My brothers and sisters at the WSJ.com surprisingly have fallen for that old chestnut which usually surfaces this time of year:

The U.S. and euro-zone economies are swapping places, at least for the second half of 2006. The growth rate in the traditional leader seems to be slowing from an already disappointing 2.5% annual rate in the second quarter, while it is accelerating in the traditional also-ran, to as high as 3%.

Turning to Eurostat for second-half comparisons stretching back to 1995, one finds the following GDP growth quarter on quarter:

I have commented that there is an undercurrent of anti-Western self-loathing permeating parts of our popular culture and our news media. There is. But there are also some other trends worth studying.

I watched the movie Superman Returns recently. I knew it had received some criticism in advance. Rather than Superman’s traditional motto “truth, justice and the American way,” his mission had now been transformed to “truth, justice and all that stuff" by scribes Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris. “The world has changed. The world is a different place,” Harris said. “The truth is he’s an alien. He was sent from another planet. He has landed on the planet Earth, and he is here for everybody. He’s an international superhero.” “We were always hesitant to include the term ‘American way’ because the meaning of that today is somewhat uncertain,” Dougherty explained.

The hysteria over the deaths at Qana continues to mount, and in response, Israel has suspended its air campaign for 48 hours. This is a fool’s move on Israel’s part, which speaks well of its humanity, and poorly of its military sense. Let’s recapitulate, because we must, what has happened here: Israel is fighting an enemy, Hezbollah, that explicitly seeks civilian massacre, and hides amongst civilian populations as a matter of course. The direct result of this, as anyone might expect, is civilian deaths. (I am not, as an aside, convinced that there is a meaningful “civilian” designation here, but we will accept it for the sake of argument.) Now, who bears primary responsibility for those deaths? Ordinarily, one might assert that it’s the combatant that actively sought to place those dead civilians in the line of fire.

An idea is gaining ground. It is a Palestinian-Israeli peace to be concluded over the prostrate body of Lebanon. The project suffers from numerous ailments. They begin with the word “peace.” What is actually meant is an “armistice” of uncertain duration. That might be better than what we have now but it is, regardless of wishful thinking, considerably less than a “peace.”

The news today brings word of a massacre of children in Lebanon at the hands of the Israeli Air Foce. There is no other word for it: they were asleep, and now they are dead. It is a profound tragedy, an unspeakable horror, and a wrenching consequence of war. It is also, contrary to what you will hear in the coming days, utterly irrelevant to the justice of the Israeli cause, and meaningless to the need for a ceasefire.

Until recently I did not know that Muslims are not allowed to face Mecca (nor turn their back to it) when sitting on the loo. I heard about it last April when the British press reported that Brixton Prison near London is rebuilding toilets so Muslim inmates can defecate in the right direction. First I thought it was a joke. This week, however, the BBC website has a story on a housing estate in North England. The homes, with wind turbines and solar panels on the roofs, have up to seven bedrooms, kitchens that comply with halal cuisine and “bathrooms that face away from Mecca.”

Historian David Littman is a representative to the United Nations (Geneva) of the Association for World Education. He has spent years tracking the rise of Islamic influence at the UN. According to him, “In recent years, representatives of some Muslim states have demanded, and often received, special treatment at the United Nations.” “As a result, non-diplomatic terms such as ‘blasphemy’ and ‘defamation of Islam’ have seeped into the United Nations system, leading to a situation in which non-Muslim governments accept certain rules of conduct in conformity with Islamic law (the Shari’a) and acquiesce to a self-imposed silence regarding topics touching on Islam.”

Israel's ambassador to Norway, Miryam Shomrat, has filed a complaint at PFU against the cartoon in Dagbladet about Ehud Olmert. She also said she was «disappointed» in the Norwegian government because it has neglected to react against the assault of a jew by some Arabs a while ago. Meanwhile, the bishop of Oslo has urged the government to officially condemn what happened.

Ruby Schembri is a white 35-year old Maltese national who moved to Britain in 2004. She recently earned £750 by taking her employer, HSBC Bank, to court claiming race discrimination because she had overheard a private conversation between colleagues.

Watford Employment Tribunal found both Debbie Jones, a local bank manager, and HSBC guilty of racial discrimination after Ms Schembri claimed that she had overheard Ms Jones say “I hate foreigners” and “I am against immigration” in a conversation with Rosemary Johnstone, a colleague, in April 2005.

Following the episodes of street violence and civil unrest which surfaced in the suburbs of Paris in late 2005, recent events in French society have conjured up a new political image – the immigrant populations in the suburbs have rebelled against the model of French citizenship, declaring that they remain completely unassimilated on either the economic, social or political level. Typical of the French, you might think. Indeed, they seem to have adopted the old accepted 1968 convention of disagreement within French society: bricks and Molotov cocktails.