolation of the World Trade Center in NY after the 9/11 attacks.

Over a number of years several terrorist attacks are believed to have had connections in Malaysia.

Ahmad Al-Baghdadi, a political science lecturer at Kuwait University, writes in the Kuwaiti daily Al-Siyassa (translated in MEMRI) that from the moment Western societies distanced "the man of the cloth from life", they began to flourish.

In contrast, he says, are realities in Muslim and Arab countries today, where Islamist religious thought:

- produces terror, because of negative interpretations of Quranic verses regarding Jihad.

- opposes the Other, accuses him of heresy, and objects to living by his side. "There is no Islamic country in which a Christian or a Jew could reveal a cross or a skullcap, and get away with it peacefully. In contrast ... there is no secular country that prohibits the construction of mosques ... (or) prevents the Muslim from praying in public ..".

- persists in accusations of apostasy, leading to the killing of human beings, even without trial. "In the secular world the author, the intellectual, and the journalist are not sent to jail for their opinions ... In contrast, the extremist Muslims and the Islamic clerics often adopt ideological terror" against the "apostate"

- supports political tyranny and opposes democracy, as in Saudi Arabia.　The governments of many Muslim countries, he says, "exploit religious thought in order to impose their legitimacy. Thus you find that they are the most avid supporters of the religious groups, (even while) knowing that these groups include those who support terrorism and harm society."

Al-Baghdadi's ideas seem to be in synch with comments made by Nicholas Kristoff in August, and Christopher Hitchens in November.


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Many academics in Western universities possess neither the courage nor the desire to make such comparisons, instead directing (blinkered, jingoistic) anger at the mythical extremism of the US government.

WSJ reports that a survey commissioned by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) at 50 top US universities confirms the bias alluded to here, and cites this experience of a student at Yale:

"My teacher came into class the day after the election proclaiming, 'That's it. This is the death of America.' The rest of the class was eager to agree, and twenty minutes of Bush-bashing ensued. At one point, one student asked our teacher whether she should be so vocal, lest any students be conservatives. She then asked us whether any of us were Republicans. Naturally, no one volunteered that information, whereupon our teacher turned to the inquisitive student and said, 'See? No one in here would be stupid enough to vote for Bush.' "

Matt Stone of "South Park" fame responded recently to criticism by "anti-war" actor Sean Penn regarding Stone and Trey Parker's new top-rating puppet flick Team America: World Police:

"Something you have to know about Sean is, he smokes a lot of weed. Not all weed smokers are insane, but if you do smoke a lot, who knows where your brain's at?

"I think it was a real detriment to the anti-war movement that their spokesmen were actors. In the build-up to the Iraq war, every time you turned on your TV it was like, 'This is the situation in Iraq and now for an update, let's go to Sean Penn.' Or 'To argue the other side, we have Janeane Garofalo.'

"It was insane. You'd be like, 'Get the f--- off my news show! You just want the actor's head to get blown off!"

And actors' heads apparently do get blown off in the film, while North Korea's Kim Jong-Il plays a starring role, at one point feeding Hans Blix to a shark.

It is being said in some quarters that Penn's starring role as a Hussein puppet in the lead up to the US invasion of Iraq may have inspired Stone and Parker to experiment with the new animation technique.


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BP asks British staff to stop having sex in the office


British Petroleum recently sent managers a memo after some staff were caught on CCTV cameras having sex in toilets, meeting rooms and behind cabinets.

(Picture from The Economist)



In his book "Arrogance" (Warner Books, 2003) Bernard Goldberg describes Columbia University's School of Journalism as the "Taj Mahal" of American journalism schools, and castigates it for bias.

He tells of the 2001 lecture at Columbia by ABC News president David Westin, just 6 weeks after 9/11, where one of the students asked Westin the appallingly offensive: "Do you believe the Pentagon was a legitimate military target, even if (using a hijacked jetliner) was not?"

Westin answered: "Actually, I don't have an opinion on that", thus in Goldberg's view distinguishing himself from the majority of Americans, who would have had little trouble in providing a clear-cut answer, but ingratiating himself with journalistic colleagues and students, many of whom would agree with Westin's astounding explanation, when pressed on the subject later, that it would be journalistically improper to take a position on whether the Pentagon attack "was right or wrong".

Not that many in journalistic or other academia have much difficulty on taking a position on a host of other subjects Goldberg talks about, like beating a gay person to death, Taliban non-education of women, or white bigots dragging a black man behind a pick-up truck.

Liberal staff far outnumber conservatives at elite universities. American Enterprise magazine reported in 2002 on the breakdown as follows:

Cornell: 166 liberals, 6 conservatives.

Stanford: 151 liberals, 17 conservatives.

Colorado: 116 liberals, 5 conservatives.

UCLA: 141 liberals, 9 conservatives.

In 2004, according to the Center for Responsive Politics,

"(O)f the top five institutions in terms of employee per capita contributions to presidential candidates, the third, fourth and fifth were Time Warner, Goldman Sachs and Microsoft. The top two were the University of California system and Harvard, both of which gave about 19 times more money to John Kerry than to George W. Bush."

George Will presented these statistics in his column a couple of weeks ago, and then acidly commented on this self-serving justification for the disparity procured from a liberal academic:

"... (According to) George Lakoff, a linguistics professor at Berkeley, ... (t)he disparity in hiring, ..., occurs because conservatives are not as interested as liberals in academic careers. Why does he think liberals are like that? 'Unlike conservatives, they believe in working for the public good and social justice.' That clears that up."

Will procures a better explanation for the "monochrome" pseudo-intellectual provincialism of academic campuses from Mark Bauerlein, who says a "false consensus effect" occurs when, "people think that the collective opinion of their own group matches that of the larger population ... When like-minded people deliberate as an organized group, the general opinion shifts toward extreme versions of their common beliefs."

They become tone-deaf, says Will, to the way they sound to others outside their closed circle of belief.

Often they go beyond being merely tone-deaf though, as exemplified in this flagrant example of harrassment of an Israeli student by a professor at (where else?) Columbia, related by Daniel Pipes.

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Meanwhile, as blogged in Solomonia, a cult-of-death style Islamic preacher has been invited to speak at MIT this coming Saturday night. No interference or trouble is expected.

But scroll further down the page and see the report about a pro-Israel group that wants to display the remains of a Jerusalem bus (blown up in a murder lemming attack) at UC Berkeley.

The City of Berkeley people are furiously resisting the idea, ostensibly because of concerns that anti-Israel and "anti-war" groups will rampage and go nuts!

You couldn't make this stuff up.


New survey shows bias at top 50 US universities

MEMRI has today published some interesting opinions from Arab columnists, including these selected excerpts:

"... (T)he first free and general elections in the history of the Arab nation are to take place in January: in Iraq, under the auspices of American occupation, and in Palestine, under the auspices of the Israeli occupation.

"(T)he Arab League ... wanted the Iraqi opposition to be invited to the Sharm Al-Sheikh conference, ...other Arab oppositions have not been invited to any Arab League meeting ... throughout the history of the Arab peoples.

"The Arab concern for … the legitimacy of Iraq's upcoming elections ... is outrageous ... we do not understand why this concern does not apply to the many Arab countries that do not permit their minorities to announce their existence, let alone their right to [political] representation.

"... (C)ertain countries today are treating the Iraqis with the cheapest kind of political hypocrisy, even though no one heard any particular Arab protest during the time of the regime of the mass graves [i.e. during Saddam's rule].

"[Arab regimes act] as if history is not happening as long as they do not acknowledge its existence and do not announce it in the papers and on the television channels, [all of] which they control. Can anybody ask the Arab League why the media in occupied Iraq and Palestine enjoy freedom under the occupation, while the media in the other Arab countries do not?"

Can anybody ask CNN International why they recently showed an excerpt of a hooded and armed "insurgent" declaring that elections could take place in Iraq after American forces leave, but not before? The airheaded presenters then proceeded to seriously discuss the possibility of election postponement - without offering any comment or criticism on the flagrantly disingenuous statement shown in the excerpt.

Such discussion is in much the same vein as the joyful highlighting of the Iraqi election postponement "issue" taking place in the Washington Post and New York Times. Buried in the pages of those newspapers are sensible opinions, like that of Charles Krauthammer, :

"In 1864, 11 of the 36 (US) states did not participate in the presidential election. ...

"In 1868, three years after the security situation had, shall we say, stabilized, three states (not insignificant ones: Texas, Virginia and Mississippi) did not participate in the election...

"The (Iraq) election should be held. It should be open to everyone. If Iraq's Sunni Arabs -- barely 20 percent of the population -- decide they cannot abide giving up their 80 years of minority rule ... then they... forfeit their chance to shape and participate in the new Iraq.

"Americans are dying right now to give them that very chance.

And that of William Safire:

"So far, voters who support implanting freedom in the Middle East have won three in a row, electing President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, the American ally John Howard in Australia, and George Bush here.

"Now pessimists are trying desperately to call off the fourth election - the one scheduled for late January in Iraq to elect a 275-member national assembly that will write a constitution - lest they lose that vote, too."

The mere fact of an election taking place in Iraq will be treated as a "loss" by the liberal international conglomerate insanely opposed to George Bush.

That is why they will do their utmost to portray the election as a failure, should it take place, no matter what the circumstances and no matter what the damage for the poor people of Iraq, who have to live and die with the effects of this supremely cold cynicism, and with the comfort and encouragement it incubates for the murderers amongst them.