It’s hard to say anything particularly new about the Obama / Wright controversy. For the Senator’s opponents, it looks at this point like a gift that will keep on giving, perhaps all the way to November. First the Senator refused to disown Wright, then all of a sudden he discovered that he really, really dislikes the man, and so on. Despite the claims of Senator Obama and his wife that people are tired of hearing about this strange preacher and his strange opinions, the topic continues to fascinate many in America (and if Americans were able to tire of Reverend Wright in 45 days, how come it took the Obama family 20 years to do so?). Charles Krauthammer has a good summary of where things stand:

“I can no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother.” — Barack Obama, Philadelphia, March 18. Guess it’s time to disown Granny, if Obama’s famous Philadelphia “race” speech is to be believed.

Of course, the speech was not just believed. It was hailed, celebrated, canonized as the greatest pronouncement on race in America since Lincoln at Cooper Union. A New York Times columnist said it “should be required reading in classrooms across the country.” College seniors and first-graders, suggested the excitable Chris Matthews. Apparently there’s been a curriculum change. On Tuesday, the good senator begged to extend and revise his previous remarks on race. Moral equivalence between Grandma and Wright is now, as the Nixon administration used to say, inoperative…

Wright’s latest comments — Obama cited three in particular — were so shockingly “divisive and destructive” that he had to renounce the man, not just the words. What were Obama’s three citations? Wright’s claim that AIDS was invented by the U.S. government to commit genocide. His praise of Louis Farrakhan as a great man. And his blaming Sept. 11 on American “terrorism.” But these comments are not new. These were precisely the outrages that prompted the initial furor when the Wright tapes emerged seven weeks ago…

Obama’s turning surprise about Wright into something to be counted against whites — one of the more clever devices in that shameful, brilliantly executed, 5,000-word intellectual fraud in Philadelphia — now stands discredited by Obama’s own admission of surprise. But Obama’s liberal acolytes are not daunted. They were taken in by the first great statement on race: the Annunciation, the Chosen One comes to heal us in Philly. They now are taken in by the second: the Renunciation…

This 20-year association with Wright calls into question everything about Obama: his truthfulness in his serially adjusted stories of what he knew and when he knew it; his judgment in choosing as his mentor, pastor and great friend a man he just now realizes is a purveyor of racial hatred; and the central premise of his campaign, that he is the bringer of a “new politics,” rising above the old Washington ways of expediency. It’s hard to think of an act more blatantly expedient than renouncing Wright when his show, once done from the press club instead of the pulpit, could no longer be “contextualized”…

For the reasons stated in Krauthammer’s last paragraph and others, it is awfully hard to imagine Senator Obama winning in the general election. Of course there will be forceful condemnation from the elite media any time the Senator’s opponents mention Reverend Wright as the fall rolls along, but Jeremiah Wright just might have some new things to say later this year. As has been reported, Reverend Wright may have an agenda of his own (repaying Obama for his “nonsense and betrayal“) — and he has forcefully shown that, at least so far, he will not silenced.

Will the media be able to ignore the Reverend if he has some further interesting things to say about himself and the Senator in September or October, or are we possibly watching a slow motion train wreck?

It used to be that the rain in Spain stayed mainly in the plain. But that’s all different now thanks to America’s favorite wacky reverend. Gerard Van der Leun explains the enigmatic title above. Also, Michelle Malkin asks a variant of the question: what is the sound of one hand clapping? Ace has more.

For an academic deconstruction of the rantings of Jeremiah Wright, see this article by Heather MacDonald.

The Washington Post has an op-ed from Mahmoud al-Zahar, a founder of Hamas. It contains the following clarifying statement, just in case you harbored any doubt about the group’s objectives:

A “peace process” with Palestinians cannot take even its first tiny step until Israel first withdraws to the borders of 1967; dismantles all settlements; removes all soldiers from Gaza and the West Bank; repudiates its illegal annexation of Jerusalem; releases all prisoners; and ends its blockade of our international borders, our coastline and our airspace permanently. This would provide the starting point for just negotiations and would lay the groundwork for the return of millions of refugees.

The op-ed is unusual for a number of reasons. One of these is that it is the subject of a denunciation in an editorial in the Post the same day. The Post says, referring to Jimmy Carter, but in a way, also to itself: “it is one thing to communicate pragmatically, and quite another to publicly and unconditionally grant recognition and political sanction to a leader or a group that advocates terrorism, mass murder or the extinction of another state. That is what Mr. Carter is doing by lending what is left of his prestige to an avowed terrorist such as Khaled Meshal — or Mahmoud al-Zahar.” But isn’t that what the Post just did too? HT: LGF

The AP reports on some of the interchanges between the Democratic contenders for President during the debate yesterday:

In a 90-minute debate, both rivals pledged not to raise taxes on individuals making less than $200,000, and said they would respond forcefully if Iran obtains nuclear weapons and uses them against Israel. “An attack on Israel would incur massive retaliation by the United States,” said Clinton. Obama said, “The U.S. would take appropriate action.”

Senator Clinton’s answer seems clear enough. But what about Senator Obama? What would constitute “appropriate action”? Food for thought, perhaps, given some of Senator Obama’s support from Hamas.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, whom we’ve noted with great approval in the past, has spoken out again:

Sistani spoke through Jalal el Din al Saghier, a senior leader of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a rival political party to the Sadrist movement. Saghier was clear that Sistani did not sanction the Mahdi Army and called for it to disarm. “Sistani has a clear opinion in this regard; the law is the only authority in the country,” Saghier told Voices of Iraq, indicating Sistani supports Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki and the government in the effort to sideline the Mahdi Army. “Sistani asked the Mahdi army to give in weapons to the government.”

Wretchard has more.

Juan Williams has a poignant tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and contrasts him with Senator Obama:

Martin Luther King Jr. died at age 39; today, the 40th anniversary of his death, is the first time he has been gone longer than he lived. Figures such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have tried to claim his place on the American stage. But at most they have achieved fame and wealth. What separated King from any would-be successor was his moral authority. He towered above the high walls of racial suspicion by speaking truth to all sides…

Mr. Obama’s major speech on race last month was forced from him only after a political crisis erupted: It became widely known that he’d sat for 20 years in the pews of a church where Rev. Jeremiah Wright lashed out at white people. The minister cursed America as worthy of damnation, made lewd suggestions about the nature of President Clinton’s relationship with black voters, and embraced the paranoid idea that the white government was spreading AIDS among black people.

Here is where the racial tension at the heart of Mr. Obama’s campaign flared into view. He either shared these beliefs or, lacking good judgment, decided it politically expedient for an ambitious young black politician trying to prove his solidarity with all things black, to be associated with these rants. His judgment and leadership on the critical issue of race is in question.

While speaking to black people, King never condescended to offer Rev. Wright-style diatribes or conspiracy theories. He did not paint black people as victims. To the contrary, he spoke about black people as American patriots who believed in the democratic ideals of the country, in nonviolence and the Judeo-Christian ethic, even as they overcame slavery, discrimination and disadvantage. King challenged white America to do the same, to live up to their ideals and create racial unity. He challenged white Christians, asking them how they could treat their fellow black Christians as anything but brothers in Christ.

When King spoke about the racist past, he gloried in black people beating the odds to win equal rights by arming “ourselves with dignity and self-respect.” He expressed regret that some black leaders reveled in grievance, malice and self-indulgent anger in place of a focus on strong families, education and love of God. Even in the days before Congress passed civil rights laws, King spoke to black Americans about the pride that comes from “assuming primary responsibility” for achieving “first class citizenship.”…

as his campaign made headway with black voters, Mr. Obama no longer spoke about the responsibility and the power of black America to appeal to the conscience and highest ideals of the nation. He no longer asks black people to let go of the grievance culture to transcend racial arguments and transform the world.

He has stopped all mention of government’s inability to create strong black families, while the black community accepts a 70% out-of-wedlock birth rate. Half of black and Hispanic children drop out of high school, but he no longer touches on the need for parents to convey a love of learning to their children. There is no mention in his speeches of the history of expensive but ineffective government programs that encourage dependency. He fails to point out the failures of too many poverty programs, given the 25% poverty rate in black America. And he chooses not to confront the poisonous “thug life” culture in rap music that glorifies drug use and crime.

At the end of the piece Williams says this about Obama’s remaining in the church of Jeremiah Wright: “What would Jesus do? There is no question he would have left that church.”

Steven Erlanger has a rather remarkable piece in the NYT that illustrates well the intractability and multi-generational nature of the Israel-Palestine conflict:

In the Katib Wilayat mosque one recent Friday, the imam was discussing the wiliness of the Jew. “Jews are a people who cannot be trusted,” Imam Yousif al-Zahar of Hamas told the faithful. “They have been traitors to all agreements — go back to history. Their fate is their vanishing. Look what they are doing to us.” At Al Omari mosque, the imam cursed the Jews and the “Crusaders,” or Christians, and the Danes, for reprinting cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. He referred to Jews as “the brothers of apes and pigs,” while the Hamas television station, Al Aksa, praises suicide bombing and holy war…

“If you take a sample on Friday, you’re bound to hear incitement against the Jews in the prayers and the imam’s sermon,” said Mkhaimer Abusada, a political scientist at Al Azhar University here. “He uses verses from the Koran to say how the Jews were the enemies of the prophet and didn’t keep their promises to the prophet 1,400 years ago.” Mr. Abusada is a Muslim and political independent. “You have young people, and everyone has to listen to the imam whether you believe him or not,” he said. “By saying the same thing over and over, you find a lot of people believing it, especially when he cites the Koran or hadith,” the sayings of the prophet…

in a column in the weekly Al Risalah, Sheik Yunus al-Astal, a Hamas legislator and imam, discussed a Koranic verse suggesting that “suffering by fire is the Jews’ destiny in this world and the next.” “The reason for the punishment of burning is that it is fitting retribution for what they have done,” Mr. Astal wrote on March 13. “But the urgent question is, is it possible that they will have the punishment of burning in this world, before the great punishment” of hell? Many religious leaders believe so, he said, adding, “Therefore we are sure that the holocaust is still to come upon the Jews.” At the end, Mr. Marcus points out, Mr. Astal switches from “harik,” the ordinary word for burning, to “mahraka,” normally used to connote the Holocaust…

children’s program, “Tomorrow’s Pioneers,” has become infamous for its puppet characters — a kind of Mickey Mouse, a bee and a rabbit — who speak, like Assud the rabbit, of conquering the Jews to the young hostess, Saraa Barhoum, 11. “We will liberate Al Aksa mosque from the Zionists’ filth,” Assud said recently. “We will liberate Jaffa and Acre,” cities now in Israel proper. “We will liberate the whole homeland.”

The mouse, Farfour, was murdered by an Israeli interrogator and replaced by Nahoul, the bee, who died “a martyr’s death” from lack of health care because of Gaza’s closed borders. He has been supplanted by Assud, the rabbit, who vows “to get rid of the Jews, God willing, and I will eat them up, God willing.”

When Assud first made his appearance, he said to Saraa: “We are all martyrdom-seekers, are we not, Saraa?” She responded: “Of course we are. We are all ready to sacrifice ourselves for the sake of our homeland. We will sacrifice our souls and everything we own for the homeland.”…

The Prophet Muhammad made a temporary hudna, or truce, with the Jews about 1,400 years ago, so Hamas allows the idea. But no one in Hamas says he would make a peace treaty with Israel or permanently give up any part of British Mandate Palestine. “They talk of hudna, not of peace or reconciliation with Israel,” said Mr. Abusada, the political scientist. “They believe over time they will be strong enough to liberate all historic Palestine.”…

The chairman of the Palestinian Scholars League, and a Hamas legislator, Mr. Abu Ras is popularly called “Hamas’s mufti,” because he is ready to give religious sanction to Hamas political structures. Last month, he criticized Egypt for closing the Gaza border at Israel’s request. He complained, “We are besieged by the sons of Arabism and Islam, as well as by the brothers of apes and pigs.”…

“This is an open war with Israel, with each side trying to press the other,” he said. A war? “If it’s not a war, what is it?” he asked. Then he spoke of his son, who tried to volunteer to fight the Israelis at 17. “I convinced him to wait, he had no weapon, until 20,” Mr. Abu Ras said. “Now he’s a member of Qassam,” the Hamas military wing, “and an example for young people.”

Erlanger notes that “incitement against Israel and Jews was supposed to be banned under the 1993 Oslo accords and the 2003 ‘road map’ peace plan.” Doesn’t seem to be working out that way. (More on the debate regarding the road map here.)

Finally, we were surprised to learn — perhaps we shouldn’t have been — that Erlanger’s article appeared four months after his transfer from Jerusalem to Paris. It’s hard not to be reminded of Eason Jordan.

J. Scott Carpenter of Harvard has some thoughtful comments on the Fitna controversy and the related topics of apostasy and its punishments:

in an unprecedented ruling by Egypt’s highest administrative court, the court determined that a group of Coptic Christians who had converted to Islam could have their re-conversion officially recognized. This was proclaimed by the New York Times as something of a triumph to be celebrated: “Egyptian Court Allows Return to Christianity,” it trumpeted.

Although a fairly radical step for Egypt, it was not a blossoming of religious freedom. Agreeing with the lower court that Islam does not envision conversion from Islam to “a less complete religion,” the court required an asterisk of sorts be placed on the returning Christians’ national ID cards. The cards will have added to them the brief phrase: “adopted Islam for a brief period” — marking their bearers as apostates and possibly for death.

In May of last year, Habib al-Adly, Egypt’s Minister of Interior, wrote a memo urging the blanket rejection of all re-conversions to Christianity. Al-Adly insisted that Islam is the state religion, meaning that any Muslim man who abandons his faith should be killed. Happily this was not the case for women. A Muslim woman, he wrote, “should only be imprisoned and beaten every three days until she returns to Islam.”

What is ironic about this is that al-Adly is also charged with protecting the Egyptian state from the purported scourge of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Punishing apostasy is a form of psychological torture that forces an unbeliever to live a hidden intellectual and spiritual life. It should be a crime itself to impose any penalties for apostasy, let alone death or beatings. However, achieving consensus on this would appear to lie a number of generations in the future.

We noted the other day the grotesque rantings of the “uncle” of one of the leading Presidential candidates during their close relationship of two decades. Today we were reminded by Mona Charen of another, more casual, relationship of Senator Obama, a certain William Ayers. Though this is old news, we looked in on an article in the NYT about this fellow that appeared on September 11, 2001:

No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives…”I don’t regret setting bombs,” Bill Ayers said. ”I feel we didn’t do enough.” Mr. Ayers, who spent the 1970’s as a fugitive in the Weather Underground, was sitting in the kitchen of his big turn-of-the-19th-century stone house in the Hyde Park district of Chicago…

In 1967 he met Ms. Dohrn in Ann Arbor, Mich. She had a law degree from the University of Chicago and was a magnetic speaker who often wore thigh-high boots and miniskirts. In 1969, after the Manson family murders in Beverly Hills, Ms. Dohrn told an S.D.S. audience: ”Dig it! Manson killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach.”…

Ms. Dohrn, Mr. Ayers and others eventually broke with S.D.S. to form the more radical Weathermen, and in 1969 Ms. Dohrn was arrested and charged with resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer during the Days of Rage protests against the trial of the Chicago Eight — antiwar militants accused of conspiracy to incite riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

In 1970 came the town house explosion in Greenwich Village. Ms. Dohrn failed to appear in court in the Days of Rage case, and she and Mr. Ayers went underground, though there were no charges against Mr. Ayers. Later that spring the couple were indicted along with others in Federal Court for crossing state lines to incite a riot during the Days of Rage, and following that for ”conspiracy to bomb police stations and government buildings.” Those charges were dropped in 1974 because of prosecutorial misconduct, including illegal surveillance.

During his fugitive years, Mr. Ayers said, he lived in 15 states, taking names of dead babies in cemeteries who were born in the same year as he. He describes the typical safe house: there were usually books by Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh, and Che Guevara’s picture in the bedroom; fermented Vietnamese fish sauce in the refrigerator, and live sourdough starter donated by a Native American that was reputed to have passed from hand to hand over a century…

Even today, he finds ”a certain eloquence to bombs, a poetry and a pattern from a safe distance,” he writes.

Swell fellow, this Ayers. Of passing interest perhaps is that Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn hosted a critical introductory event in 1995 for the current Senator from Illinois, and that Ayers and Obama served on a board together after that for a few years. Ayers also is a contributor to Obama. Hmmm. Upon further reflection, we’re pretty sure that this relationship of Senator Obama means nothing at all. After all, his relationship with Tony Rezko meant nothing. Obama only received an unsolicited job offer from Rezko in 1990. Indeed, they only had lunch “once or twice a year,” Obama only got $168,000 from Rezko and his circle, and Obama’s accepting of the essentially free backyard from Rezko was a “mistake” that was nonetheless “handled ethically.” So we’re pretty sure that neither the Ayers nor Rezko situations require any further scrutiny. (Nor does the strange case of the earmarks and the raise — nothing to see here, ladies and gentlemen.)

The ultimate proof that these relationships obviously meant nothing at all is that Senator Obama apparently pays little or no attention to what his associates think or say. After all, though Pastor Wright was Obama’s “spiritual mentor” of 20 years who provided not only the title of one of his books but some of the content of his 2004 DNC speech, Senator Obama never heard of the outrageous things he was saying over the course of their long relationship and the hundreds of sermons he attended. As Obama wrote: “The statements that Rev. Wright made that are the cause of this controversy were not statements I personally heard him preach while I sat in the pews of Trinity or heard him utter in private conversation.”

Evidently, Senator Obama hasn’t gone to his church’s bookstore to see the readily available DVD’s, or even read the autobiography that Obama himself wrote or the article in last April’s NYT for which the Senator himself was interviewed. (Apparently, a sermon full of profanity and references to “Bush administration bullshit” does not count as sufficiently offensive, since Senator Obama was seen at one of those.) NYT:

Mr. Obama was entranced by Mr. Wright, whose sermons fused analysis of the Bible with outrage at what he saw as the racism of everything from daily life in Chicago to American foreign policy…He was also interested in the world beyond his own; in 1984, he traveled to Cuba to teach Christians about the value of nonviolent protest and to Libya to visit Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, along with the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Mr. Wright said his visits implied no endorsement of their views…[Wright added: “When his enemies find out that in 1984 I went to Tripoli with Farrakhan, a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell.”]…

Mr. Wright issued a “War on Iraq I.Q. Test,” with questions like, “Which country do you think poses the greatest threat to global peace: Iraq or the U.S.?”…Mr. Wright’s political statements may be more controversial than his theological ones. He has said that Zionism has an element of “white racism.”…On the Sunday after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Mr. Wright said the attacks were a consequence of violent American policies. Four years later he wrote that the attacks had proved that “people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just ‘disappeared’ as the Great White West went on its merry way of ignoring Black concerns.”…

Mr. Obama says…He was not at Trinity the day Mr. Wright delivered his remarks shortly after the attacks…

Curious. Many Americans, even those who don’t go to church regularly, attended services on September 16, 2001, and in the weeks thereafter. Apparently Senator Obama is just never around when his supporters are doing or saying outrageous things.

We learned a lot today about the “US of KKK A“. And about how America invented AIDS. And about how the song should not be God Bless America but God Damn America. And about how FDR knew that the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor but let it happen. And about certain nasty words that Senator Clinton has never been called. And far worse as well. Yes, it really is that bad. And we learned it all in church! Hmmm.

We never heard such things in church before. We must have gone to the wrong Sunday School. Speaking of that, would it be considered child abuse to put the kids through sermons of this sort? Does such a church deserve a $22,500 donation from a presidential candidate? What does it say that he attended sermons by this fellow since 1988 or 1990? VDH also has some very pertinent comments on Reverend Wright and Senator Obama.

Question: if this chap were your “uncle“, would you sit next to him at dinner or lock him in the attic?

UPDATE

Spengler explains elements of the strange theology at work in this case. Excerpt:

Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill Gods who do not belong to the black community … Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy. What we need is the divine love as expressed in Black Power, which is the power of black people to destroy their oppressors here and now by any means at their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject his love.

This seems as weird as the idea of President Tom Cruise.

This is the 50th anniversary of the hula hoop fad that swept America in 1958. We seem to have a new version of the same phenomenon today in the Obama craze that has gripped the media and a good chunk of the populace. John Dickerson, Mark Steyn, and Tom Maguire contribute a few more stories and quips in the Ehrenreich genre of ethereal unreality about America’s current instant messiah, King of Kings, and Man of Steel who will save the planet with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men:

Barack Obama just seems to get cooler and cooler. He’s the most popular topic on the New York Times topics page…Internet widgets allow you to see what great thing Barack Obama has done for you…on the New York subway Friday morning, one of our copy editors…heard one woman joke to another: “Obama, will you pick me up after my noninvasive minor surgical procedure?” To which the other replied: “Obama, will you hold my hair back when I puke?”…

Many spiritually advanced people I know…identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul…

John Lewis, the venerable civil rights hero and congressman, put words to this feeling recently. “In recent days, there is a sense of movement and a sense of spirit,” he said, suggesting that he might switch his superdelegate vote from Hillary Clinton to Obama. “Something is happening in America and people are prepared and ready to make that great leap.”…On Facebook, people write about dreams featuring Obama. There is only one correct reaction to the will.i.am “Yes We Can” video and that is to start chanting along…

There was the woman in New Hampshire who compared him with Christ. There was Maria Shriver’s comparison of the candidate with the state of California, with the rhetorical fervor usually seen only after a preacher shouts, “You are healed!”…

“Obama’s finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don’t even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair.”…

“Be not afraid; for behold I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all the people: for there is born to you this day in the city of Chicago a Savior, who is Barack the Democrat.”

Questions: (a) the 1958 hula hoop craze lasted two years — how long will this one last? (b) if today’s fad politician is the hula hoop, who will be the frisbee (the second fad invented by Wham-O in the late fifties)? (c) and finally, what’s the deal with all the women who faint at the Senator’s rallies and rather disturbing revival meetings — is it real or is it something else entirely? (The list of these suspicious fainting spells seems to be getting longer and longer.)

The incomparable ninny Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, has some opinions. You’d do better reading Iowahawk’s parody of Chaucer, which lays the matter out clearly and cleverly, but here are the cleric’s views:

Among the manifold anxieties that haunt the discussion of the place of Muslims in British society, one of the strongest, reinforced from time to time by the sensational reporting of opinion polls, is that Muslim communities in this country seek the freedom to live under sharia law.

And what most people think they know of sharia is that it is repressive towards women and wedded to archaic and brutal physical punishments; just a few days ago, it was reported that a ‘forced marriage’ involving a young woman with learning difficulties had been ‘sanctioned under sharia law‘ –- the kind of story that, in its assumption that we all ‘really’ know what is involved in the practice of sharia, powerfully reinforces the image of -– at best –- a pre-modern system in which human rights have no role.

The problem is freely admitted by Muslim scholars. ‘In the West’, writes Tariq Ramadan in his groundbreaking Western Muslims and the Future of Islam, ‘the idea of Sharia calls up all the darkest images of Islam…It has reached the extent that many Muslim intellectuals do not dare even to refer to the concept for fear of frightening people or arousing suspicion of all their work by the mere mention of the word’ (p.31). Even when some of the more dramatic fears are set aside, there remains a great deal of uncertainty about what degree of accommodation the law of the land can and should give to minority communities with their own strongly entrenched legal and moral codes.

As such, this is not only an issue about Islam but about other faith groups, including Orthodox Judaism; and indeed it spills over into some of the questions which have surfaced sharply in the last twelve months about the right of religious believers in general to opt out of certain legal provisions – as in the problems around Roman Catholic adoption agencies which emerged in relation to the Sexual Orientation Regulations last spring.

This lecture will not attempt a detailed discussion of the nature of sharia, which would be far beyond my competence…

Well, that last statement seems true enough. Perhaps the Archbishop could begin his studies by observing how the law is viewed by the man in the street. He should do a bit more investigation of Tariq Ramadan’s opinions as well. Finally, James Arlandson has a rather comprehensive list of specific laws that the Archbishop might want to consider before he utters more glib nonsense. (And there’s always Ace.)

UPDATE

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown responds in The Independent:

What Rowan Williams wishes upon us is an abomination and I write here as a modern Muslim woman. He lectures the nation on the benefits of sharia law -– made by bearded men, for men – and wants the alternative legal system to be accommodated within our democracy in the spirit of inclusion and cohesion…What he did on Thursday was to convince other Britons, white, black and brown, that Muslims want not equality but exceptionalism and their own domains. Enlightened British Muslims quail. Friends like this churchman do us more harm than our many enemies. He passes round what he believes to be the benign libation of tolerance. It is laced with arsenic…

Look around the Islamic world where sharia rules and, in every single country, these ordinances reduce our human value to less than half that is accorded a male; homosexuals are imprisoned or killed, children have no free voice or autonomy, authoritarianism rules and infantilises populations.

What’s more, different Muslim nations claim to have their own allegedly god-given sharia. In Saudi Arabia, women cannot drive (What in Allah’s name could the Koran have warned about cars?)…There is no agreed body of sharia, it is all drafted by males and the most cruel is now claiming absolute authority. In Pakistan, on the statutes are strictures on adultery introduced by the military dictator Zia ul-Haq. Women activists in that country have given their lives protesting against the injustice of those laws where women suspected of adultery, or rape victims, are punished in hideous ways and the man goes free. The Iranian theocracy changes its regulations from year to year, capriciously playing with the lives of females. The morality police hound women and girls, beat them up, imprison them for showing an ankle, walking too provocatively or singing in the streets. They fight back but are ground down eventually. Two Iranian friends chose to die rather than live under the demeaning religious orders.

Go to Afghanistan if you fancy a 12-year-old bride –- a practice approved by the mullahs. That’s sharia for you. Many women, gay men and dissidents came to Britain to escape Islamic tyrants and their laws. Dr Williams supports those laws and, by default, makes the refugees victims again. Four years ago, a Saudi woman in her fifties came to my home. She was divorced from a Saudi prince who had sent her away and kept her children. What she said about sharia cannot be repeated. She had money, this princess, but no parental rights…Yet, family disputes, says Dr Williams, would be easier, within sharia. For whom exactly? The polygamous men who live in this country, yes, certainly…

Sensing the drift in their direction, British sharia “experts” today shamelessly direct female medical students not to wash their forearms, essential to prevent the spread of infections, because that exposes their flesh.

Does the Archbishop even know that sharia comes in many guises and that several schools of jurisprudence have their own versions? The list is long – Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi, Hanbali, Jafari, Salafi and on and on. Ayatollah Khomeini preferred his DIY set of crimes and punishments when he came to power. No women are allowed to be imams or serious jurists, so cannot help make their own fair and free set of female-friendly sharia. All the systems insist on ultimate truths, hard certainties. Sharia cannot provide solutions to the complex challenges of modern life and many violate fundamental human rights as established by the United Nations.

Taj Hargey, a historian and Islamic theologian, runs the Muslim Education Centre in Oxford. He, with me, is a trustee of British Muslims For Secular Democracy which is attempting to educate Muslims out of authorised obscurantism and non-Muslims into a better understanding of the progressive and evolutionary nature of the practice of Islam. He is incandescent that Dr Williams backs a perilous Islamic conservatism, already too powerful in Britain: “Sharia is nothing but a human concoction of medieval religious opinion, largely archaic and outmoded and irrelevant to life today. Most sharia contradicts the letter and spirit of the Koran, distorts the transcendental text.”…Apostasy, says the holy text, will be dealt with by Allah in the afterlife. Sharia policemen insist apostates should be tortured and killed.

Wretchard observes: “The really scary thing about Rowan Williams is not that he is deviant but actually representative of a certain type of soft-left individual who believes in Global Warming, organic food, and the ‘inevitability’ of certain kinds of social engineering.” The world certainly needs more people like Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and fewer like Williams.

Sonny boy:

Jewish identity in the past has been locked into the holocaust experience — a German burden that the Jews have not been able to shed. It is a very good example of a community can overplay a historic experience to the point that it begins to repulse friends. The holocaust was the result of the warped mind of an individual who was able to influence his followers into doing something dreadful…The Jewish identity in the future appears bleak…We have created a culture of violence (Israel and the Jews are the biggest players)…

Gramps:

“I am as certain as I am dictating these words that the stoniest German heart will melt [if only the Jews] adopt active non-violence. Human nature…unfailingly responds to the advances of love. I do not despair of his [Hitler's] responding to human suffering even though caused by him.”

They say all human traits are heritable. Maybe so.

We won’t bother to give you the context of this government inquisitor’s attempt to probe the mind of a magazine publisher to determine whether his inner being is acceptable to the state. The whole story is fairly chilling. For many years, the proper response of a publisher to the thought police would have been a three word interview (”go to hell”) but it appears that times are different now:

The performance of the grand inquisitor in the video, a “blandly unexceptional bureaucrat,” is, its way, Oscar-worthy and reminiscent of past films that cover similar ground. The government apparently thinks it is its business to enforce a regime where “tolerance means accepting and defending everyone’s values but your own.” More of the interview here and here. (Finally, Scott Johnson manages to work Alexis de Tocqueville into the discussion.)

A leading presidential candidate appears to be likening President Musharraf of Pakistan to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, who is widely thought to have ordered the assassination of disobedient former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri several years ago:

I don’t think the Pakistani government at this time under President Musharraf has any credibility at all…I’m calling for a full, independent, international investigation, perhaps along the lines of what the United Nations has been doing with respect to the assassination of Prime Minister Hariri in Lebanon.

The logic of Senator Clinton’s statement is that Assad is to Hariri as Musharraf is to Bhutto. Are we missing something or should this be a scandal of some sort? Isn’t Syria an enemy and Pakistan an ally? How would a Clinton presidency in 2009 deal with President Musharraf, who, like him or loathe him, has a tremendously difficult and complex situation on his hands?

UPDATE

Oops. We didn’t realize that accusing and getting rid of Musharraf was considered conventional wisdom among some of the Democratic presidential contenders.

Iran is putting a lot of firepower into protecting its “peaceful” nuclear reactor at Bushehr, including the Tor-M1 (SA-15 Gauntlet) and a rumored deal involving the S-300. IBD wonders why and notes, regarding the current NIE, that such reports have been rather dramatically wrong in the past:

Russia completed delivery of 29 mobile Tor-M1 (SA-15 Gauntlet) short-range surface-to-air missiles in January, part of an arms deal worth $700 million. The Tor-M1 is part of a nationwide air defense system clearly designed to prevent a repeat of Israel’s 1981 strike against Iraq’s French-built Osirak reactor. That’s an awful lot of firepower to protect a peaceful nuclear power program…

The S-300 is a much more powerful and versatile weapon than the Tor-M1 missile systems that Moscow supplied earlier this year and which are capable of hitting airborne targets at altitudes up to 20,000 feet. The S-300 is capable of downing aircraft, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles at a distance up to 95 miles and at altitudes up to 90,000 feet…

The Bushehr deal supposedly has safeguards: Iran would return spent fuel rods to Russia, and the International Atomic Energy Agency has surveillance cameras at various Iranian nuclear facilities. But as noted by Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center who served under Bush 41, the deal brings Tehran frighteningly close to a nuclear warhead.

“At any time while it is loading the fuel,” he told the Washington Times, “Tehran could seize it and have enough uranium to fuel its centrifuges at Natanz to make up to 150 crude nuclear weapons.”

A year after Bushehr is brought on line, a third of its fuel in the form of near-weapons-grade plutonium is scheduled to be removed from the reactor — enough to make 20 nukes. For a single bomb, Iran would simply have to divert just 5% of the spent fuel…

National Intelligence Estimates have been wrong before. On Sept. 19, 1962, a NIE reassured us that while it would give the Soviets a military advantage, “the establishment of Soviet medium- and intermediate-range missiles in Cuba…would be incompatible with Soviet practice to date and with Soviet policy as we presently estimate it.”

The strangeness of the current NIE, so completely at odds with the previous NIE, combined with the Bush administration’s rather passive attitude towards it, continue to confound and confuse us.

Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud today “denied the Pakistan government’s claims that he was behind the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.” (Al Qaeda did claim credit for the assassination of “the most precious American asset which vowed to defeat mujahadeen”.) Meshud’s denial came after the Pakistani government released this widely quoted transcript of a phone conversation:

Maulvi Sahib: Congratulations, I just got back during the night.

Baitullah Mehsud: Congratulations to you, were they our men?

Maulvi Sahib: Yes they were ours.

Baitullah Mehsud: Who were they?

Maulvi Sahib: There was Saeed, there was Bilal from Badar and Ikramullah.

Baitullah Mehsud: The three of them did it?

Maulvi Sahib: Ikramullah and Bilal did it.

Baitullah Mehsud: Then congratulations.

So Baitullah Mehsud was apparently recorded speaking with a field coordinator of the attack, if the transcript is accurate and his voice can be identified. That would appear to be pretty damning evidence. But that’s hardly the most interesting part of the conversation. Here’s more:

Maulvi: Where are you? I want to meet with you?

Mehsud: I am in Makin. Come I am at Anwar Shah’s home.

Maulvi Sahib: OK I will come.

Mehsud: Do not inform their family presently.

Maulvi Sahib: Right.

Mehsud: It was a spectacular job. They were very brave boys who killed her.

Maulvi Sahib: Praise be to God. I will give you more details when I come.

Mehsud: I will wait for you. Congratulation once again.

Baitullah Mehsud thus was waiting in Makin (photos here), a village in South Waziristan “at Anwar Shah’s home.” With a little luck, you might be able to find Mr. Shah’s house on Google Earth. Certainly its location, whether a safe house or not, should not be that difficult to locate for people who are already listening to his phone calls. It would seem simple enough to capture or dispatch this Taliban commander who is apparently responsible for the death of Benazir Bhutto.

So why is this fellow Meshud still roaming free? Wikipedia may or may not give us a hint: “The principal villages of the Mahsuds are Makin and Kanigurram…A large number of Mahsuds are employed in the Army.” Musharraf would appear to have quite a situation on his hands.

UPDATE

Let’s not forget that in Pakistan: “According to poll results, bin Laden has a 46 percent approval rating. Musharraf’s support is 38 percent.” You may judge for yourself whether US presidential candidates of either party as well as administration officials who blandly speak of democracy as a solution to Pakistan’s ills really understand the complexity of that country.

UPDATE II

Still unexplained is the very peculiar behavior of the Musharraf administration, whose explanations for the precise cause of Bhutto’s death appear to be contradicted by videos of the incident, as well as other evidence. Very strange indeed. And now this:

Caretaker Interior Minister Hamid Nawaz Khan has asked the media and people to “forgive and ignore” comments made by his ministry’s spokesman Javed Iqbal Cheema which were slammed by her Pakistan People’s Party as “lies” and led to an uproar at home and abroad. The Interior Minister made the apology during a briefing for Pakistani newspaper editors on Monday. Punjab province on Tuesday issued a front-page advertisement in newspapers that offered a reward of Rs 1 crore for information about a gunman and a suspected suicide bomber seen in the photos and video footage of the assassination.

Pretty stupid thing to lie about, especially with all the cameras.

In some ways Benazir Bhutto’s acute personal sense of destiny appears to have contributed to her death. In numerous situations, she courted danger in a dangerous land, and survived. Doubtless that has an effect. As Churchill said: “There is nothing so exhilarating as to be shot at, without result.”

We note that Benazir Bhutto was killed in the city that CBS reported was home to Osama bin Laden during kidney treatments in 2002. A very dangerous city and country indeed, as Andrew McCarthy said yesterday. Christopher Hitchens remembers Bhutto as an unusual mix of attributes: a woman of physical courage, corruption, hauteur and charm — and perhaps other things just emerging:

It is grotesque, of course, that the murder should have occurred in Rawalpindi, the garrison town of the Pakistani military elite and the site of Flashman’s Hotel. It is as if she had been slain on a visit to West Point or Quantico. But it’s hard to construct any cui bono analysis on which Gen. Pervez Musharraf is the beneficiary of her death. The likeliest culprit is the al-Qaida/Taliban axis, perhaps with some assistance from its many covert and not-so-covert sympathizers in the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence. These were the people at whom she had been pointing the finger since the huge bomb that devastated her welcome-home motorcade on Oct. 18.

She would have been in a good position to know about this connection, because when she was prime minister, she pursued a very active pro-Taliban policy, designed to extend and entrench Pakistani control over Afghanistan and to give Pakistan strategic depth in its long confrontation with India over Kashmir. The fact of the matter is that Benazir’s undoubted courage had a certain fanaticism to it. She had the largest Electra complex of any female politician in modern history, entirely consecrated to the memory of her executed father, the charming and unscrupulous Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had once boasted that the people of Pakistan would eat grass before they would give up the struggle to acquire a nuclear weapon.

(He was rather prescient there—the country now does have nukes, and millions of its inhabitants can barely feed themselves.) A nominal socialist, Zulfikar Bhutto was an autocratic opportunist, and this family tradition was carried on by the PPP, a supposedly populist party that never had a genuine internal election and was in fact—like quite a lot else in Pakistan—Bhutto family property…

She always displayed the same unironic lack of embarrassment. How prettily she lied to me, I remember, and with such a level gaze from those topaz eyes, about how exclusively peaceful and civilian Pakistan’s nuclear program was. How righteously indignant she always sounded when asked unwelcome questions about the vast corruption alleged against her and her playboy husband, Asif Ali Zardari…

now the two main legacies of Bhutto rule—the nukes and the empowered Islamists—have moved measurably closer together. This is what makes her murder such a disaster. There is at least some reason to think that she had truly changed her mind, at least on the Taliban and al-Qaida, and was willing to help lead a battle against them…

Perhaps we’ll never really know now if “she had truly changed her mind.” Her other qualities contributed to eliminating that possibility — this was, after all, a woman who had named three specific individuals who were plotting to kill her several months ago, before she had even returned from exile to Pakistan. She came back anyway, apparently heedless of the near inevitability of her demise. What a waste of recklessness that might otherwise have been useful. One possible moral to the story is this: even if you have a well developed sense of your own destiny, perhaps you shouldn’t bet the house on it.

Mark Steyn:

The notion that a Norwegian imam can make a statement in Norway but if a Canadian magazine quotes that statement in Canada it’s a “hate crime” should be deeply shaming to all Canadians.

HT: Powerline

The ancient Roman Saturnalia was grafted onto the Nativity in a particularly strong way around the time of the Council of Nicea in the fourth century. Christmas has had its ups and downs over the many succeeding centuries, including a period in which it was banned in some of the American colonies. It was ultimately amplified in America in 19th century New York with the creation and marketing of Santa Claus — in a typical American way, it was pretty much all business. John Steele Gordon:

St. Nicolas is the patron saint of New York (the first church built in the city was named for him), and Washington Irving wrote in his “Diedrich Knickerbocker’s History of New York” how Sinterklaes, soon anglicized to Santa Claus, rode through the sky in a horse and wagon and went down chimneys to deliver presents to children.

The writer George Pintard added the idea that only good children got presents, and a book dating to 1821 changed the horse and wagon to reindeer and sleigh. Clement Clarke Moore in 1823 made the number of reindeer eight and gave them their names. Moore’s famous poem, “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” is entirely secular. It is about “visions of sugar plums” with nary a wise man or a Christ child in sight. In 1828, the American Ambassador Joel Roberts Poinsett, brought the poinsettia back from Mexico. It became associated with Christmas because that’s the time of year when it blooms.

In the 1840s, Dickens wrote “A Christmas Carol,” which does not even mention the religious holiday (the word church appears in the story just twice, in passing, the word Nativity never). Prince Albert introduced the German custom of the Christmas tree to the English-speaking world.

In the 1860s, the great American cartoonist Thomas Nast set the modern image of Santa Claus as a jolly, bearded fat man in a fur-trimmed cap. (The color red became standard only in the 20th century, thanks to Coca-Cola ads showing Santa Claus that way.)

It does a body good to see the great number of brand names and copyrighted materials associated with the rise of the American Christmas holiday celebration — from Washington Irving (the first American to make his living entirely from writing), through Moore (whose little poem sold for $280,000 recently), to Coca-Cola (which hired artist Haddon Sundblom to help boost Coke sales during the slow winter season). American Christmas has been quite the capitalist holiday for several centuries now. (As we have said, the creation and metastasis of thousands of famous brand names is one of America’s great gifts to the world.)

America’s biggest holiday is a celebration of two important elements of our history — our religious and business heritage. Ironically, it is no surprise that anti-Christmas forces in the US are arrayed in opposition to both a religious and capitalist observance.