...born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.
Don't they have any accurate history texts at Foggy Bottom?: Condi Rice compares Palestinians to blacks living under Jim Crow laws.
You should know something, Condi: it isn't always about you. To bone up on the subject, I suggest you read this.
And this.
Gee, ya think? Annapolis may be catastrophe for Israel, ex-official says.
A fruitless plea: Times have changed and so has Great Britain. In the days when Britannia ruled the waves--or even when Maggie Thatcher was P.M.--the sight of a Brit imprisoned at the whim of demented Islamists would have occasioned a harsh and immediate response from the British government. These days, of course, Britain is a shadow of its former self, and prefers, whenever possible, to speak imploringly and wield a flaccid noodle (as it did when the Shias comandeered a British naval vessel two summers ago). Telegraph opiner Boris Johnson thus realizes there’s fat chance of the P.M. taking up a cudgel on Gillian Gibbons’ behalf, and is beseeching those who have some real power to make themselves useful:
…When the news broke yesterday teatime that poor Gillian Gibbons was facing prosecution in Khartoum for inciting hatred and showing contempt for religious beliefs, I am afraid my normal good humour momentarily deserted me.
How dare they! I spluttered, and for a brief undignified moment, I had fantasies of a return to the age of Palmerston.
Here is an innocent British citizen, a good and patently well-meaning 54-year-old British teacher. She has decided to make a new life for herself by giving instruction to children in one of the poorest countries on Earth. She has got herself into a muddle over the name of a teddy bear - and now she is facing 40 lashes or six months in jail.
There was a time when Britain would have sent a gunboat to rescue her. There was a time when MPs would have been holding furious debates on the matter, and bandying phrases such as "civis Britannicus sum".
In the old days there would have been démarche from Britain to Sudan, warning that His Majesty's government would not suffer a hair on her head to be disturbed.
Well, folks, that time is past. We must accept that the world has changed, and our place in the world has changed, too.
We must ask ourselves what earthly good we can do, and how we can persuade people to come to their senses. We need to encourage reasonable people in Sudan to get Gillian Gibbons out of jail as soon as possible and I have a feeling, alas, that there is not a lot to be gained by just quivering our jowls and invoking the spirit of Don Pacifico; or at least, not a lot that will help Gillian Gibbons.
Of course it is demented that this teacher should now have spent four nights in jail for calling a teddy bear Mohammed.
It is utterly bonkers that she should face the possibility of some barbaric punishment, for what was so obviously a complete misunderstanding.
She did what thousands of teachers do across Britain, and asked her class to come up with a name for their teddy bear mascot.
Her class, which included Muslim children, voted for the name of the prophet - which they themselves seem to have thought a pretty uncontentious choice, since millions of Muslim boys bear the same name.
She did not mean to imply that she thought the messenger of Allah was in any sense a cuddly toy. It simply did not cross her mind that there could be some idolatrous or blasphemous implication.
In so far as she caused offence to some of the parents, there must have been a thousand better ways to sort out the problem. She could have apologised; she could have instantly changed the name of the mascot to Paddington, or some other name less offensive to Muslims.
She could have called it Aloysius, like the chap in Evelyn Waugh, and though Aloysius is a pretty emetic name for a teddy bear, no one would have suggested locking her up.
She wasn't given the chance to do any of those sensible things, and the result is a mess; and it is worse than a diplomatic embarrassment. The jailing of Gillian Gibbons is helping to confirm people's worst prejudices about Islam.
It may be that the judge will simply spring her today, in which case all will be well. But if he doesn't, and if this business drags on, then there is one group that must speak up.
There's no point in the British government raging from afar, or rattling an empty scabbard. There's no point in us jumping up and down on the sidelines, and shaking our fists at Khartoum. Any such posturing would only help, of course, to deepen the intransigence of the Sudanese.
No, the voices we need to hear now belong to Britain's vast, sensible Muslim majority. If British Muslims speak up decisively and loudly against this lunacy, then they can achieve two good things at once. Their arguments will be heard with respect in Khartoum, since they cannot be said to be founded on any kind of cultural imperialism, or to be actuated by Islamophobia…
Who's he kidding? If Gillian has to depend on Britain’s vast, sensible Muslim majority to go to bat for her, the poor woman’s going to languish in a squalid, overcrowded, mosquito-infested Sudanese jail for a very long time.
Existential sock: Think Jean-Paul Sartre, only stretchier.
This ain't no teddy bear's picnic: With the appropriate apologies:
If you go down to
You’re sure of a big surprise.
If you go down to
You better go in disguise.
For ev’ry loon with time on his hands
Has gathered there to heed some commands
To seethe and rave about a grave insult to Islam.
Seething time for Sudanese.
They all are so displeased
A teddy bear bears the Prophet’s name.
See them madly dash about.
They like to scream and shout
That Islam itself has been defamed.
Watch them wildly ranting, too.
Good thing Gill’s not a Jew,
Or she’d be a goner for sure.
For days and days their fury will rage unabated
‘Cause they’re crazed little jihadis.
The fine line between art and idiotic criminality: At “Combating Hatred,” the day-long gripe-fest put on for the grievance industry by Bay Street and other large corporations, a few of the speakers said they weren’t quite sure what “hate” was, but that they knew it when they saw it. (And some of them saw it in some mighty strange places—for example, in an opinion piece written by the National Post’s Jonathan Kay, who, oddly enough, was there as the conference’s token eee-vil conservative.)
The same observation, I believe, can be made about art: I don’t know what it is, but I know it when I see it.
This ain’t it (from the Globe and Mail):
A student at the Ontario College of Art and Design turned himself into police with his lawyer Thursday night after a multimedia bomb hoax at the Royal Ontario Museum on Wednesday night.
The 25-year-old allegedly made a fake bomb, along with an equally phony video posted on YouTube of the ROM blowing up, for a final project for his video class, police said.
"It would appear ... that it was, in my opinion, a misguided art project," Detective Constable Hector MacDonald said.
The ROM had to cancel a charity fundraiser and call in the bomb squad when a worker discovered the fake-bomb-in-a-bag - labelled "This is not a bomb." The online video was uploaded the same evening and relayed to news media outlets.
Jerkily shot with a hand-held camera and still on display yesterday, it depicts a smiling ROM visitor - possibly a genuine visitor whose recording was obtained by pranksters - who walks up to the entrance before disappearing from the screen with a bang, a flash and a chorus of shouts.
The fake bomb - which comprised three simulated pipe bombs wrapped in wire and a battery - was discovered by a security guard shortly after 6 p.m. outside the museum's Bloor Street entrance. It was shortly before more than 2,000 guests were due to arrive for the Canadian Foundation for AIDS Research dinner, a $600-a-plate affair expected to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The dinner was cancelled, the Toronto police bomb squad arrived in force, along with its robot, and traffic was snarled around Bloor Street and rerouted for the next four hours.
The video, posted later in the evening, showed a simulated explosion and aftermath at the museum and similarly declared itself: "The fake bombing at the ROM, Toronto, 28.11.07."
In an interview with Torontoist.com yesterday, the man said he thought the disclosure notes he affixed to his project meant he wasn't breaking the law. He told the website the idea of the project was to show how context changes the meaning of a piece of art. In this case, something that is "quite clearly not dangerous, but when you put it in a different context the viewer recontextualizes it."
He has been suspended from OCAD for non-academic mischief. Two faculty members have also been suspended with pay, the college said in a statement.
The dinner will be rescheduled, likely in January, and much of the money being raised for CANFAR may still materialize, as corporate sponsors promised to honour their pledges.
The elaborate hoax nonetheless spelled a major disappointment. "This makes me feel very sad; it's quite a tragic event for the organization," said CANFAR executive director Elissa Beckett.
As to the video, there were no plans yesterday to remove it from public view. In general, videos that are neither pornographic nor unduly violent can get a free spot on the YouTube site, and there appears to be nothing illegal about airing footage of an explosion that never occurred.
Thorarinn Jonsson has been charged with common nuisance and mischief interfering with property.
Well, as long as there's "nothing illegal" about it...
If there’s any justice, Jonsson will get to do some “performance art” in prison with a hairy-backed cellmate named Spike.
"Squalid, overcrowded and infested with mosquitoes": A description from a satirical travel brochure of Sudan? Could be. But it also describes the jail cell where Islam-insulter Gillian Gibbons is set to serve her 15-day sentence--that is, if the seething crowd of the insulted doesn't get to her first.
“Science” in the Magic Kingdom: Who says the Wahhabis aren’t modern and up-to-date? Why, they’ve even gone and done one of those newfangled psychologimacal studies. Conducted by a noted expert in the fast-growing field of pilgrimage research, the study has revealed—now, hold onto your hats—that at least a portion of pickpockets who operate during Haj are there for the sole purpose of stealing!
I guess that’s why those psychologimacalists get the big bucks. From Arab News:
MAKKAH, 30 November 2007 — A recent study concludes that nearly a fourth of pickpocket crimes in the two holy cities are committed by people who are in the cities solely for the purpose of stealing from pilgrims or are pilgrims themselves who are supplementing their trips by theft.
The report, entitled “The Psychological and Social Impact Pickpockets Have on Pilgrims,” was the result of research by Mahmoud Kasnawi of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques’ Haj Research Institute with the aim of developing strategies to protect pilgrims from such crimes.
The study concluded that 17 percent of the pickpockets in and around the mosque complexes at Makkah and Madinah are there for the sole motive of stealing while 16.5 percent are the pilgrims themselves. The rest are opportunists that steal when the chances arise but aren’t pre-meditating these criminal acts.
The study also contends that 46.5 percent of the pickpockets arrested at the Grand Mosque in Makkah were Egyptians. About one in five people that have been arrested for pick-pocketing are women. About 14 percent of the pickpockets sleep in the Grand Mosque or on the pavements, bridges and tunnels, the study said.
The report underscored the need to minimize the sense of insecurity and loss of mental peace caused by the acts of pickpockets on the pilgrims.
Some gangs use children under the age of 15 to steal from pilgrims. Teenagers account for a third of the pickpockets.
Another finding of the study was that 10 percent of the pickpockets have been for Haj more than once, possibly encouraged to return because of the money they stole during the previous pilgrimage.
The study also said 84 percent of the arrested pickpockets were married while 67 percent of them had their family with them.
While 86 percent of the pickpockets traveled to the Kingdom on their private earnings, the remaining stole the money to pay for the travel expenses.
The study noted that most of the thefts take place close to Kaaba at the time of tawaf (circumambulation) to take advantage of the heavily crowded conditions and the fact that pilgrims often carry with them their valuables.
In other “scientific” news, pilgrims often get crushed to death because—stop me if you’ve heard this before—too many people are crammed into too small a space.
Two of a kind: There’s an immense chasm, we’re told, between “secular” Fatah chief Mahmoud Abbas and his “extremist” rival, Hamas. Said chasm provided the rationale for the Annapolis sit-down, since the “secularist,” unlike the “extremist,” is supposedly amenable to “solving” things in a reasonable way.
So much for that theory. From the Jerusalem Post:
Fatah will fight alongside Hamas if and when the IDF launches a military operation in the Gaza Strip, a senior Fatah official in Gaza City said Thursday.
"Fatah won't remain idle in the face of an Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip," the official said. "We will definitely fight together with Hamas against the Israeli army. It's our duty to defend our people against the occupiers."
The Fatah official said his faction would place political differences aside and form a joint front against Israel if the IDF enters the Gaza Strip. "The homeland is more important than all our differences," he said.
The statements came amid reports that some Arab countries were planning to resume mediation efforts between Fatah and Hamas to avoid further deterioration in the aftermath of the Annapolis peace conference.
According to the reports, Saudi Arabia and Egypt have decided to invite representatives of Fatah and Hamas for talks on ways of ending their power struggle.
A senior Palestinian official who visited Cairo this week said the Egyptians and Saudis have reached the conclusion that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas won't be able to move forward with the peace talks with Israel without solving his problems with Hamas…
That’s the great thing about the Zionist entity. You can always count on it providing the incentive murderous Jew-haters need to let bygones be bygones in pursuit of their larger goal.
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes: David Horowitz poses the question, "Have academic radicals lost their minds?"
Wretched equivalence, in song: As the writer/composer of “Elders,” a musical based on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, I was heartened to hear that Canadian playwright Oren Safdie was assaying a cheeky musical take on the Israeli-Palestinian squabble. Alas, from the sounds of it, it’s another exercise in moral equivalence as purveyed by someone for whom there’s no right or wrong, only “nuance” and endless shades of grey. From the Ceeb (of course):
It’s fitting that Canadian playwright Oren Safdie should be opening a new musical satire called West Bank, U.K. in the very same week that saw another Middle East summit aimed at resolving the long, bloody Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Safdie’s show, premiering Nov. 29 at New York’s La MaMa theatre, is a Mideast allegory with a sitcom premise. Assaf, an Israeli Jew, arrives at his apartment in London’s West Bank after a long absence to discover that Aziz, a Palestinian refugee, has taken over the lease. NYC, their American landlady, steps in as mediator, suggesting they resolve the situation by sharing the place. At first, the two roommates get along, but when Aziz’s fundamentalist Muslim uncle and Assaf’s Orthodox Jewish girlfriend show up, the cosy arrangement begins to fall apart. Before you know it, there’s a furniture barrier dividing the flat and suicide bombers at the door.
The Middle Eastern-style songs, by Safdie’s collaborator Ronnie Cohen, include outrageous comic riffs on the Jewish conspiracy theory and the 72 celestial virgins promised to Muslim martyrs. (“My wives will wait for me in heaven; / They’ll want my manhood 24/7.”) There are cracks about “kikes” and “camel jockeys” and jokes about blasphemous cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. It’s a far cry from the gentle, Canadian-style humour of Little Mosque on the Prairie and much closer to the raw racial comedy of Sacha Baron Cohen and Sarah Silverman.
Safdie admits he and Ronnie Cohen were a little nervous about handling such incendiary subjects. “There were certain moments, when we were writing things, when we wondered, ‘Can we do this? Can we say that? Are we going to get bomb threats?’”
But Safdie, who is also directing the show, found his fears allayed in rehearsals. “My barometer has really been the two actors who play the lead roles,” he says during a telephone interview from New York. His leading men are Jewish-American Jeremy Cohen, who portrays Assaf, and Arab-American Mike Mosallam, who plays Aziz.
“[Mike] is quite an activist in the Arab community here, to the point where he refuses to go out for any terrorist roles, which are probably 90 per cent of the roles for Middle Eastern actors these days,” Safdie says. “And the guy who plays Assaf [Cohen] is just back from Israel and is quite a Zionist. And they seem to be OK with everything in the play — there doesn’t seem to be any concern. Besides, it’s an equal-opportunity offender,” Safdie adds wryly. “One group can’t complain that we’re being unfair; there are little jabs at everybody.”
Not that Safdie is only interested in scoring satiric points. “I want to get into the psychology behind why these people, and these countries, act the way they do,” he says. “For example, if the Israeli seems to jump to conclusions and is a little bit more defensive, it’s because of his history. And it’s like that hopefully for every character — we understand why they’re acting a certain way. I think that takes away the idea that there is a right or wrong; it’s more about how people behave certain ways because this is the way they are.”...
Here’s a heads-up for you, Oren. The reason the Palestinians act the way they do is because they want the Jews to am-scray. The reason Israelis behave the way they do is that some of them at least still think they have a right to stay, even though it—what’s that popular expression the kids like to use?—oh, yeah, “insults Islam.”
In “honour” of Oren, I am reposting one of the songs from “Elders.” It’s a take-off of a song from the Sondheim show, Sweeney Todd, a production of which was recently staged in my hometown. Sung by two of the Elders, the song deals with the age old canard that the “chosen” have a cannabalistic penchant for draining the blood of juicy young Gentiles to add piquancy to festival baked goods:
Holiday Pastry
There's nothing that is quite as tasty
As a little blood in your holiday pastry
A little blood in your holiday pastry
Makes it taste divine.
Mix it up with eggs and flour
Eat it hour after hour
It is what gives us the power
For our evil crime.
Have some Persian?
No, I’ve an aversion.
A little Moroccan?
Now you’re talkin’!
A morsel of Kurd?
Don’t be absurd.
A bisssel Chechan?
Makes me wretchan.
Some Sudanese?
Makes me sneeze.
A hot piece from Libya?
I’ll wear a bibya.
Something from Qatar?
Spread it like butter.
How ‘bout some Syrian?
No, gives me delirium.
A drop from Dubai?
I’ll give it a try.
Some Abu Dhabi?
Did you bring the wasabi?
Azerbaijani?
Too much money.
Try my Malaysian?
Not my persuasion.
Any Jordanian?
I wouldn’t complainian.
Care for Somali?
Too hard to swalli.
Some Lebanese?
With couscous, please.
Turkish Delight?
Thank, not tonight.
A little Iraqi?
Well, just for a snaqi.
There’s nothing that is quite so yummy
As a little blood to fill your tummy,
A little blood to fill your tummy,
And your satisfaction grows.
Don’t be deceived by the Torah’s taboos
After all, we are the Jews
And we can have blood if we bloody-well choose,
As ev’ry Jew-hater knows.
Judenhass on campus: It has come to this—Jewish students on the campus of Toronto’s York University were forced to flee from an angry mob. From the Jewish Tribune:
TORONTO – York University saw the worst antisemitic display ever on that campus last week, said Ben Feferman, senior campus coordinator for the Canadian region of Hasbara Fellowships, an Israel advocacy organization spearheaded by Aish Hatorah.
The Betar-supported Campus Coalition of Zionists (CCZ), together with Hasbarah, manned a table in Vari Hall, with permission from the university, with pamphlets and brochures about the danger emanating from Iran.
However, the situation became very difficult for the students who participated. They were vastly outnumbered by pro-Arab students who surrounded them, and eventually the pro-Israel activists fled. As they left, there was cheering by the pro-Arab mob.
According to Feferman, “I’ve never seen anything like this at York. We weren’t even discussing the issues anymore. It was pure Jew hatred. That’s what it’s come to.”
In fact, Feferman noticed an acquaintance there and said hello, but received no acknowledgement. She emailed him later that day to apologize, explaining that she didn’t want everyone to know she was Jewish. To Feferman, this episode is a red light. “We know there’s a crisis when a student on campus is afraid to reveal she’s Jewish and feels unsafe,” he said.
Another disturbing issue that day, according to Feferman, was that a Hillel executive was standing nearby, watching. Feferman can’t understand why he didn’t take action or get his students to help out.
When asked why they didn’t offer to support Hasbarah and CCZ, Tilly Shames, associate director, Hillel of Greater Toronto, did not answer the question directly referencing a program Hillel had held previously that experienced no protest.
Shames said, “Hillel @ York ran an extremely successful Israel program in a very public space (Vari Hall) on campus last Thursday. The Israel program was received positively and embraced by the student body. Hillel experienced no protest for running a public Israel program.”
“This is one of the first issues we’ve moved forward with in a pro-advocacy way, rather than being put in a reactive situation later on,” said Orna Hollander, executive director of Betar Canada.
The following day, Palestinian Media Watch’s Itamar Marcus addressed York students on the daily indoctrination of children living under the Palestinian Authority to hate Jews.
“It was absolute chaos,” Hollander declared. “It was impossible to moderate. People would ask loaded questions. Marcus wasn’t given an opportunity to respond. He refused to get into a screaming match. One girl, raised in Canada, said she herself would gladly be a suicide bomber and would have no qualms raising her daughter to become a shahid.”
A couple of weeks ago, when US-based anti-Israel professor of linguistics Noam Chomski was scheduled to address York students via satellite, CCZ and Hasbarah joined forces to provide information about what Chomski stands for.
“We wanted to do a protest,” Feferman said, “but the university administration wouldn’t allow it, saying they didn’t want a lot of noise and they were afraid that signs could be used as weapons.” The students settled for a table with handouts about Chomsky and two large posters, one depicting Chomsky with [Hezbollah leader] Nasrallah. One poster quoted Chomsky’s statement: “I see no antisemitic implications in denial of the existence of gas chambers, or even in denial of the Holocaust.”
The event was successful in providing information, Feferman said. “Over the course of four hours, a few hundred people came by. About half of them were moderate people who said they had heard about Chomsky in their English class and didn’t know he had these views. The other half were people who condemned Israel and insisted Hezbollah isn’t a terrorist organization. At one point they came together and surrounded us, argued about issues and blamed America and Israel. We had good security, including non-uniformed security guards. We succeeded in raising awareness of Chomsky’s worldviews, although at times it was confrontational. We’re now organizing a protest for the Finkelstein event at U of T on Thursday.”
Hasbarah and CCZ are making plans to launch a presence at Ryerson University, where the vice-president of the student union has made several unsuccessful attempts in recent months to impose a boycott, divestment and sanctions motion against Israel and has organized a number of anti-Israel programs on campus.
(Last week, when a couple of Ryerson Student Union leaders tried to introduce a boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel at the annual congress of the Canadian Federation of Students, more than two-thirds of the voting plenary rejected the call. B’nai Brith had called on the Federation to reject categorically the boycott proposal.)
“Two [Ryerson] students in the past few weeks called me and said they need help doing something,” Feferman said. “We’re going to try to find the students there and hope to start advocating properly on campus.”
After the anti-Jewish near-rioting at York last week, one student representing the “Independent Body and Advocates of Peace and Humanity,” handed out flyers stating its opposition to any comparison of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmanidejad with Hitler and claiming that CCZ was marginalizing Iranians by attacking Iran’s leader. It should be noted that the same students who resent any criticism of Ahmanidejad and worry about a negative impact on Iranian students are active proponents of anti-Israel activity.
“Freedom of speech is only for them,” Feferman said. “The right to censure a country’s leader is only for them.”…
Just like in Nazi Germany, way back when.
Déjà vu: The international Jewish conspiracy, a.k.a. "The Lobby,” has been getting busy again. When it isn’t pulling the levers of power in Washington (see the Mearslimer diatribe) it’s throwing its weight behind a Jewish quadroon in France. From the Telegraph:
An Algerian minister threatened to ignite a diplomatic row by claiming that Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, owed his election to "the Jewish lobby".
Mohamed Cherif Abbés, the minister of war veterans, insinuated that Mr Sarkozy, whose grandfather was of Greek-Jewish origin, was an agent of Israel. "You know the origins of the French president and those of who brought him to power," Mr Abbés told an Algerian newspaper.
He said Bernard Kouchner, the foreign minister, had joined Mr Sarkozy's government because he had Jewish roots. "It was the result of a movement that reflects the will of the real architects of Mr Sarkozy's accession to power - the Jewish lobby that has a monopoly on industry in France," he said.
Mr Sarkozy is due in Algeria next month for talks with Abdelaziz Bouteflika, his counterpart, and hopes to win contracts to build nuclear power stations. The French foreign ministry said the remarks were contrary to good relations.
Care bear: A Globe and Mail editorial condemns the ursine lunacy in Sudan:
A soft toy is alleged to be the West's latest weapon in the clash of civilizations.
British schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons has been charged with insulting Islam and inciting religious hatred and could face flogging or jail in Sudan over a class project that went horribly awry. The teacher asked her seven-year-old students at a private school in Khartoum to name a teddy bear. Unsurprisingly at the largely Muslim school, Mohammed was the winning choice. Each student then took Mohammed home for a weekend and was asked to keep a diary of the toy's activities. It is hard to view the assignment as anything worse than an act of cultural naiveté on Ms. Gibbons's part.
But when word that a stuffie had been named after Islam's Prophet leaked out, Islamic leaders, who might have been expected to dispense mercy in the name of the Merciful, reacted disgracefully, seizing on the excuse to provoke jihadist sentiment. A leading organization of the clerics issued a statement alleging Ms. Gibbons's purported blasphemy was not the product of ignorance but a "calculated action" undertaken by those "plotting against Islam." The 54-year-old Ms. Gibbons, a primary teacher from Liverpool who has been in Sudan half a year, hardly fits the mould of a crusader.
The offence against Islam was not Ms. Gibbons's. It was committed by the clerics baying for her blood over a transparently innocent act.
Hear, hear. But you wouldn’t think, in this day and age, you’d have to point that out.
Thus does sharia in an Islamist backwater have an impact far beyond its borders.
My letter to the Globe:
One has grown used in recent times to hearing about perceived “insults” to Islam and the over-the-top reaction they often incur in the “insulted.” For the life of me, though, I can’t fathom the Khartoum teddy bear kafuffle.
They’re flipping out because a school teacher named the class stuffie Mohammed?
Seems to me that, since teddies are furry, appealing and adorable, that’s actually a compliment, not an insult.
Update: Mohammed the teddy pleads his case (via the appropriate Elvis tune):
Imams, let me be
Their lovin’ teddy bear.
Call me Mo,
Take me home.
Give me hugs to spare.
Oh, let me be
(Oh, let him be)
Their teddy bear.
I don’t wanna be insultin’
‘Cause insults make you burn.
I don’t wanna cause no floggin’
Even tho' you
Think that teacher has to learn.
Just wanna be
(Just wanna be)
Their teddy bear.
Can’t you see
No blasphemy
Has happened anywhere?
Oh, let me be
(Oh, let him be)
Their teddy bear.
Imams, let me be
The stuffie in the school.
Take a pill.
Try to chill.
And please, now,
Don’t be cruel.
Oh, let me be
(Oh, let him be)
Their teddy bear.
Et tu, V.C.?: The betrayals seem to be coming fast and furious these days. First, George and Condi force Israel to participate in a latter-day Wannsee Conference (only this time around, the Jews get to sit down with the Nazis and help plan their own genocide). Now there’s word that a high-level Vatican official is endorsing the Palestinian “right of return”—essentially, something the Arabs cooked up to ensure Israel’s demise through the weapon of overwhelming demographics. From Ha’aretz:
A senior Vatican cardinal said on Wednesday that all Palestinian refugees had a right to return to their homeland.
Cardinal Renato Martino, head of the Vatican department that formulates refugee policy, made the comment as U.S. President George W. Bush was set to revive long-stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace talks at a White House summit.
"Palestinian refugees, like all other refugees, have a right to right to return to their homeland," Martino said in response to a question about the 44-nation conference in Annapolis on Tuesday.
Martino did not make clear whether he meant refugees had a right to return to homes in what is now Israel or to an eventual Palestinian state.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas have
pledged to try to forge a peace treaty by the end of 2008 that would create a Palestinian state.
The issue of the return of Palestinian refugees, along with the status of Jerusalem, is one of the most sticky issues in a peace treaty.
There are some 4.5 million Palestinian refugees in camps in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Successive Israeli governments have made clear they will not accept the right of return of Palestinians who left homes in what is now Israel, saying it would threaten the country's existence.
Some ministers have said that some Palestinians might be allowed to settle in Israel on humanitarian grounds if a final peace settlement is reached.
The Vatican, which sent a delegation to Annapolis, supports a Palestinian homeland as well Israel's right to exist in security.
Um, scuzi, your eminence, but how is Israel supposed to “exist in security” if some 4.5 million Palestinians are allowed their “right” to enter its borders and smother it to death?
Now, it could be that this senior Cardinal was speaking on the fly and that his statement doesn’t reflect official Vatican policy. If so, the Pope will no doubt clarify the matter a.s.a.p.
And if he doesn’t, his silence will speak volumes.
More Tom foolery: It’s been several years since NYT pundit di tutti pundits Thomas L. Friedman endeavoured to float the lead balloon of a Saudi “peace” plan. The credulous columnist did so at the behest of the Wahhabis—who could spot a clueless wishful thinker from miles away. In today’s paper, TLF demonstrates that the ensuing years haven't brought even a scintilla more wisdom:
The Middle East is experiencing something we haven’t seen in a long, long time: moderates getting their act together a little, taking tentative stands and pushing back on the bad guys. If all that sounds kind of, sort of, maybe, qualified, well ... it is. But in a region in which extremists go all the way and the moderates usually just go away, it’s the first good news in years — an oasis in a desert of despair.
The only problem is that this tentative march of the moderates — which got a useful boost here with the Annapolis peace gathering — is driven largely by fear, not by any shared vision of a region where Sunni and Shiite, Arab and Jew, trade, interact, collaborate and compromise in the way that countries in Southeast Asia have learned to do for their mutual benefit.
So far, “this is the peace of the afraid,” said Hisham Melhem, Washington bureau chief of Al Arabiya, a satellite news channel.
Fear can be a potent motivator. Fear of Al Qaeda running their lives finally got the Sunni tribes of Iraq to rise up against the pro-Al Qaeda Sunnis, even to the point of siding with the Americans. Fear of Shiite thugs in the Iranian-backed Mahdi Army has prompted many more Shiites in Iraq to side with the pro-U.S. Iraqi government and army. Fear of a Hamas takeover has driven Fatah into a tighter working relationship with Israel. And fear of spreading Iranian influence has all the Arab states — particularly Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan — working in even closer coordination with America and in tacit cooperation with Israel. Fear of Fatah collapsing, and of Israel inheriting responsibility for the West Bank’s Palestinian population forever, has brought Israel back to Washington’s negotiating table. Fear of isolation even brought Syria here.
But fear of predators can only take you so far. To build a durable peace, it takes a shared agenda, a willingness by moderates to work together to support one another and help each other beat back the extremists in each camp. It takes something that has been sorely lacking since the deaths of Anwar Sadat, Yitzhak Rabin and King Hussein: a certain moral courage to do something “surprising.”
Since 2000, the only people who have surprised us are the bad guys. Each week they have surprised us with new ways and places to kill people. The moderates, by contrast, have been surprise-free — until the Sunni tribes in Iraq took on Al Qaeda. What I’ll be looking for in the coming months is whether the moderates can surprise each other and surprise the extremists.
The Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, announced even before he got to Annapolis that there would be no handshakes with any Israelis. Too bad. A handshake alone is not going to get Israel to give back the West Bank. But a surprising gesture of humanity, like a simple handshake from a Saudi leader to an Israeli leader, would actually go a long way toward convincing Israelis that there is something new here, that it’s not just about the Arabs being afraid of Iran, but that they’re actually willing to coexist with Israel. Ditto Israel. Why not surprise Palestinians with a generous gesture on prisoners or roadblocks? Has the stingy old way worked so well?...
“Stingy”?! You call releasing hundreds of jihadis bent on your destruction “stingy”? What’s your idea of “generous,” Tom? Opening the cell doors and letting out the whole damned lot of them?
As for the idea that Rabin and Arafat displayed “moral courage”—‘tis to laugh. The only thing Rabin displayed was a refusal to see things clearly—a refusal that resulted in thousands of deaths, including, ironically, his own. And the only thing Arafat displayed was a shrewdness far greater that his enemies’; when they handed him another opportunity to become powerful and siphon off lots of aid money earmarked for his people into his own personal bank accounts, who was he to balk at such a sweet, no-strings-attached deal?
But how’s this for a “surprising” gesture: the President stops trying to burnish his legacy/pander to the oily Sheiks/get Arab Sunnis to form a common front against Iranian Shias, or whatever the heck it is he’s doing, and publicly acknowledges that until such time as Muslims shun the doctrine of Islamic supremacy, no infidel anywhere in the world will be safe.
Prescient Marxist: As a tormented Utopian once observed, history occurs twice. First time around, it’s a tragedy. Second time around, it’s a farce.
That isn’t to say, though, that out of this farce, a tragedy on the scale of the Shoah couldn’t arise.
Today on the Ceeb: On Ceeb radio show The Current, host Anna Maria Tremonti is delving into the following stories:
With violence once again sweeping the suburbs around Paris, we'll get an update on the situation and look at why these neighbourhoods are so prone to violent confrontations with authorities.
And we'll have a feature interview with the person behind "Shooting Back," a project that involves putting video cameras in the hands of Palestinian civilians in order to document what happens to them.