After the tremendous outpouring of comments and furious reactions relevant to the attack in the Parisian night bus (known as the "Noctilien"), readers will find the following testimony by the victim himself to be either politically correct to a shocking degree, or a refreshingly honest statement from a 19-year-old student who does not want to make a mountain out of a molehill. At any rate, those were the two main reactions of Le Figaro's readers.

A six-minute video from a surveillance camera, showing an attack on a young white man in a Parisian bus, during the night of December 6-7, 2008, has aroused a tsunami of reactions throughout the French-language Internet. At François Desouche there are almost 2000 comments to the video, not to mention other sites.

George Handlery about the week that was. How to end piracy. The erogenous zone of politics. Obama in Prague, Good propaganda, bad policy. Total nuclear disarmament is the rogue states’ opportunity. When cheers replace supportive participation. The implications of the Rasmussen candidacy. Easy practical tests for gauging development.
 
1. The news resonate with the splash Obama made in Prague. In an effective PR action, the address that announced a bad policy turned out to be successful propaganda. The President has hit on an erogenous zone of politics when he suggested that America desires the total elimination of nuclear weapons. There are two contexts in which this might fit. If the statement reflects policy, a problem emerges.
Total nuclear disarmament is much more difficult to enforce and to control than is the partial reduction of such forces. If such an agreement is enforceable in the case of the known, admitted and major nuclear powers, a new problem attains paramount importance. Once the present’s major players have emptied their arsenals, the rogue cheater’s undetected or out Of PC politeness ignored small stash receives a significance. It is comparable to what the US’ three bombs had in 1945. In case of total de-nuclearization, the cheaters are given a nuclear monopoly. This card would be played out in the pursuit of criminal goals by either using these weapons or by threatening to resort to them.

Bugler among somnambulists

Of all the law-enabled crimes that the ruling elites of the West have perpetrated on their subject populations in the last 40 years, none has been as grave as the demented stuffing of 55 million imported Muslims into Western Europe, another 5 million into the white Anglosphere countries, plus unknown millions of illegals in both. This has shattered the common cultural, moral and religious social capital of the Euro peoples, dissolves bonds of community and civil society, and led to strife, violence, terrorism and anti-West genocidal plots by Muslims – all of which, we shall argue, could have been avoided had the West remained the West and the East remained where it properly belongs, in the Crescent Moon East. 

Spanish National Court Judge Fernando Andreu says he will redouble his probe of seven top Israeli military and government officials for suspected “crimes against humanity.” He made the decision after determining that documents forwarded by the Israeli Embassy in Madrid show that Israel has decided not to prosecute anyone for the targeted assassination of Salah Shehadeh, the commander of the military wing of Hamas, in Gaza City in 2002. Spanish law allows the prosecution of foreigners for such crimes as genocide, crimes against humanity and torture committed anywhere in the world if the suspects will not be tried in their home country.

George Handlery about the week that was. The spongy cogs of the distributing bureaucracy. Lost: The moral compass. NATO: Danger? What danger? The façade of fake facts. Furthering or restraining achievers. System competition through taxes.
 
1. The approach sounds great. Take from the rich, give it to the poor. Fill the deficit-pit while doing so. The genially simple solution brings surprises. The initiators of such projects prefer to have them discussed in the abstract. These peddlers of snake medicine do not tell how much will be absorbed as a lubricant between the spongy cogs of the distributing bureaucracy. Approving citizens assume that they will be filed under “poor”. (Are we not all poorer or “non-richer” than we think that we deserve to be?) In practice, when the duped wake up as the bill is delivered, they discover that they are classified as “rich”. It is not good to be rich when it means, “plucked” and not “getting”.

Just a few days ago, not many Americans knew about Daniel Hannan, a Conservative member of the European Parliament. However, after a three minute speech on March 24 in which he confronted British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Hannan has become an international sensation. His YouTube video “The devalued Prime Minister of a devalued government” is already an internet success. It has become the most viewed political speech faster than any other in internet history, with almost two million views in its first week, and it has been the number one viewed video for several straight days. As a principled politician, Hannan has been widely praised by conservatives in the United States and was recently featured on Fox News, the Drudge Report and various important conservative radio talk shows, including the Rush Limbaugh Show.

To the surprise of many, Dr. Michael Nazir-Ali, the (Anglican) Bishop of Rochester, England, has announced that he will retire next September. The 59-year old Bishop says that he is resigning so that he can work “for endangered or beleaguered Christian minorities both abroad and in the UK.”

I have published a brief early review of The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization by Jonathan Lyons at the Gates of Vienna blog, and will publish a longer and more thorough rebuttal of this book at some point in April, either at Jihad Watch or at Atlas Shrugs. Lyons’ subject matter is related to that of John Freely’s book Aladdin’s Lamp: How Greek Science Came to Europe Through the Islamic World, which I will concentrate on here.

 I. The Locust Years

Among the most corrosive public debates of American history must be that over the Iraq War. Unlike so many other wrenching questions that seized the national attention, it has no resolution, and no definitively right or wrong side. (Contrast with, say, slavery, isolationism, or the equal-rights amendment, all with moral or pragmatic winners and losers.) In this, it is distressingly similar to the long war of the prior generation, in Vietnam. The parallel is limited, though: not least because comfortable collegians are not being forced to go fight (the observation that Vietnam-era protest ended when the draft did is not original to me), and hence social discord has been comparatively muted.