Marching Toward Hell

Michael Scheuer's new book Marching Toward Hell, America and Islam After Iraq came in the mail today, I've read the first 20 pages or so, it looks to be a very good read. The man is the Merle Haggard of foreign policy.

Meaningless op-eds masquerading as human interest stories

From the CNN.com article: Muslim women: My headscarf is not a threat after telling a story about rudeness at Walmart while wearing a hijab (which they put in quotation marks for some reason).

Such stories are not altogether uncommon for Muslim Americans.

Wow, not altogether uncommon! I guess it's not unlike a problem of variable merit. There's also the annoying use of the term Muslim American (implying ethnicity or nationality) instead of American Muslim.

The rest of the story is of dubious logic and follows the same pattern as all other CNN.com stories about group identity, which is

1. An offensive incident
2. A quote of data after some seemingly arbitrary date
3. Quote from expert
4. Further interview with subject, telling everyone that he/she wants to be different while remaining the same.
   

Nuking Mecca would be counterproductive and silly

I listened to the Republican Debate from Sunday and heard Tom Tancredo repeat his strategy of nuking Mecca if terrorists launch another attack on the United States. It's just silly. Everyone is sold on the notion that religions are "of" something, like peace or justice.

Nuking Mecca is a way of fighting on technicalities and hoping that the other side believes in them as much as we would like them to. It's like trying to fight LSD use by threatening to build a Starbucks on Jim Morrison's gravesite.

Saturday link roundup

• A nice how-to on HDR photography
• Survivorman is blogging again!
• The greatest living American you've never heard of.
• The world's stupidest Fatwas, my favorite -

  Many Muslims believe that unmarried men and women should not work alone together—a stricture that can pose problems in today’s global economy. So one Islamic scholar came up with a novel solution: If a woman were to breast-feed her male colleague five times, the two could safely be alone together.

  The injuction against the Polio vaccine is scary though.
• It seems that tires will outlive us all
• More on the Kathryn Johnson case
• A Slate article on the ethanol haters, of which I am one. He leaves out the fact that creating ethanol takes more energy than it produces.
  

Recommended reading for Tuesday

• Londonistan Calling - Hitchens goes back to London. Choice quote:

  He was a conspicuous figure because, having lost the use of an eye and both hands in an exchange of views in Afghanistan, he sported an opaque eye plus a hook to theatrical effect. Not as nice as he looked..

• The Crime Against Kansas - Why isn't this sort of thing in more history classes? You might hear about John Brown's raid, but never about any clashes
  

The most illuminating presentation I've seen in years

Via Zen Pundit, it's Col Patrick Lang's Lecture on Islam. Purely informative, insightful, historical, well presented, and doesn't run afoul of the Electric Shaver of Peace fallacy. I recommend it to everyone. It's about 90 minutes worth of video, I just let it play while I worked on other stuff.

Friday night round up

• Hansellman on graphing - the data "wants" to be presented in a certain way
• Hansellman on a family backup strategy - for all of those of us who give out free tech support to family and friends
• Perceptions of America and Iran in der Spiegel
• Der Spiegel again - Muslim integration into Europe
  

Sunday round up

• A good read on economics and statistics
• Islam and Christianity - IBM and Microsoft - Embrace and Extend
• Resiliancy, and how to measure it
  

Quick tab clearing roundup

• The Sunni-Shia Quiz - I got a 100!
• Private solutions to Global Warming
• Ron Paul is running for president! Finally a good republican.
• Engineering Quotes
• Woman Fired For Writing About Avoiding Work
  

Thursday rapid fire

• Hitchens reviews Stein - personally I don't think the demographic argument carries much weight - look at the performance of Japan vs China and Germany vs Russia in WWII. A productive culture beats a backward one in a life or death struggle. It's an interesting read though. To clarify - the reason that Japan and Germany lost was American material and military support. While they could die bravely, that doesn't lead to many wins.
• Toddler's Temper Ousts Family From Plane -

  She was removed because "she was climbing under the seat and hitting the parents and wouldn't get in her seat" during boarding, Graham-Weaver said.

• Police in Tijuana Issued Sling Shots -

  The police department has issued about 60 slingshots to officers in the violent border city of Tijuana, where soldiers confiscated police weapons two weeks ago on allegations of collusion with drug traffickers.

  Yet the war on drugs continues. This time for sure!
  
• Battery Breakthrough - Well worth reading. If true, this changes American society for the better in ten years or less. Sadly, most scientific breakthroughs tend to be either false or meaningless
• Diane Feinstein and conflicts of interest
• Winning the battle for freedom - RTWT - from the founder of Whole Foods no less.
  

Everyone should read this

Dan Habbot over at TDAXP has the single most informative article on the difference between Sunni and Shia Islam I've ever read.

Thoughts on today

Another terror plot is centered in London and Pakistan, as were the 7/7 plot.

I wonder if the prime focus of radical Islam is not the Arab word but Central Asia. Perhaps Arab culture, for good or ill, is too strongly ingrained to be replaced by a pure (messianic cult) version of Islam. The Central Asian states, might be more pliable due to 70 years of Soviet purges weakening the societies.

Just a thought.

Freedom lives in syndication

South Park's "Super Best Friends" is still airing in syndication, and still shows Mohammed.

Things that annoy me about our modern world

At the moment, it's the politically correct West, and their treatment of Islam. I recently came across an ad for the movie Islam: What the West Needs to Know.

I read the site and found it irritating. The phrase "religion of peace" has been repeated often enough to be ridiculous, and it is a patently ludicrous assumption. But the opposite of a falsehood is not necessarily the truth, it's usually another falsehood, as it is in this case.

Plainly put, saying a religion is a religion of peace is about as meaningful as saying the Norelco Bodygroom is an electric shaver of peace; it's a term that doesn't apply. Religions aren't inherently anything, it's all in the practice, and that varies with people location and time. If the practice at a given point in time and place is warlike or placid, then so be it. It's a meaningless statement. It's like imputing anti-semitism to vegetarians due to Hitler's aversion to meat.

Quick Sunday night round up

• Drones over Los Angeles
• Unusual, but proven business ideas
• Smart Traffic Systems, in Georgia no less.
• Photographing Urban Landscapes
• A poll of the Muslim countries, one thing that jumped out was

  One of the more surprising findings in the poll was that solid majorities in Indonesia (65 percent), Turkey (59 percent), Egypt (59 percent) and Jordan (53 percent) said they do not believe the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States were carried out by groups of Arabs.

  which is scary, scary stuff.
  
• MSNBC has a nice catch-all page on Islam in Europe.
• Wikipedia entry of the day: Charles Martel
• Wildcats in Buckhead
  

Nomenclature

Over the past week the term "Prophet Mohammed" has come into existence. Weird. It used to just be Mohammed, with no title.

In related news, here is a fine editorial by Andrew Sullivan on the topic, and here is a post about the media as "a proper Victorian gentleman" which is well worth reading Also marginally related, Fareed Zakaria on the decline of Europe.

I forgot about that one

Andrew Sullivan remembers that South Park portrayed Mohammed in an episode a few years ago. And no on cared. What a scam this all is.

And Kudos to the Weekly Standard for publishing the photos. The gutlessness of the American press on this one has been quite sad. The article is well worth reading as well. Quick quote:

None of these anguished reactions actually occurred, of course--no pogroms, no renunciation of U.S. and E.U. aid, no hiccup in the Iranian nuclear program. Because there was no real "anguish." In truth, by December nothing much had happened because of the cartoons.

So a group of Danish imams took off for the Middle East to try to cause trouble. To do this, they added three cartoons to their roadshow that they seem to have ginned up--crude propaganda pieces that would be guaranteed to stir a mob, just in case the original illustrations didn't produce the effect they were after.

The militants' trip was a success. Various extremist groups and terror-connected Islamists decided to use the cartoons as yet another weapon in the radical Islamist attempt to intimidate the West, and various Arab dictatorships saw a political opportunity in starting some anti-European riots.

And you can understand their calculation. Since 9/11, the West has gone on offense against radical Islamists and Middle Eastern dictatorships. That assault has apparently been more threatening to them than many of us realized. From Iraq to Palestine to Iran, from Islamist enemies of liberty to dictatorial opponents of democracy, those who are threatened by our effort to help liberalize and civilize the Middle East are fighting back with whatever weapons are at hand, and with whatever invented excuses and propaganda ploys they can discover.

There's not much more to say.....

Everything that needs to written about the current green line conflict (to use hip internationalist jargon) in Denmark has been written. I suppose the underlying theme is the need for people to participate in a society to a strong degree.

It is a good display of spine by the Danes; I imagine we'll see a lot more of this sort of thing in the future as multiculturalism wears thin for the Europeans, and diminishing marginal returns (as it becomes easier to move about that part of the world) on immigration.

Interesting

Holland might ban the burqua. Here is a link to Georgia's largely unenforced mask law, which would ban it here as well.

Quick round up

• An article from Newsweek which has some interesting stats on American feelings on abortion.
  
• Saudi teacher sentenced to 750(!) lashes for blasphemy. Among other things he was charged with "defending Jews". No one seems to have adopted him as the new Scopes.
• "Ban Asian marriages of cousins, says MP"
  

  The report, commissioned by Ann Cryer, revealed that the Pakistani community accounted for 30 per cent of all births with recessive disorders, despite representing 3.4 per cent of the birth rate nationwide.

  ...

  "I think this should be applied to the Asian community. They must look outside the family for husbands and wives for their young people."

  It is estimated that more than 55 per cent of British Pakistanis are married to first cousins, resulting in an increasing rate of genetic defects and high rates of infant mortality. The likelihood of unrelated couples having the same variant genes that cause recessive disorders are estimated to be 100-1. Between first cousins, the odds increase to as much as one in eight.

  55%!?

• This is way cool.
  

A fine point

I forget how I got to this examination of the French riots, but this is a pretty good explanation

What you’re seeing in the riots now is really just the same thing that happens when the government tries to privatise some public company, and the unions go on strike.

This is the French banlieu criminal union going on strike.

Long time no blog

The riots in France continue. Is it me, or is it very strange that there is a national strategy on what is essentially a local law enforcement problem, albeit a common one.

I still think some of the French politicians are playing a "the worse, the better" game with the rioters, to wit, the worse the riots, the more the anti-immigration sentiment, which bodes well for le Pen's party. Or it could be that the French government simply lacks the ability to end the riots.

And on the 13th day

The riots continue, and seem to escalate a tad.. I am a believer that this underclass was created by perverse incentives of the French welfare system, who have nothing to lose by indulging in Jane Galt "breaking stuff is fun" meme.

That being said though, are the French actually trying to stop the rioting? Their efforts have been somewhat subtle. It seems like there's something larger afoot here.

Are the French even trying?

We enter day 11 of the European intifada.

So now the French cops found a Molotov Cocktail factory and rioters are shooting at cops and attacking firemen. They seem to be doing a successful job of ghettoizing (or creating their own autonomous areas) themselves. I suppose the French will eventually call in the military once this whole thing starts to lose steam and then call it a triumph of civilization.

One of the commenters over at the Belmont Club observed:

But are letting the burnings and insurrection go on so as to give the Muslims plenty of rope to hang themselves. Perhaps a decision exists within the French government that Muslim labor is not needed when less criminally-inclined, less subversive alternatives exist in Latin America, India, Asia......and that they have decided Islam cannot assimilate and the riots are a good way of convincing the public of that fact..

Which is an interesting thought. Not practical, and a bit too clever. It also ignores the (I think) obvious observation that when you pay people to stay out of the economy you create an underclass and breed resentment. I would imagine that would happen with most immigrant groups.

Also from Belmont

Car burning is spectacular, serious enough to get attention yet -- and this is the vital point -- not serious enough to provoke lethal force

which is probably true. That means these things can go on forever and probably continue for another week or two. All of this points to large gains for le Pen's far right party whenever their next election happens.

Two things

1. Bali protesters: Kill the bombers - an example of history moving in the right direction abroad. Evidently Bali is one of the few countries where radical Islam exists, but is actively not tolerated
2. A major clash between the Russians and the fellow travelers of radical Islam, Chechen separatists, is not major news. Chewbacca becoming an American citizen does make it above the fold on CNN.com.
   

Fascinating and horrifying

I recently read this interview with a terrorist recruiter in the UK Prospect. It's quite long but worth reading. The recruiter is some unassimilated Pakistani Brit who seems quite terrifying in his certainty. It brought to mind two things.

1. It is uncanny how accurate Eric Hoffer was in describing this sort of person in The True Believer as rootless, no strong family, no national identity, no sense of self etc.
2. The current situation seems to be similar to the international(ist) unrest Trotsky had in mind before he was forced out by Stalin. That is to say; having active agents throughout the world with no strong connections to the center of the movement. The Global Guerillas blog calls this Open Source Warfare.

And now I see this article on the French deporting radical Muslim clerics. Hmm.

Yet more London

I came across an interesting column in the Times of London, specifically The act of small-time losers by Anatole Kaletsky. Similar in some ways to my earlier thoughts on the matter, different in others. Specifically

In this sense, the most useful analogue for last week’s outrage in London may not be September 11 or even the bombing of Madrid last year, but the worst act of terrorism in postwar Western history before September 11: the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people in 1995. Timothy McVeigh, the perpetrator, was, like the London bombers, a small-time loser who felt he was acting out of intense ideological and religious motives. He was a fervent white supremacist and belonged to an extensive network of neo-Nazi fanatics who are generally believed to number many thousands across the US. His commitment to an essentially religious doctrine — that a global Jewish conspiracy, using African-Americans as their subhuman foot-soldiers, was taking over the world and preparing to exterminate or enslave all white Christians — was every bit as sincere as the faith and “piety” of many jihadist terrorists.

...

It certainly did not occur to anyone after the Oklahoma bombing to apologise for the racial desegregation which had provoked the American neo-Nazis and their ideological antecedents, the Ku Klux Klan. Nobody suggested abolishing affirmative action or banning Jews from public office on the grounds that racial mixing and the prominence of Jews was angering white supremacists and acting as “a recruiting sergeant” for more neo-Nazi terrorists who might copy McVeigh.

Should the political sensitivities and religious aspirations of jihadist killers be treated with any greater respect? The answer is clearly, no.

and

Just as conservative America totally isolated the white supremacists and neo-Nazis after the bombings in Oklahoma, the rational Muslim community in Britain must be forced to reject completely the small minority of Wahhabi fanatics who boast that they “love death”. Only then can there be any hope of restoring respect for human life in the Islamic community and reducing the concept of martyrdom to what it really amounts to: a sad, lonely and utterly futile suicide.

While the entire column is well worth reading I do object to a few points. The final paragraph can easily be taken to mean that white supemacists and neo-Nazis were an integral part of conservatism in America, which hasn't been true in my lifetime (outside of Mississippi I suppose). The second point is that it ignores the proportions and locations.

The Wahhabi fanatics are part of the Muslim community in Britain, probably a very small percentage. For a round number, call it one percent. Compare that to the percentage of neo-nazis in the white community, where I would imagine it is less than one percent of one percent. Also, from what I've read British Muslims are concentrated in cities where the intimidation power of a commited minority is likely to be greater. The likely "conservative white" (to follow Kaletsky's logic) supporters were more suburban and rural where I would imagine the power of a commited minority is lessened by distance.

Repeating News

This is now the third appearance of the Muslim vs. teh Unclean meme, this time taking the form "Calif. Nat'l Guard Sorry About Pig-Blood Flier". Oddly enough I've seen it about the same time every year.

The gist of the story is that mixing suicide bombers blood with an "unclean" animal would discourage the suicide bomber from killing people. For example, a bus in Israel could have a bucket of pig's blood on board. Were the bus to explode the unclean blood would forever taint the suicide bomber's final remains, and therefore, no paradise and 72 virgins for him.

Naturally, Snopes has an article on this. Short summary, it's a very improbable solution.

The desire for simplistic solutions to complex problems has spawned several widely-circulated messages of late which seek to transform a fight against terrorism to the easily-manageable level of a horror film or a comic strip. Today's popular notion is the concept that a pig is to a Muslim as a crucifix is to a vampire — simply arm yourself with a porker, and you can use it to render even the most fanatical terrorist helpless, sending him cowering in fear lest he come into contact with anything porcine.

Such notions reduce an extremely widespread and diverse religion — and the people who follow it — to a monolithic entity with a single set of beliefs and rules to which everyone adheres. Islam has a variety of sects and sub-sects just as Christianity has a multiplicity of denominations; assuming that all "Muslims" believe and behave identically is like assuming that all Catholics and Baptists believe and behave identically because both of the latter groups are "Christians." In one sense, messages such as the ones quoted above could be considered as silly as Muslims' proclaiming that a good way to throw the USA into disarray would be to "bomb" America with juicy steaks on Fridays, because "Americans are Christians," and "everyone knows Christians who eat meat on Fridays go to Hell." Never mind that not all Americans are Christians, that not all Christians are Catholics, that not all Catholics believe in exactly the same things, that not all Catholics are equally religious or faithful, and that even the "rules" of Catholicism have changed over time.

I would quibble over the user of the term "simplistic" when what is actually meant is "simple". Of course people would want simple solutions over complicated ones.

Then again, as I prowl the Snopes site, I see this legend, marked true: "An article from The Jewish Journal describes Israeli doctors' providing blood to Palestinians who were injured at Jenin but refused to be given "Jewish blood.""

More thoughts on London

Instapundit pretty well sums up my view of the matter, but the whole business has led a few things to come to mind:

One thing absent from most analysis of the current world situation is the far reach of the community aspect (Ummah I believe) of Islam:

It is correctly used to mean the nation of the believers (Ummah Al-Muhmini) in Islam, thus the whole Muslim world.

In practical terms it takes the form of a meta-loyalty that competes with national loyalties (probably the reason the wretched term "Muslim-American" is used instead of "American Muslim"). I suppose the nearest comparison is the affinity of many American Jews for Israel, as well as the clamor for leniency for Jonathan Pollard. It also explains the attention given to Israeli treatment of Palestinians compared to the relatively scant attention given to all of the problems in Kyrgistan, Egypt, Sudan et al (in-team vs out-team)

For the most part though there is simply no matching comparison for Americans. Islam gives many Muslims a competing loyalty which Westerners have problems understanding but seems very natural to Muslims. This "team" aspect to the religion (a horizontal and not vertical faith, I'll elaborate on that later) gives overlap to loyalties and goes far to explain the wholly inadequate Muslim response to terrorism.

In looking over this I see I shouldn't post at 4:00 in the morning if I want to impress people with clarity.

The winner for weirdness

From an interview with female Palestinian suicide bomber

According to the Koran, male martyrs are welcomed to Paradise by 72 beautiful virgins. Ayat, as with many of the women she is incarcerated with, believes that a woman martyr "will be the chief of the 72 virgins, the fairest of the fair".

From the Telegraph UK.

Second class even in the afterlife.

That annoying media of ours

I was reading The Model School, Islamic Style recently and had the thought, does the media only interview histrionic pretentious American Muslims?

The article is about a Muslim school outside of Chicago. To Quote

The second order of business is creating what Universal calls an "Islamic environment." The Koran and the sayings of Muhammad are taught two days a week, Arabic three days a week. Grades 2 to 12 break for prayer once a day. Beyond Scripture, a Muslim approach influences the traditional curriculum as well. When teacher Fuzia Jarad's English class read Romeo and Juliet, the girls wanted to know, "Is it love at first sight?" "Yes," the teacher answered. "As Muslims, we don't do that. The difference is lust versus love; appearance versus knowing. Islam protects you from mistakes." For assistant principal Abdallah, who is in charge of discipline, love is a big issue. "I've had students come to me and say, "So and so are in love. Everyone is gossiping about the girl. Her reputation is ruined.'I tell them, 'If you care, show respect and stop the discussions.' Sometimes a girl or boy will tell me about a love letter they've received. It's always a letter. They can't socialize. They don't want the letter. They don't want to get in trouble. The feelings for each other are natural. Islam gives us a way to approach those feelings. Choose your spouse, but don't give your body or soul to someone until you're married."

What's central to the environment is a sense of Muslim family values. That's why Mohammad (Mo) Suleiman sent his daughter Samia, 18, to Universal. "Family means the older have mercy on the younger," says Suleiman, "and the younger respect the older." The students seem to make an effort, but cultural isolation is impossible. "My dad will hear the word love when I play my music, and he'll say that's against our religion," says freshman Ryan Ahmad. "So I'll stop for a week. But then one of my friends will start singing some lyric, and I start up again." When freshman Gulrana Syed watches TV, she tries to stick with family shows but gives in to the temptation to watch Fear Factor. "If swearing starts," she says, "I turn it off and hope God forgives me."

Though the school and the parents want their kids to be successful in America, the ambivalence of many Islamic parents sends mixed signals. The pull of their home country is a constant distraction from fitting into this one. "They are obsessed with foreign politics," says Steve Landek, who has been mayor of Bridgeview since 1999. "I come to talk to them about better sidewalks. They want to know how to run for Congress so they can change America's Israeli policy." Clearly respectful, however, of the economic and cultural contributions of Muslims to the community, he regrets to say 9/11 has set them back. "I still hear comments. I'm not going to repeat them. I'm not going to perpetuate the negative."

and

The students next door sometimes give voice to the commonplace resentment that can be found among Muslims the world over. Assigned by his English teacher to write an essay about his own American Dream, a 15-year-old wrote that the occupied territories should be returned to the Palestinians and "the Jews should be left to suffer." More often, however, Universal's students feel resentment about being stereotyped, both in the media and on the streets. To senior Ali Fadhli, the Fox TV show 24, which had a plot this season about a Muslim terrorist cell, is "obnoxious," he says. "America has moved on to a new enemy. We're treated now like the Russians were during the Cold War." Being teenagers though, perhaps the worst slight of all is being regarded as outsiders. "The students are aware," says Dalila Benameur, head of the social studies department, "that they are perceived as different." Says freshman Gulrana Syed: "It's kind of impossible to blend in wearing a head scarf." Student Ryan Ahmad, whose dad is his toughest music critic, admits, "Americans seem to have more fun. Muslims try to be American, but we don't know how. The cultures are so different." A sense that U.S. life has its own contradictions provides some perspective. Senior Muna Zughayer, noting the use of women as sex objects, says, "I think it's funny people look at us and say we're oppressed!"

So, in other words, they go to lengths to maintain their own culture and traditions, they voluntarily segragate themselves in education, visibly and publicly remove themselves from American mainstream culture, present a monolithic public face, and have strong loyalties to other countries.

Then they wonder why they don't fit in the with the culture they're rejected. You can't be different without being different.

I guess the question is: Does the media deliberately seek out these people and ignore the rest of American Muslims or do they seek out the media. With the exception of finding out the Dave Chappelle was a Muslim (also in Time magazine), I can't remember any other mention of American Muslims where that was a detail and not the focus. One never reads about, say some dentist who invented a new method of flossing, who got the idea on the way to prayers (or something like that). To put it another way, is the only public Muslim someone who is professionally Muslim?

Bolshevism and Islam

As an amplification of my earlier post about Saudi influence on modern Islamic culture. Throw in a bit of Bryan Caplan and Eric Hoffer, and I'm closer having better thoughts on the subject.

To wit, the problem is the merging of state, society, economy and religion into a single unit. The most obvious parallel is pre-revolution Russia, with the Saudi royal family playing the Romanovs, and bin Laden playing Lenin.

After Ivan the Terrible essentially annexed the Russian orthodox church and installed the Czar as head of the church (or maybe that was Peter the Great, I can't remember), all authority, be it economic, political, or religious in Russia became ever more centralized in the person of the Czar. When Lenin seized power in 1917 he merely continued this process, finally culminating in Stalin.

All of this centralization basically discards useful information as revealed in action and prices per Hayek in the Fatal Conceit. One man does the thinking for millions, and the society is one millionth as smart as it could be. Could this be what is happening in the Arab world right now? Is the problem just lack of knowledge and power distribution, as it was in the Soviet era, and current North Korea?

As I read over this post I see it is very jumbled and unclear. I'll explore more on this topic later.

The Saudis

There are currently unconfirmed reports that King Faud of Saudi Arabia is dead. This is not as momentous as it seems since he's effectively been out of power for several years.

This leads me to wonder: How much of modern Islam is just Saudi quirks?

In comparison, if you gave one of the more radical environmental groups, say Earth First, 200 billion dollars a year starting in 1985 to spend on the "Movement" what would environmentalism be like now? I would imagine it would be more extreme, and much, much weirder since there would be no idea competition or moderating influences.

Hitch puts it very well

Christopher Hitchens gets it right in his latest Slate column (refering to the fatwa put on Salman Rushdie)

Now, everything in me is revolted by the burning of books, let alone the attempt to murder writers, and I claim the right to feel this at least as strongly as any illiterate fanatic may choose to feel about a story in Newsweek. Some of us can be offended at insults to our culture, and we, too, possess unalterable convictions and principles. Many people take the same view of the desecration of Old Glory. But we would never dream of venting ourselves in random assaults on mosques or Muslims, and if anyone on our soil did dare to commit such atrocities, I hope and believe that they would not receive moist and sympathetic treatment in the pages of the American press.

Hitchens is one of the very few commentators that does not treat Muslims as exotic pets.

On a related note this CNN.com article was interesting for a few reasons, money grafs

Women in black veils marched through Kashmir, where schools and businesses were closed as part of the protest, and set American flags and copies of the U.S. Constitution ablaze.

"The defilement of our holy book is outrageous because we consider it to be the word of God," thundered Asiya Andrabi, head of the women's group Daughters of the Community, through her veil. "Guantanamo Bay is a cage. It is not a prison."

1. They burned copies of the Constitution? That's a first. Maybe they DO hate us for our freedom.
   
2. "Daughters of the Community"?
3. "Thundered.... through her veil". Who writes this stuff? Are they trying to work jokes in?

Our troubling times

I came across this article on Instapundit. It's a Reuters article about Italian authorities criminally charging an author for defaming Islam. For all practical purposes she would be tried for blasphemy. She's rather old and living in the US and I doubt she'll be extradited. Glenn ends with this quote

Tom Wolfe once said that Fascism is forever descending on the United States, but that somehow it always lands on Europe. Perhaps the same is true with theocracy?

Now mind you, she is being charged in Italy, not the US. If the Italians want to dig their own grave, so be it.

The cause (I think) is based upon vastly different underlying concepts; namely the West has moved the concepts of state, society and religion (and, for the properly educated, the economy) so far apart that Westerners' really aren't on the same page as those raised or educated in the Middle East or in the Middle Eastern way. What is a minor matter to us is a much larger thing to them and vice versa. Political Correctness and a permanent indignation industry don't help either.

I do think it's going to end badly. The cumulative effect of legal and other victories on behalf of Muslim sensibilities will effectively dehumanize Muslims in the eyes of the West and move them further out of the mainstream. By expending large amounts of effort on what seem to be trivial matters (based on the conceptual differences listed above), and maintaining group unity (which also seems to be happening) it will have the de facto effect of separating Muslims from the rest of society and giving them a high-maintenance reputation. Put in more mathematical terms it will raise the costs of interaction. The long run effect of all this is that the Western world treats Muslims as exotic pets and they never assimilate.

I wonder if there are any Ricardian Theories of cultural conflict? If not, this is the genesis of one I suppose.

So like us

I saw this at Gates of Vienna under the heading "The Jihad That Refreshes". Then I laughed hysterically. It basically takes the Coca Cola logo, flips it, changes it is non-obvious ways, to make the logo have an anti-Islam message. It's a middle eastern version of the old Proctor & Gamble church of Satan hoax.

A new slur!

Yesterday while at Borders I spent about 20 minutes flipping through a US News & World Report special issue about Islam. What I read was fairly informative. While I thought it neglected the conceptual differences between traditional Islamic notions of law and society and traditional Western notions, it was still a good read.

One thing that stuck me was the interviews with American Muslims (in describing themselves they used the phrase "Muslim-American" which annoys me intensely) was their descriptions of how 9-11 affected them. Granted I'm sure they interviewed dozens of people and they only chose a few, but they all had the same theme, largely that they were all self-consciously Muslim in their day to day life, whether in garb, associating with other Muslims, etc. One even went so far as to describe identification with a larger group as "uniquely American". That also annoyed me intensely (this should be a country for individuals, groups are for the Balkans.). They were then surprised and offended when people began viewing them differently after 9-11. Put another way, they voluntarily profiled themselves before 9-11, but became offended when perception became negative.

There was also a section on Europe's experience with Islam. The Theo van Gogh story is well known, but there was an article about Muslim immigrants not assimilating in Germany. The article also mentioned that the immigrant children are taught in Islamic schools. I don't remember if the German taxpayers were on the hook for that or not. Not surprisingly this produces youth who have no interest in assimilating and I would imagine no economically viable skills, which is great if you're trying to produce a permanent underclass, but beyond that it seem braindead. The slur mentioned in the title is "Pork Eaters" which is a derogatory term that the Muslim schoolchildren use for ethnic Germans.

I then come across this article in Reason

On April 30, American journalist Chris Crain became the victim of a hate crime in Amsterdam. While walking in the street holding hands with his partner, he was savagely beaten by seven men shouting antigay slurs. A few days later, Scott Long, director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Program at the Human Rights Watch, expressed some sympathy for the gay-bashers. Crain's attackers were reportedly Moroccan immigrants.

"There's still an extraordinary degree of racism in Dutch society," Long opined to the gay news service PlanetOut. "Gays often become the victims of this when immigrants retaliate for the inequities that they have to suffer."

and

Serap Cileli, a Turkish-German author and filmmaker who escaped an arranged marriage, told Der Spiegel that until recently, the German media refused to publish her accounts of her and other Turkish women's experiences for fear of appearing "racist."

Even feminists often balk at breaking the multicultural faith. A 2001 article in Labyrinth, a feminist philosophy journal, lamented that concerns about the oppression of women in the Third World could perpetuate "the stereotype that 'brown' men abuse 'brown' women more than white men" and cause "Third World" people to be perceived as "more barbaric" than Westerners.

Now beyond the implicit statistical errors in the above what does it say when everyone is so concerned about appearances and feelings over everything else. I'm reminded of the old Onion headline "ACLU defends Klan's right to burn down ACLU headquarters".

While I'm waiting

For the hosting data center to "reboot to fix latency they call it", I'll share this link on media self-absobrtion by Claudia Rosette. It's the best article I've read so far about the Newsweek debacle. Money grafs"

But the chief victims to date have been the rioters themselves, some of whom died as the violence escalated. A Washington Post report Monday quoted an Afghan dry-goods salesman, Del Agha, who joined one of the riots, as saying: "We wanted to have a peaceful demonstration, but the demonstration was like a car and some people who are the enemies of Afghanistan took the steering wheel and turned it in the wrong direction."

As recounted in the Arab News, an English-language newspaper based in Saudi Arabia, Afghans angered by the Newsweek story "have lashed out in fury in all directions. The fact that not only government and UN buildings were burned, but even mosques shows the depths of their rage. The same level of public anger has been reported from Pakistan, Indonesia, Egypt and many other Muslim countries."

Let's pause right there. We are hearing that Muslims, infuriated by a report of blasphemy, went on violent rampages that resulted in . . . dead Muslims and burned mosques. Meanwhile, not only is Newsweek apologizing and retracting, but the U.S. government is regretting the loss of life.

What's really going on here is two stories. One involves Newsweek and the ups and downs of U.S. journalism. The other involves a swath of the Islamic world in which anger, fueled by years of gross political misrule, is a chronic feature of life--seeking to acquire a target. What produced these particular riots was the intersection of Islamic-world furies and that brand of U.S. self-absorption in which no subject is more fascinating to the American media than any possible misdeeds of the U.S. itself.

One media flaw that this (and every other article I've read) misses is that the media will not acknowledge that there are large parts of the world that are unreachable to them, yet it acts like it's giving you the whole picture. It will not admit ignorance.

While we're awash in celebrity stories, and the white house press pool will devote considerable time to getting their affectations right, we hear very little about the hundreds dead in Uzbekistan, and next to nothing about Darfour. Yet one never sees Peter Jennings saying "we have no Central Asian news tonight because the government won't allow us in. Now J-Lo and P Diddy are back together...."

The two points are not entirely related but I thought I should get them on paper.

Thinking about Culture

First I come across this interview with the Aspen institute with some serious thinkers (Irshad Manji, Steven Emerson and Gilles Kepel), about how Muslim immigration into Europe is changing the immigrants, then 5 minutes later I come across this Rumble In Europe post (speculation about how Muslim immigration into Europe is changing the Europeans. Then that night, I see an interview with Irshad Manji on Tucker Carlson's program (synopsis, Islam is infected with Arabian culture).

All quite interesting to read and watch, I suppose the most interesting part is that I came across all of the independently, all within 2 hours of each other, and they all had the same general topic.