"In the end, asking Hamas to investigate may have been a mistaken enterprise"...

Who knows how far along the way to wisdom Justice Richard Goldstone may travel if he's granted another few years?

"We cannot pretend we were not warned"...

Martin Bright on the nasty subject of that Libyan fellow whose despotic reign the Left unwashed have more or less happily tolerated from its beginning. The 'Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya' indeed; pft.

This sort of thing is provoking...

But scarcely surprising; Zenit reports that Cardinal Antonios Naguib, Patriarch of Alexandria of the Egyptians, has told the authorities at Al Azhar and in the Foreign Ministry that the Roman Pontiff was in fact misquoted or otherwise misrepresented by (well, the Zenit report doesn't say but elsewhere the offending news agency has been identified as...) Al Jazeera when he intervened (in an Angelus address and in the annual allocution to the diplomatic corps at the Holy See) to plead with the Egyptians for more civil treatment of the Copts. We remain entirely ignorant of the way in which Al Jazeera did its nonsense, if it did (I suppose that if I had the time at my disposal I might be able to investigate the matter online), and are meant to praise God for the goodness of the Muslim Egyptians who of course are always generous to a fault where the Christian Egyptians are concerned. Pft.

Someone was obliquely defending Mr Beck in my hearing...

The other evening, and I had to admit that I'd never seen or heard the man. Alex Massie at the Spectator has come to my rescue with what is a rather long YouTube video which I have to admit has so far captured my attention. The mix of truths and half-truths and nonsense is quite amazing. "The whole world will implode." Mr Beck is... amusing; I gather he is selling a book.

Update on Tuesday, February 1, 2011 at 21:43 by Marc

The Beck I watched supra is indeed amusing, as I pointed out; but so is this sort of criticism of the Beckian persona or act. Of course it is ridiculous at first glance to imagine the Chinese managing the wild kangaroo or the Turks the 21st c. Bulgurs; yet it would have been entirely unimaginable to a member of the Roman elite in the epoch of her greatest ascendance that North Africa would fall to the barbarians or that their influence would make and unmake the reigns of the Caesars themselves.

It really is remarkable how a thing...

Can be perceived in two differing and rather contradictory ways; I tend to think of Europe as a mainly urban and ex-urban stage whereon a tragedy of decadence and moral ruin has continued to run, less and less profitably, for fifty years, run in a way contrary to its own self-interest, divesting itself of the remaining relics of its former Christianity (which had sustained the production for the previous nineteen hundred years) while the Turkish government, apparently, sees a discothéque for Christan gentlemen that it wants to be added to the guest list for. Pft.

At Davos today, the Turkish vice-premier Ali Babacan today said that he regretted the lack of progress in the process of the adhesion of Turkey to the EU, deploring that the latter has become a "Christian club" that is "turned in on itself". 

Speaking after a panel at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Ali Babacan judged that "the politics of 'the open door' no longer exist" in the EU. "We had always thought that the European Union was a grand project building peace, but lately the process of its enlargement is purely and simply blocked", he said. 

"One of the greatest reasons why Turkey hasn't become a member of the European Union is that it is a Christian club. This is very dangerous in our eyes", he remarked.

Return Constantinople to the Greeks, to the Christian world, and then we will think about opening up social clubs together, is my rejoinder to Mr Babacan. While I do not seriously believe that the Turks must hand back Constantinople as a prerequisite to continued peaceful and profitable relations with the West, the fact that it is the Europeans who must cede this and allow that, and so on and so forth, rather galls; they can't even allow the Ecumenical Patriarch to freely exercise his office.

Seymour Hirsch has had a long career as a journalist...

Although it's quite true that I don't pay much attention to his work; evidently, he is concerned that too many Knights of Malta and members of Opus Dei machinate in the Pentagon. Or something. Anyway, I do believe that there is a war ongoing between a number of civilisations or cultures that significantly features the US and 'Islamic jihad', so if folks at the Joint Chiefs want to participate that is perfectly fine by me.

Am reading Mons Aillet's little book...

The Old Mass and the New, and noticed at Le Salon Beige that the good Bishop of Bayonne has written a most excellent, evangelical book foreward praising an 'authentic missionary spirit' vis-à-vis the Muslims. Perhaps he will go to Paris when Cardinal Vingt-Trois retires in a few years.

"Muslims, in the name of Shariah, are not able to understand the value of human rights"...

I had missed this essay by P Samir Khalil Samir SJ that appeared last week at AsiaNews; while I tend to rely on Father Samir's insights in this business of Catholics and Muslims cooperating in civil society, the good Jesuit does permit himself the occasional deplorable lapse e.g. to assert that in "the secularist West... there is no room for religion" is silly--except as political rhetoric. I live in one of the most flagrantly 'secularist' cities in the United States and no one attacks the parish church or the local Catholic schools, I can pray my beads on the bus et cetera. And he needs a better translator into English, ahem. Catholicism Pure and Simple g a.

Update on Sunday, January 16, 2011 at 13:24 by Marc

There is an audio interview with P Samir at La Bussola Quotidiana; as I figured out after a few seconds, one must click on the link beneath the rubric 'Documenti'.  He is going on about the events in Tunisia and I could only follow about four words out of ten but that is my very bad, bad Italian; a pleasure to hear the voice, in any event.

"Let us acknowledge that Jordan is Palestine"...

The Dutch politician Geert Wilders made a speech in Tel Aviv yesterday, the text of which is posted at Dr Andrew Bostom's site, here.  I honestly don't see any workable resolutions on the horizon; spes contra spem.

Nothing at all strange about V.S. Naipaul's troubles at...

The "European Writers' Parliament in Istanbul" (which sounds to be a proper lot of nonsense, in any event), contra David Blackburn at the Spectator: many Muslims have a hard time acknowledging their religion's violent history, and too few have undertaken the effort to distinguish in it that which may be morally defensible from that which isn't.

Dr Weigel on Rome's duty to end appeasement of Islamic jihad...

His essay is at First Things today.

... I quite understand that Christians in the Islamic world are tiny minorities, burdened by economic distress and cultural prejudice (the latter partially explaining the former). But unless Christians begin to push back against those who, like the Baghdad murderers, describe their churches as “dirty place[s] of the infidel that…have long been used as a base to fight Islam,” jihadists and other radical Islamists will simply roll over them, en route to rendering anything deemed an “Islamic land” Christian–free. What might a strategy of resistance to this implacable persecution look like?

It would begin with the Vatican....

Not quite Mrs Geller but close enough for government work.

Senator Graham has made a speech reaffirming...

That if push comes to shove the United States would be best advised to obliterate the military capabilities of the Iranian regime rather than to allow them to gain the use of nuclear weapons; I agree entirely, although I should very much hate to see Mr Obama re-elected to office on the basis of his successful destruction of Iranian power.

The poor Austrian Muslims were only trying to vindicate their claim that the Cathedral...

Of Córdoba is actually also a mosque; pft. The original LifeSiteNews article is here.  Next time I'm in Constantinople with a few dozen fellow pilgrims, perhaps we'll try that stunt at the Hagia Sophia and see if we each get only a five lira fine.

"The Western fantasy that adherence to the cause of jihad is spawned by poverty..."

Caroline Glick at her best in the Jerusalem Post, via Big Peace. I realise that the second link is also to Mrs Glick's article but am presuming that the JP link will vanish before much longer, either because of the activity of the demon of the paywall or for some other reason.

'Righteous anger' and martyrdom in Iraq and elsewhere...

Father Raymond J. De Souza has an excellent brief comment at CERC on the justifiable righteous anger aroused in attentive Catholics by the awful terrorist spectacles that have resulted in so many dead in Iraq during the last weeks.

The 'debate' between Dr Robert Spencer and Dr Peter Kreeft on Islam...

Will well repay being listened to, doubtless, although I haven't yet done so; at the weekend. Carl Olson g a. 

An interview with Bat Ye'or on the publication...

Of her new book L'Europe et le spectre du caliphat was published here on the site of the interviewer, Véronique Chemla; translation of a part of the conversation is here, at GalliaWatch.

"He said he was sorry it upset me, but really, it was plain that he was fine with it"...

That paragon of civic virtue Jon Stewart is perhaps not so sensitive and liberal as has been advertised?  Verum Serum g a.

Let's suppose that the 'conversation' is represented accurately...

And has made it through the traitor's hands also more or less accurately (I don't read at Klein Verzet regularly enough to be familiar with its authors); what should one make of the Turkish minister's remarks to MEP Madlener?

... The confrontation between Bagis and Madlener took place last May in a meeting between Turkish and EUnion parliamentarians. During that meeting Madlener asked some pointed questions about the refusal of the Turkish government to meet with a delegation of Dutch parliament that included Geert Wilders.

'You are good friends with Iranian dictator Ahmadinejad, while you shun my party's leader. It is a disgrace.'

Bagis is reported as answering:

'Racism is a dangerous disease from which Europe suffers much. It is clear there are still people suffering from it. Mr Madlener, we will cure you.'

According to Madlener this was the most noteworthy moment of the meeting, yet someone scouring the minutes would look in vain for it....

The post's original and major point was of course that the EU bureaucrats will happily edit out of the record--out of the 'record', in several different senses--whatever doesn't suit their purpose, without any especial regard for the truth.  "We will cure you"; what did the gentleman mean by that? For all I know, it may be perfectly obvious from the original German, Dutch, or Turkish, but I rather doubt it; Google Traduction is not good enough with the Dutch of De Volkskrant.

Cut off an infidel's hand, win elective office...

That's how it works in Kerala, apparently; Yves Daoudal posts that the Muslim man who severed a Catholic teacher's hand in July has now won election to a local authority in Ernakulam.  From jail.  With a margin of thousands of votes. One lesson might be, 'Yes, we can'.