spinbadz own

According to Gordon Liddy, "The disengagement (of Israel from Gaza) will encourage the Arab terrorists. They will say: `Look, we'll kill some more Jews, we'll send some more rockets and they'll fold.' We, the Americans, made mistakes like that in Lebanon. After the terrorists blew up the Marine base near Beirut, we withdrew. And we repeated the mistake in Somalia. Retreats from terrorists encourage terror."

Even so, leaving Gaza to the rule of its majority is the right thing to do.

Elsewhere:

Michael Barone 's short history of liberal media bias

Deb Saunders on Cherie Blair:

"Three years ago, the (British) P.M.'s wife, a human-rights lawyer, outraged many when she gave this dubious justification for Palestinian suicide bombers:

"As long as young people feel they have no hope but to blow themselves up, you are never going to make progress."

Mrs. B. ... last week ... warned against responding to "terror in a way which undermines commitment to our most deeply held values and convictions, and which cheapens our right to call ourselves a civilized nation."

You hear it in America, too: If we curb civil liberties, the terrorists win.

It's a mindless mantra. First, the terrorists don't want tougher laws. They want loose laws. And when government fails to pass laws that make it easier to stop and prosecute them, the terrorists win.

Cherie Blair better change.

Greg Sheridan (The "Australian"): Howard on the world stage

Israeli Yishai Ha'etzni makes a compelling case in the New York Post for profiling of airline passengers.

He cites two disturbing examples of how these techniques have helped Israel shape up effectively to a less benign terrorist threat:

(In) April 17, 1986. Anne-Marie Murphy, a pregnant Irish woman, was traveling alone to Israel to meet her fiancé's parents. Her bags went through an X-ray machine without problems, and she and her passport appeared otherwise unremarkable.

But ... (t)hey inspected her bags more closely and discovered a sheet of Semtex ... under a false bottom. Unbeknownst to Murphy, her fiancé, Nizar Hindawi, had intended to kill her and their unborn child along with the other passengers on the plane.

...In May 2002, a would-be suicide bomber ran away from the entrance to a mall in Netanya after guards at the entrance grew suspicious. Though he killed three people when he blew himself up on a nearby street, he would have murdered far many more people had he been able to enter the mall.

His ethnicity - along with his demeanor, dress, even his hair - ... was a factor.

The author argues that profiling simply "works better than anything else", that "blanket avoidance of profiling undermines the entire point of checking passengers":

Is profiling worth the resulting infringement on the democratic values of equality? Yes. After all, protecting human life is also a democratic value, perhaps the supreme one.

Terrorists use our society's openness against us.

I think this is a very important point.

Now that there is finger-pointing reverberating about contradictions and hypocrisy in religious dogma, let us not forget that Islam and Christianity are both chronological offshoots of the Jewish faith.

That is, all these holy / blessed / unimpeachable ... and often contradictory ... biblical phrases harnessing for murderous purpose, from time to time throughout history, the anger and energy of the testosterone-laden were compiled and prescribed thousands of years ago.

It seems to me that the Jewish religion - whatever truths and/or contortions and/or distortions subsequently modified the perception thereof over the centuries and depending, of course, on which collared and/or bearded elderly fellow happens to be indoctrinating you - lays germane to the credibility of all.

So if we honestly analyse the key story of Moses - objectively, without fire and brimstone, on the one hand, or Dan Brown on the other - what do we come up with?

Perhaps: that we can reasonably assume - on the basis of available evidence - that there may well have been a character like Moses, or somebody like him - that is, a person (or persons) either educated in the ways of or connected to Egyptian royalty who succeeded in leading the Jewish members of the Egyptian slave class out of captivity and into a northern adjacent land.

As to other elements of the story:

- Does anyone seriously believe that there cannot be elements of profound embellishment in this biblical account of plagues, sea-partings, electrified shrubs and ozone-originating meals?

- Is it not tremendously suspicious that contemporaneous ideas, on the one hand, and philosophical ideas that had been leveraged, pondered and roundly explored by Egpytian elite up to the time of Moses, on the other hand, seem to be reflected in the Ten Commandments? To wit:

(1) the use of unimpeachable heavenly authority to achieve legitimacy;
(2) the concept of a single Creator

(This idea had already been explored and preached in Egypt, partly as a sensible antidote to inanity of the established Egyptian pantheon of idols, partly in response to the conquering armies that for centuries had always forced their own Heavenly Ruler pantheon upon the subject peoples of the continental cross-roads )

(3) the general, logical rules enabling any conglomeration of humans to function effectively together over time and survive - re reproductive units, respect for body and property et al;

(4) - and this is the most obvious sign of a human hand - the consecration of one-day-off-work-per-week (the Sabbath day) as a Ten Commandment-level religious rule - doesn't this seem suspiciously like the kind of things that a group of angry escaping slaves would just lap up?


The Ten Commandments have survived as moral bedrock over the years partly because it is a brilliant compilation of ideas.

But the biblical story behind it deserves to be taken with a few grains of Red Sea salt. So it follows that everything biblically following deserves to be taken the same way.

Have we sufficiently evolved in collective intelligence that we can begin to appreciate the brilliance of the Ten Commandments without the legitimacy trick that Moses may well have pulled to quell the queries of the plebs at the foot of the mountain?

That's the real question, in my mind.


********************


I thought this piece of dialogue from Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code was very interesting:


"(E)verything you need to know about the Bible can be summed up by the great canon doctor Martyn Percy:

'The Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven.'"

"I beg your pardon?"

"The Bible is a product of Man my dear. Not of the Creator. The Bible did not fall magically from the clouds. Man created it as a historical record of tumultuous times, and it has evolved through countless translations, additions and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book.

"Jesus Christ was a historical figure of staggering influence, perhaps the most enigmatic and inspirational leader the world has ever seen. As the prophesied Messiah, Jesus toppled kings, inspired millions and founded new philosophies. As a descendant of the lines of King Solomon and King David, Jesus possessed a rightful claim to the King of the Jews. Understandably his life was recorded by thousands of followers. More than 80 gospels were considered for the New Testament and only a few chosen."

"Chosen by whom?"

"The pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great."

"I thought Constantine was a Christian."

"Hardly. He was a lifelong pagan who was baptized on his deathbed. In Constantine's day, Rome's official religion was sun worship - Sol Invictus - and Constantine it's head priest. Unfortunately for him, a growing religious turmoil was gripping Rome. Three centuries after Christ His followers had multiplied exponentially, and their conflict with pagans threatened to rend Rome in two.

"Constantine decided something had to be done. In 325 AD he decided to unify Rome under 1 religion. Christianity.

"He could see that Christianity was on the rise, and simply backed the winning horse. By fusing pagan symbols into the growing Christian tradition, he created a kind of hybrid religion that was acceptable to both parties.

"Egyptian sun disks became the halos of Catholic saints. Pictograms of Isis carrying her miraculously conceived son Horus became the blueprint for images of the Virgin and Baby Jesus. Catholic ritual elements like the mitre, the altar, the doxology and communion were taken directly from paganism.

"December 25 is the birthdate of the pre-Christian Mithras, called the 'Son of the Lord and Light of the World'.

"Originally, Christianity honoured the Jewish Sabbath of Saturday, but Constantine shifted it to coincide with the pagan veneration day of the sun - Sunday.

"Until the ecumenical gathering Constantine arranged to strengthen Christianity, the Council of Nicaea, Jesus was viewed by his followers as a mortal prophet.....a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless. A mortal. Jesus' establishment as 'Son of the Lord’ was voted on by this Council. By turning Jesus into a deity, whose power was unchallengeable by pagans and others, followers of Christ could only redeem themselves through the only sacred channel – the Roman Catholic Church.

“The twist is this. Because Constantine upgraded Jesus’ status centuries after His death, thousands of documents already existed chronicling His life as a mortal man. He needed a bold stroke, and from this sprang the most profound moment in Christian history.

“Constantine commissioned and financed a new Bible, which omitted those gospels that spoke of Christ’s human traits and embellished those gospels that made him gdlike. The earlier gospels were outlawed, gathered up and burned.

“The Latin word haereticus means ‘choice’. Hose who ‘chose’ the original history of Christ were the world’s first heretics.”


“(E)very faith in the world is based on fabrication. That is the definition of faith – acceptance of that which we imagine to be true, that which we cannot prove. Every religion describes the Creator through metaphor, allegory and exaggeration, from the early Egyptians through modern Sunday school. Metaphors are a way to help our minds process the unprocessible. The problems arise when we begin to literally to believe our own metaphors.

“The Bible represents a fundamental guidepost for millions of people on the planet, in much the same way the Koran, Torah and Pali Canon offer guidance to people of other religions. If you and I could dig up documentation that contradicted the holy stories of Islamic belief (and others), should we do that?

“Religious allegory has become part of the fabric of reality. And living in that reality helps millions of people cope and be better people.”

Amazing item by Mark Steyn in today's Australian newspaper:

WITH hindsight, the defining encounter of the age was not between Mohammed Atta's jet and the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, but that between Mohammed Atta and Johnelle Bryant a year earlier.

Bryant is an official with the US Department of Agriculture in Florida, and the late Atta had gone to see her about getting a $US650,000 government loan to convert a plane into the world's largest crop-duster. A novel idea.

The meeting got off to a rocky start when Atta refused to deal with Bryant because she was but a woman. But, after this unpleasantness had been smoothed out, things went swimmingly. When it was explained to him that, alas, he wouldn't get the 650 grand in cash that day, Atta threatened to cut Bryant's throat. He then pointed to a picture behind her desk showing an aerial view of downtown Washington - the White House, the Pentagon et al - and asked: "How would America like it if another country destroyed that city and some of the monuments in it?"

Fortunately, Bryant's been on the training course and knows an opportunity for multicultural outreach when she sees one. "I felt that he was trying to make the cultural leap from the country that he came from," she recalled. "I was attempting, in every manner I could, to help him make his relocation into our country as easy for him as I could."

So a few weeks later, when fellow 9/11 terrorist Marwan al-Shehhi arrived to request another half-million dollar farm subsidy and Atta showed up cunningly disguised with a pair of glasses and claiming to be another person entirely - to whit, al-Shehhi's accountant - Bryant sportingly pretended not to recognise him and went along with the wheeze. The fake specs, like the threat to slit her throat and blow up the Pentagon, were just another example of the multicultural diversity that so enriches our society....

I'd never heard this account.

The unsightly wart of European appeasement was freeze-blasted after Chamberlain. The virus that produced it has, however, remained active. Long-buried symptoms are being aired in the wake of 7/7.

Like this hideous outbreak in the 1970s, described by Michael Portillo in yesterday's Sunday Times:

As tributes were paid last week to Sir Edward Heath, I recalled his appalling decision in 1970 to release the Palestinian terrorist Leila Khaled. She had hijacked an Israeli airliner but was exchanged by Britain for hostages seized in another hijack.

The Black September group to which she belonged subsequently murdered 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.

The Germans released the perpetrators in return for yet more hostages.

(Emphasis mine)

The list of oversights, blunders and embarrassments engendered by the desire to avoid confrontation is truly appalling. See, inter alia:

Mark Steyn
Niall Ferguson

On real goings-on in disunited, disaffected British Muslim communities:

Abdul-Rehman Malik







(Ha'aretz reports that Moshe Dayan's eyepatch is being pitched on eBay for 75 large. ... developing ...?...)

"This is about hatred of a way of life."

So said Australian PM Howard at a joint press conference with Tony Blair last week. He was responding to journalist queries from the usual suspects implying, as London Mayor "Red" Ken Livingstone did within days of his city being attacked, that western government foreign policy was 'responsible' for the terrorist attacks in London. Howard continued:

"Can I remind you that the murder of 88 Australians in Bali took place before the operation in Iraq? ... that the 11th of September occurred before the operation in Iraq? ... that the very first occasion that bin Laden specifically referred to Australia was in the context of Australia's involvement in liberating the people of East Timor?

"Are people, by implication, suggesting that we shouldn't have done that?"

That theme - that 'root causes' for terrorist actions are about personal-cultural complex - is taken up by French academic Olivier Roy (author of "Globalized Islam") in a New York Times op-ed piece:

"The Americans went to Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11, not before. ...(That) attack was plotted well before the second (Palestinian) intifada began in September 2000, at a time of relative optimism in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

"Spanish police have foiled terrorist attempts in Madrid even since the government withdrew its forces.

" ... (T)here (are) virtually no Afghans, Iraqis or Palestinians among the terrorists ... the bombers are mostly from the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, Egypt and Pakistan - or they are Western-born converts to Islam. ... (T)hey do not care about Afghanistan as such, but see the United States involvement there as part of a global phenomenon of cultural domination.

"(The jihadists) are rebels looking for a cause. They find it in the dream of a virtual, universal ummah, the same way the ultraleftists of the 1970's (the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Italian Red Brigades) cast their terrorist actions in the name of the "world proletariat" and "Revolution" without really caring about what would happen after."

Australian journalist Miranda Devine's exploration of a number of culturally-charged gang rape cases in Sydney, which I previously discussed here and here, throws shocking light on the actual ideas and influences motivating a number of thugs who used their 'religion' as a shield.

Devine continued the theme in today's Sun-Herald. She says that according to the General Practitioner who is the father of 4 juveniles in Sydney's west who gang-raped a number of teenage girls between the ages of 13 and 18:

'(I)t is Australia that is unjust.' Last month he told Sydney Morning Herald journalist Natasha Wallace: "You are the enemy of the Muslim . . . they [his sons] are not rapists."

Dr K has maintained his sons' innocence ... even after viewing in court one of the videotapes police found ... (showing a) ... comatose 13-year-old girl, drunk or drugged, and the brothers performing degrading criminal acts on her body.

Dr K revealed his views about Australian girls to a reporter: "What do they expect to happen to them? Girls from Pakistan don't go out at night."

In court Dr K complained his sons, "did not know the culture of this country".

(In Pakistan, "honour rapes" have a long tradition. In one case that has become an international feminist cause, a woman was gang raped by 13 men on the order of a village council as a punishment because her brother had befriended a woman from another tribe)

He incubated his monsters in one of the most remote and primitive corners of Pakistan, in a small village near the Afghanistan border town of Peshawar where Osama bin Laden lived in the 1980s ...

Whether the crime is murder or mass-murder or rape or multiple gang-rape, western mores demand that perpetrators be held responsible for their own actions.

Otherwise, as the San Francisco Chronicle's Deb Saunders puts it:

"Imagine if anti-abortion terrorists killed 52 civilians and themselves, and Americans blamed feminism, or abortion rights, or the U.S. Supreme Court for Roe vs. Wade. Because the equivalent is happening at home and abroad."

In an unprecedented and sickeningly timed incident, the spectre of Islamofascist terrorism visited and wrenched the collective stomachs of Australian rugby league fans last night.

Nearly 30,000 of them would have thoroughly enjoyed a possible NRL grand final preview at Sydney's Olympic Park, but for a frightening explosion - within the stadium - late in the game.

Police are saying that "2 hooligans" are being detained over setting off a "large firework" in the north-east corner of the Telstrastad after the Canterbury Bulldogs scored a late try to beat the Brisbane Broncos in a thriller.

There are no reported injuries. Most in the stadium were suddenly disturbed by the loud blast, including many of the players.

The ripples of the blast have already resounded amongst many angry Bulldog supporters and in the broader community, as well.

I have written about the club before:

... (O)ne of the distinct changes that (Sydney's) beachside Bondi has seen since my own long-ago youth (is) its growing rowdiness, especially in the evenings. People from outside suburbs flock there now for entertainment.

Some of them seem to come there with "have-not" chips on their shoulders. Bondi is noted for being glitzy and touristy, frequented by "haves" and, famously amongst these, Jews. It's also a very, very multicultural area - but that doesn't change these other givens.

Amongst Bondi's visiting outsiders are a not-inconsiderable number - many of them with Lebanese or other Middle Eastern ethnic roots - who ostentatiously wear "Bulldogs" shirts and identificants.

The famous Canterbury Bulldogs are currently Australia's champion rugby league team.

Their Canterbury headquarters is in a Sydney suburb far away from Bondi. Their broad support base includes a percentage of persons with Muslim and Arab heritage. One of the current team's star players is the brilliant Hazem El-Masri, proud muslim, national icon and one of the finest goal-kickers in the history of rugby league.

Bulldogs paraphernalia was much in evidence around Bondi in the days following the 2004 championship Grand Final. In that match, the Bulldogs triumphed over the Bondi-based Sydney Roosters.

Thrashed 'em.

So the parading of the Bulldogs shirts and hats and banners around Bondi Roosterville after that game was a bit like rubbing salt into wounds.

In a good-natured way, perhaps. Nobody really minded. The 'Dogs supporters were proud, and deservedly so. Australian sport is about fun and enjoyment and good-natured rivalry, where everyone ribs each other and has a drink together afterwards.

Having said that, a slightly eery pallor has tainted Australian sport in recent years.

It was during 2004 that an in-season Bulldogs-Roosters match became embroiled in large-scale crowd violence. It was big news, and perhaps the first time in the history of traditional Australian sport that such a thing had ever occured.

Much has been done by rugby league authorities since that time to crack down on the psychotic behaviour of the minority of spectators who might be tempted to engage in violence at games, and their efforts have so far been successful. There has never been any overt hint of ethnicity or racial motivation inspiring such behaviour, nor have any such overtones affected or coloured the crackdown.

Nor should they. Paranoid joining of far-flung dots ... has no legitimate basis.

There are indeed minor - psychotic - groups that bear watching though, as underlined by the youth recently featured in Australian headlines after a video was found showing him making a suicide-bombing style threat against Australian military targets, Australian flag in the backdrop of a film piece otherwise notable for its Islamofascist style.

Let's hope patriotism and love of country runs deep with many of us, and that same does not become muddied with cancerous, violent ideas.

In the wake of this new incident, let's indeed continue to hope.

From Opinion Journal yet another report on the failure of current European law enforcement to contain terrorist operations:

Earlier this week, Germany's Constitutional Court set free Mamoun Darkazanli, a German national who is suspected of being Osama bin Laden's principal money man in Europe, on what amounted to a legalism regarding the constitutionality of a Spanish judge's extradition request.

That followed on last month's release of Mounir el Motassadeq, who had previously been convicted by a Hamburg court as an accomplice in the 9/11 attacks.

Here again, he owes his release mainly to legal niceties, which al Qaeda members are trained to manipulate.

The SMH has apparently upgraded the Muslim rape-gang theme to the front page. Following the Devine op-ed item yesterday, locals are now digesting this horrific report:

(T)he crimes of the brothers MSK, MAK, MRK and MMK, and their friend R (who came to Australia from Pakistan around 2000) can now be made public. ... They were juveniles, aged 16 and 17, when they committed the first offences.

...(T)hey went on a six-month rampage (at least eight girls), luring girls as young as 13 to their home in Ashfield to rape them. ... (and)had claimed in the face of damning DNA evidence that they were the victims of an anti-Muslim conspiracy.

Under cross-examination, the girl was accused of coaxing MSK to have sex.

Before raping the girl, MSK told her he had strangled a girlfriend and hung her from a balcony in Iraq - though he was from Pakistan.

Australian journalist Miranda Devine hits on some good points in this Sydney Morning Herald op-ed item:

Left-liberals are always banging on about "root causes" of terrorism, generally finding the United States and "Western imperialism" to blame ...

But they dare not confront ... their own role in fomenting hatred of Western values.

That role, she says, includes:

Trying to erase ...long-established culture ... rooted as it is in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and replacing it with vapid, secularist nothingness ...

It simply creates a vacuum for radical Islam to rush in and fill.

And it is doing its best. At the weekend, at Belmore Mosque, Melbourne's radical Sheik Mohammed Omran criticised Australia and its "half-naked" women, ... "Don't believe this is a free country," he railed. "It's only a free country for the Bondi Beach people."

Bondi Beach, in Sydney's exclusive eatern suburbs, is a cosmopolitan area studded with Jewish cultural centres and synagogues. The area is also replete with all kinds of multicultural landmarks, but the plethora of different peoples there doesn't seem to haze the focus of Australia's Islamic radicals. An attendant at the Lakemba Islamic bookshop visited by journalists and authorities yesterday fumed at allegations that incendiary materials were being distributed there, and exhorted visitors to instead focus on the equivalent materials she claimed were certainly distributed at "those Jewish bookshops in Bondi Junction".


Anyway, Devine continues:

The Sydney-born Sheik Feiz Mohammad ... told 1000 people at Bankstown Town Hall that rape victims have "no one to blame but themselves" (because they wear) "… strapless, backless, sleeveless, nothing but satanic skirts, slit skirts, translucent blouses, miniskirts, tight jeans … to tease man and appeal to his carnal nature."


The Australian-born young Muslim gang rapists who plagued Sydney a few years ago were said by police to have deliberately targeted non-Muslim "Australian" girls and referred to one victim as an "Aussie pig". They were also avid consumers of internet pornography.

The American commentator Thomas Friedman, exploring why so many young angry Sunni Muslim males are prepared to become suicide bombers, writes: "They are, on the one hand, tempted by Western society, and ashamed of being tempted."

Their inner conflict leads them to become vulnerable to terrorist recruiters ...

The increasing permissiveness of Western culture ... can only fuel the inner conflicts of alienated young Muslim men.

And with secularists hell-bent on removing any religious influence, no matter how benign, from daily life, it is no wonder that decadent displays in the Big Brother Uncut tradition now seem commonplace ...

Hot on the heels of deranged genocidal fruitcakes attempting to murder or maim his city's transport system, London mayor Ken Livingstone witlessly remarked on Tuesday that Hamas and Israel's Likud Party are "two sides of the same coin."

The London mayor last year welcomed Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, an apparent advocate of Palestinian suicide bombings against Israelis who has been banned from entry into the United States.

How did Livingstone get elected?

From Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose", Random House 1998 paperback edition, page 72:

"(T)hree things concur in creating beauty: first of all integrity or perfection, and for this reason we consider ugly all incomplete things; then proper proportion or consonance; and finally clarity and light, and in fact we call beautiful those things of definite colour ... (T)he sight of the beautiful implies peace, and ... our appetite is calmed similarly by peacefulness, by the good and by the beautiful ... "

Some timely food for thought rounded off Charles Krauthammer's latest Washington Post column:

"Decadence is defined not by a civilization's art or music but ultimately by its willingness to simply defend itself."

The London attacks may have spurred this kind of thinking amongst political writers around the globe.

The genus of the same idea seems apparent in the July 16 offering of The Australian's Greg Sheridan:

"Whether the West has the ideological strength to respond to a deadly challenge was a question the communists and the Nazis both asked, and al-Qa'ida and its fellow travellers ask it today."

As in the respective struggles against Nazism and communism we can assume that, regarding the effectiveness or otherwise of various responses, painful trial will inevitably reap painful error. The important thing is to learn and move forward.

That idea echoed when I read the criticism proferred by Daniel Pipes in his discussion of the 2004 British government-commissioned report "Young Muslims and Extremism":

"(The report) draws on MI5 information to make this astonishing statement:

'... (T)he number of British Muslims actively engaged in terrorist activity, whether at home or abroad or supporting such activity, is extremely small and estimated at less than 1% (pdf 2, p. 9).'

"If one accepts the report's estimate (pdf 2, p. 5) that the Muslim population of Great Britain numbers 1.6 million, then up to 16,000 'British Muslims actively engaged in terrorist activity.'

"Extremely small"? Excuse me ...

"That the British authorities do not recognize that they should worry about thousands of terrorists in their midst is reason to worry what planet they inhabit. ..."

Since the London attacks some interesting ideas and prospective anti-terrorism measures have come to public attention - not only in England noting, for example, today's investigation of bomb-making and terrorist how-to books on sale in a Sydney Islamic book store.

Further:

- Countries like England and Egypt appear to be cooperating with respect to a key deportation in the case, and laws may be strengthened to stop hate preachers entering and operating in Britain.

- The university campus connection to the London bombings has been publicly highlighted.

- Authorities are encouraging and enabling moderate Muslims to take active measures warding against the commission of hate crimes.

- New laws enabling law enforcement agencies to monitor and take action against terror suspects and their suppliers are under discussion.

So far, so good.

For terrorists, it's party-time. They're celebrating the joy of the successful London mass murder with fresh blessed actions by brave mujahadeen.

In Iraq yesterday, we're told, 20-odd Iraqi children were slaughtered by exploding lemmings pouncing on a few US soldiers who were handing out sweets to the group. Meanwhile, several Israelis were (suicide-)murdered and scores maimed while at a downtown shopping mall, the first sneak bomb sprung on civilians there for 5 months.

Across the civilisation /non-civilisation divide the approach is a little different - sober and resolute. The police investigation into the London attacks moves apace. It's warts-and-all facts are headline fodder. Because of that, even Britain's leftist media establishment is forced to grok and digest the new mood. Part of the new zeitgeist dictates: call things by their proper name.

So the word "terrorist" (minus scare quotes) is popping up even in The Independent, in The Guardian, and on the BBC - sometimes under sufference.

There is an attempt in some quarters to accept the new mood and curb its course politically correctly. So Karen Armstrong, writing op-ed in The Guardian, beseeches us: if we must call the thing terrorism, let's not to call it "Muslim" terrorism. Without deciding on an accurate term she suggests "Qutbian terrorism" or "Wahhabbi terrorism", and finishes her piece on a pious crescendo:

"By making the disciplined effort to name our enemies correctly, we will learn more about them, and come one step nearer, perhaps, to solving the increasingly perilous problems of our divided world."

Which would be impressive reasoning had she not, a few paragraphs earlier, referred to "Zionist fundamentalism in Israel and the fervently patriotic Christian right in the US". Seeing as Ms. Armstrong was purporting to make pains to be technically correct and sensitive, she might avoided such terminology.

Neither of these "movements" glorifies or makes a habit of deliberately targeting civilians. It begs the question of why they are mentioned at all in an item discussing terrorism.

The misunderstood and maligned word "zionist" is not a religious term. It covers the full gamut of political thinking, left right or otherwise, on Jewish self-determination. It reinforces an unwarranted negative stereotype to use the description "Zionist fundamentalism".

In the US, many people on the right are not Christian and many Christians are not on the right.. Patriotic people of either or both descriptions are often not "fervent", and those that are are rarely minded towards killing civilians to advance their cause. The descriptive "fervently patriotic Christian right ", especially when used in this context, also reinforces an unwarranted negative stereotype.

Moreover, seeing as equitability clearly must underline any genuine "disciplined effort" towards accuracy, it runs in stark contrast to note that many newspaper reports on the new terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians and American soldiers, mentioned at the outset, were short items buried deep in their respective publications.

There is absolutely no doubt that some - including Islamofascists and members of the far left - would interpret such attacks as legitimate responses to "Zionist fundamentalism in Israel and the fervently patriotic Christian right in the US".

Whether Ms. Armstrong's description of these other political trends are equitable or accurate or otherwise, she did principally set out to find a satisfactory term for terrorism inspired by perverted religious views of a particular kind.

Can we agree to call it "Islemmingism" then?

Because, inter alia: lemmingism is indeed what it is, the actual perpetrators being the lowest beings on the food chain that begat them, while showing themselves, by their actions, to be unfathomably desperate, naïve, stupid, ignorant, hateful, intense, insecure and/or immature. What "promises" wrought them to chauvinistic murder - virgins in heaven, martyrdom, instant hero status, revenge; who cares?

Admittedly, the term "islemmingism" is insensitive and contemptuous.

Unquestionably, such emotion accurately conveys how such people are and ought to be viewed.

If prospective Islemmings imagine themselves to be heroes and dream of the leap from nothingness to notoriety - and there is every indication that that is the case - perhaps calling the malignancy for what it is might be part of an antidote: selfless martyr? No: self-possessed fame-seeker. Blessed, holy, warrior? Actually: psycopathically anti-social stooge - or scum. You're call, scumbag.

Achieving contempt and provoking odium, rather than winning respect, represents failure for Islemmingists in the first instance - in the very act of talking about them, and everybody knows part of their aim is to be talked about, to be feared.

Nothing scotches a social cancer like failure.

If you were Osama Bin Laden, or one of his henchmen, and you were looking to recruit an apologist to convey useful idiocy on your behalf in the west, the chances are that you would choose "The Independent"'s Robert Fisk.

Matter of fact, Bin Laden has glowingly and famously so nominated Fisk before, in the shadowy tape recording before Bush's re-election.

You can understand why Bin Laden loves Fisk.

Relentless in vindictive hyperbole, shameless in his bias and his hatred, sharing the same key enemies as Osama, and superbly positioned atop far-left literati, Fisk is ideal to let Britons know they deserved to be mass murdered on July 7.

Lo and behold comes July 8 and, before the subway dust has settled and before the rats have started to chew their prey, that is precisely what this ugly little man sets out to do, for example here.

Yet as futile and easy as it is deconstruct the monotone pontificating, he has therein made an important point (albeit in a different context):

"(T)his is part of the point of yesterday's bombings: to divide British Muslims from British non-Muslims"

All of us in the west knows the visceral anger that has welled since the terror attacks, the course investigations have taken, the target of suspicion. All of us have heard and read angry and blanket reactions, and felt a temptation to target their own ire.

Many of us have been taught not to generalise or to draw ignorant conclusions.

Now is the time to heed that lesson, to keep in mind that many more Iraqis have been slaughtered in Iraq than Americans, that millions of these people came out to democratically vote while under extreme threat. That the likes of Bin Laden wish to sway Muslims to their support, and that only a miniscule spattering of haters currently lend such support.

It requires the illusion of enmity and the perversion of the spirit to kill yourself and others in a lemming attack, or to cheer the result of one.

Let's not create the illusion.

Ben Gurion University of the Negev has awarded an honorary doctorate to 69-year old Egyptian writer Ali Salem.

Israel's Ha'aretz newspaper says that Salem has been "shunned by the Egyptian intellectual community, which is leading the struggle against peace with Israel, because he dared to voice a different opinion".

Regarding the attitude of his people toward Israel, Salem has written:

"There is no limit to the pain people feel when you suddenly lift the curtain of illusions and lies."

He also says:

"I believe in the sincerity of the Americans when they say that they want to bring freedom and democracy to the Middle East ... In the end they will succeed, because the people in the Middle East want the same thing."


"The movers of civilization are the merchants and the businessmen. People cross borders and countries not only with merchandise, but with ideas as well ... Everyone admires the role of the intellectuals, but today businessmen are the ones who change reality."

Here's to hoping that the views of people like Salem eventually prevail, in the Arab and Muslim world, over the views of hateful preachers who we might assume to be delighted over the carnage recently exacted by mass murderers in London.

Stumbled across this chat board conversation, where poster "sad muppet" claims he was on the London bus that exploded

James Taranto observes:

The BBC Calls It by Its Name
"London Rocked by Terror Attacks" reads a headline on the BBC's Web site. This seems unremarkable, except that, as the Mediacrity blog points out, the BBC's "editorial guidelines," in Reutervillian style, state:

The word "terrorist" itself can be a barrier rather than an aid to understanding. We should try to avoid the term, without attribution. We should let other people characterise while we report the facts as we know them.

The Beeb does apply this rule sometimes, such as in this timeline of attacks against Israel, which nowhere refers by name to terror, terrorism or terrorists.

Even Reuters is leaving out the scare quotes in some dispatches: "Police said they suspected terrorists were behind the bombings," the "news" service reports from London.

That rash reversion to calling terrorism by its name was all a mistake, evidently, because today (July 12) London's Telegraph reports:

The BBC has re-edited some of its coverage of the London Underground and bus bombings to avoid labelling the perpetrators as "terrorists", it was disclosed yesterday.

Early reporting of the attacks on the BBC's website spoke of terrorists but the same coverage was changed to describe the attackers simply as "bombers".

Phew.

The admiration of a guest columnist (Democrat, of course) for Pat Robertson's activities in supporting aid-to-Africa publicity initiatives constitutes the meat of the New York Times most emailed article over the last 7 days.

Stands for Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy, apparently, and is described here.

Unfortunately it seems apt to describe the behaviour of some people we probably all know. What to do about it is another question.

Altruism wasn't the only thing in the minds of a lot of the people who watched Live 8. Drying up poverty, a popular mantra dictates, will dry up the recruiting ground of terrorists.

But it ain't necessarily so. A fascinating and detailed treatment by Robert S. Leiken on the Real Clear Politics web site (Europe's Angry Muslims) pinpoints comfortable Europe as a burgeoning terrorist haven.

The item is long, and I have paraphrased excerpts as follows:

(T)he growing nightmare of officials at the Department of Homeland Security is passport-carrying, visa-exempt mujahideen coming from the United States' western European allies ...The cell in Hamburg that was connected to the attacks of September 11, 2001, was composed of student visitors, and the Madrid train bombings of March 2004 were committed by Moroccan immigrants. But...a Dutch Muslim of Moroccan descent, born and socialized in Europe ... murdered the filmmaker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam last November.

...(I)t is estimated that between 15 and 20 million Muslims now call Europe home and make up four to five percent of its total population. ... (which) will double by 2025

...(M)ost Muslim newcomers to western Europe started arriving only after World War II, crowding into small, culturally homogenous nations....Europe's Muslims gather in bleak enclaves with their compatriots: Algerians in France, Moroccans in Spain, Turks in Germany, and Pakistanis in the United Kingdom.

...(M)any younger Muslims reject the minority status to which their parents acquiesced. .... the very isolation of these diaspora communities obscures their inner workings, allowing mujahideen to fundraise, prepare, and recruit for jihad with a freedom available in few Muslim countries.

... Dutch youth are now embracing the fundamentalist line. Much the same can be said about angry young Muslims in Brussels, London, Paris, Madrid, and Milan.

Broadly speaking, there are two types of jihadists in western Europe: call them "outsiders" and "insiders." The outsiders are aliens ...(M)any of these first-generation outsiders have migrated to Europe expressly to carry out jihad.

Insiders ... were born and bred under European liberalism. Some are unemployed youth from hardscrabble suburbs of Marseilles, Lyon, and Paris or former mill towns such as Bradford and Leicester....another paradigmatic second-generation recruit (is) the upwardly mobile young adult, such as the university-educated Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker, or Omar Khyam, the computer student and soccer captain from Sussex, England, who dreamed of playing for his country but was detained in April 2004 for holding, with eight accomplices, half a ton of explosives aimed at London.

Al Qaeda's drives focus on the second generation. And if jihad recruiters sometimes find sympathetic ears underground, among gangs or in jails, today they are more likely to score at university campuses, prep schools, and even junior high schools

Several hundred European militants -- including dozens of second-generation Dutch immigrants ...　have also struck out for Iraq's Sunni Triangle. In turn, western Europe serves as a way station for mujahideen wounded in Iraq.

...(T)he Iraq network, which procures weapons in Germany from Balkan gangs, parallels those for the conflicts in Chechnya and Kashmir. Thanks to its state-of-the-art document-forging industry, Italy has become a base for dispatching volunteers. And Spain forms a trunk line with North Africa

Terrorism　(in Europe) is still seen as a crime problem, not an occasion for war. Moreover, some European officials believe that acquiescent policies toward the Middle East can offer protection. ... bin Laden ... has offered a truce to those European states that have stayed out of the conflict.

Contrary to what many Americans concluded ... France is the exception to general European complacency. ...during the 1990s the energetic French state denied asylum to radical Islamists even while they were being welcomed by its neighbors. Fearing, ..., that contagion would turn "the social malaise felt by Muslims in the suburbs ..." into extremism ... the French government ...detaining suspects for as long as four days without charging them or allowing them access to a lawyer. Today no place of worship is off limits to the police in secular France. Hate speech is rewarded with a visit from the police, blacklisting, and the prospect of deportation. These practices are consistent with the strict Gallic assimilationist model that bars religion from the public sphere (hence the headscarf dispute).
French youth could still tune into jihadist messages on satellite television and the Internet, but in the United Kingdom open radical preaching spawned terrorist cells.

Fragmentation and rivalry among Europe's security systems and other institutions continue to hamper counterterrorism efforts.

The new mujahideen are not only testing traditional counterterrorist practices; their emergence is also challenging the mentality prevailing in western Europe since the end of World War II. Revulsion against Nazism and colonialism translated into compassion toward religious minorities, of whatever stripe.

To strike at the United States, al Qaeda counts less on domestic sleeper cells than on foreign infiltration

The members of the Hamburg cell that captained the September 11 attacks came by air from Europe

The Independent started an item on "Live 8" with the above sentence, and proceeded to throw it's weight behind the initiative to pressure the G8 to do something about African poverty:

"Back in 1985 Geldof wanted your money. Yesterday Sir Bob, as he is now, put on an even bigger show ... to convince the G8 that an awful lot of people want to help Africa again, and this time in a way that lasts. By cancelling national debts, ensuring trade is fair and letting African countries compete in the market place without being crippled by unfair rules.

"That's how Bob sees it. And so does Bono, and Sting, and Madonna ... (and the people watching the rock show)"

That's not exactly how I see it, and I was one of the minions watching Sir Bob's show. I wonder: why can't African countries pay at least some of the debt? Why is the trading situation and it's associated rules inherently unfair?

I am glad the Live 8 show has drawn attention to the poverty issue and how it impacts on modern Africa.

The concert has sparked an international - well, pan-first world, at least - conversation on Africa. It has reminded, perhaps, people outside the wealthier countries that their brothers and sisters on the fortunate side of the economic gap are, for the most part, very uncomfortable about the unfair imbalances in this world.

But the conclusions of each individual regarding what to effectively do to tackle the problem may differ. All over the English-speaking world, and throughout continental Europe, interest has been sparked by Live 8 in information about what's going on in Africa, why there is such terrible poverty there.

Because of Live 8, editorials like the following one in Australia's Sydney Morning Herald are cropping up, and being read and thought about:

"Joseph Conrad found his African Heart of Darkness in the Congo, where he described "the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience". ... Congo's own took up where the colonialists left off, and proved just as brutal. ...

"Now ... (v)oter registration has finally begun for the first elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo in four decades.

"The country boasts immense natural wealth: forests, agricultural land, gold, diamonds and other minerals, as well as enough hydroelectric potential to power half the continent. With the G8 summit focusing on Africa this week it is worth remembering that the Congo is a very large piece in the region's jigsaw. Achieving stability in the heart of Africa would resonate way beyond the Congo's borders."

"Achieving stability" - therein lies the answer. Perhaps. From my comfortable armchair I infer that stability means a functioning, peaceful, democratic system underwritten with the rule of law.

Does the G8 have the power to implement said stability?

Not on it's own, I would think. Not any more than international powers were able to create successful reconstruction in Germany, Japan and China after the Second World War without the proactive initiative of the local populations in those places.

Not that that reality will quell the overt anger of the usual parade of protestors when the G8 Summit begins. But it will certainly be in the thinking of the people watching those protests, as it was in the thinking of many of the people watching Live 8.

Japanese news outlets at this time don't seem all that concerned with Live 8.

Top stories on Kyodo News include baseball star Hideki Matsui's 11th Major League home run, and the world record set by a man reciting pi to the 81,400th digit, or thereabouts. Makuhari Messe Convention Center was said to be only half full when the concert started.

Imagine - if you'll excuse the pun - the fuss that might have been generated there had Paul McCartney trotted out with Yoko Ono and Ringo to do a John Lennon number, instead of (Beatlessly) recycling Sergeant Pepper.

Paul famously hates her, but Yoko has been quite the hero amongst various cross-sections of Japanese over the years. Diplomatic (not to mention practise-what you-are-preaching) opportunity missed, in my book, by not involving her.

Hell may freeze over before Paul buries the hatchet with Yoko. And there is a very, very persuasive argument that she is right, and he is wrong, about the British media-fanned perception of Yoko - well-known in Japan to have come from a very wealthy background - as Lennon-piggybacker and Beatles-destroyer.

Norman Mailer, somewhere in medialand, spat at NYT editor Michiko Kakutani by describing her as a "threefer": a person who is untouchable on 3 counts in accordance with PC rules. Firstly, as a person of non-Anglo-Saxon minority ethnicity; secondly, as a feminist; thirdly, "Oh, what was the third?" queried Mailer aloud, "Let's just call her a twofer then."