Man who burned a few Koran pages on camera fired

...from New Jersey Transit after an 11-year career. The reason? He violated an "ethics code."

Let me get this straight: People who work with trains for New Jersey Transit are subject to an ethics code that prohibits (somehow) mistreating a Koran? I'd love to see the quotation from the ethics code in question. What does it say? "Everybody who works with train logistics for New Jersey Transit must be a multiculturalist in good standing"? I mean, seriously.

And these are the same people who would no doubt be horrified if someone were fired from New Jersey Transit for appearing in drag (or in nothing at all) in a Gay Pride parade or doing a spread for Playboy. Wouldn't they? Bet they'd find a way to sue over it.

Ethics code, indeed.

HT: VFR

What 9/11 means to me [Updated]

In case I have any readers here who aren't friends on Facebook, this is what I said there about 9/11:

I remember 9/11. And the moral I take from it is this: Islam is the problem. We must defy and oppose Islam. It is a major problem that nine years after 9/11, our country is far, far more deferential to Islam than it was before, far more afraid to say that Islam is _not_ a religion of peace. Take off the blinders, America! This is what 9/11 means.

P.S. If anyone hears about whether Bob Old of Tennessee actually burned a Koran and posted it on Youtube, let me know and post a link. I'm very curious.

Ah, here we go: Bob Old followed through. And there was some poor woman (whose husband is in Afghanistan) outside his house saying, "Someone's got to stand up for our troops." Say, what? We are insane.

More pictures of...er...related incidents, including a video link to another pastor, at VFR here.
I really have to hand it to Lawrence Auster. He has his readers inspired to take oaths not to submit to Islam even at the cost of their lives. Pretty impressive.

"Musical child abuse" page

I've been researching penny whistles lately, and in the process I found this absolutely hilarious page about a penny whistle set sold at Christmas some years ago. Be sure that you are all set to laugh when you read this, though actually, I agree with the guy. Whoever did this should be shot, figuratively speaking.

Acoustic Sunday--Kevin Williams, Buddy Greene, et. al.

If you like acoustic country and bluegrass music and hymns, you should buy this album. My favorites are "At Calvary" and "Amazing Grace."

Really beautiful stuff.

Amazon link here. Detailed review here.

HT: Eldest Daughter

The Pooh Community

Very fun satire by Richard Bauckham. Some tidbits:

The stories afford us a fairly accurate view of some of the rivalries and disputes within the community. The stories are told very much from the perspective of Pooh and Piglet, who evidently represent the dominant group in the community - from which presumably the bulk of the literature originated, though here and there we may detect the hand of an author less favourable to the Pooh and Piglet group. The Pooh and Piglet group saw itself as central to the life of the community (remember that Piglet's house is located in the very centre of the forest), and the groups represented by other characters are accordingly marginalized. The figure of Owl, for example, surely represents the group of children who prided themselves on their intellectual achievements and aspired to status in the community on this basis. But the other children, certainly the Pooh and Piglet group, ridiculed them as swots. So throughout the stories the figure of Owl, with his pretentious learning and atrocious spelling, is portrayed as a figure of fun. Probably the Owl group, the swots, in their turn ridiculed the Pooh and Piglet group as ignorant and stupid: they used terms of mockery such as 'bear of very little brain.' Stories like the hunt for the Woozle, in which Pooh and Piglet appear at their silliest and most gullible, probably originated in the Owl group, which used them to lampoon the stupidity of the Pooh and Piglet group. But the final redactor, who favours the Pooh and Piglet group, has managed very skilfully to refunction all this material which was originally detrimental to the Pooh and Piglet group so that in the final form of the collection of stories it serves to portray Pooh and Piglet as oafishly lovable. In a paradoxical reversal of values, stupidity is elevated as deserving the community's admiration.

Such insight into the tensions between various factions in the Pooh community could easily be extended into more debatable territory (the identification of the Eeyore faction e.g. is still debated - some recent scholars have argued that Eeyore is best seen as representing the adults of the village). But I move on to give you an example of the way in which various crises in the community's history have left their mark in the traditions. One such crisis, we can be sure, was caused by the arrival in the village of an Australian family. This was a highly disturbing event for such a community of rural English children - otherwise isolated from the rest of the world. Rabbit (in the book) voices what must have been the general reaction of the community: 'We find a Strange Animal among us. An animal of whom we had never even heard before!' While Rabbit voices the indignation, Piglet expresses the community's fear of the newly arrived Australian children: 'Generally Regarded as One of the Fiercer Animals.' The Australians are represented in the story, of course, by Kanga and Roo.

One small correction for Prof. Bauckham and his Pooh community scholars: He states that honey is not found in the Narnia books (while it is found in the Pooh books). I beg to differ. The Bulgy bears give honey as a gift to the exiled boy king Caspian when he is taken to visit them in Prince Caspian, and we are told that it took him a long time to get unsticky again afterwards. No doubt modern scholarship will provide us with at least one scholarly article or perhaps a dissertation on this matter.

Enjoy.

HT: Esteemed Husband

A foreign events fantasy

My fantasy speech from an Israeli Prime Minister:

I have no interest whatsoever in the so-called peace process. The peace process is a sham and worse than a sham. We do not have a "partner for peace." The only thing that can come of our engaging in such talks is that we will make dangerous concessions to our bitter enemies, enemies who relentlessly seek our eradication. Why should we do such a thing? So far from asking for the opportunity to engage in "direct talks" with representatives of the "Palestinians," I ask only that we be left alone to get on with governing our country and keeping our citizens safe. Oh, and by the way, a construction freeze in our capital city of Jerusalem is obscene, and construction in the eastern part of our capital begins tomorrow. Have a nice day.

I can dream, anyway.

Sam Harris and the Jews

I have recently become aware of The Devil's Delusion, David Berlinski's book on the New Atheists. Berlinski has in excelsis the gift of biting invective, and to let him loose on the New Atheists is almost unfair but also highly satisfying. One might almost say that he writes like an angel, but one would immediately have to add that he writes like a cynical, secular, and very Jewish angel.

Through Berlinski's book I have become aware of something that I'm sure caused a flap in the blogosphere, but as it was a flap I missed, and as some of my readers may have missed it too, I will report it here. The atheist Sam Harris has made some...striking comments apropos of the Holocaust in his book The End of Faith. Predictably enough, Harris attempts to blame anti-semitism in part on religion (Christianity and Islam, which he treats as equivalent in this regard), but Harris has an additional theory about the causes of anti-semitism that is more surprising. After documenting contemporary Muslim anti-semitism for a couple of pages, Harris proceeds (pp. 93-94) to say this:

The gravity of Jewish suffering over the ages, culminating in the Holocaust, makes it almost impossible to entertain any suggestion that Jews might have brought their troubles upon themselves. This is, however, in a rather narrow sense, the truth. Prior to the rise of the church, Jews became the objects of suspicion and occasional persecution for their refusal to assimilate, for the insularity and professed superiority of their religious culture-that is, for the content of their own unreasonable, sectarian beliefs. The dogma of a "chosen people," while at least implicit in most faiths, achieved a stridence in Judaism that was unknown in the ancient world. Among cultures that worshiped a plurality of Gods, the later monotheism of the Jews proved indigestible. And while their explicit demonization as a people required the mad work of the Christian church, the ideology of Judaism remains a lightning rod for intolerance to this day. As a system of beliefs, it appears among the least suited to survive in a theological state of nature. Christianity and Islam both acknowledge the sanctity of the Old Testament and offer easy conversion to their faiths. Islam honors Abraham, Moses, and Jesus as forerunners of Muhammad. Hinduism embraces almost anything in sight with its manifold arms (many Hindus, for instance, consider Jesus an avatar of Vishnu). Judaism alone finds itself surrounded by unmitigated errors. It seems little wonder, therefore, that it has drawn so much sectarian fire. Jews, insofar as they are religious, believe that they are bearers of a unique covenant with God. As a consequence, they have spent the last two thousand years collaborating with those who see them as different by seeing themselves as irretrievably so. Judaism is as intrinsically divisive, as ridiculous in its literalism, and as at odds with the civilizing insights of modernity as any other religion. [Emphasis added]

Berlinski on this passage is inimitable.

Having rejected the suggestion [that the Jewish people brought their troubles on themselves] as an impossibility, Harris at once proceeds to embrace it....Although Harris is officially committed to assigning the blame for intolerance on the intolerant, there is blame enough left over to assign some to the intoleree as well....To be a lightning rod for intolerance is a moral defect, the more so when the remedy--get rid of those divisive sectarian beliefs--lies close at hand. (pp. 28-29)

Berlinski on the "civilizing insights of modernity" with which Judaism is allegedly incompatible:

No doubt the civilizing insights of modernity appear considerable in Santa Barbara, where Sam Harris lives; but as travel broadens one's mind, it enlarges one's perspective, and those civilizing insights of which he writes are apt to seem a good deal less persuasive five thousand miles farther to the east, where modernity expressed itself in cattle cars rumbling from all the ancient civilized cities of Europe in order days later to deposit their famished, suffering victims at German extermination camps. (p. 30)

There's much more, including a terrific riff on Richard Dawkins's attempt to claim that atheism had nothing to do with the evil behavior of Stalin, Mao, et. al. (pp. 25-26).

I am, in point of fact, seriously considering sitting down and actually reading the entire Berlinski book, and if you knew how seldom I actually sit down nowadays and read a new book cover to cover, you would know how high a compliment that is. From what I've seen already, it's highly recommended.

As for Harris's disgusting anti-Jewish remarks I have nothing much to add to Berlinski's scathing response, except that when, just past the section I quoted, Harris manages to drag in the Evil Israeli Settlers (a principle obstacle to present peace and a cause of future wars, according to Harris), a few dots connected up for me. A certain type of secularist does find anti-Israel sentiment to be a gateway drug, as it were, for more sweeping anti-Jewish opinions.

I think that Harris's remarks should be more widely known and should call down upon him a due measure of opprobrium from non-Christians as well as Christians. But they probably won't. When I was seeking the electronic text of the Harris passage for easy copying into this entry (and, yes, I did also find it in its context in Harris's book on Google books), it was interesting to find one atheist blogger seeking help to answer criticisms of Harris based on the remarks--anti-atheist propaganda, as he called it.

That tells one a lot about the way a "rational skeptic" thinks. At least, it should.

Clueless in Iowa

You can't make this stuff up. Black wilding gangs openly hold a "beat whitey night" at the Iowa State Fair ("Our state fair is a great state fair..." sorry, Rodgers and Hammerstein), and the police merely find it "very possible" that the attacks had "racial overtones."

And you thought the British were the masters of understatement.

HT: VFR

The Obama administration's "special policy"

On tax exempt applications from pro-Israel groups. See the lawsuit here. An IRS agent got a little too talkative. (It was a woman, in case that's relevant.) Apparently applications from groups whose educational activities concern Israel are sent to a special unit to see if the group's policies contradict those of the present administration. That's, um, problematic from a legal perspective. It doesn't surprise me at all, though. What does surprise me is that the agent blabbed about it. I hope the lawsuit is successful and embarrassing for Obama. Not that we're hearing about this elsewhere in the news, of course.

HT: Carl in Jerusalem

Ayn Rand was a prophet

Rand once said that she had seen someone claiming that people had a right to, shall we say delicately, sexual satisfaction.

Well, look here. It's true. Britain is paying for the disabled to go to Holland and visit prostitutes. It would be a violation of "human rights" not to do so.

Apologies!

I apologize for not moderating comments in a timely fashion. I had thought that blogger would be sending me e-mail notifications when they were awaiting moderation, but evidently not. I've now entered the e-mail address in a second place on settings, and we'll see if that works as planned.

Apologies again.

Comments moderation enabled

Dear friends,

I'm sorry to have to do this, but I am getting sufficiently fed up with the steady trickle of spam (and nothing but spam) and have enabled comments moderation. Those of you who do post substantive comments, please do not be put off by this. I will be quite quick at moderating.

Thanks!

Get up in Jesus' name

If you didn't listen to the song in the previous post, go listen to it now. I'll wait here.

Okay, great. That song ("Wake up Dancin'") is beautiful and should be widely known.

This next one is completely different, though it's also sung by Gordon Mote. In fact, this one is not the kind of song I would usually post. It's not very melodic, and it's a bit too rocky for my taste, though I don't see how anyone could fail to appreciate the fun, wonder, and glory of Gordon's jazz piano playing, which you didn't get to see much of in the previous song. The harmonica and electric guitar here are also pretty cool, and the complicated rhythm with the Gaither Vocal Band backup is fascinating.

The reason I'm posting this is because of the Prop. 8 decision. Yeah, I know, leave it to me to politicize a great song. But wait until you hear the second verse, and you'll know what I mean. It talks about how the church seems discouraged and fearful, the world full of evil, and about how we need to get up in the name of Jesus and be His soldiers.

So now you see why I made the connection. Get up, Christians. Get up, church. Don't listen to those who would tell you to give in. Resist. Get up, in Jesus' name.

Songs to Die For: "Wake Up Dancin'"

Just encountered this wonderful country song (not even gospel, just country) yesterday, courtesy of Eldest Daughter.

The artist is Gordon Mote, the blind pianist for the Gaither Vocal Band, but as you can see, a singer in his own right.

But of course, there could be no "rational basis" for...

...a state to restrict marriage to one man and one woman.

See here. In case you're wondering why you should read it, it's called "Open Monogamy" and is about how some social scientists think it's just ducky that homosexual "marriage" will lead to a redefinition of "monogamy" to mean...um...I'm not sure. I think it means that you can have sex with anybody you want to and still call yourself "monogamous" as long as you are emotionally unattached to all the sexual partners other than the partner with whom you are said to be in a "committed relationship."

I'm waiting for the apologies from all the people who said, "How could this possibly hurt straight marriages?" in 3...2...1. Oh. Guess I shouldn't bother waiting.

We Give Thanks to Thee for Thy Great Glory

I've started going through parts of the Anglican liturgy (the Cranmerian parts, mostly) with two of my daughters. We were doing the Gloria in Excelsis the other day and came to my favorite line: "We give thanks to thee for thy great glory..." There have been plenty of songs and, I'm sure, many sermons on this line. We praise God and thank God for who He is, not only for what He has done for us.

As I was trying to explain what is so important about this particular line, I was inspired to make a point I have never made before: We catch a small glimpse of this notion of praising God for who He is when we have a sense of thankfulness for someone we know, just for that person's being, for that person's existence. Sometimes we have this sense about a person in the past whose works we have read. It's hard to communicate this to children, especially children who have been loved and sheltered, but there is so much evil in the world, so many people who are not what they seem, who fail us and let us down, so much bad faith, that to find and know a man of integrity and greatness, to be able to admire someone, brings a sense of enormous relief. The mind and the heart rest in the sense that here at last is someone truly good.

If, in mere mortal human beings, sinners like ourselves, we can find greatness, if we can feel gratitude for their character and for our opportunity to know them or even just to know of them and to be refreshed by the knowing, how much more is this true of God Himself, the source of all goodness?

And so the mind moves upward from the creature to the Creator, and we say with the church throughout the ages, "We give thanks to Thee for Thy great glory."

"Shall We Gather At the River" with Irish whistle

Here's a really nice rendition of "Shall We Gather At the River" with accordion, penny whistle, and acoustic guitar. Has a folk sound. Buddy Greene singing, Jeff Taylor on accordion and penny whistle.




Buddy Greene is the harmonica player for many Gaither homecomings, and here he is bringing the house down at Carnegie Hall (!) with his harmonica:

New manuscript discovery (satire)

Those of you who have been following the outrageous treatment of Christian missionaries in Dearborn, MI, through my coverage at W4 or at the blog of Acts 17 ministries may or may not be aware that the Acts 17 guys and their friends have had a fair bit of their time wasted--on blogs, on Facebook, etc.--answering Christian "friends" who accuse them of being "too confrontational," etc., and hence getting themselves in trouble. (Never mind the rule of law, the freedom of religion, the mandate to proclaim the gospel, and all that. We're busy proving how hard we can be on fellow Christians who have the audacity to run afoul of the sharia police.)

Anyway, I cannot reveal here how the following came into my possession. I will only say, for the record, that I did not write it. I wouldn't want to take credit for something that isn't my own.

Don't forget to note the acronym at the end...

***************************************************************************

[The following document, written in Koine Greek on a surprisingly intact sheet of fine vellum, was recently found in a drawer in the British Museum, where it had lain uncatalogued for an unknown time. Scholarly opinion is divided, but some experts believe that it may have been a document that was considered and then rejected for inclusion in the fourteenth chapter of Acts. It is translated here for the first time.]

Dear Brother Paul,

We were grieved to hear of the commotion caused when you and Barnabas were here last month. Though we are, of course, grateful that you suffered no bodily harm, we feel it our duty to point out that what you were doing was in every way calculated to inflame strong passions and to incite violence. Because we love you as brethren, we feel it necessary to “show unto you a more excellent way,” lest your actions should cause a breach in the excellent relations we enjoy with the Jewish community here and in our sister cities to the south, Lystra and Derbe.

First, it is reported that you and Barnabas entered a synagogue. You of all people must understand that this placed you in a sensitive position. It is one thing to speak on a public street – sensitively, of course – but it is quite another to go forcing one’s way into the very house of worship of our Jewish friends. Ask yourselves: what would Jesus do? Would he have caused trouble in the Temple itself?

Second, it is reported that when you and Barnabas had entered the synagogue, you began openly preaching the gospel. Brethren, this is out of character with the behavior of our blessed Lord and Saviour, who, as the prophet Isaiah foretold, “opened not his mouth” – a moving description that we have taken as our motto for the Ministerial Society.

Third, it is reported that you engaged in this activity for an extended period of time, speaking boldly and with confidence. We entreat you: was there any need for this? Was there not a time and a place for sharing your convictions that would have been more compatible with the excellent advice you yourself have been known to give from time to time, that “all things might be done decently and in order”?

Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that the civil authorities and a sizeable portion of the religious population joined forces to prevent your actions. Without seeming to condone any violence you might have suffered, we feel compelled to point out that we in the Ministerial Society have never been the focus of such actions from either the civil or the religious direction. Indeed, several of the leading Rabbis here in Iconium have assured us that they have not the least problem with the manner in which we conduct ourselves.

This manner of conduct we earnestly commend to you. There is no need for you to suffer for your faith, whether out of misplaced piety or a juvenile desire for public attention. Our God, who is able to make the rocks cry out His praises, neither requires nor is glorified by brash attempts to proclaim His word in unseasonable circumstances. It is better – safer, and, we think, wiser – to remember the words of the preacher, that there is “a time for silence.”

Sincerely,

M. W. T. Rollos, secretary

Worship, Iconium! Ministerial Peace Society

“... ουκ ανοιγει το στομα αυτου”

New phonics material

A couple of years ago I put up on the Internet a first set of phonics lessons for beginning readers, along with some instructions for starting to teach your child to read. Here is my post on that, which I see is almost exactly two years old.

I now have a huge amount of additional phonics material available here. It begins with quite easy lessons, and most of the first one hundred pages or so are hand written. (Some of these were small pages from a tablet, so it isn't quite as impressive as it sounds. Still, I'm impressed looking back at how much was hand written. Don't know quite why I didn't start typing sooner.)

The lessons get quite advanced as they go on, teaching complex phonics concepts like words ending in -tial, hard and soft c and g, and many more. There are, unfortunately, no supplementary materials such as instructions or even a table of contents. It's just the lessons themselves. You have to browse for what you need. One suggestion for browsing would be using the underlying OCR layer to search for a word that has the phonics idea you need to drill, though this won't work on the handwritten portions.

The lessons are obviously written for my own children and sometimes refer to specific family situations and so forth. Parents who want to use the material might have to skip some of that or adapt it, unless you just want to use it as drill as you would with any material that uses unfamiliar names and situations.

I'm proudest of the stories in this big document. With a very few exceptions (toward the end) these stories were written by me (occasionally adapted from other things I have read), and nearly every story drills or reviews a phonics concept. Sometimes this leads to stiltedness in the prose, but looking back from the distance of a decade, I'm surprised at my own energy and ingenuity.

Here, for example (from pp. 122-123 of 327 total), is a fairy tale that drills single and double consonants before suffixes (for example, filling, filed, stopping, hoping). With apologies to lots of other stories, including the stories of Pandora, Psyche, Cinderella, the fairy tale version of "Beauty and the Beast" (not the movie), and probably others I'm not thinking of. I think I called the girl "Marie" because my reader at that time was having trouble distinguishing "Marie" and "Maria." (I also notice now that for most of these I wasn't observing the requirement to start a new paragraph for every new speaker in a dialogue.)

Once upon a time there was a lovely little girl named Marie who lived with her wicked stepmother. Her father and mother had died, and Marie's stepmother made her work hard all day, filling buckets of water and scrubbing the floors. If she did not do the work fast enough, she was whipped and put in a dark room in chains. Marie was very unhappy, but she kept hoping that she would be free some day.

One day, while she was sitting in a small room, wiping tears from her eyes, a little mouse came in carrying a file which he had stolen from the kitchen. He began sawing away at her bonds. Finally he had filed them loose, and Marie was free. The mouse led her quietly out of the house and into the woods. Suddenly, when Marie looked, the mouse was gone. At first she was frightened, but then she saw a robin looking at her very brightly. "Can you help me?" she asked the robin. It said nothing, but it pointed the way with its wing and then flew in front of her.

At last, she arrived at a golden house in the middle of the wood. Marie went up to the door and rang the bell, but no one she could see carne to the door. The door opened, and invisible hands led her inside. They took her into a room with a long table, filled with all sorts of food, and helped her to sit down. Marie began to get the feeling that she was not alone. The room appeared empty, but soon, someone spoke. "You cannot see me, but I am the master of this house. I am a prince, and I am under a spell. Your wicked stepmother is a witch who has also enchanted me, so that I am invisible. Only if you will go on a long journey can I be freed." "What must I do?" said Marie. "You must take this golden box, without saying a word to anyone, and without opening it, and carry it through the woods to the good fairy of the lake."

Marie picked up the box and carried it away. But the task was hard. The wood was scary; it was full of matted thorns, and bats which hated people and flew at her. Once she met an old woman who tried to talk to her, and once a man who looked kind asked her where she was going, but she remembered what the prince had said and refused to say a word. sometimes she found herself scraping away clinging vines in order to make her way. Sometimes she stopped and rested, but she never gave up. And sometimes she wished she knew what was in the box, but she never opened it.

And at last, the wood was behind her and a beautiful lake was in front of her. And there, beside the lake, was a lovely woman who could only be the good fairy of the lake. Taking the box from Marie, the fairy said, "My child, you have fulfilled the task which was laid on you. Now I shall open the box, and both you and the prince will be free forever." The fairy opened the box, and a sweet smell filled the air. Suddenly, the prince was standing beside Marie, now visible. He kissed her and said, "Your wicked stepmother, the witch, is dead, because you were faithful. Now you shall be my queen."

And they lived happily ever after.

I hope there are some parents out there who will find the material useful, despite the need for browsing. I've been wanting for a long time to get it preserved electronically. The problem was that much of it was hand written and, beyond that, the old floppy disks containing all the typed lessons have been misplaced. My heartfelt thanks to Jason Thueme for the scanning job and to Tim McGrew for help with the scanning, for the use of his fancy scanner, and for the underlying OCR layer.

Welcome "Ruminations" readers

At the urging of a friend I've recently installed Statcounter, a free software that allows me to find out how many people are viewing Extra Thoughts and where they are coming from. In this way I have learned something I hadn't noticed before--namely, that the Israeli historian Yaacov Lozowick has a link to Extra Thoughts from his blog, Ruminations. And people do come to Extra Thoughts by way of that link. I am extremely pleased to learn this.

Those of you who come to Extra Thoughts by that route may find yourselves a bit surprised or even disoriented. Here is a link from a blog by an Israeli historian to the personal blog of a devout, Protestant Christian who, nowadays, seems to be blogging American gospel music videos in more than half of her posts. Well, stranger things have happened in the blogosphere. Nor should this be very surprising to the politically astute, who have long known that evangelical Christians in America are Israel's best friends--sometimes even more vocal in Israel's defense than Israel's own leaders. Please do look around, and especially, please see the Israel label, the Holocaust label, and the Buchanan label. (There is some overlap among the posts under these labels.)

If you are an Arab or Muslim reader of Yaacov's blog, please understand that I am much less nice than he is, as well as a good deal farther to the right. I treat Extra Thoughts more or less as a personal space, and I don't lose a wink of sleep over deleting comments from Israel-haters, leftist trolls, and the like.

Just now my main thought about Israel is a feeling of bafflement that Netanyahu would consider it something gained to have "direct talks" between Israel and the "Palestinians." As far as I'm concerned, something gained would be cutting off all talks, since they are obviously worse than pointless from Israel's perspective and can do only harm to Israel and no good. (Lawrence Auster calls the Middle East "peace process" the Dance of the Undead, and boy, is he right.) Which, if you are new to Extra Thoughts, probably tells you (along with the scare quotes around "Palestinians") all you need to know about my perspective on Israel.

Bonus: I just learned today of this incredible outrage. The rule of law in England is taking a real beating. A judge (who, despite his blandly British name, apparently was born in Jaffa) led a jury by his summing up to aquit seven thugs who did 180,000 pounds in damage to a factory on the purely political grounds that they were motivated by opposition to Israel. (Evidently they believed that the company in question sold arms to Israel.) The judge sympathizes with their political motives and brought the supposed plight of the Gazans into his summing up to lead the jury to aquit them, despite the fact that the evidence of their actual destructive actions is beyond all question. This isn't the first time that political motivation has been used to acquit thugs in England. The previous time a jury found that a group of thugs had "lawful excuse" to damage a power station because it was allegedly contributing to global warming. But in the anti-Israel case, the judge appears to have been more directly involved; in the "green" case, the cause of the jury's acquittal was apparently sheer propaganda from defense attornies. (HT on this story, VFR.)

How long, I wonder, before this kind of rank court anarchy comes to the United States?