Cat Massage Video from You Tube

Someone I know sent me this very funny cat massage video from You Tube...

Michelle Malkin on the Associated (with terrorists) Press

It seems like Michelle Malkin has uncovered a scandal involving terrorists associated with the Associated Press's photographer Bilal Hussein. She's upset that the Washington Post seems to be in full coverup mode, publishing AP president Tom Curley's op-ed defense of the AP--but not the story itself:

Let me repeat: According to the US military, Hussein was captured by American troops in a Ramadi apartment with an alleged al Qaeda leader and a weapons cache, and tested positive for explosives.

More Curley if you can stand it:

U.S. journalists are severely limited in their ability to move safely, make themselves understood and develop sources in such areas. AP has learned to overcome those limitations, using techniques honed over decades of covering sectarian confrontation and bloodshed in the Middle East.

"Techniques" such as turning a blind eye to widespread concern about the use of local stringers overseas? Or perhaps finely honed news-suppression techniques like those perfected by CNN during the Saddam regime?

Speaking of Eason Jordan's CNN, is Curley trying to pull an Eason in this incendiary paragraph:

Both official and unofficial parties on every side of a conflict try to discredit or silence news they don't like. That is certainly the case in Iraq, where journalists are routinely harassed, defamed, beaten and kidnapped. At last count, 80 had been killed.

Yes, you read that right. He is absolutely suggesting that our troops are retaliating against journalists whose work they don't like. Read the whole piece again and look at the context.

And his organization calls my reporting "incendiary?"

***

Will anyone at the Washington Post clue its readers into the real controversy over AP and Bilal Hussein? Anyone?

Robert Hughes on Journalistic Ethics

Time Magazine's legendary art critic tells how he got his job:

First, however, I had my trial run in Manhattan. AT Baker proved to be a bluff, weatherbeaten salt with an office on the 24th floor. Its perforated sound-tile ceiling bristled, porcupine-like, with red and green pencils, which he was in the habit of throwing upward to see if they would stick. They looked like something from the last Venice Biennale.

He sat me down and produced a packet of colour transparencies of the work of someone I had never heard of, a decorative artist named Felix Kelly. Baker pointed out with emphasis and regret that Kelly was a particular friend of Clare Boothe Luce, the widow of Henry Luce, Time’s founder.

Kelly was having a show in San Francisco. I would not, Baker added, be expected to fly over to see it. I could work from the transparencies, which were excellent. Mrs Luce would read my copy closely and with interest.

Felix Kelly turned out to be a stage designer whose speciality was pretty-as-a-picture late-surrealist perspectives — late Dali and eau-de-cologne — punctuated with stranded boats, Roman ruins and tottering, picturesque New Orleans–style tenements, embellished with much wrought-iron lace. I turned in 120 lines of falsely enthusiastic copy — unsigned, of course, in the Time style.

Those were the days. Mrs Luce was gratified and sent a note to Henry Grunwald urging that this new candidate be hired forthwith. And I was, at what seemed to me to be the munificent salary of $20,000 a year, plus expenses.

The Girl in Black (1956)

Watched this Michael Cacoyannis drama last night. It is depressing, yet starkly brilliant. The cast was unknown to me, but probably well-known to Greeks. A sensitive Audrey Hepburn-like Ellie Lambeti played Marina, the "girl in black". Dimitris Horn was a darkly handsome, Pavlos. And George Foundas a creepy Christos, villian of the piece. The acting was striking, at times the faces looked like masks in a Greek tragedy. It is about a clash of civilizations, Greek style, when two cosmpolitan Athenians arrive on a small Greek island for a week's vacation. The island is completely backwards and medieval in its mentality. Gangs of youths prey on the villagers, enforcing a strict code of morality in a violent way. However, our two Athenians are unaware of the world of darkness they have entered. It is so sunny on the island--they have come to swim and have fun, after all. So, they rent rooms in the dilapidated mansion of a Greek widow and her two children--brought there by a dockside tout, who has diverted them from the more sterile tourist hotel. The two Athenian holiday makers are a study contrasts themselves--the bald one is a hardworking architect, who sketches by the waterfront. The good-looking one is a playboy who lives with his mother. I won't give away the plot, except to say it involves the two Athenians clashing with each other--and the remaining Athenian clashing with the entire town, except the title's girl in black. For all the talk about honor killings in Islam these days, the film shows that rural Greece was just as repressive, religious, and opposed to cosmopolitanism in 1956 as anywhere today. The tragic death of innocents that concludes the film has a symbolic message about the future of Greece, it would seem. Luckily, Greece seems to have made the transition to modernity. Which gives one hope that half a century from now, perhaps the violence accompanying the clash of civilzation we see these days will becomeas much of a bad dream as Cacoyannis's story of an Athenian "vacation from hell."

Robert Hughes' Confessions

The Australian has run the best article so far on Robert Hughes' Agustinian-sounding memoir, Things I Didn't Know:

Five years later, the rest of New York continues to wallow in pained debate about how the victims of the attacks should be memorialised and what kind of buildings should be erected next to the void at ground zero. Not Hughes, though.

He is happy that what he calls that "great ugly scaleless box of a thing" no longer disfigures the New York skyline.

He never liked the twin towers, and he likes even less the endless "dickering" over 9/11 monuments and memorials. "Can you imagine how little would have happened to London after the Blitz if the same obsessive concentration on loss and sacrifice were placed upon every building that the Luftwaffe flattened?" Hughes asks.

He concedes that the initial shock of the towers' collapse was "deeply discombobulating". The post-9/11 view from his window was like "looking into a familiar face with a piece bashed out by some maniac with a baseball bat, which of course was the case". "But do I miss it aesthetically? Obviously not."

This was fighting talk from a New York resident on the day most of the city was weepily observing the fifth anniversary of the worst terrorist attack on the US. Yet Hughes has made a career out of the unflinching honesty of his opinions, as several prominent British artists know to their cost. As the vastly influential art critic for Time magazine for more than 30 years, Hughes was never much impressed with Brit Art celebrities such as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, and he is not about to change his mind now he is ageing and injured.

UPDATE: Someone I know found this link to an excerpt in the Times of London, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-2320105.html
Full disclosure: I have met Hughes, around the time he wrote about my work on the NEA and PBS issues rather critically, so I can't say he's exactly a friend--but he's a very good writer. I assigned his American Visions to my students in the American Culture course that I taught in Moscow. So I imagine this book is pretty interesting, too...You can buy a copy from Amazon by clicking here:

Blair Helps Shell

Tony Blair is lobbying Vladimir Putin to leave British-Dutch Shell Oil alone, in what is turning into an ugly business dispute over Sakhalin island wells:

Last week Russia's Ministry of Natural Resources suspended environmental permits allowing Shell and its partners - Mitsui and Mitsubishi of Japan - to operate the project, which is 80 per cent complete, and which has already secured contracts for a large proportion of the gas it is expected to produce. Sakhalin-2 has reserves totalling 4.5 billion barrels.

Downing Street, along with the Foreign Office and the Department of Trade and Industry, have made it clear they are not satisfied with the Russian government's explanation for the suspension.

Happy Ramadan!

According to Wikipedia, the month-long fast of Ramadan begins September 24th in Saudi Arabia and a day later elsewhere, ending October 23rd. It's not easy to fast for a month. When I taught in Uzbekistan, you could see the students who fasted were quieter and less energetic during class. Nights were noisier, as people ate. The Eid feast ending the fast was a big deal--the Indonesian Embassy slaughtered a bull, ordinary people slaughtered sheep.

Muslims believe that during Ramadan, the revelation of the Qur'an to Prophet Muhammad began. The entire month is spent fasting from dawn to dusk. Fasting during this month is often thought to figuratively burn away all sins. Furthermore, the Prophet Muhammad told his followers that the gates of Heaven would be open all the month and the gates of Hell would be closed. The first day of the next month is spent in great celebrations and rejoicings and is observed as the ‘Festival of Breaking Fast’ or `Eid ul-Fitr.

Melanie Phillips: Britain Must Do More

After Home Secretary John Reid's speech:

Whether this tentative throwing down of the cultural gauntlet in the face of creeping Islamisation does mark a more general shift away from the Whitehall strategy of appeasing extremism that has obtained until now remains to be seen. There is still a huge distance for the government to travel before it emerges from its state of collective denial. What is urgently needed, for example, is much more robust action against the fanatics doing the brainwashing. It is beyond belief that individuals are still able to parade on the streets of Britain calling for the murder of the Pope, or inciting hatred and murder against Jews or – in the words of the shiny new law on the statute book — glorifying terrorism. But despite such persistently high levels of paralysis within the establishment, there are now also signs in various quarters of a growing movement towards reality.

Tony Blair: L'Shanah Tovah!

From the British Prime Minister's Rosh Hashonah column in the Jerusalem Post:

As the latest report on anti-Semitism illustrates, the Jewish people have too often in history been victims of hatred. But they have also rightly inspired respect and admiration. We must not forget that the Jewish community - the oldest minority faith community in Britain - serves as an example of how identity through faith can be combined with the deep loyalty to the British nation.

As one of the children from the Naima Primary School wrote in the booklet presented to me at the thanksgiving service at Bevis Marks Synagogue in June, "Am I Jewish or English? This keeps me in confusion / I'm both, you see, that's my final conclusion / Judaism is my religion; I make it so, clearly / I adore England, I love it so dearly."

We shall continue to value our Jewish community and ensure that its members feel safe and security in Britain and know that they are an integral part of British society. We shall persist in the fight against anti-Semitism and racism, and our police will continue to work together with communities to ensure their safety and security.

The Jewish New Year is always an opportunity for renewal and new beginnings. My particular hope this year is that we can re-energize the peace process in the Middle East. But I would also like to say thank you to the Jewish community in Britain, which for the last three-and-a-half centuries has contributed enormously to Britain. I salute all they do for their community and country, their courage and endurance, their contribution and commitment to Britain, and Israel.

The Future of US Foreign Aid

Last night, on the PBS Newshour with Jim Lehrer, Paul Solman hosted an interesting debate between economists William Easterly and Jeffrey Sachs. I'd say that Easterly won hands down. Sachs came across a lot like a used-car salesman, even had a blow-dry haircut and fancy suit. There's no transcript on the PBS website--unfortunately. But there is a link to RealAudio and mp3 versions, so you can hear the discussion for yourselves.

Shawn W Crispin on Thailand's Coup

It's monarchic networks, stupid! As Shawn W Crispin explains in his article on events in Bangkok for The Asia Times Online:

The mainstream media have widely misinterpreted the potent but peaceful protests as being galvanized by the Thaksin family's controversial US$1.9 billion tax-free sale of its 49% holdings in the Shin Corporation to Singapore's Temasek Holdings. To the contrary, the protests, which were later co-opted by various special-interest groups aligned against the government, were first galvanized and primarily sustained by the explosive claims first made by firebrand media mogul Sondhi Limthongkul that Thaksin was on particular occasions disloyal to the throne.

Democratic-minded Thais have since loyally donned royal-yellow shirts to demonstrate their support for the King, months after the elaborate June celebrations that marked the 60-year anniversary of his accession to the throne. Thaksin, who had stepped down as prime minister in April hours after a closed-door meeting with Bhumibol, surprised many when he resumed his caretaker role the following month to plan and preside over the high-profile royal celebrations.

The ARC's statement on Tuesday accusing Thaksin of lese majeste has brought the long-brewing tensions between the prime minister and monarch into the open. A groundbreaking academic paper that has recently made the rounds among Thailand's intelligentsia, written by Thailand expert Duncan McCargo, argues that Bhumibol had over the years maintained his authority over elected politicians through so-called "monarchic networks" of loyal royalists strategically positioned inside the bureaucracy, including the highest echelons of the military.

Monarchic networks

Although the paper remains controversial, what is apparent is that Thaksin did move to sideline a number of top government officials, which in effect diluted the palace's influence inside the bureaucracy and, as one palace source believes, aimed to consolidate his power in anticipation of the post-Bhumibol era.

For example, when Thaksin ordered in 2001 the sidelining of Kasem Watanachai and Palakorn Suwannarat, two well-known royalist bureaucratic officials, the King within hours appointed both of them to his Privy Council.

In 2002, two reporters for the Far Eastern Economic Review, including this correspondent, were threatened by Thaksin's government with lese majeste charges and deportation for a report signaling tensions between his government and the palace. More significant, the premier regularly wrangled with the Privy Council over annual military reshuffles in which Thaksin bid to promote his loyalists to pivotal positions in the top brass.

In 2003, he controversially promoted his relatively unknown cousin, General Chaisit Shinawatra, to the post of army commander - the country's most powerful military position - while elevating many other of his allies.

Tuesday's coup significantly came against the backdrop of another hotly contested scheduled military reshuffle in which Thaksin had controversially vied to elevate a clutch of his pre-Cadet Class 10 loyalists to the pivotal 1st Army Division. That reshuffle list reportedly brought Thaksin into conflict with senior members of the top brass and the Privy Council, and his refusal to back down from the proposed personnel changes appears to have been a major factor behind the coup.

According to sources familiar with the matter, Thaksin had attempted to elevate Major-General Prin Suwanthat to commander of the 1st Army Division, which crucially is charged with overseeing security in Bangkok. Thaksin also reportedly pushed to promote Prin's ally, Major-General Daopong Ratanasuwan, to take over the 1st Infantry. With assistant army commander Pornchai Kranlert in place, the reshuffle, if accomplished, would have given Thaksin an unbroken chain of command over crack troops responsible for Bangkok's security.

Notably, without his allies in the top posts, Thaksin's order from New York to impose a "severe state of emergency" and remove Sonthi from his position as army commander went unheeded.

Meanwhile, the military has promised to return power to the people as soon as possible, and judging by past royally orchestrated extra-constitutional interventions, it will honor that vow.

Thaksin's ouster will pave the way for important democratic reforms, which under the military's and monarchy's watch will broadly aim to dilute the power of the executive branch, limit the power of large political parties, and strengthen the independent checking and balancing institutions that Thaksin stands accused of undermining.

With the likely legal dissolution of Thaksin's powerful Thai Rak Thai political party, the nation now seems set to return to the wobbly coalition politics composed of several competitive middle-sized parties that characterized Thai democratic politics throughout the 1990s after the last coup in 1991 and the restoration of civilian rule after the bloody street protests of 1992.

More significant, perhaps, Thaksin's departure from the political scene will allow the Privy Council and the palace to plan without worries for a dynastic transition that maintains the centrality of the monarchy in Thai society. Thai democratic history shows that the country often takes one step backward to take two steps ahead, and Tuesday's royally backed coup is consistent with that tradition.

BTW, here's a link to Prof. Duncan McCargo's website (though I can't find his paper on monarchic networks listed).

Martin Kramer on Islamic Fascism

Martin Kramer argues that Islamism is a form of clerical fascism:

Any student of my generation first would have encountered the comparison in the work of the late Manfred Halpern, who spent nearly forty years as a politics professor at Princeton. Halpern grew up with fascism: born in Germany in 1924, he and his parents fled the Nazis in 1937 for America. He joined the war against the Nazis as a battalion scout in the 28th Infantry Division, and saw action in Battle of the Bulge and elsewhere. After Germany's surrender, he worked in U.S. Counterintelligence, tracking down former Nazis. In 1948 he joined the State Department, where he worked on the Middle East, and in 1958 he came to Princeton, where he did the same.

In 1963, Princeton published his Politics of Social Change in the Middle East and North Africa. For years, this book was the basic text in the field, and included the only academic treatment of Islamism, which no one much cared about at the time. Halpern labeled it "neo-Islamic totalitarianism," and this is how he described it:

The neo-Islamic totalitarian movements are essentially fascist movements. They concentrate on mobilizing passion and violence to enlarge the power of their charismatic leader and the solidarity of the movement. They view material progress primarily as a means for accumulating strength for political expansion, and entirely deny individual and social freedom. They champion the values and emotions of a heroic past, but repress all free critical analysis of either past roots or present problems.

Halpern continued:

Like fascism, neo-Islamic totalitarianism represents the institutionalization of struggle, tension, and violence. Unable to solve the basic public issues of modern life—intellectual and technological progress, the reconciliation of freedom and security, and peaceful relations among rival sovereignties—the movement is forced by its own logic and dynamics to pursue its vision through nihilistic terror, cunning, and passion. An efficient state administration is seen only as an additional powerful tool for controlling the community. The locus of power and the focus of devotion rest in the movement itself. Like fascist movements elsewhere, the movement is so organized as to make neo-Islamic totalitarianism the whole life of its members.

At the time, Halpern was a central figure in Middle Eastern studies, and his book—reprinted six times—appeared in every syllabus for the next fifteen years. His critical analysis of Islamism very much cut against the grain, at a time when Cold War strategists ardently wooed Islamists as allies against communism. In the 1970s, he walked away from the field, and his reputation within it slipped. But his rigorous treatment of Islamism stands up well, and his comparison of it with fascism was a serious proposition, made by someone who had seen fascism up close.

The comparison of Islamism with fascism also made sense to the late Maxime Rodinson, the preeminent French scholar of Islam, who pioneered the application of sociological method to the Middle East. As a French Jew born in 1915, Rodinson also learned about fascism from direct experience. He moved to Syria in 1940, but the Vichy regime deported his parents to Auschwitz, where they perished. Rodinson was a man of the left—in his early years, militantly so—but he took his thinking from no one.

In 1978, during Iran's revolution, enthusiasm for Islamism began to spread among his colleagues on the French left, who romanticized it as the vibrant, new anti-West. The French philosopher Michel Foucault become famously enamored of Ayatollah Khomeini. Rodinson decided to set things straight, in a long front-page article in Le Monde, targeted at those who "come fresh to the problem in an idealistic frame of mind." Rodinson admitted that trends in Islamic movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood were "hard to ascertain."

But the dominant trend is a certain type of archaic fascism (type de fascisme archaïque). By this I mean a wish to establish an authoritarian and totalitarian state whose political police would brutally enforce the moral and social order. It would at the same time impose conformity to religious tradition as interpreted in the most conservative light.

By "archaic," Rodinson referred to the religious component of the ideology, largely absent from European fascism.

I'm not sure whether Rodinson ever repeated this precise phrase, but putting it once on the front page of Le Monde was enough. He had accused his colleagues on the left of celebrating a form of fascism, from his perch at the pinnacle of Islamic scholarship. This especially rigorous critic of Eurocentric distortions of Islam didn't shy from the comparison of Islamism with fascism, at a moment as politically charged as the present one.

In 1984, Said Amir Arjomand, a prominent Iranian-American sociologist at SUNY-Stony Brook, picked up the comparison and ran with it. With a nod to Halpern, Arjomand pointed to "some striking sociological similarities between the contemporary Islamic movements and the European fascism and the American radical right.... It is above all the strength of the monistic impulse and the pronounced political moralism of the Islamic traditionalist and fundamentalist movements which makes them akin to fascism and the radical right alike."

In 1986, he took took the comparison even further, in an influential article for the journal World Politics entitled "Iran's Islamic Revolution in Comparative Perspective." Arjomand entertained a number of comparisons, but in the end settled on fascism as the best of them. Islamism (he called it "revolutionary traditionalism") and fascism "share a number of essential features," including "an identical transposition of the theme of exploitation" and a "distinct constitutive core."

Like fascism, the Islamic revolutionary movement has offered a new synthesis of the political creeds it has violently attacked. And, like the fascists, the Islamic militants are against democracy because they consider liberal democracy a foreign model that provides avenues for free expression of alien influences and ideas. (Also like the fascists, however, the Islamic militants would not necessarily accept the label of "antidemocratic.")

Arjomand's conclusion: "The emergence of an Islamic revolutionary ideology has been in the cards since the fascist era." (For much more of the comparison, go here. Arjomand later repeated the argument almost verbatim in his 1989 book The Turban for the Crown, Oxford.)

Joseph Hayes, 88

Hollywood screenwriter, fellow UCLA alumnus, and former teaching assistant to Professor Howard Suber (author of The Power of Film), Jefferson Dunbar emailed that Joseph Hayes, author of The Desperate Hours--Humphrey Bogart's classic 1955 film, directed by William Wyler--has passed away. Like Hayes, Dunbar is a writer, Hoosier, and Indiana University alum. You can read Hayes' New York Times obituary here.

How to Access Banned Blogs

I just found this website that serves as a gateway to banned blogs by following a link on my sitemeter hits counter. Somewhere in the world, for some reason, my blog seems to be banned--so someone got to it using PKBlogs.com...

Michael Freund on the Pope

From the Jerusalem Post blog (ht Daniel Pipes):

The question as to whether or not the Pope should have apologized is beside the point - it is a distraction from the main issue currently confronting Israel and the West, which is how to defeat the global jihadist movement. By focusing so much attention on this issue, while ignoring far more grievous incidents, the media is being selective and tendentious in its choice of what to report.

When Palestinian terrorists recently forced two abducted Fox News journalists to convert to Islam as a condition of their release, I don't recall the media pressing any senior Muslim clerics to apologize to Christians. When a Palestinian mob burned and destroyed the Tomb of Joseph in Shechem ( Nablus ) back in October 2000, journalists did not bang down the doors of Muslim sheikhs looking for expressions of regret and contrition.

And when Palestinian newspapers and television and filled with anti-Semitic vitriol on a near-daily basis, where is the demand for Muslim remorse?

So if the media were truly concerned about assuaging hurt feelings, they would do well to stop worrying so much about our radical Islamist foes, and start focusing more on the victims of their violence and intolerance.

Is the NY Times Censoring Books Critical of Islam?

A friend just sent us this email about the NY Times failure to review Oriana Fallaci's books on Islam prior to her death:

I just doublechecked. Times never reviewed any of Fallaci's post 2001 books.They also never reviewed Bruce Bawer, Claire Berlinski or Melanie Philips books about Islam and Europe. They didn't review Eurabia, either. But they did review Ian Buruma's new book, which said we have nothing to worry about.

Daniel Pipes on the Pope

Pipes writes in the NY Sun:

...the Muslim uproar has a goal: to prohibit criticism of Islam by Christians and thereby to impose Shariah norms on the West. Should Westerners accept this central tenet of Islamic law, others will surely follow. Retaining free speech about Islam, therefore, represents a critical defense against the imposition of an Islamic order.

Who Was Manuel II Palaiologos?

Wikipedia has more information on the Byzantine Emperor, who lived from 1350 to 1425, and has recently been cited by Pope Benedict:

Created despotēs by his father, the future Manuel II traveled west to seek support for the Byzantine Empire in 1365 and in 1370, serving as governor in Thessalonica from 1369. The failed attempt at usurpation by his older brother Andronikos IV Palaiologos in 1373 led to Manuel being proclaimed heir and co-emperor of his father. In 1376–1379 and again in 1390 they were supplanted by Andronikos IV and then his son John VII, but Manuel personally defeated his nephew with help from the Republic of Venice in 1390. Although John V had been restored, Manuel was forced to go as an honorary hostage to the court of the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid I at Prousa (Bursa). During his stay, Manuel was forced to participate in the Ottoman campaign that reduced Philadelpheia, the last Byzantine enclave in Anatolia.

Hearing of his father's death in February 1391, Manuel II Palaiologos fled the Ottoman court and secured the capital against any potential claim by his nephew John VII. Although relations with John VII improved, the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid I besieged Constantinople from 1394 to 1402. After some five years of siege, Manuel II entrusted the city to his nephew and embarked on a long trip to western courts (including those of the Kingdom of England, France, the Holy Roman Empire, and Aragon) to seek assistance against the Ottoman Empire.

Meanwhile an anti-Ottoman crusade led by the Hungarian King Sigismund of Luxemburg failed at the Battle of Nicopolis on September 25, 1396, but the Ottomans were themselves crushingly defeated by Timur at the Battle of Ankara in 1402. As the sons of Bayezid I struggled with each other over the succession in the Ottoman Interregnum, John VII was able to secure the return of the European coast of the Sea of Marmara and of Thessalonica to the Byzantine Empire. When Manuel II returned home in 1403, his nephew duly surrendered control of Constantinople and was rewarded with the governorship of newly recovered Thessalonica.

Manuel II Palaiologos used this period of respite to bolster the defenses of the Despotate of Morea, where the Byzantine Empire was actually expanding at the expense of the remnants of the Latin Empire. Here Manuel supervised the building of the Hexamilion (six-mile) wall across the Isthmus of Corinth, intended to defend the Peloponnese from the Ottomans.

Manuel II stood on friendly terms with the victor in the Ottoman civil war, Mehmed I (1402–1421), but his attempts to meddle in the next contested succession led to a new assault on Constantinople by Murad II (1421–1451) in 1422. During the last years of his life, Manuel II relinquished most official duties to his son and heir John VIII Palaiologos, and in 1424 they were forced to sign a peace treaty with the Ottoman Turks, whereby the Byzantine Empire undertook to pay tribute to the sultan. Manuel II died on 21 July 1425.

Anne Applebaum on the Pope

From The Washington Post(ht NRO)

I don't mean that we all need to rush to defend or to analyze this particular sermon; I leave that to experts on Byzantine theology. But we can all unite in our support for freedom of speech -- surely the pope is allowed to quote from medieval texts -- and of the press. And we can also unite, loudly, in our condemnation of violent, unprovoked attacks on churches, embassies and elderly nuns. By "we" I mean here the White House, the Vatican, the German Greens, the French Foreign Ministry, NATO, Greenpeace, Le Monde and Fox News -- Western institutions of the left, the right and everything in between. True, these principles sound pretty elementary -- "we're pro-free speech and anti-gratuitous violence" -- but in the days since the pope's sermon, I don't feel that I've heard them defended in anything like a unanimous chorus. A lot more time has been spent analyzing what the pontiff meant to say, or should have said, or might have said if he had been given better advice.

All of which is simply beside the point, since nothing the pope has ever said comes even close to matching the vitriol, extremism and hatred that pour out of the mouths of radical imams and fanatical clerics every day, all across Europe and the Muslim world, almost none of which ever provokes any Western response at all. And maybe it's time that it should: When Saudi Arabia publishes textbooks commanding good Wahhabi Muslims to "hate" Christians, Jews and non-Wahhabi Muslims, for example, why shouldn't the Vatican, the Southern Baptists, Britain's chief rabbi and the Council on American-Islamic Relations all condemn them -- simultaneously?

Maybe it's a pipe dream: The day when the White House and Greenpeace can issue a joint statement is surely distant indeed. But if stray comments by Western leaders -- not to mention Western films, books, cartoons, traditions and values -- are going to inspire regular violence, I don't feel that it's asking too much for the West to quit saying sorry and unite, occasionally, in its own defense. The fanatics attacking the pope already limit the right to free speech among their own followers. I don't see why we should allow them to limit our right to free speech, too.

Hitchens on the Pope

Christopher Hitchens says the Vatican is reaping what it has sowed (ht Andrew Sullivan):

The Muslim protesters are actually being highly ungrateful. When the embassies of Denmark were being torched earlier this year, Rome managed a few words of protest about … the inadvisability of profane cartoons. In almost every confrontation between Islam and the West, or Islam and Israel, the Vatican has either split the difference or helped to ventriloquize Muslim grievances. Most of all, throughout his address to the audience at Regensburg, the man who modestly considers himself the vicar of Christ on Earth maintained a steady attack on the idea that reason and the individual conscience can be preferred to faith. He pretends that the word Logos can mean either "the word" or "reason," which it can in Greek but never does in the Bible, where it is presented as heavenly truth. He mentions Kant and Descartes in passing, leaves out Spinoza and Hume entirely, and dishonestly tries to make it seem as if religion and the Enlightenment and science are ultimately compatible, when the whole effort of free inquiry always had to be asserted, at great risk, against the fantastic illusion of "revealed" truth and its all-too-earthly human potentates. It is often said—and was said by Ratzinger when he was an underling of the last Roman prelate—that Islam is not capable of a Reformation. We would not even have this word in our language if the Roman Catholic Church had been able to have its own way. Now its new reactionary leader has really "offended" the Muslim world, while simultaneously asking us to distrust the only reliable weapon—reason—that we possess in these dark times. A fine day's work, and one that we could well have done without.