Apropos Of Nothing

Jill Carroll has this to say about the Iraqi terrorists who kidnapped her and held her captive for three months:

“[Their decision to free her] just shows that the mujahedeen are good people fighting an honorable fight, a good fight. While the Americans are here, the occupying forces, you know, treating the people in a very, very bad way.”

She has apparently entirely forgotten Allan Enwiyah, her 32-year-old interpreter, who was shot to death in front of her by these fine human beings. It’s as though he never was.

Everyone seems eager to absolve Carroll of this revolting oversight by assigning her a case of Stockholm Syndrome. I’d be more inclined that way myself were this not the umpteenth case of left-leaning ex-hostages taking advantage of their sound bytes to extol the virtues of the bullet-spraying, bomb-detonating, head-chopping, Iraqi-child-killing murderers and simultaneously take swipes at the Americans. All reality goes in the toilet if an opportunity presents itself to condemn the United States. This woman is supposed to be a journalist; one might expect her to be a mental step or two ahead of, say, the Christian activists who are wont to defend Islamic fundamentalists in advance of their being murdered by them. Yet she blinds herself just as eagerly to the fact that her kidnappers, far from being defenders of the Iraqi people, despise the Iraqi people — people like her unlucky and disgracefully unlamented translator.

Please forgive my lack of proper journalistic reserve. Allan Enwiyah is on my mind right now, not foolish young Jill Carroll, and I’m very angry.

Palestinians took a few moments during Israel’s election day yesterday to launch three Katyusha rockets from the Gaza Strip into Israel. One of them landed south of Ashkelon but fortunately did not explode.

This event is significant because it is the first time they have launched Katyushas rather than Qassams. Katyushas have a much longer range than Qassams and put many more Israelis within striking distance. The incident seems to be a dare of sorts. Palestinians have been trying and failing for years to get Katyushas into the Strip (Arafat tried to bring in a huge stash on the Karine A). They have now obviously succeeded. The rocket south of Ashkelon might as well have had a message painted on it in neon: “Mazeltov on the win, Olmert. What are you going to do about this?”

The army is now trying to determine whether the rocket came from Iran (a near certainty). This event represents a serious escalation of the Palestinian war on Israel and will have to be dealt with hard and fast. This is a good moment for Olmert to earn some Sharon-esque credibility, if he can pull it off. The Jericho prison operation went smoothly; let’s hope he can take similarly effective and swift action in this case.

This incident bolsters those on the right who warned that disengagement from Gaza would result in an escalation of Palestinian firepower from the area. It also, however, bolsters those who support the principle of unilateral disengagement (and thus a further disengagement from the West Bank): pull out on our own terms, let the Palestinians do what they’re going to do, and then respond to their aggression with greater legitimacy. It remains to be seen whether Kadima’s relatively unimpressive showing in the election, and its consequent lack of much room for maneuver, will prevent it from reacting appropriately. If this attack is permitted to evaporate into the next news cycle without a response, we should expect a lot more of the same, and soon.

My apologies for the quiet: I had an ailing child at home all last week, which dropped computer time way down on the priority list. I’m very glad to say he is fully restored and back at gan (nursery school).

The most striking event of the past week was the — how shall I put it? — transitioning of the murderers of Israeli MK Rehavam Ze’evi from a Palestinian prison in Jericho, from which they were about to be sprung, into Israeli custody, where they belong. It’s an interesting story on many levels — the strikingly abrupt departure by the British and American monitors who finally lost patience with the refusal of the Palestinian Authority to uphold its obligation to protect them; the hissy fit thrown by Mahmoud Abbas, which was chutzpadik even for him (accusing the Brits and Americans of reneging on a deal he’d been reneging on since it was inked); the remarkably good timing of the IDF action from the point of view of Olmert’s Kadima party (which begs the question whether the monitors’ departure really was quite as strikingly abrupt as it seemed from the outside); the candy-ass response of the murderers’ PFLP buddies back in the territories (running around grabbing foreigners, making dopey comments to the media, releasing the foreigners and then fading instantly back into the woodwork); the non-response of Hamas to the PFLP mayhem (perhaps an homage to the uselessness of the Fatah police in the days when it was Hamasniks running amok), and more. As I say, I was too involved with nursing my little one to blog about this, but Daniel has a good comprehensive piece on it that should fill in the blanks for you.

Meanwhile, it’s business as usual in Gaza. Masked Palestinian gunmen today murdered 25-year-old Palestinian Ahmed Naseem for the alleged crime of collaboration. (As we have seen, that term is used blanketly by Palestinians to whack their brethren for a wide variety of other reasons, so who knows why this poor kid is dead.) Six other Palestinians were wounded today by roving gunmen who shot up the Gaza City police station and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (these “miitants” were expressing frustration at late paychecks, apparently). More shooting took place on the north-south Gaza highway, at a power station and at a military hospital.

Quelle breath of fresh air!

Courtesy of LGF, I happened across this encouraging bit of news: the French citizens of Saint-Genis-Pouilly, a hamlet on the border with Switzerland, are standing up to Muslim tyranny. What could the Muslims possibly have done to rouse them?

They dissed Voltaire.

Concurrently with the cartoon jihad, Muslims in this Alpine community decided they just couldn’t tolerate French people in a French village reading aloud a 265-year-old play by a French literary master — a master who is remembered not only for his barbs and literary flair (“If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him”) but for his position as representative of Europe’s unalterable (we hope) commitment to secular enlightenment. The play in question is called, pointedly enough, “Fanaticism, or Mahomet the Prophet,” and as the article cited above puts it, it “uses the founder of Islam to lampoon all forms of religious frenzy and intolerance”. To the surprise of no one, the Muslims protested the reading by expressing religious frenzy and intolerance.

A Muslim cafe-owner named Said Akhrouf — who, though of Moroccan descent, was born and raised in France and thus might have had some inkling as to the value of Voltaire to the culture of which he is an intimate part — got together for a powwow with three “Islamic activists” to decide how they were going to deal with this intolerable provocation. They wrote a letter to the town’s mayor, Hubert Bertrand, demanding that their sensibilities be appeased by canceling the show. The letter stated the cancellation was required “in order to preserve peace” — pretty thin code for a shakedown.

To his great credit, Bertrand told them to buzz off, called the police and arranged protection for the theater for the night of the reading. When he announced — flanked by French security officials — that the show would go on, he read aloud the portion of the French constitution that guarantees free speech.

Sure enough, on the night of the performance a “small riot” broke out, in which a car and garbage cans were set on fire. Policemen spent the evening chasing Muslim “youths” through the streets. Mayor Bertrand, who I gather quite enjoyed this little run-in, described the riot as “the most excitement we’ve ever had down here”.

It appears that stomping on Voltaire might be the most effective way of shaking the French people out of their drowsy complacency. As the article points out,

Supporters of Europe’s secular values have rushed to embrace Voltaire as their standard-bearer. France’s national library last week opened an exhibition dedicated to the writer and other Enlightenment thinkers. It features a police file started in 1748 on Voltaire, highlighting efforts by authorities to muzzle him. “Spirit of the Enlightenment, are you there?” asked a headline Saturday in Le Figaro, a French daily newspaper.
…
…the name Voltaire — and the Enlightenment tradition he embodies — has frequently been cited by pundits across Europe commenting on the Danish cartoon furor. That controversy has triggered violent clashes in Pakistan, Nigeria, Libya, Syria and elsewhere, leaving scores dead…Sunday in the Pakistani city of Karachi, about 50,000 people, many chanting “Hang those who insulted the prophet,” rallied to protest the cartoons. The protest, held a day after a visit to the country by President Bush, also featured chants of “Death to America.” In a video broadcast Sunday, Osama bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, also denounced the Danish drawings…

“Help us Voltaire. They’ve gone mad,” read a headline last month in France Soir, a daily newspaper.

Voltaire himself had a taste of the oppression French Muslims are trying to oppose on his country — only then, the fanatical tyrants were Christians:

When Voltaire wrote the play in 1741, Roman Catholic clergymen denounced it as a thinly veiled anti-Christian tract. Their protests forced the cancellation of a staging in Paris after three performances — and hardened Voltaire’s distaste for religion. Asked on his deathbed by a priest to renounce Satan, he quipped: “This is not the time to be making enemies.”

The French director of the reading, Herve Loichemol, “says he wasn’t trying to provoke Muslims but knew from experience his production might anger some. He pushed ahead anyway. Banning blasphemy ‘admits private beliefs into public space,’ he says. ‘This is how catastrophe starts.’”

Well done, Saint-Genis-Pouilly. And may I suggest to Muslim cafe owner Akhrouf: you might want to consider packing up your croque monsieur pan and your lace curtains and opening a nargila parlor in Marrakech. You might feel a little more at home.

[Frivolousness Alert: This post contains nothing whatsoever about Israel, Palestinians, existential conflicts, Islamofascism, unilateral withdrawals, political realignments, Muslim anti-Semitism, or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.]

It has recently come to my attention that John Corbett, late of Northern Exposure and Sex and the City, has turned his back on acting and taken up country music. Now, what I’m about to say has nothing to do with liking or not liking country music. This post is about aesthetics, yes, but physical ones, not musical ones.

John Corbett is one of the most fetching individuals ever to grace the screen. His character on Northern Exposure, disc jockey Chris Stevens, was well nigh perfect: gorgeous, honest, sensitive, tough, and swooningly, crazily articulate. For quite a while, Chris Stevens was the hypothetical dream man of one G. Salt. This became even more true when he materialized as Carrie’s boyfriend on Sex and the City, when he looked like this:

Now, I would argue that if good fortune has graced you with a face like that (on top of a long, lean, gorgeous body), you have a certain moral obligation to both the divine (who bestowed such a gift upon you) and to your legions of admirers (for whom your loveliness is a source of both inspiration and good cheer) not to mess with it.

Unfortunately, however, Mr. Corbett has apparently decided that playing country music requires going native, and has morphed into this:

Note the sideburns, people. That face (so decorative! so ornamental!) is now marred by giant swatches of fur that extend, both longitudinally and latitudinally, down the cheeks. And I can’t bring myself to talk about the hair. For the love of God — Why, John? Why?

The Hamas election wasn’t only ominous news for the Jews in the neighborhood. It is also making life distinctly uncomfortable for Palestinian Christians.

This is a group that has to walk a tightrope: as citizens of the Palestinian Authority rather than of Israel, their allegiance is expected to be to Palestine, but Palestine has just made its Islamic (indeed, Islamist) character abundantly clear. This is no time to rely on lip service to a separation between Palestinian mosque and state; to Hamas, which was expressing a desire even before the ballots had closed not only to introduce sharia law into Palestine but to use it to replace existing law, the two are intimately entwined. Palestinian Christians are both insiders and outsiders. With Hamas in power, they have a life of dhimmitude to look forward to, which is likely to be both inherently frustrating and dangerous and also galling, after their long struggle with Israel.

Muslim fundamentalists are pretty clear about their views toward Christians. (Recall, for example — and there are myriad examples of Muslim persecution of Christians around the world — the recent beheading of Indonesian schoolgirls for the crime of being Christian.) In our local case, the community may be entirely Palestinian, but some Palestinians are considered by the new administration to be more Palestinian than others. As the Post article says,

With fear of government-supported religious coercion on the rise since Hamas’s unexpected win in January’s Palestinian elections, Christians across the West Bank and Gaza Strip are keeping a low profile, with eyes wide open.

…If Hamas follows on its founders’ path to fight Israel and install strict Islamic religious rule, Palestinian Christians stand to become a legally subjugated minority inside Palestinian society.

The article goes on to discuss the expected Hamas clampdown on the consuption of alcohol, and the already festering problems between Christians and Muslims in the territories — problems of property theft (Muslims steal from Christians and rely on Christian reluctance to report the crime), assault, even rape. Christian holy places in the territories are being attacked without consequence by young Muslim men (there’s that demographic again). Women, of course, are being murdered; a Muslim woman allegedly having an affair with a Christian man was killed by her own family, and the man’s family was set upon by Muslims.

The Christian community in the territories, small in number and smaller in power, is extremely reluctant to represent such violence as indications of a Muslim-Christian problem. (Their hesitant responses to repeated assaults are reminiscent of the behavior of Jews abroad over the centuries, who have behaved, in the face of mounting provocation and discrimination, like guests in their own countries who must be careful not to rock the boat.) Their plight will probably be mitigated in the short term by Hamas’s need to fake a generally moderate stance in order to secure desperately needed aid money, but the squeeze will be on once Hamas is financially secure.

It should be noted that Muslim Fatah gunmen — always to be relied upon to make an appearance in touchy situations — descended on Palestinian Christian churches during the cartoon jihad and were immediately slapped down by Hamas, which voiced its solidarity with the Christians. This was almost certainly a message of power over the vanquished Fatah rather than a genuine message of unity with Christians, but it does suggest that the Christians will have a grace period of sorts. Still, provided Hamas remains in power and they receive promised infusions from Iran and Europe, a day of reckoning will come. We’ll have a battle on our hands over here, of course, but so too will Palestinian Christians — as will the moderate Muslim community in Palestine, if it still exists.