Mysterious Things

That would be usefully remembered by Mr Obama and his people in Washington, as Jason points out.  I discovered The Road to Oxiana via Evelyn Waugh's diaries long ago.... 

Terrorist-sponsoring pro-holocaust capitals; but it was an amusing read, Richard Spencer's column. @WillHeaven g a.

I don't listen to National Public Radio these days, but do recall enjoying Renee Montagne's voice; Mark Steyn remarks on one of her 'malicious' on air comments here: even NPR's finest don't necessarily take kindly to capital city centers being vandalised, I guess. Oh; Toronto isn't Canada's capital, is it; tsk. 

The Tehran regime appears to be not entirely unreasonable, as John Hinderaker points out.

On the Iranian nuclear weapons sites? Hugh Tomlinson at the Times writes that they are.  I wonder what assurances Mr Obama has given Jerusalem, if any....

Mons Ruggero Francheschini OFM Cap, archbishop of Izmir, as apostolic administrator of Anatolia, succeeding the late Mons Luigi Padovese, requiescat in pace.  The Italian newspaper Il Foglio is running an interview of Mons Francheschini by Paolo Rodaro today, as Dr Magister has noted on his blog Settimo Cielo. Haven't looked to see if I can access the entire conversation but the Magister post includes Mons Francheschini saying that the Holy Father was 'badly advised' to attribute responsibility for Mons Padovese's murder to anything other than (I am paraphrasing) the Islamist demon in the murderer's heart.

I think that in the Vatican they have realised that I have justification to assert: the only motives for the murder of Luigi Padovese were religious; the assassination displays explicitly Islamic aspects.  It had nothing to do with the Turkish government or Ankara, nothing to do with private, personal motivations: only Islam. I know, the Pope said before landing in Cyprus "this is not a religious or a political assassination but a personal thing".  Certain things, the Vatican cannot teach us.

We shall see.  Oremus pro invicem. 

That is the paragraph of Mons Francheschini's interview available to non-subscribers, alas. 

At First Things, by David Goldman, 'Spengler'.

The West has lost a series of battles, but not necessarily the war. Islamism also has its Achilles heel. I wrote in 2004:

The West cannot endure without faith that a loving Father dwells beyond the clouds that obscure His throne. Horror—the perception that cruelty has no purpose and no end—is lethal to the West. Europe is dying slowly from the horror of the twentieth century's world wars, ending the way T. S. Eliot foresaw in the poem cited above, ‘not with a bang but a whimper’. Despite its intrinsic optimism, America is vulnerable as well.

The Islamic world cannot endure without confidence in victory, that to “come to prayer” is the same thing as to ‘come to success’. Humiliation—the perception that the Ummah cannot reward those who submit to it—is beyond its capacity to endure.

Radical Islam has risen against the West in response to its humiliation—intentional or not—at Western hands. The West can break the revolt by inflicting even worse humiliation upon the Islamists, poisoning the confidence of their supporters in the Muslim world.

Israel, the stone that the builders rejected, yet may be the West’s cornerstone. An Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear program, if it humiliated Iran sufficiently, might change the equation.

I don't know, and do not pretend to. The one premise I consider incontrovertible-- that there is a substantial connexion between the Jews, the faithful of the First Covenant, and the State of Israel-- is certainly denied by many.

Melanie Phillips and J. E. Dyer; all the usual suspects will condemn Israel's war crimes and "state terrorism" (the Turkish premier, according to the New York Times), and the plight of the poor Palestinians. Meanwhile, three Israeli submarines have taken up positions in the eastern Mediterranean from which Jerusalem will be able to strike at the Iranian regime with nuclear missiles. Most of my adult life, I have believed that some sort of grand settlement would be achieved in the Holy Land that would enable the pacification of at least most of the poor troubled peoples in the region; don't remember precisely when I began to doubt that this would happen: these days, I expect dead skies and dead land. Tsk.

Throughout history have been "obsessed", as Mark Steyn puts it, that civilisation has maintained its hard-won gains contra barbariam.

Update on Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 17:54 by Marc

Really, I had totally missed 'Everybody Draw Mohammed Day', tsk; it is true that I have not been spending much time reading the secular politics and GWOT blogs et cetera during the last few weeks: am enjoying the first book of Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria instead.  Post impetratam studiis meis quietem...

In September? I doubt it, since the Turkish government, no matter how many religious sympathisers are among its ministers and officials, cannot afford to antagonise the military secularists in such an outrageous sort of way.  But, good luck to Mr Spirou, who is, alas, not without his critics, I see from a quick Google search; he seems to be or to have been a 'player' in Democratic party politics and (perhaps) in other milieux.

Or so someone or some persons in Mr Obama's corps of retainers may well be thinking, according to Stewart Baker at Volokh Conspiracy.  The terrorist murderer Omar Khadr "has become a cause", as "a senior administration official" has put it in the Washington Post, and the politicians in DC are worried: Mr Khadr was fifteen when he committed his crimes.

... So what’s the problem with the case?  It is widely believed to have a stronger evidentiary basis than any other likely military prosecution.  Despite this, the administration is apparently so spooked by emanations and penumbras of international law that it is ready to send the killer of an American soldier back to his loathsome family after a few years — and perhaps immediately, if he gets credit for eight years already served.

At that point, Omar Khadr will be in his twenties and living just a three-hour drive from the world’s longest undefended border.

Gee, what could go wrong with that?

I suspect that Mr Khadr will serve many, many years in prison, when all is said and done: that there is liable to be some injustice in that, I freely grant. But I'm not willing to execute him, nor have the civil power do so, and there is something to be said for the fact that his relative youth may have predisposed him to a prudential misjudgment or two or three, and it is just possible that decades in the solitude of a prison will allow him to come to some comprehension of the enormity of his crimes.  Human life is unjust (which is another way of repeating the canon of the Second Council of Orange, "Homo non habet de se nisi mendacium").

Troubles in Arabia.  I wonder if AsiaNews has any competition from the Timeses et alia in reporting this story? a partial answer to that would require me to look at e.g. the Times this morning.  Hmm.  Perhaps. 

And no Iranian representatives on the UN Human Rights Council both. What did Cato repeat so tiresomely? 'ceterum censeo armamenta persicana esse delenda', or something like that.

But in the context Professor Althouse is discussing--which is politics and political action, in fact--I believe that she is mistaken as to the substance, while also admitting that some of those doing this sort of Muslim bourgeoisie striking are not as pure in motive as I am.  Andrea Harris g a.

I don't have time to read the article this morning but I expect that there will be issues with this.  As a general rule, the French government can obtain passage of whatever legislation it proposes (unlike the majority party in the Congress in this country, for example); we shall see. Have, days later, corrected my title's spelling of burqa; fat lot of good my semester of Arabic did me, eh; if only it were the 'u' or the 'a' I had gotten wrong, I could have blamed my error on the fact that one has to write vowels with signs and squiggles instead of proper letters.

Andrea Harris observes our guardians at work.

Noah Pollak at Contentions writes about our friends the editorial managers at the Times:

... The fact of the matter is that the most violent and genocidal kinds of anti-Semitic (and anti-Christian, and anti-American) hate speech are commonplace in the Muslim Middle East, yet are covered in the West only by boutique outlets such as MEMRI and Palestinian Media Watch. But when a white, Christian, European makes a statement that really is far more insensitive and dumb than it is anti-Semitic, not only does it land on the front page of the New York Times, but it is given sensational media coverage throughout the western world. The key factor is not the offense itself-- it is the religious or cultural identity of the person who has committed the offense....

He began by contrasting the "not just covered, but given above-the-fold, front page treatment" Times reporting of the Cantalamessa nonsense (and I do mean, nonsense attributed to Pater Cantalamessa) with that accorded

... One of the top leaders of Hamas, Mahmoud Zahar, a man who has been written about on hundreds of occasions in the Times, [who] responded to the dedication of a synagogue in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem by delivering a viciously anti-Semitic rant in which he promised the annihilation of Israel and said that the Jews “killed and murdered your prophets” and “have always dealt in loan-sharking” and are “destined to be destroyed.” ...

I may have briefly hesitated, at this or that moment in the past, to criticise the Times over an item of its coverage of the Church or her ministers because of a scruple about my own obvious non-objectivity; then I've recalled the witness of people like Mr Pollak and come to my senses. By the way, Miss Peggy Noonan, not all journalists and editors are created equally objective and honorable.

Of Our Lady's Assumption in Cordoba in Spain?  I noticed that Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs posted on this yesterday (with a typically provocative title--although I do agree that the Hagia Sophia ought to be returned to the Patriarch of Constantinople) but it being Good Friday I had better things to do than this.  The only major media site I checked--the Guardian's; the article being written by Giles Tremlett)--is as much concerned with not repressing the Cordoban jihadis' right to be quoted on major media sites and mocking the Catholic religion as with anything else.

... Yesterday's incident coincided with the city's famous Easter Week celebrations, where groups of nazarenos (penitents) dressed in long robes and tall conical hats carry statues of Jesus and the Virgin Mary from local churches around the streets....

As Matthew Balan at the NewsBusters site points out, none of the major media corporations in the United States reported any of this themselves, although there was an AP story on the wires.

Update on Sunday, April 4, 2010 at 11:27 by Marc

Religion Clause is the invaluable site where Professor Howard Friedman posts links to almost every religion-and-law story that appears in US English; he notes this today.

And so, while I'm agnostic on the real question Thomas Hegghammer is disputing with Bret Stephens, I do none the less very much appreciate someone who can bring effing Lady Gaga into the discussion about the so-called Palestinians.  A client at work listened enthusiastically to Fame or whatever it's called about 438 times until he had too much of a good thing (I suppose) and then began to ignore it.  She is a most excellent entertainer and self-promoter, I'll grant her that.

Are certainly not responsible for these tragedies: but who knows who the perpetrators are? I should prefer to believe that they were, in fact, Islamist terrorists (as seems to be the general 'diagnosis') but, given all the nonsense that Mr Putin and his fellows have 'accomplished', who knows?