No, it was not Napoleon.

It was Muslims. According to a German scholar, the  Muslim rulers of Egypt knocked the nose of the Sphinx off in 1378 because Egyptians were behaving unacceptably like pagans in bringing tributes to the statue, and this violated Islam.

I know. You are not surprised.

Listen here.

The Daily Mail has the juicy details.

03/12/2010

Ralph Peters has a blistering column in the NYPost:

We've been viewed as a fickle (if mighty) partner at least since the 1970s, when we abruptly dumped allies from Saigon to Tehran. Now the White House not only delights in insulting our closest traditional ally, Britain, but has intensified its diplomatic pogrom against Israel -- our only respectable ally in the Middle East.

President George W. Bush was mocked for shooting from the hip, but this administration fires with its eyes closed.

Obama's unbalanced actions shrivel confidence among allies around the globe -- partners we need. Policy differences are one thing, but gratuitous attacks by the White House are quite another.

Has Obama's vaunted intellect been so easily seduced by the myth that Arab extremists long to be our pals -- if only Israel would go away?

Yes, we spend diplomatic capital -- and Yankee dollars -- on Israel. Would it really be wiser to spend it on the wretchedly corrupt Palestinian Authority and Hamas? Anyway, we've spent a hell of a lot more on Iraq, which Obama's anxious to abandon.

No Palestinian leader has offered up a fraction of the compromises made by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But Obama demands that the Israelis make all the compromises, giving their mortal enemies a free pass for their transgressions. (If releasing terrorist prisoners is a helpful confidence-building measure, he could release Khalid Sheik Mohammed . . .)

It's surreal to watch our president act as if terrorist organizations, autocracies and outright dictatorships are morally superior to Israel's rule-of-law democracy.

The aura of unreality extends to the assumption that Israel, faced with threats to its very existence, can be bullied by a White House aligned with its enemies.

The Israeli government's capable of doing stupid, counterproductive things. Israel's raucous democracy sometimes falls hostage to nasty splinter groups. But it remains the only country in the neighborhood where an irate electorate can vote offenders out. Does Obama honestly believe that tilting against Israel will have any positive effect on the Arab world's moral incompetence and ingrained anti-Americanism?

Apparently he does. The roots of this month's diplomatic debacle lie in Cairo -- where Obama preened and pandered a year ago, sugar-coating the Arab world's self-made problems, groveling before Islamist bigotry and fatally encouraging Palestinians and their manipulators to believe that the US had turned away from Israel.

The result has been the collapse of the fragile peace process, which tumbled from direct negotiations back to grudging proximity talks (that have yet to occur).

Israel's on guard. Arabs are intransigent. And progress is dead. All thanks to Obama's arrogant refusal to do his homework before his Cairo apologia. ("No-Drama Obama?" Check out the riots in Jerusalem).

And all this seems fueled by emotion, not sober analysis.

The president's glee in humiliating the Brits stems from his ties to Kenya at an impressionable age, back when liberation rhetoric was in vogue. He behaves as if the Brits still rule in Nairobi, whipping servants and potting lions from the veranda. (This freeze-dried activist world-view also nudges Obama into emotional sympathy with the likes of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and imbues him with a rosy picture of Russia.)

Regarding Israel, a lifetime of extremist associations has infected Obama with an emotional loathing for the Jewish state and a romantic vision of Palestinian terrorists as freedom fighters. (Anti-Israeli and naked anti-Jewish rhetoric is endemic within left-wing hate-church congregations, such as that led by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.)

Obama's Cairo diatribe was hailed by the left as the greatest speech given by an American president (as were all of Obama's speeches back then). It may, indeed, prove great in its effects -- but the results all look negative for America, Israel and freedom.

Sorry, Mr. President: The Palestinians, Syrians, Iranians, Hezbollah, Hamas, Russians, Chinese, Chavistas and all those enemies you've rushed to embrace are not going to love us -- or you. Cease your mad affairs. Come back to our marriage with our proven allies.

Betraying Israel may give you emotional satisfaction, sir, but it will bring us no lasting benefits. Israel is, literally, flesh of our flesh. Don't stick a knife in it.
 

Listen here.

By Melanie Newman for Times Higher Education:

Hundreds of Muslim students have been holding prayers outside City University London for a month in protest at the closure of a prayer room used exclusively by them.

The students declare that “multi-faith” alternatives are unacceptable because “a vast number of Muslim scholars throughout history believe it is impermissible for Muslims to offer prayers in a place where [a god] other than our Lord, Allah, is worshipped”.

What was that about the "three Abrahamic faiths," and "we all pray to the same God"?  Now we learn that Muslim scholars throughout history believe that the Islamic Allah is NOT the same god as the Christian God or the Jewish YHVH?  Goodness me.

In an open letter, the protesters also point out that the multi-faith room can accommodate only 40 people, which is too small for the number of Muslims who need to pray at least three times per day.

All-male groups have been praying on the pavement outside City since 15 February, with more than 200 reportedly turning up for Friday prayers in Northampton Square.

The protest follows a fight between members of the City Islamic Society and a gang of youths last November outside the Gloucester building in Whiskin Street which previously housed the Muslim prayer room.

Police described the attack, in which two students were stabbed, as racially aggravated. Earlier the same week, students reported being pelted with stones as they left the room.

[...]

Relations between the City University Islamic Society members and other student groups have been strained since last year, when the society invited cleric Abu Usamah to a fundraising event.

The preacher featured in a Channel 4 documentary, Undercover Mosque, in 2007, in which he said homosexuals should be “thrown off a mountain” and labelled women intellectually deficient.

The Inquirer ran an article and editorial criticising the society for inviting Mr Usamah.

In its response, also published by the paper, the society warns The Inquirer and City staff to “submit to Allah” or face “severe and painful punishment” in the “next life”.

A second response, from anonymous Muslim students at City, points out that “male chauvinists are everywhere” and asks non-Muslims to “take a critical look at the myriad media reports of angry Muslims shouting ‘death to the infidels’. There are approximately 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, and if Islam advocated violence and sexism, the whole world would be up in flames by now,” they write.

Uhh, do the anonymous Muslim students have access to newspapers, televisions, or the internet?  Because Muslims are committing violent attacks on almost every continent in the world (I admit to not seeing reports of  jihad attacks in the Antarctic).

Jewish candidate favored for PM, Dutch poll shows

March 17, 2010

(JTA) -- Opinion polls in Holland show that a majority of voters favor the Jewish former mayor of Amsterdam for prime minister.

Some 52 percent of those polled last week would vote for Marius Job Cohen as prime minister in national elections scheduled for June, the European Jewish Press reported.

Cohen was selected from a list that included current Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende and extreme-right, anti-Islam campaigner Geert Wilders.

Cohen, the mayor of Amsterdam for nine years, was chosen as the new leader of the Dutch Labor Party on March 12.

Watch here.

Watch, and listen, here.

Amazingly, the interview appeared on the BBC's Arabic service.

One of the best posters at Jihadwatch is "gravenimage" (and another is "Dumbledore's Army" to whom I initially, and wrongly -- see the comments -- assigned the credit). Today, from sunny San Franciso, she posted, in a thread under a piece at Jihad Watch about  Erdogan's threat to expel 100,000 Armenians,  the following excerpts from a diary kept by a Turkish officer who witnessed the mass-murdering of Christian Armenians by Muslim Turks and Kurds:

"Here's a passage from a first-hand account from 1916 by a Turkish Army officer, Lieutenant Sayied Ahmed Moukhtar Baas, who was sickened by the atrocities:

"The women and children were sent ahead under escort with the assurance by the Turkish authorities that their final destination was Mosul and that no harm will befall them. The men kept behind, were taken out of town in batches of 15 and 20, lined up on the edge of ditches prepared beforehand, shot and thrown into the ditches. Hundreds of men were shot every day in a similar manner. The women and children were attacked on their way by the ("Shotas") the armed bands organised by the Turkish Government who attacked them and seized a certain number. After plundering and committing the most dastardly outrages on the women and children they massacred them in cold blood. These attacks were a daily occurrence until every woman and child had been got rid of. The military escorts had strict orders not to interfere with the "Shotas"."

[Of course, the reference to "committing the most dastardly outrages" on the women and children means rape—GI]

"The children that the Government had taken in charge were also deported and massacred.

The infants in the care of the American Consul of Trebizond were taken away with the pretext that they were going to be sent to Sivas where an asylum had been prepared for them. They were taken out to sea in little boats. At some distance out they were stabbed to death, put in sacks and thrown into the sea. A few days later some of their little bodies were washed up on the shore at Trebizond.

In July 1915 I was ordered to accompany a convoy of deported Armenians. It was the last batch from Trebizond. There were in the convoy 120 men, 700 children and about 400 women. From Trebizond I took them to Gumish-Khana. Here the 120 men were taken away, and, as I was informed later, they were all killed. At Gumish-Khana I was ordered to take the women and children to Erzinjian. On the way I saw thousands of bodies of Armenians unburied. Several bands of "Shotas" met us on the way and wanted me to hand over to them women and children. But I persistently refused. I did leave on the way about 300 children with Moslem families who were willing to take care of them and educate them.

[Clearly, the relatively decent Lieutenant Baas hoped for the best here. If these children were "lucky"—luckier than their families, in any case—they were converted to Islam and raised by their new Muslim families. This did not always happen—there are numerous reports of Muslim families, who, on the pretext of taking in these children, used them as slaves and sex slaves, and eventually murdered them—GI]

"The "Mutessarrif" of Erzinjian ordered me to proceed with the convoy to Kamack. At the latter place the authorities refused to take charge of the women and children. I fell ill and wanted to go back, but I was told that as long as the Armenians in my charge were alive I would be sent from one place to the other. However I managed to include my batch with the deported Armenians that had come from Erzeroum. In charge of the latter was a colleague of mine Mohamed Effendi from the Gendarmerie. He told me afterwards that after leaving Kamach they came to a valley where the Euphrates ran. A band of Shotas sprang out and stopped the convoy. They ordered the escort to keep away and then shot every one of the Armenians and threw them in the river."

http://www.armenian-genocide.org/br-12-26-16-text.html

An excellent—and deeply disturbing—book on the Armenian genocide is "The Burning Tigris", by Peter Balakian."

Listen here.

Watch, and listen, here.

One of the wonderful features of The Spaniards Inn is that it has a doggy wash, to wash off the mud of Hampstead Heath. The Spaniards is a dog-friendly pub, with bowls and drinking water provided for the dogs along with pint glasses for its human clients. It is a superbly un-Islamic environment, and long may this continue.

The doggy wash at The Spaniards is a primitive affair, unlike this - from Japan (where else?):

I notice there is a button for cats. They would hate this, and I imagine dogs would too.

Turkey PM says could deport up to 100,000 Armenians

By Ibon Villelabeitia

ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkey's prime minister has threatened to expel thousands of illegal Armenian immigrants after U.S. and Swedish lawmakers passed votes branding World War One-era killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks as genocide.

Turkey, a NATO member and candidate to join the European Union, recalled its ambassadors to Washington and Stockholm after the non-binding votes and warned they could hurt a fragile effort to reconcile with Armenia after a century of hostility.

Asked about the votes in an interview with the BBC Turkish service that was broadcast late on Tuesday, Erdogan said: "There are currently 170,000 Armenians living in our country. Only 70,000 of them are Turkish citizens, but we are tolerating the remaining 100,000. If necessary, I may have to tell these 100,000 to go back to their country because they are not my citizens. I don't have to keep them in my country."

Thousands of illegal Armenian immigrants, mostly women from the impoverished countryside, work as cleaning ladies and in other low-skilled jobs in Istanbul, where they settled after an earthquake in their homeland in 1988.

The exact number of Armenian immigrants in Turkey is unknown. But Turkish-Armenian groups say Turkish politicians inflate numbers of illegal workers and threaten expulsions whenever tensions escalate between Ankara and Yerevan.

Erdogan said Armenian immigrants had been allowed to work in Turkey as a "display of our peaceful approach, but we have to get something in return."

Aris Nalci, an editor at Turkish-Armenian weekly newspaper Agos, said it was not the first time Erdogan had made such remarks. "We are not taking it as a serious threat," he said.

HISTORIC ACCORDS

Muslim Turkey and Christian Armenia signed historic accords last year to establish diplomatic ties and open their common border.

But the deal has yet to be ratified by their respective parliaments and the governments have accused each other of trying to rewrite the texts. Erdogan's comments could further strain the process of normalizing ties that have been burdened by the deportation and killing of Armenians during the chaotic end of the Ottoman empire nearly a century ago.

The deportation threats will also be frowned upon in Europe, which supported the peace accords with Armenia and said they would help Ankara's EU bid.

Suat Kiniklioglu, foreign affairs spokesman for the ruling AK Party, played down Erdogan's words, saying the premier felt the need to "remind the public" about Armenians living illegally in Turkey. He said Erdogan was "not talking about something that would happen today or tomorrow."

In the interview, Erdogan accused the Armenian diaspora of pushing the resolutions in the United States and Sweden and called on Armenia and other foreign governments to avoid being swayed by their lobbying. The U.S. and Swedish governments opposed the non-binding resolutions, which passed by extremely thin margins.

The issue of the Armenian massacres is deeply sensitive in Turkey, which accepts that many Christian Armenians were killed by Ottoman Turks but vehemently denies that up to 1.5 million died and that it amounted to genocide -- a term employed by many Western historians and some foreign parliaments.

Daniel Akst asked what would happen to all those lost people of literature (h/t Arts & Letters Daily):

When Robinson Crusoe was stranded on a tropical island he did pretty well for himself, all things considered. But to the rest of the world he was as good as dead. Daniel Defoe's novel, masquerading as a memoir, came out in 1719, a time when voyages were dangerous and people could easily be lost to one another with no way to get in touch or even determine if the other party was living. Indeed, when Crusoe finally gets back home he finds himself disinherited by a father who had assumed, sensibly enough, that his son was deceased.

Today, of course, Crusoe's dad would probably just check his son's Facebook page—unless Crusoe had used his iPhone to send his GPS coordinates to his various Twitter followers. After all, these days what is known as Robinson Crusoe Island, off the coast of Chile, has Internet access.

What a momentous change. For most of human history, losing contact with a loved one was all too easy, especially when great distances intervened. Leave-takings must have been particularly fraught when one might not get word of a loved one for months, years—or ever. Laura Linney, as Abigail Adams, brought to vivid life the heartache of an 18th-century parting when John Adams left for Europe in the TV miniseries. In Crusoe's day, in fact, most people didn't even have pictures of one another to hang onto.

It's no wonder that variations on the long-lost theme have been a literary staple practically since the dawn of narrative. In "The Odyssey," Penelope weaves her way through years without word from her wily husband, Odysseus, who finds himself waylaid by a Cyclops here and a minor goddess there for the better part of a decade.

[...]

Odysseus, Crusoe, the various Ardens—so many characters in movies and books wash up on these far-flung flyspecks that it's a wonder they don't run into one another. Had Crusoe lived long enough, he might have encountered the whole "Gilligan's Island" crew, the FedEx guy from "Cast Away," or all those sweaty desperadoes on the TV series "Lost."

The journeys of yore were not always taken voluntarily, either. In Thomas Hardy's "The Mayor of Casterbridge," the moody protagonist Henchard "sells" his wife and baby one day in a fit of drunken pique. Hating himself in the morning, he sets out to recover his family—but despite an extensive search, it's hopeless.

Like so many venerable plot devices, the tradition of the lost loved one has been rendered pretty well obsolete by digital communications technologies—and thank God for them. Think back to the aftermath of World War II, when millions of displaced persons in Europe struggled to find lost loved ones. Some searched for decades. Under similar circumstances today, the displaced would probably consult a searchable database on the World Wide Web, or perhaps set up a Google alert to notify them when a relative's name cropped up.

Literature's loss, it seems, is humanity's gain. Not a bad trade, I think.

The Spectator's Jonathan Sumption mars an otherwise fair (and favourable) review of Anthony Julius' Trials of the Diaspora - A History of Anti-Semitism in England with some idiotic comments about the Middle East:

Julius’s main arguments are that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is an issue of local significance only, whose global impact is exaggerated by the critics; and that they object only to the injustices perpetrated by Israel, not to the equal or greater injustices committed by others, such as the Chinese in Tibet. Therefore, he suggests, the criticisms, even if objectively justifiable, are not really rational responses to the problem and can properly be characterised as anti-Semitic.

The difficulty about this is that there is overwhelming evidence that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is a powerful stimulant of anti-American resentment and violence in the Islamic world, albeit that other factors are at work as well. Moreover, there are rational reasons, which have nothing to do with anti-Semitism, for English critics to concentrate their fire on Israel. The Middle East is at their back door. There is a large Islamic minority living in England. And for those who know something of the history of the Middle East, it is obvious that Britain’s reorganisation of the region after 1918 has been a major source of its current problems. The true test, surely, is not whether Israel’s critics get equally angry about other injustices, but whether they would be equally angry if the same injustices were perpetrated by Gentiles. The question is hypothetical, but it is not difficult to answer.

The question is not merely hypothetical; it is fatuous. Quite apart from the assumption that Israel, which makes concession after concession, perpetrates "injustices" - there is scarcely a group more unjustly favoured than the "Palestinians" - this hypothetical question ignores the reasons for Israel's creation in the first place. Gentiles have not, as a people, faced centuries of persecution and are not forced to defend their tiny refuge against a mortal enemy.

In any case, far greater injustices - if Israel is unjust, which I dispute - are indeed perpetrated by Gentiles in the Middle East: by Arab Muslims against Israel, against Arab Christians, against Copts and against other Arab Muslims, most of them female. And those real injustices are excused by the West, often as being indirectly the fault of Israel. Sumption is right - the question is not difficult to answer, and the answer is no.

This is not the worst of it: Sumption asks us to believe that because England has "a large Islamic minority" who might easily become violent if it looks kindly on Israel, the English should turn against Israel rather than the violent Muslims. Not only must we accept Muslim anti-Semitism as a given; we should pander to it. The idea is, or should be, repugnant; unfortunately it is widely held, and I am sorry to see it in The Spectator.

Criticism of Israel need not be anti-Semitic, but it nearly always is. Call it a rebuttable presumption.

The New York Times on March 10 quoted a United Nations report to the effect that aid given to Somalia was not reaching the people most in need of it, that is to say the malnourished and the starving.

I would not be telling you the truth if I said that, when I read the news, you could have knocked me down with a feather. Can there be anyone left in the world who thinks that aid will go only, or even mainly, to the people most in need of it? By comparison with such a belief, faith in Father Christmas is a model of rational expectation. At least the presents arrive, even if Father Christmas doesn’t.

I have been to Somalia only once, in the comparatively palmy days of the wily dictator, Siad Barre, who by then had jumped ship from the Soviet to the American (Ethiopia has jumped in precisely the opposite direction). Among my treasured possessions of no value to anyone but myself is a Soviet-era (and produced) phrase book, with such essential expressions as ‘Hand me the opera glasses, please, and ‘How many workers does your collective farm have?’ translated into Somali. As everyone knows, Somali was reduced to writing only very recently; the Soviet time reduced it further in no time to nonsense.

Even then, in those comparatively happy times (in how many countries in the world are the days of some loathsome dictator looked back upon with nostalgia, if not longing?), I should not have mistaken Somalia for a country in which the distribution of aid was likely to proceed smoothly in the direction of the needy. Far from it; and I also became rather sceptical there of the foreign distributors of aid.

I remember going into the headquarters of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees in Mogadishu to obtain information about the cholera epidemics then raging in some of the refugee camps. I was somewhat surprised to find two things: first, a complaint on the UNCHR staff notice-board that the portions in the staff canteen were too small, and second that the staff were de facto on strike because of the Somali government’s insistence on exchanging their salaries at the official exchange rate, which was only a fraction of the open market rate.

In effect, this little vignette captured not the paradox of aid (a policy that is persisted in cannot be regarded as paradoxical once its effects have been generally recognised), but the very essence of aid. In short, aid is no way to aid a country.

Another so call ‘paradox’ that is often referred to in the press is that of African countries that have remained generally impoverished despite the existence of vast natural resources. Nigeria and the Congo are two prominent cases that spring to mind. But the paradox is not a paradox, at least in the sense that it is something not explicable.

In most African countries, it is not the enterprise of the local people that had led to the extraction of mineral wealth, but rather that of foreigners, exploitative as they may often have been. Even though local people have supplied the manual labour necessary to the extraction, the wealth as a whole that accrues to African society as a whole comes as a free gift, more or less as aid does.

This is a disaster for the rounded development of a backward country, for it makes control of the government (which receives the bulk of the wealth accruing to African society from mineral extraction) the most important, and sometimes the only, path to personal or ethnic advancement. Ambition itself is wholly politicised, therefore, and  the humble task of producing things is left to the unambitious and perhaps the less able.

In countries such as Nigeria and the Congo, the mineral wealth is not sufficient by itself to enrich the population as a whole (unlike in Kuwait, for example, where everyone can be well-off doing nothing). However, the mineral wealth is more than sufficient to make those who control it very rich indeed. Wars are worth fighting in the Congo because control of the minerals is so lucrative, where the other possibilities are such commodities as coffee and bananas. In Nigeria, the oil revenues are immense by comparison with those of all other sectors of the economy: and Nigeria’s share of the oil revenues goes more or less straight to the government. If you mix in a little ethnic discord with government control of mineral revenues, the scene is set for prolonged, indeed endless and often bloody political struggles. Far from being a blessing, therefore, oil wealth has been a curse for Nigeria.

In countries less well-endowed with extractable wealth, foreign aid has played the part of oil in Nigeria. Oil constitutes at least 80 per cent of Nigeria’s foreign exchange earnings; in several African countries, foreign aid constitutes very nearly as much.

This results in the same perversions of the national economy, and the same obstacles to real development, as oil has done in Nigeria. The ambitious and able people want to join the government, and so life in general is deeply politicised; genuine economic life is paralysed, and becomes a desperate zero sum game.

When this happens, there is a built-in and deeply perverse incentive to continue to follow policies that impoverish, for a flourishing economy would obviate the supposed need for the foreign aid which is the source of the power, influence and wealth of the elite through whom it is funnelled. Here is one case in which poverty really is a source of wealth.

The most extreme instance of the above syndrome is civil war. It is therefore not in the least surprising that aid to Somalia is not reaching the neediest; it would be very surprising, indeed it would be absolutely astonishing, if it were. Neither is it surprising, however, that it should be reported as if it were surprising (unsurprising news not being news). For otherwise, the fact that aid does not reach the neediest would be a threat to our sense of power, our feelings of omnipotence. How could a few lousy uneducated Somalian gunmen be thwarting our infinite benevolence?

First published at Front Page.

See here.

But the Good Book:says: 

"And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock."

Jeez, I certainly hope so.

I leave the country for a few days and look what happens - in a scene quite hard to picture, a Lithuanian has "used his penis to assault a police officer". The BBC reports in deadpan police-speak:

Marium Varinauskas, 28, tried to strike the officer on the head with his penis when she was called out to his flat, but she got out of the way.

How? By "taking evasive action":

Police were called to his home by his girlfriend, who had complained about him being drunk last November.

They arrived to find the self-employed engineer sitting on the sofa wearing a pair of underpants.

Fiscal depute Elaine Lynch said: "The accused got to his feet and was standing over the police officer exposing his penis and thrusting it in her face, forcing her to take evasive action to avoid getting struck."

Incidentally, the responsibilities of a fiscal depute include the assessment of bona vacantia.

Marc Riboud / Magnum photos (Slate)