The Irish Examiner (registration required) reports that the EU wants to ban sex as a determinant of car insurance.

Women drivers could be facing a €750-a-year rise in premiums after MEPs backed plans to ban sex discrimination in the car insurance industry.

The controversial European Commission (EC) proposals would force insurance companies to apply "gender neutrality" preventing them from using statistics such as driving records, life expectancy and other basic criteria when giving insurance quotes.

Green Party MEP Nuala Ahern said the plan was an "own goal" by the commission.

"This will make it more costly for women to get insurance. We all want equality but if there is a genuine risk differential between young male drivers and young women, it's completely mad of the commission to disallow this objective data," said.

The Irish Insurance Federation (IIF) has warned that applying equal treatment without taking account of the fact that women statistically are safer drivers than men, could raise women's motoring premiums by as much as €750.

"We believe it won't benefit men and it would certainly penalise women," said IIF regulation and planning officer manager Paul McDonnell.

He said the proposals might initially lead to an increase in car insurance premiums for women and a drop in premiums for men.

But if this attracted more risky male drivers, the industry would compensate by increasing premiums and both sexes would suffer.

UPDATE: This proposal may be a benefit to married couples relative to single people as well. When you insure a family (at least one without children of driving age), you get a package of a man and a woman. Therefore, the risk is the simple average of the two. If, on the other hand, you insure a person drawn at random, the risk is a weighted average of the probabilities, weighted by the proportion of men and women. If men are more than half the drivers, which I think plausible, the risk posed by a single person is greater than the risk posed by a married couple. Moreover, forced pooling of men and women will attract men into the market, therefore raise the proportion of men, and increase the risk of insuring a single person.

Talk about a kick in the teeth to the radical feminists. I didn't think the European Commission had it in them.

David Horowitz's FrontPageMag explains in detail why Arafat won his Nobel Peace Prize, and why Sheikh Yassin was such a good contender.

Do not, and I mean this in all seriousness, do not, click on the link if you are eating or if you are at all squeamish. It is brutal.

The Chicago Tribune (registration required) reports that downstate and suburban legislators are taking on Chicago legislators in the gun control debate.

The Illinois Senate Friday approved legislation to allow retired police officers and former military police officers to carry concealed weapons, the latest example of a growing mood against gun control in the legislature despite the Democratic takeover of both chambers.

In addition to the concealed-carry measure, lawmakers in recent days have voted for bills that would lower the age to obtain a gun owner's permit without parental consent and allow a court to override enforcement of municipal handgun bans in cases where weapons are fired in self-defense.

Gov. Rod Blagojevich aggressively pushed for tougher gun-control measures when he served as a member of the U.S. House. But that stance caused him problems with Downstate voters in the Democratic governor's primary in 2002, and his advocacy for gun control has been far more muted since he has taken office.

Still, he pledged in a January interview with the Tribune to renew his efforts this spring.

He has yet to push any gun-control legislation of his own, however, and has so far been silent about whether he would approve the relaxation measures if they land on his desk. Aides said he needs more time to review the bills, which have won approval in different forms in the House and Senate.

.    .    .

The measure was passed 40-12, with most opposition coming from Chicago-area Democrats. One who backed the measure, however, was State Sen. Barack Obama (D-Chicago), the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate.

Obama, a liberal who is trying to broaden his appeal to Downstate voters for the Senate race, said he voted for the bill because law-enforcement officers may be "more vulnerable and need protection" and because they're experienced and trained in handling firearms.

"I don't think anybody thought that this was going to be somehow opening the door to the Wild West," Obama said.

Sen. Iris Martinez (D-Chicago), a gun-control advocate, warned that people are becoming too "laid back about violence."

But Rep. Mike Bost (R-Murphysboro) said Downstate residents grow up around guns and so have learned to deal with them responsibly.

One of the charming features of Bob Herbert of the New York Times is that even when he is saying something sensible, he still gets it wrong. Today, he lets loose at New York's Mayor Bloomberg for putting up $300 million for a stadium for the New York Jets.

Last week Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the New York City Police Department "is doing a great job," and added, "I wish I had the money to pay 'em more."

Two days later he was at a press conference giddily explaining how anxious he was to fork over $300 million in city funds to help the New York Jets build a glittering new playground for the rich on the banks of the Hudson River in Manhattan.

I guess it's a matter of priorities. The mayor can't find the money to pay the city's cops or teachers what they deserve, but he can sure come up with the cash for a stadium.

One more thing. While the fattest of the fat cats can line up for a shot at the luxury boxes, ordinary New Yorkers for the most part will not ever be able to go see the Jets in their billion-dollar-plus palace by the Hudson. Jets games are already sold out to season-ticket holders.

Anyone else who wants tickets has to go on a waiting list. When I asked a spokeswoman how long the wait might be, she said, "10 years."

UPDATE: More on stadium building at Marginal Revolution and The Sports Economist.

Patricia McKenna is an Irish MEP (Member of the European Parliament), who is also a member of the Green Party. Last week she got a bit hysterical over US Secret Service agents, remarking that “Now the big danger is that Irish protesters will be more at risk from George Bush’s trigger-happy security people than ever from terrorist actions.” This is pretty much par for the course stuff from McKenna, but Ryle Dwyer takes her to task for it in the pages of the Irish Examiner (registration required).

In all of the attacks on the presidents, not one shot was fired by the secret service, so there was clearly no justification for Patricia McKenna’s assertion that the agents are trigger-happy. She obviously did not know what she was talking about.

Her remarks exhibited ignorance and poor judgment, which she compounded the following day by her refusal to withdraw the unjust allegation, despite being offered repeated opportunities to do so on Joe Duffy’s ‘Liveline’ programme.

It was Patricia who was trigger-happy in shooting her mouth off. If she thought her babble was obscuring her ignorance, she was just fooling herself.

UPDATE: If I had kept up with my blog reading, in which I am sadly behind, I would have noticed that the Irish Eagle was already on this story.

MORE UPDATE: Kesher Talk links to a related story, and puts it under Euroweenie watch. God help me, but I am actually going to put in a defense of Europe on this one. Kesher Talk links to a misleading piece in Newsday:

Justice Minister Michael McDowell, speaking during a two-day meeting of European police chiefs in Dublin, said U.S. Secret Service agents would be allowed to open fire if deemed necessary "to save lives."

"Shooting at anybody in Ireland is only done to save lives. That's a fundamental principle of our constitution and our common law, and it's not going to be abrogated in any way," McDowell said.

Opposition leaders critical of the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq called for Ireland's national police force, the Garda Siochana, to have sole responsibility for Bush's security.

"This is a sovereign nation, yet Minister McDowell appears to be prepared to hand over responsibility for law enforcement and for the use of firearms to the security personnel of another country," complained Joe Costello, justice spokesman for the opposition Labour Party.

What revolution are You?
Made by altern_active

That is certainly a relief. Norm Geras is the French Revolution (shame, shame).

Norman Geras profiles Peter Briffa, who writes one of my favorite blogs, The Public Interest. It is sort of relentless, unsentimental Toryism. What is there not to like?

George Carey, the former archbishop of Canterbury, has gotten more than a few people upset with his critical comments about Islam.

In his comments, delivered as part of a lecture in Rome, Dr Carey said: 'Throughout the Middle East and North Africa, we find authoritarian regimes with deeply entrenched leadership, some of which rose to power at the point of gun and are retained in power by massive investment in security forces.

'Although we owe much to Islam...it is sad to relate that no great invention has come for many hundred years from Muslim countries. This is a puzzle because Muslim peoples are not bereft of brilliant minds. They have much to contribute to the human family and we look forward to the close co-operation that might make this possible.

'Sadly, apart from a few courageous examples, very few Muslim leaders condemn clearly and unconditionally the evil of suicide bombers who kill innocent people.'

'I am saddened' by Dr Carey's comments said Iqbal Sacranie, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain. 'He should be well aware that mainstream Muslim organisations have consistently condemned terrorist attacks, but their statements are often ignored by the media. Dr Carey is trampling on a very sensitive area by referring to the Koran and the traditions of the Prophet.'

They did not merely condemn Israel's killing of Sheikh Yassin, the Hamas "spiritual leader", they wrote this:

The Muslim Council of Britain condemns in the strongest terms Israel's criminal assassination of Shaykh Ahmad Isma'il Yasin, the renowned Islamic scholar and founder of the leading Palestinian Resistance Movement - Hamas.

Or as a smaller point, when Moshin Khan, a Moslem in the British Royal Air Force reserve, went AWOL claiming that being a Moslem prevented him from fighting except in self-defense, the Council was there to defend him.

The Council ritually denounces terrorism:

The Muslim Council of Britain issued a press release condemning the attacks of Sept 11th within 3 hours of them occurring and within 48 hours we had organised a well-attended press conference where all the main Muslim leaders from around the UK signed a statement saying that the attacks were morally indefensible and demanded that the perpetrators be brought to justice.

Maybe I'm wrong here. Maybe the Council is not a front for radical Islam. Maybe they are just Kerry supporters.

Remember Janet Reno taking, as she put it, full responsibility for the Waco disaster, except that she didn't resign or fire anyone? Some responsibility.

So this crops in Nottinghamshire:

The report published yesterday by the chief inspector of probation, Rod Morgan, on the death of PC Gerald Walker in Nottingham in January last year includes scathing criticism of probation officers, Home Office ministers, and the management of the Nottinghamshire and national probation services.

David Parfitt, 26, had been released early from Ranby prison under licence in a pilot scheme. The condition was that he should pass two drug tests each week.

Professor Morgan found that Parfitt regularly breached his licence conditions. He missed seven appointments - on one occasion saying he "was feeling unwell as he had been smoking heroin heavily", and failed 10 out of 19 drug tests.

The probation officer should have instigated the revocation of his licence, his arrest, and his recall to prison in September 2002, but he continued to show "inappropriate leniency" for a further three months.

Parfitt was being tracked by police officers after his licence was officially revoked in Dec-ember 2002. He was on the run when Walker tried to stop him in a stolen taxi.

Parfitt sped off and the dog handler was dragged by the speeding car. Walker died two days later from head injuries. Parfitt was captured the next day. He was jailed for 13 years in December 2003 for manslaughter.

David Hancock, Nottinghamshire's chief probation officer, said that he took full responsibility for the failures of his staff. and that he had apologised to Mrs Walker. But no disciplinary action has been taken against staff.

Mr Hancock said the probation officer was very experienced but that she had failed to absorb the "finer details" of the guidelines on the drug-testing programme.

Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution is also, among many other things, research director at the very libertarian Independent Institute. Yet today, he implicitly offers a defense of the State, which is, like so many defenses of the State, wrong. Here is what he writes:

From an economic point of view, fines are the best punishment because they benefit the punisher as they punish the violator and imprisonment is the worst punishment since it punishes the punisher as well as the violator.

At the simplest level, a policeman demanding a bribe is an inefficient fine. Bruce Benson, David Rasmussen, and David Sollars found evidence that state and local involvement in the drug wars was heavily driven by the revenues from it.

An advantage of imprisonment is that the government gains nothing (ignoring the case of political prisoners), so it has less incentive to cheat.

I should mention that this idea is hardly original with me. For example, David Friedman has a lucid discussion of the virtues of inefficient punishment.

UPDATE: Alex Tabarrok has generously updated his post.

Southern Appeal has a good picture of Sheikh Yassin's successor.

Betty Gooch is a frail 75 year old woman. She has been charged with theft by deception and passing bad checks.

Over the past four years, Betty A. Gooch has walked into several Chicago-area dealerships with a cane and an oxygen cart, then paid for cars with bad checks, police said.

"She'll say she's sick and going to be hospitalized, or that her stockbroker is sending the money, or promises they'll have the money next Friday," said Tony Kotlarz, an investigator for the McHenry County state's attorney's office.

In the latest case, Gooch wrote a check for $36,534 for a new Toyota Sienna and another check for $20,041 for a new Toyota Matrix during a November visit to one dealership, said Cook County state's attorney's spokeswoman Marcy Jensen.

Gooch is to be arraigned April 8 on charges of theft by deception and passing bad checks. She is out on bail and declined to comment Tuesday.

It came as no surprise to me to discover that the Guardian's lead editorial on the killing of Sheikh Yassin thought it was a bad idea. And it would not be the Guardian without the usual stuff.

But with the death of Shanab and, to a lesser extent, Yassin, Hamas lost the two leaders associated with the emerging de facto Islamist acquiescence of a two-state solution: the acceptance of 22% of historical Palestine as an interim solution and the deferment of the armed struggle against Israel to "future generations". The timing of Yassin's assassination is also unclear. He lived openly in Gaza and could have been killed any time in the last five years. What does Israel gain from killing him now? Does it truly believe that beheading Hamas will make a pullout from Gaza easier? Or is Mr Sharon playing to a domestic audience, acting as the bulldog of Israel, when in fact he is about to make (in Israeli terms only) a large territorial concession?

But this qualification they put in left me nearly speechless.

Ahmed Qureia, the Palestinian prime minister, claimed Yassin was a "moderating" influence within Hamas and that his murder opened the door wide to chaos. If Yassin was being a "moderating" influence when he encouraged young Palestinian women to follow the example of a 22-year-old Palestinian mother of two who blew herself up at a checkpoint in Gaza killing four Israelis, then it would be good to know what course an immoderate Hamas leader would advocate.

UPDATE: Scott Burgess at the Daily Ablution offers up a neat obituary quiz: who wrote the more fawning obituary of Sheikh Yassin? And Michele at A Small Victorynails Fisk for being even more cretinous than usual in fawning remarks on the dead sheikh.

Me, I like the obituary he got from Judith Weiss at Kesher Talk:Rest in pieces.

A couple of friends of mine, an Israeli and her German boyfriend, just returned over the weekend from a trip to Israel. While we were talking about the trip, the boyfriend mentioned this bus trip they took with a really crazy driver who kept weaving in and out of traffic. One of the few bits of Hebrew he had learned was how to say "slow down", and he kept wanting to shout it at the driver. I'm not surprised. Every Israeli I know speaks quite openly about the bad driving in Israel.

What made me think of this was the tut-tutting about the killing of Sheikh Yassin, Hamas's spiritual director. (Some bloggers have written as if there is some irony in calling Yassin a "spiritual director". I see none. Clearly, Yassin has directed quite a lot of people to the spirit world.) The Guardian reports:

The killing was widely condemned elsewhere. Britain and the UN secretary general Kofi Annan called it unlawful, the EU said it would end the only prospect for peace in the region and Egypt cancelled a parliamentary visit to Israel to mark the 25th anniversary of the peace treaty between the two countries.

Okay, enough sarcasm. I'm weary of it. Hamas wants to kill every Israeli it can. Hamas attacks are not revenge. The attacks are the very reason for the existence of Hamas. If the Israelis did not kill Yassin, Hamas would still try to kill every Israeli it can.

Norman Geras and Henry Farrell offers some evidence of a decline in anti-Semitism in Europe, citing a Pew Research Poll. The results of the poll are here, in pdf format, and the question on Jews is on page 4. This is the relevant passage.

	Very favorable	Somewhat favorable	Somewhat unfavorable	Very unfavorable	Don’t know or refused
United States	36	41	6	2	15=100
Mid-July,2003	20	52	6	3	19=100
June,2003	25	54	6	2	13=100
March,2002	18	56	7	2	17=100
Mid-Nov.,2001	24	51	5	2	18=100
March,2001	16	56	8	2	18=100
Sept.,2000	27	50	5	3	15=100
June,1997	26	56	7	2	9=100
Great Britain	23	53	6	3	15=100
France	28	53	8	3	8=100
1991	14	58	11	3	14=100
Germany	10	53	16	4	17=100
1991	5	47	18	6	24=100
Russia	18	47	17	8	10=100
1992	11	54	15	7	13=100
1991	9	49	18	8	16=100
Turkey	6	21	17	32	23=99
Pakistan	1	2	7	73	17=100
Morocco	1	5	11	81	2=100

It is good to see declines in the fraction of Europeans in the unfavorable columns. But here is what bothers me: saying you are anti-Semitic seems less fashionable than actually being anti-Semitic. Think of the Dave Brown cartoon in the Independent that was openly anti-Semitic, yet the cartoonist and the Independent defended it as anything but. I note even more worrying is that the way that the phrase "not anti-Semitic, just anti-Israel" has become a code phrase for anti-Semitism. Not merely that anti-Semites use it, but that anything is allowed through under that phrase. Recall the wild lie about 4000 Jews not showing up for work at the World Trade Center on 9/11? This is how it got transformed in the nasty little poem by Amiri Baraka, "Who Blew Up America" with this charming bit?

Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed
Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers
To stay home that day

Kerry's sleazy comment, probably a lie, that foreign leaders told him they wanted him elected, is beginning to blow up in his face. The LA Times reports:

Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry received the backing of an unwelcome source Thursday when former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said that he supported him.

Mahathir, who had been in power 22 years, retired in October following condemnation of remarks he made that "Jews rule the world by proxy."

Kerry's foreign policy advisor, Rand Beers, released a statement saying that the Massachusetts senator rejected any association with Mahathir, "an avowed anti-Semite whose views are totally deplorable."

Still, Mahathir's backing kept attention focused on a controversial statement Kerry made last week. Speaking to donors at a fundraiser in Florida, Kerry said unnamed "leaders" had told him they wanted him to defeat President Bush. Kerry later said he was talking about "people around the world" at "different levels."

UPDATE: Betsy's Page picked up this story last night, and she adds this nice shot.

The Kerry people, realizing that the endorsement of a Socialist and anti-Semite would not be helpful in a United States election have asked foreign leaders to please stop endorsing him.

Of course, he still retains the right to brag about their secret support for him. He just doesn't want them to go public and let the American people know exactly which leaders prefer him so much. Perhaps the list of those leaders might be as unimpressive as Zapatero and Mahatir.

Daniel Pipes reports on an attempt by an ACLU employee to disrupt a speech he was giving. The ACLU employee insists he was there in a private capacity, but the ACLU refuses to either confirm or deny it. Do you smell cover-up?

Mark Kleiman thinks that John Kerry needs to push harder just how tough a war president he would be.

I'm hoping the lines "big on bluster and short on action" and "I do not fault George Bush for doing too much in the war on terror, I believe he's done too little" get to be part of the Kerry stump speech, and that one of the early Kerry ads will go hard at Bush on this issue.

"I do not fault George Bush for doing too much in the war on terror," droned Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry at a campaign event in Washington this week.

Zzzzzz.

"I believe he's done too little."

What was that? My ears perked up slightly. Would this "proven leader" who claims he will "stand up to the special interests" talk about the need for racial, ethnic, nationality and religious profiling? Would he attack the Bush White House for appeasing the ethnic grievance industry and keeping silly Norm Mineta in his Cabinet during these deadly serious times?

Or would he propose a temporary visa moratorium on terror-friendly countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Morocco? Or how about the open-borders lobby? Would Kerry have anything to say about the continuing security threat that unchecked illegal immigration poses to the "hardworking families" he claims to represent?

Naaah.

Kerry, you see, was speaking before the International Association of Fire Fighters, whose president, Harold Schaitberger, is national co-chair of the Kerry for President Committee. Their complaint is not that Bush has done too little to fight terrorism, but that he has showered too little government funding on certain Democratic constituencies. Hence, the First Responders Fake-out.

Kerry's big proposal to fight the global war on terrorism (borrowed from Bill and Hillary Clinton) is to add 100,000 "first responders" to the ranks of firefighters and emergency medical personnel in cities and towns across the United States. In other words: Wait until the terrorists strike us again and then do a really, really good job of cleaning up the mess afterward.

Of course, our brave firefighters, cops and emergency personnel need better training and equipment to respond in the event of another attack. But responders, no matter how courageous, prevent nothing. Dialing 911 is not the solution to stopping another 9/11.

"When it comes to protecting America from terrorism," Kerry complains, "this administration is big on bluster and short on action." And what does Kerry have to offer? More bluster about the old Clintonian "law enforcement" approach to prosecuting al Qaeda. More jury trials for terrorists.

Meanwhile, Terence Jeffrey offers up evidence that Kerry is not merely a windbag, but an anti-wind windbag.

Foreign Affairs carried a piece last year by Jonathan Stevenson on the differences between American and European security measures, and the ways in which they conflict with each other. It makes for timely reading. His primary point:

European leaders seem not fully to appreciate an insidious dynamic: that poor European homeland security is now making the United States more vulnerable, and strong U.S. homeland security is making Europe more vulnerable. Until policymakers in Europe start to focus on this reality and push to improve cooperation, countries on both sides of the Atlantic will remain at greater risk.

One of the crucial differences between the American and the European experiences with terrorism -- and something that helps explain why their respective governments have taken different approaches to fighting it -- has to do with the level and kind of violence involved. Most of the ethnic and nationalist terrorists who have plagued Europe over the last three decades have used their violence with restraint. This strategy allowed these groups -- organizations such as the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the Basque separatists of the Euskadi ta Askatasuna (ETA) -- to preserve a place at the negotiating table even while they set off the occasional bomb. And it meant that many of these groups could be tamed through political means. Indeed, many of Europe's terrorists were open to negotiation, direct conflict resolution, and other forms of accommodation. These options were epitomized by Northern Ireland's Good Friday Agreement of 1998 and by Paris' application of the "sanctuary doctrine" -- under which terrorist-support work in France was tolerated by the government so long as operations were not actually directed at French interests themselves.
.      .      .
Al Qaeda, on the other hand, represents a transnational threat -- one very different in kind from that posed by the IRA or even newer groups such as Hamas. Al Qaeda has potentially thousands of members and no interest in bargaining with the United States or its allies. Instead, it seeks to cripple them, by inflicting mass casualties if possible, potentially with weapons of mass destruction (WMD). It is impossible to imagine Osama bin Laden's followers apologizing for inadvertently killing Americans -- as Hamas did, after a suicide attack on Jerusalem's Hebrew University in August 2002.

Europe's more restrained approach to homeland security will have negative implications for the United States, however. September 11 demonstrated that America's security is organically linked to Europe's vulnerability to infiltration by terrorists. Europe, after all, was the key recruitment, planning, and logistics base for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and Europe may continue to serve as a source for threats against the United States. Despite Washington's intention to create an enhanced security system whereby standing, permanent capabilities minimize terrorist threats to U.S. territory, citizens, and assets, the United States has so far merely set the agenda for doing so. Given the unwillingness of Americans to trade liberty for security and the resurgence of partisanship in Congress, implementation of that agenda will remain slow, fitful, and fraught. So long as the United States remains vulnerable, Europe may remain most useful to al Qaeda as a recruiting and staging ground -- not as a target.

.      .      .

But one overarching factor suggests that Europe will not opt out of a coordinated counterterrorism policy: Europe's own vulnerability. The United States is spending almost $40 billion on homeland security in the current fiscal year. The country's capabilities should improve once the new Department of Homeland Security gets up and running and the law-enforcement establishment completes its reorientation toward counterterrorism. These considerable efforts will probably make the American homeland less vulnerable to terrorist attack. In that event, however -- as has been hinted by bin Laden's tape and al Qaeda's growing affection for soft targets over a widening geographical expanse -- terrorists may suddenly find European countries more appealing targets.

Indeed, al Qaeda's new decentralized post-Afghanistan structure and the group's heightened reliance on local talent now makes opportunistic, lower-level "freelance" attacks in Europe a greater threat. For example, in late 2000, a group of Algerians with probable al Qaeda connections planned to blow up a Strasbourg market. Such attacks are operationally similar to the old-style terrorism of the IRA or Hamas. But they will occur in a substantially more dangerous political and military context, due to the absence of bargaining as a tool of moderation and al Qaeda's intention to escalate the violence to the level of mass destruction. Even if al Qaeda focuses only on American installations in Europe, should its operatives use WMD, the consequences will be grave for the population at large.

Usually Peter Briffa beats me to beating up on George Monbiot, a.k.a. Moonbat, the Guardian's perpetually goofy columnist. But not today. Maybe he is just being charitable. The Moonbat is off again on his hysteria about supermarkets. If you read him, you know the drill: big, really big monopolies that attract swarms of customers by offering them little choice at high prices, or something like that. But today, the Moonbat is extra special.

Yesterday I spoke to a fruit grower in Gloucestershire, who told me that to stay in the game he must sometimes sell Coxes for as little as 57p a kilo, less than his cost of production.

Maybe the Guardian keeps the Moonbat around for comic effect.

Suzanne Goldenberg takes to the pages of the Guardian to declare that George Bush is the enemy of Women.

George and Laura Bush invited a number of their closest Afghan and Iraqi women friends to a reception at the White House the other day. In his remarks, Mr Bush was nostalgic about his first meeting with the guest of honour: Raja Habib Khuzai, one of three women on the US-appointed Iraqi governing council. Apparently she turned up for her audience at the Oval Office weeping tears of joy, declaring: "My liberator."
It is a fairly safe guess that would not be a typical female reaction to meeting Mr Bush. On the very first day of his presidency, he imposed a ban on US foreign aid to any agency offering abortion advice.

Of 12 issues investigated in this study as possible priorities for a women's movement, only abortion generates sharp differences of opinion. Half of women (49%) say keeping abortion legal should be a top priority of the movement, but 24 percent assign it a lower priority, and 25 percent reject it outright as an issue that should concern a women's movement.
.      .      .
Women's opinions on the issue of abortion itself are sharply divided, and entrenched. Only one-third (34%) of women say abortion should be generally available to those who want it. Forty-five percent hold the opposite view and want access to abortion limited: 31 percent want it limited only to cases of rape, incest and to save the woman's life and 14 percent say abortion should never be permitted. Nineteen percent of women prefer a middle ground, saying abortion should be available, but under new limitations. These might include limitations, for example, on the timing of abortions, or on the steps that must be taken before a woman can have an abortion.

18. Which one of the following four statements comes closest to your own view on abortion:
(READ STATEMENTS 1-4 IN ORDER)
34 A-Abortion should be generally available to those who want it,
19 B-Abortion should be available but under stricter limits than it is now,
31 C-Abortion should be against the law except in cases of rape, incest, and to save the women's life, OR
14 D-Abortion should not be permitted at all?
1 Don't know
1 Refused

She might have a tad more credibility if she did not wax nostalgic for the good old days of sex equality under Saddam and the Taliban.

"Just think about it," Bush said. "More than 50 million men, women and children have been liberated from two of the most brutal tyrannies on earth - 50 million people are free. And for 25 million women and girls, liberation has a special significance."

He said the Taliban regime in Afghanistan was "incredibly barbaric" and that Afghan women are far better off with its departure.

So too were the women of post-war Iraq, according to the Bush doctrine. "Every woman in Iraq is better off because the rape rooms and torture chambers of Saddam Hussein are forever closed. He is a barbaric person," Bush said.

The reality is far from clear. Hania Mufti, the representative in Iraq for Human Rights Watch, agrees with Mr Bush that Saddam Hussein's worst atrocities have ceased. But she also notes that post-war violence and chaos has banished many women indoors, keeping girls out of school and female graduates from venturing out to seek work for fear they will be kidnapped and raped. "What good is freedom if you are afraid to step out in the street?" she asks.

Women also fear for their rights in the future after the Iraqi governing council came close to imposing the sharia code, dismantling Saddam's secular laws on property and marriage.

Nora Owen is a former Irish Justice Minister, and a member of Fine Gael, a party that is struggling for political survival. The Irish Independent (registration required) reports that she wants George Bush's planned visit in June for a US-EU summit cancelled, because it could invite an al-Qaeda attack.

Former Justice Minister Nora Owen has said the planned visit of President Bush to Ireland in June poses an unnecessary risk.

Ms Owen strongly hinted the EU/US summit should not go ahead here following the heightened terrorist threat in the aftermath of the Madrid bombings.

The Fine Gael spokesman on Foreign Affairs, Gay Mitchell, said he believed the summit should go ahead provided the Government is happy it can provide the security.

The Irish Examiner's (registration required) editorial response?

Former Justice Minister Nora Owen called yesterday for a rethink on George W Bush's planned visit here next June, because of the danger that al-Qaida might target this country.

As Justice Minister she did not advocate surrendering to the Real IRA in the wake of the Omagh bombing, so why does she advocate pandering to al-Qaida now?

.    .    .

Suggesting that Mr Bush should call off his visit would not only amount to surrendering to terrorist blackmail; it would also set a dreadful precedent.

.    .    .

The bombings in Bali, Istanbul, Tangiers, Madrid and elsewhere were indiscriminate attacks on innocent people around the globe. In effect, everybody is being held hostage to the crazed whims of these militant fanatics.

Appeasing terrorists and bullies does not work. It merely feeds their rapacious appetites.

George Bush will be very welcome in Ireland in June, or any other time. The idea that he should cancel the US-European Union meeting due to take place here on June 25-26 is absurd for many reasons, of which only two need be mentioned.

Ireland will always greet with warmth and courtesy any President of the United States. We may have our differences, but we have been in that country's debt for a long time.

Secondly, the June event is not a bilateral US-Irish meeting but one between the US President and the EU presidency, held by Ireland. The obvious place to stage it is Ireland. The atrocity in Madrid has not changed that.

The Labour leader, Pat Rabbitte, has summed up the argument by saying that neither state-to-state business nor US-EU business should be disrupted by the threat of terrorism. He might have added that cancelling a meeting in an atmosphere of heightened fear would itself constitute a surrender. A pity that some other politicians have not displayed similar good sense.

I just learned that the students in the Hispanic Society at my university have set up a book of condolences to be sent to the Spanish Embassy in Dublin. Good for them.

I always thought the Masons were a vaguely Protestant organization, although I confess to having known almost nothing about them, except that they used to throw a really good annual parade in Chicago. But now I learn that they are an organization of Israeli Jews. How do I know? Well, the Guardian reports:

Two people were killed and seven injured last night when two suicide bombers attacked a restaurant in Istanbul during a meeting of a masonic lodge.

One of the bombers was killed and the other injured in the attack, the first in the city since a spate of bombings killed more than 60 people in November.

The injured attacker, who lost an arm and appeared to suffer severe abdominal injuries, could be seen angrily chanting slogans as he was taken to hospital.

.    .    .

CNN-Turk television said a man chanting "Allah, Allah" entered the building and detonated an explosive.

Joel Mowbray reports that tomorrow is being called the "National Day of Appreciation for Abortion Providers" by an outfit called Refuse and Resist, which encourages people to view abortionists as heroes. Not exactly fringe, either. Their co-sponsors include

• Abortion Access Project
  
• Abortion Clinics Online
  
• ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project
  
• American Medical Women's Association
  
• Association of Reproductive Health Professionals
  
• Boston Women's Health Book Collective
  
• Catholics for a Free Choice
  
• Center for Reproductive Rights
  
• Choice USA
  
• Feminist Majority Foundation
  
• Medical Students for Choice
  
• Ms. magazine
  
• NARAL Pro-Choice America
  
• National Council of Jewish Women
  
• National Network of Abortion Funds
  
• National Organization for Women
  
• Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health
  
• Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice
  
• Third Wave
  
• National Abortion Federation
  
• National Coalition of Abortion Providers
  
• Planned Parenthood Federation of America

Some will complain that I’m making abortionists look worse by highlighting partial-birth abortion, a particularly gruesome procedure.

But that’s the thing about abortion. It’s always gruesome. It’s always violent. The end result is always that an unborn child dies at the hand of the abortionist.

Over the years, though, most Americans never really had to bother much with the details of abortion. All that changed, however, with the long-running debate over partial-birth abortion.

When the partial-birth abortion issue came to prominence in 1995, support for abortion was at its highest point in nearly two decades. Gallup found that 56% of Americans identified themselves as “pro-choice,” compared to only 33% calling themselves “pro-life.”

The hard-core abortion supporters preferred the clinical-sounding medical term “dilation and extraction.” The public didn’t.

Once Americans were forced to consider the ugly reality of a procedure where full-term babies are partially delivered breech (meaning feet first) so that the brain could be suctioned out, support for abortion—not just partial-birth—plummeted.

Since 2001, roughly the same number of people polled by Gallup identified themselves as “pro-choice” as “pro-life,” a seismic shift in public opinion in just six years.

Most Americans now find abortion morally wrong when done in any type of procedure, and only one-third think that ending the life of the unborn child is morally acceptable, according to a Gallup poll released last summer.

Perhaps the most logical explanation is that more and more people recognize the core nature of abortion. Even the most common procedures, such as “suction curettage” (typically performed in the first trimester) or “dilation and evacuation” (usually done in the second and third trimesters), are too horrifying to fathom.

As described by pregnantpause.org, “suction curettage” is where an abortionist inserts into a woman's dilated cervix a tube with a sharp edge on it that "is connected to a suction device, similar to a home vacuum cleaner but much more powerful. Between the sharp edge and the force of the suction, the developing baby is torn apart and the pieces sucked out through the tube.”

Even more gruesome is “dilation and evacuation.” From pregnantpause.org: “A seaweed-based substance called ‘laminaria’ is inserted into the cervix to dilate it, usually overnight. The next day forceps with sharp metal teeth are inserted and used to twist and tear off the unborn baby's limbs and remove them piece-by-piece. The head is usually too large to be removed whole and must be crushed.”

It’s not difficult to see why the more the details of abortion creep into the public debate, the more pro-life Americans become. It’s only natural. Abortion’s “ok”—as long as it is just a “choice.”

When people are forced to think about the details inherent in an abortion, however, fewer and fewer people support “choice” when they realize what that “choice” actually entails—and fewer still will celebrate the abortionist “holiday.”

Mulling on quizzes, here is a quiz I would like to see, and would write it myself if I knew how. The quiz would be titled, "If they made a movie of your life, which actor would play you?" I envision an end result where, if you are really cool, or at least willing to lie, you end up with Sean Connery or Chow Yun-Fat, or Kim Cattrall or Kirsten Dunst. If you are an amiable funny guy, maybe John Goodman (and yes, I know, Goodman can do a lot more than that). Terry McAuliffe could be played by James Spader, the premier portrayer of low-life greaseballs.

For me, I figure John C. Reilly.

Bryan Caplan of George Mason University has an online quiz to test how libertarian you are. I scored a 72.

51-90 points: You are a medium-core libertarian, probably self-consciously so. Your friends probably encourage you to quit talking about your views so much.

These quizzes are fun, and Caplan's is better than average. (My score is probably reasonably accurate.) The Yes-No format, however, can be misleading.

For example, question 45 is "Should the Supreme Court strike down economic regulation as unconstitutional?" However much I may oppose much economic regulation, it strikes me as more of a question about the role of the courts. Whether a too powerful legislature or a too powerful court is a greater threat to liberty is a prudential question, not a question about how libertarian I am.

Or take question 58: "Should the courts be privatized?" I have little difficulty with privatizing civil courts, and in fact, much of their work is already privatized by arbitration. I am less confident about criminal courts. So how do I answer this all or nothing choice?

UPDATE: It turns out my score of 72 is almost identical to Ramesh Ponnuru's (of NRO) 73. Maybe there is something to this test.

CalPundit has described Bill Clinton as an extremist. Okay, so he didn't actually those words. But this is what he did say.

Using methodology developed by Keith Poole of the University of Houston, he compares Kerry to past Democratic presidents and gets the following rank order:

1. John F. Kennedy (most liberal)
   
   

2. Bill Clinton
   
   

3. Jimmy Carter
   
   

4. John Kerry
   
   

5. Lyndon Johnson (most conservative)
   
   

So Kerry is well toward the middle compared to past Democratic presidents. How about George Bush?

1. Ronald Reagan (most conservative)
   
   

2. George W. Bush
   
   

3. George Bush Sr.
   
   

4. Richard Nixon
   
   

5. Dwight Eisenhower
   
   

6. Gerald Ford (most liberal)
   
   

Bush is the second most extreme Republican president since World War II.

Or does Kevin mean second most extreme difference from him? Just asking.

Henry McDonald takes to the pages of the Guardian to eviscerate the Irish anti-war left. I am hard pressed to think of a more deserving target.

If the IRA, INLA, UDA or UVF had carried out operations like the Karbala/Baghdad massacres during the Troubles the Province would have been plunged into total chaos. Moreover, in the case of the IRA and INLA, such deliberate wide-scale atrocities would have prompted their 'intellectual allies' (and I use the first term very loosely) to abandon the Provos and the Erps forever.

The cheerleaders from the Irish and British ultra-left who for so long lent republican violence some spurious radical edge would have left the field instantly once their 'heroes' started fomenting total sectarian conflict. The fact that by and large the paramilitaries avoided an inevitable all-out 'war' via a series of Karbala-style atrocities shows that there were limits, both moral and political, even to the cold-hearted calculations of republicans and loyalists.

Massacres such as Enniskillen, no matter how morally repulsive and politically counter-productive, were not only rare but also not generally the policy of the paramilitary leaderships. Incredibly, however, large sections of the Irish left seem to have no problem aligning themselves with the people who are doing exactly that in Iraq today.

Since Saddam Hussein was overthrown last year and the attacks both on the Allies and - more importantly - the Iraqi people began, the far left have awarded the alliance of the ex-Baathists and the Islamists the morally loaded nomenclature 'resistance'.

So let's be clear about this: those people who are dedicated either to restoring the fascist dictatorship of the Baath or the misogynistic medieval tyranny of a mad Islamic Caliphate are now the 'resistance', a word that resonates with the heroic opposition to Hitler and the Nazis in occupied Europe during World War Two.

.    .    .

Why does the left in Ireland have no problem siding objectively with those determined to strangle democracy at birth in Iraq? And why in turn did they not support those Iraqis including the party, which holds membership of the Socialist International, attempting to build up their country after the nightmare years of Saddam's rule?

The answers to these questions are deeply depressing: the Irish left, blinded by unthinking anti-Americanism, took the easy option.

Rather than listen to the demands of the Iraqi opposition desperate to free their country from Saddam's oppression, they retreated into the protest comfort zone, wrapping themselves up in the blankets of pacifism and worse still, self-righteous isolationism.

Yet what is even more astonishing is that the mainstream, rational left has surrendered the agenda to the Trots and Stalinists. Because not a single voice in the Irish Labour Party spoke out in favour of their comrades in the Iraqi Socialist Party who supported the War as the last resort to free their country from Saddam's despotism.

There were no Irish equivalents of the courageous Welsh Labour MP Ann Clywd who, unlike most of her counterparts in Britain and Ireland, had seen at first hand what the Baath dictatorship inflicted on the Kurds.

Uh, oh. Disney has decided to try to rescue itself by wreaking havoc on the Narnia books.

Casting is under way and a five-month shoot is planned for this summer.

The Narnia stories have a strong Christian allegory, with Aslan equating to Jesus, which could be another source of strength at the box office. The surprising success of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, currently raking in millions, has shown that religion can attract movie-goers.

One disadvantage is that the Narnia books are aimed at younger readers than The Lord of the Rings, but executives are already pumping up some of the adult themes. 'It is a film ... with four kids who leave a world consumed by war that they have no control over only to enter a world where a war is raging in which their actions are crucial to the outcome,' said Cary Granat, chief executive of Walden Media, Disney's partner in the project.

Yesterday, CalPundit raised again what he calls Memogate, in which he takes shots at "conservative apologists". Josh Marshall likewise is worked up over the "pilfered memos."

Reading the memos was certainly ungentlemanly (not that the Senate is a gentlemanly place), but I will leave it to the lawyers to decide what was illegal. My curiosity is about the silence on the content of those memos, which Melanie Kirkpatrick reminds us of today.

Nov. 6, 2001/To: Senator Dick Durbin
"You are scheduled to meet with leaders of several civil rights organizations to discuss their serious concerns with the judicial nomination process. The leaders will likely include: Ralph Neas (People For the American Way), Nan Aron (Alliance for Justice), Wade Henderson (Leadership Conference on Civil Rights), Leslie Proll (NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund, Nancy Zirkin (American Association of University Women), Marcia Greenberger (National Women's Law Center), and Judy Lichtman (National Partnership). . . .

". . . The primary focus will be on identifying the most controversial and/or vulnerable judicial nominees. The groups would like to postpone action on these nominees until next year, when (presumably) the public will be more tolerant of partisan dissent."

Nov. 7, 2001/To: Senator Durbin
"The groups singled out three--Jeffrey Sutton (6th Circuit); Priscilla Owen (5th Circuit); and Caroline [sic] Kuhl (9th Circuit)--as a potential nominee for a contentious hearing early next year, with a [sic] eye toward voting him or her down in Committee. They also identified Miguel Estrada (D.C. Circuit) as especially dangerous, because he has a minimal paper trail, he is Latino, and the White House seems to be grooming him for a Supreme Court appointment. They want to hold Estrada off as long as possible."

They also identified Miguel Estrada (D.C. Circuit) as especially dangerous, because .   .   . he is Latino

The contents of the memos are not really important. If I learned, hypothetically, that the NRA had written a memo to Trent Lott asking him to oppose an appellate court nomination because the nominee was a gun control advocate and because he was black, making him a possible Supreme Court nomination, I would happily defend the memo from any charge that it might in any way be racist. I would never dream of using for purely partisan political advantage.

InstaPundit cites Reason's Ron Bailey favorably in an attack on Leon Kass and his piece in the Washington Post defending the Bioethics Council. Bailey writes:

Kass simply cannot with a straight face make the claim, as he does in Washington Post, that the "personal views" of Schaub and Lawler are "completely unknown" to him.

In addition, one distinguished scientist on the council -- Elizabeth Blackburn, an expert in cell biology -- has been replaced by another distinguished scientist-physician -- Ben Carson, chair of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Medical Center. Although her important work kept her from attending many council meetings, Dr. Blackburn contributed a great deal of expertise and insight, and charges that her replacement is in any way connected to opinions she expressed are simply false -- as any review of the council's meetings or work, or of the views of other remaining members, would reveal. Most fundamentally, this change reflects the changing focus of the council's work, as we move away from issues of reproduction and genetics to focus on issues of neuroscience, brain and behavior.

Next, Kass writes about Peter Lawler and Diana Schaub, two new members, and says:

Both are known among their colleagues for their openness to discourse and their devotion to public deliberation and democratic decision-making. Their personal views on the matters to come before the council in the coming term are completely unknown, but I am confident that they will come to them only as a result of genuine reflection and a full consideration of all the scientific and other evidence.

Kass then properly cites the genuine accomplishments of the three new, more conservative appointees; but then, disingenuously, he writes "Their personal views on the matters to come before the council are completely unknown..." Say what? While Kass may affect ignorance of their views on embryonic stem cells, cloning and so forth . . .

Bailey does not mention the qualification in that context, using it only here.

In the end Kass may have left himself a bit of wiggle room by saying that the Council is moving "away from issues of reproduction and genetics to focus on issues of neuroscience, brain and behavior."

Having misquoted Kass, Bailey then argues that Schaub and Lawler's views are well known. But on Schaub, he quotes her on issues of reproduction and cloning, which is clearly not what Kass was talking about. The closest Bailey comes to discussing Schaub's views on neuroscience issues is here:

One can reject performance-enhancing drugs and devices in the name of true human excellence. One can decline feel-good pills in the name of true human happiness. One can refuse to select and design or de-select and re-design one's children in the name of true human love. To make the case against ageless bodies, however—to say no thanks to the prolongation of one's life—one has to make an argument for human mortality.

Bailey is finally on some solid ground with respect to Lawler, who he manages to quote both correctly and in context, when he notes that Lawler wrote:

So this report is strongest when it is clearest that our pharmacological attempts at mood control will be yet another failed escapist solution to the problem of our obsessive individualism.

On this point, Kass should have a response, and I am curious what it would be. Maybe Kass got careless and forgot. But Bailey's critique could have been made without the misquotations and the red herrings. And I am not prepared to grant Bailey the benefit of the doubt while refusing it to Kass.

I like reading Clarence Page. Even when I think he is wrong, he is still interesting. Today, in the Chicago Tribune (registration required), he offers a perspective on The Passion based on comparing Jewish-Christian relations to black-white relations.

All of the fuss whirling and swirling around the Mel Gibson-written, directed and produced "The Passion of the Christ" reminds me of something a Chicago rabbi and Holocaust survivor once told me.

He grew up before World War II in a little central European village. Every year after Easter mass he could reliably depend on some of the Christian children to roam the street, looking for Jewish children to beat up, taunting "You killed Christ."

"I did not know I was white until I came to America," he said with an ironic glint in his eye.

As a black Christian American, Easter was a very different day in my childhood. I looked forward to it as a time of joy, new "Sunday clothes," lilies, bunny rabbits and hunts for candy and decorated egg hunts. The rabbi helped me to understand why some people may wince at the very mention of the holiday.

The moral of that little story is that you don't really get to know people until you have at least peeked at the world through the prism of their experiences. Misunderstanding across lines of race, religion and ethnicity become worse partly because everyone's experiences are so different.

.    .    .

Gibson comes from a Catholic tradition so conservative that it rejects the 1965 Vatican reforms. But he denies the film is anti-Semitic. I am sure he did not intend it to be. Personally, I find it hard to believe that the actor who struck up such a delightful on-screen rapport with Danny Glover in the "Lethal Weapon" series could be a hater, even if Gibson's father has revealed himself to be a misguided Holocaust denier.

But it is not enough for people of good conscience to dismiss this controversy with a flip "I don't think it's anti-Semitic," as if how they think is all that matters. What the other guy thinks matters too.

For example, many blacks continue to be annoyed that the Eurocentric notion of a Nordic-looking, blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesus persists. When I visited the Vatican last summer with my wife and son, we were delighted to find in the gift shops a wide array of offerings of the Holy Family depicted in a variety of the world's races. It may not mean a lot to you to have a Jesus who looks like you, unless you have seldom seen one before.

.    .    .

So having experienced first-hand the way blacks and whites often occupy two different worlds in America, I am not surprised that many Christians and Jews who watched Gibson's "Passion" came out sounding as if they have seen two entirely different movies.

.    .    .

I hope the divisions that it has reopened ultimately will be healed by the cross-cultural conversations it has sparked in the media and elsewhere. Some people dismiss the feelings of those who are offended in any way by the film. But as a pluralistic society it is our ability to share experiences that has kept this country from sinking into the relentless interethnic bloodbaths that Europe and some other continents have known.

So I hope Gibson's "Passion" can help us heal the wounds it has reopened. Such dialogue is good. I passionately believe that.

The Guardian, uncharacteristically, offers a sop to the poor rather than to its usual social climbing, middle class readers.

Many green activists oppose GM crops on principle. It is difficult to understand what the principle is, since they do not campaign against the production of drugs by genetic modification. Yet the same technique is used to transfer a gene from one species to another to make human insulin for people with diabetes, for instance, as to modify a GM crop.
By what principle is it right to make better drugs to protect us from disease, but not to modify plants to make them resistant to insect pests? Why is there such a violent reaction against the genetic modification of plants?

The strongest argument in favour of developing GM crops is the contribution they can make to reducing world poverty, hunger and disease. As the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, an independent body of experts and lay representatives, declared in 1999: "The moral imperative for making GM crops readily and economically available to developing countries who want them is compelling." The council's recent update of its report confirmed this view. No one argues that all problems can be solved by the wave of a magic GM wand. The question is: can GM crops help? On the evidence we have, it seems they can.
.    .    .
Blind opposition to GM crops is the triumph of dogma over reason.

Thomas Sowell points out the obvious. Until Ralph Nader ran against Gore in 2000, he was the left's little darling.

Even those who disagree with some of Nader's conclusions or methods often make obeisance to his "idealism" as a "consumer advocate" and credit his work with improving automobile safety. But again, evidence is seldom asked for or given.

For decades before Ralph Nader came on the scene, automobile fatality rates were declining, despite more cars on the streets and highways, traveling at faster speeds. The automobile fatality rate per miles driven was less than one-third as high when "Unsafe at Any Speed" was published as it was back in the 1920s.

But facts never carry as much weight as a dramatic vision of "corporate greed" sacrificing helpless consumers until they are rescued by "consumer advocates" and federal regulations. For the left, Nader was playing their song and they danced to it.

Although the term "consumer advocate" has acquired a certain halo in the media, there are no qualifications whatever required to be called a consumer advocate. Moreover, Nader was never a consumer advocate in any real sense. He was a Nader advocate then and he is a Nader advocate now, when he runs for office oblivious to his friends and supporters.

In one of his earliest writings, Nader said, "the consumer must be protected at times from his own indiscretion and vanity." In other words, he wanted the Ralph Naders of the world to be able to dictate to consumers and producers alike. It's all about him. So is running for president.

After the recent bit of poison in the Irish Catholic, it was a bit of a comfort to read this in the Jerusalem Post (registration required). Writing about the marches in front of the International Court of Justice protesting the ICJ attack on Israel's security barrier, they note:

marching with the international Jewish contingent on Monday morning were 2,000 Dutch Christian supporters of Israel, led by the international group, Christians for Israel, which started in Holland 25 years ago.

"Our founding father had the impression in the end of the 1970s that the love for Israel was decreasing between the Christians in Holland; that is the only reason he started Christians for Israel, to increase the feelings for love and the relationship with the state and the people of Israel," said its chairman Rev. Jaap de Vreugd.

Their group raises several million Euros to support immigration and welfare projects in Israel. In the Netherlands they run seminars and classes on Israel as well as a newsletter. De Vreugd said members of his group are missionaries of new sort. Their aim is to swim against the tide of pro-Palestinian public sentiment by helping Christians learn to love Israel.

"Our first aim is to make Christians more understanding about their own relationship with Israel," said de Vreugd.

The Christian community in the Netherlands was sympathetic to Israel until the 1970s and then the pendulum of sympathy shifted toward the Palestinians, he said.

The organization has now branched out to other European countries, including Germany, the United Kingdom, and Belgium. They have also opened branches in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.

The Christian community in Holland is split on this issue, with those on both sides becoming more entrenched in their positions, said de Vreugd, noting there is an anti-Semitic tradition in Europe, but less in Holland, where there is a strong tradition of good relations between Jews and Christians.

In the last 10 to 20 years, people became less pro-Israel and more pro-Palestinian, he said. The growing population of Muslims in Holland, which now numbers upwards of 900,000 also contributes to the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish feelings among the population, he said.

"This is the atmosphere we live in and in this atmosphere we try to raise our voices, as standing with Israel out of our Christian faith, and our belief in the Bible," said de Vreugd.

"We see that anti-Semitism is increasing and growing and we want to raise our voices against all these things," he said.

I do not believe, in their wildest dreams, that the writers at The Onion would ever have come up with this. If they had, they would not have written it, because readers would have dismissed it as over the top. What do I mean? The Times reports:

BIG BROTHER has been evicted from the Middle East after a wave of religious protests. The contestants were given segregated prayer rooms but the first Arab Big Brother series was suspended yesterday after ten days following street protests that the show was undermining Islamic values.

Twelve housemates from around the Arab world had entered a house in Amwaj, on a Bahraini island, to compete for the £60,000 prize. For the first time since the show’s inception there were segregated sleeping areas for men and women and a prayer room with a mat facing Mecca. Security cameras in the bathrooms and games in which men and women were chained together had been dropped.

The Bahraini Information Ministry granted a licence to transmit the nightly show to a potential audience of 150 million. However, the inclusion of a mixed-sex living area in a programme that relies on flirtatious behaviour by young men and women proved too much for traditionalists.

Events took a worrying turn when the Saudi contestant ran around the house shouting: “I am the only one who has been able to get into the women’s quarters. Yes!”

Last Friday, police had to stop more than 1,000 protesters from reaching the islands where Big Brother was being filmed. Islamist MPs attacked the programme, while 100 Bahraini women called for government resignations. They condemned female contestants for mixing with men and not wearing the traditional hijab.

The Guardian's Moonbat is apparently a tool of the rich, or so he tells us.

We also know that our MPs are weak and frightened, that the civil service remains in the grip of the upper middle classes and that the press is run by multimillionaires, whose single purpose is to make this a better world for multimillionaires. Yet somehow we continue to trust that all these twisted instruments will deliver us from evil, that the sound chaps in the system will ultimately do the decent thing.

But of course I'm being mean here. The Moonbat only meant Rupert Murdoch, or something like that. The fun part is that he wants Britain to be more like Haiti.

The formula for making things happen is simple and has never changed. If you wish to alter a policy or depose a prime minister between elections, you must take to the streets. Without the poll tax riots, Mrs Thatcher might have contested the 1992 election. If GM crops hadn't been ripped up, they would be in commercial cultivation in Britain today. In the 1990s, protesters forced the government to cut its road-building budget by 80%. Most of the cities where roads were occupied by Reclaim the Streets have introduced major traffic-calming or traffic-reduction schemes. Gordon Brown stopped increasing fuel tax in response to the truckers' blockades.
.    .    .
If we depose the prime minister through direct action, he will doubtless be succeeded by someone almost as bad, but the political context in which that someone operates will have changed. He will be forced to govern with one eye on the people, and to demonstrate that his policies differ from those of his predecessor.

UPDATE: Of course I should have checked first to see if Peter Briffa, who I believe coined the name Moonbat for George Monbiot, managed to make fun of the Moonbat before me. Of course he did, and for good measure, Briffa is a lot funnier than me.

I have tried hard to get rid of the whole notion of feeling guilty, partly because I have seen so many sociopaths thrive in the academic racket. But this morning, I had to take Mazal in to be fixed. It was an hour drive to the vet, and she cried for the first fifty (50) minutes, nonstop. Then she stopped and just shivered in her cage for the last ten minutes. You do not know guilt until you have gone through that.

I am a great admirer of Stephen Bainbridge's blog, but as a movie critic, well, first he praised the awful "aren't criminals cute" Ocean's Eleven remake, and now he heaps praise on the final (and utterly mediocre) Return of the King.

Jacob Levy, on the other hand, redeems himself of all his sins for this line, about Chicago:

I got to see it on Broadway with Marilu Henner and Bebe Neuwirth-- and Neuwirth was electrifying, amazing, orders of magnitude better than the fine-and-fun-but-nothing-really-special Catherine Zeta-Jones performance

I wanted to carp about all the Oscars heaped on Return of the King, but there really isn't time. Fortunately, over at the Weekly Standard, Jonathan Last did it for me.

Kimberley Strassel writes about Bibi Netanyahu's efforts to kill off socialism in Israel.

Economic turmoil isn't exactly new in Israel, but what has changed is the public's toleration of it. The country has seen a growing divide between private workers, who continue to float Israeli society on their overtaxed backs, and public-sector employees who earn many times the average Israeli salary. A fed-up middle class, weary of the inflation, layoffs, and a growing tax burden, has flowered into a movement that bears more than passing resemblance to the American tax revolt that preceded and carried through the Reagan era.
That movement found its feet in Israel's January 2003 elections. The party to which Mr. Rassabi belongs, Shinui (which stands for "Change"), had muddled along for years, a small player in Israeli politics. But this time Shinui's platforms of secularization (a reference to growing discontent with the country's ultra-Orthodox Jews who refuse to work, and live on entitlements) as well as a freer economy, hit home. Shinui went from seven Knesset seats to 15, making it the third largest party after Likud (40 seats) and Labor (19). It became part of Likud's governing coalition, where it has since been doggedly pushing its economic reform agenda.

And it found a powerful ally in Mr. Netanyahu. Bibi's appointment was originally met with skepticism; financial watchers worried he'd simply mind the economic store until he could launch another bid for prime minister. Instead, Mr. Netanyahu has tackled economic reform with the zeal and single-mindedness that has marked his career, drawing comparisons to New Zealand's Roger Douglas, the finance minister who liberated his own nation's economy in the 1980s.

Then again, the PA may already be near death.

The mayor of Nablus, Ghassan W. Shakah, said Saturday that he would resign because of widespread crime in his city. In a full-page letter published in the Palestinian newspaper al-Ayyam, Shakah said he was quitting because "chaos prevailed" and lawlessness had become "a daily ritual" in Nablus. His brother was murdered recently. Although Shakah publicly blamed the deteriorating conditions on the Israeli occupation, other political officials in Nablus attributed his decision to disarray within the Palestinian Authority.

Do you gripe about your neighbor's dog barking at night? Consider yourself lucky.

Neighbors of a man who keeps a cougar and three African wild cats as pets have filed a lawsuit demanding they be removed from his home.

In their lawsuit filed Monday, Gary Dutcher's neighbors allege that his three African servals - each weighing about 50 pounds - and a 7-year-old cougar violate neighborhood association rules and are "inherently extremely dangerous."

Dutcher, meanwhile, faces criminal charges for a traffic accident in which another pet cougar escaped.

In January, Dutcher crashed his car while taking home his 150-pound cougar Samson from a veterinary clinic. The cat escaped from the car, and police shot and killed it when it lunged at an emergency worker.

The Guardian carries an exceedingly funny story about the Tamworth Two? You don't remember? Me neither. It took place six years ago, and involved two young pigs who escaped from a slaughter house.

Blame the Times for getting the ball rolling. A few days after the pigs' run for freedom, it carried a nifty graphic explaining how on market day the Tamworths - brother and sister - had escaped from Newman's Abattoir, swum across the River Avon and hid up in a wooded hill which looks out towards Malmesbury's historic abbey.

The Daily Mail - the natural home of the offbeat animal story - carried a smaller piece and was bombarded by readers demanding to know more.

News editor Ian MacGregor saw the potential. If played right, what had seemed like a local newspaper space filler could become an event.

Plans were rapidly drawn up. The Mail would track down the pigs, capture them and make sure they lived out their days in clover. As so often, the Mail got its "casting" just right, choosing as its chief pig catcher not a wizened old hack reluctant to muddy his brogues but a bright young reporter, Barbara Davies, desperate to make her mark. She was freelance and was sent off to Wiltshire and told not to come back if she did not bring home the bacon.

The people who run the Cork Palestine Solidarity Campaign are upset that I suggested their organization is anti-Semitic. They insist they are anti-Zionist. In fairness, I know a couple of people in the outfit, and I have never heard them say anything anti-Semitic. They strike me as Chomskyites.