There are many good reasons to seek alternatives to foreign oil, but global warming isn't one of them...

Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile — the list goes on and on.

No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously...

...A compiled list of all the sources can be seen here. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C — a value large enough to wipe out nearly all the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year's time. For all four sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.

Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn't itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.

Let's hope those factors stop fast. Cold is more damaging than heat. The mean temperature of the planet is about 54 degrees. Humans — and most of the crops and animals we depend on — prefer a temperature closer to 70.

Historically, the warm periods such as the Medieval Climate Optimum were beneficial for civilization. Corresponding cooling events such as the Little Ice Age, though, were uniformly bad news.

Maybe ethanol wasn't such a hot idea.

Many 'green' innovations, like solar and wind power, hybrids, cellulosic biomass, etc. are useful, not because they supposedly fight global warming, but because they're an improvement over old, inefficient products. They were viable on their own, without the dopey threat of global warming. If the tempuratures go south, so do their profits.

Speaking of going south, Al Gore may no longer be the Left's Vanilla Jesus.

I hope we're not going to have to deal with 'global cooling' hysterics now. Things change, they always have. We're living on a ball of rock that's blasting around the sun at 67,000 miles per hour, while spinning at the speed of 1000 mph. The ride is bound to be a little bumpy.

Since the kids left for college, I've stopped doing huge weekly shopping trips, reverting to the hunter-gatherer mode, foraging for foods via local restaurants and daily shopping trips. Meals have more variety when I can throw something together or make something up based on what's fresh today.

There are a lot of great ethnic grocery stores in the area, but for an all-purpose trip, the local Eden Market is a great source.

They had some fresh currants for sale, I remembered that I had half a bottle of Nature Isle Mango sauce and too much sour cream in the fridge, so the recipe was mango chicken with currants

1 onion sliced thin
2 chicken cutlets sliced into bite sized pieces
1 tbs. olive oil
1/4 tsp. ground cardamom
1/2 tsp basil
1 tsp parsley
3/4 cup mango hot sauce
splash lime juice
3/4 cup water
sour cream
about 1/4 lb. fresh currants

1. Fry the onion in the olive oil till browned

2. slice the chicken into bite sized pieces. Marinade in about 1/3 cup of mango sauce

3. pull currants from their stems and put into a separate bowl

3. Add ground cardamom, basil, parsley to the oil and stir a bit. Add chicken pieces.

4. Add chicken pieces. Fry till no longer pink. add the rest of the mango hot sauce and bring to a boil. cook till liquid is reduced

5. Use a splash of lime juice and some water to thin sauce and de-stick the pan. Simmer for about 10 minutes, till chicken is done.

6. Stir in sour cream till blended. Then sprinkle the currants on top.

For a really interesting color and texture combination, serve over cooked green bamboo rice

Michael Totten's latest report from Iraq: Guns in the Desert

ANBAR PROVINCE, IRAQ – The Humvee slammed to a halt on the desert road between Fallujah and the town of Al Farris. I peered around the driver's head from the back seat and tried to figure out what was happening.

“Why are we stopping?” I said.

“IED,” Sergeant Guerrero said.

I swallowed and took the lens cap off my camera.

“Where?” I said.

All five Humvees in our convoy had stopped and pulled to the side of the road. None had been hit.

“We think there's one buried off the road around here.”

Two soldiers, including Sergeant Guerrero, stepped out of the vehicle. “Can I get out, too?” I said. I had no idea how long we would stop or if they would even let me out of the truck.

“Sure,” Sergeant Guerrero said. “You can get out.”

All IEDs are dangerous no matter how much body armor you're wearing if you're standing anywhere nearby when they explode. Some create small explosions that are merely intended to harass convoys. Others are formidable anti-tank mines. A smaller number create explosions as big as air strikes and will absolutely destroy you if you're not inside a heavily armored vehicle...

More...

[Don't forget - hit the tipjar!]

The future is still in plastics...

A self-repairing plastic "skin" has been developed and tested by US scientists.

The smart type of plastic, which automatically knits together when cracked or broken, could one day be used to make artificial organs.

The material contains microcapsules filled with a special healing agent.

Like human skin, it bleeds and heals itself, offering a potential breakthrough in vital materials used in surgical implants. It could also prove useful for making rocket and spacecraft components, which cannot be repaired once they are in use.

Frozen Grand Central

..with the hope of solving connectivity problems:

Researchers at Harvard University have developed a new method for setting the brain aglow in a rainbow of colors. The technology will allow scientists to generate maps of one of the brain's last frontiers: the complex tangle of neural circuits that collect, process, and archive information. Such maps could ultimately shed light on the early development of the human brain and on diseases such as autism and schizophrenia, which have been linked to connectivity problems.

"This will be an incredibly powerful tool," says Elly Nedivi, a neuroscientist at MIT who is not involved in the research. "It will open up huge opportunities in terms of looking at neural connectivity."...

...When the mice are fed a compound that activates the enzyme, each cell undergoes a random molecular process in which subsets of the color-coding genes are knocked out. The remaining genes produce the three colored fluorescent compounds in different amounts, which combine to form a unique new hue. "We get a wide range of colors--about 100," says Lichtman. The researchers call the animals "brainbow" mice because of the colorful images they capture of their brains. A new paper describing the process was published today in the journal Nature....

...The ability to paint individual brain cells with such a broad palette will allow neuroscientists to explore neural circuits like never before. Most previous work has focused on larger-scale anatomy or on the function of individual cells, missing out on the detailed wiring in between these two scales. "There's a whole class of disorders of the nervous system that people suspect are due to defects in the connections between nerve cells, but we don't have real tools to trace the connections," says Lichtman. "It would be very useful to look at wiring in animal models of autism spectrum disorder or psychiatric illness."

When neighboring cells are labeled with the same color, as in previous methods, it's difficult to discern each cell's path in the brain. But in this case, neighboring cells are usually different colors, allowing scientists to follow their tangled projections as they branch and synapse throughout the brain. In a proof of principle experiment, the researchers traced all the connections in a small slice of cerebellar tissue, the part of the brain that controls balance and movement. "It will allow scientists to figure out not just what neurons do, but what they do in context of the intact circuit," says Nedivi. "I'm sure the day the paper comes out, everyone and their mother will be calling them and asking for these mice."

More on fluorescent protein and other stuff for looking into the brain.

Link thanks to Icon Index Symbol

A doomsday vault in the Arctic

LONGYEARBYEN, Norway (AFP) - Aimed at providing mankind with a Noah's Ark of food in the event of a global catastrophe, an Arctic "doomsday vault" filled with samples of the world's most important seeds will be inaugurated here Tuesday.

It has the capacity to hold up to 4.5 million batches of seeds from all known varieties of the planet's main food crops, making it possible to re-establish plants if they disappear from their natural environment or are obliterated by major disasters.

"The facility is built to hold twice as many varieties of agricultural crops as we think exist," explained Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust and project mastermind...

...Many of the more vulnerable seed banks have begun contributing to the "doomsday vault" collection, but some of the world's biodiversity has already disappeared, with gene vaults in both Iraq and Afghanistan destroyed by war and a seed bank in the Philippines annihilated by a typhoon.

By the time of the inauguration on Tuesday, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault should hold some 250,000 samples, which will remain the property of their countries of origin.

Pakistan and Kenya, both undergoing periods of serious unrest, have sent seed collections, while samples sent from Colombia have been closely scrutinised by police to avoid the project becoming a vehicle for drug trafficking.

So when the world ends we're still going to be worrying about reefer?

When iPods first came out, I hoped they'd change the way we learn languages...

Learning From a Native Speaker, Without Leaving Home

THE best way to learn a foreign language may be to surround yourself with native speakers. But if you can’t manage a trip abroad the Internet and a broadband computer connection may do the job, too, bringing native speakers within electronic reach for hours of practice.

Web-based services now on the market let people download a daily lesson in French or Hindi, pop on their headsets, and then use Internet telephone service and the power of social networks to try their conversational skills with tutors or language partners from around the world.

For those who want to polish their high-school German before a vacation, or to master snippets of well-intoned Mandarin Chinese to charm a future business host in Shanghai, these sites offer alternatives to more traditional tools like textbooks and CD-ROMs. LiveMocha (livemocha.com), for example, is a free site where members can tackle 160 hours of beginning or intermediate lessons in French, German, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Hindi or English. There is no charge for tutoring; instead, members tutor one another, drawing on their expertise in their own native language.

Members chat online by typing messages, by talking or, if they have a Webcam, by video, in exchanges with others who want to tutor or be tutored. English speakers learning Spanish, for example, can write or speak descriptions of a vacation and receive feedback on their grammar and choice of idioms from native Spanish speakers on the network. A Spanish speaker, in turn, may seek advice from the English speaker about English assignments.

Skype also helps

Another electronic-based language learning program takes a different approach: podcasting. Praxis Language, based in Shanghai, offers free lessons in Mandarin Chinese (ChinesePod.com) or Spanish (SpanishPod.com) as podcasts.

Many lessons include business-based vocabulary on topics like how to hire a courier in China, said Ken Carroll, a co-founder of Praxis. While the podcasts are free, transcripts, exercises and other services typically cost $9 to $30 a month, he said. For $200 a month, members can receive daily tutoring from professional, native-speaking teachers by way of Skype, the Internet-based telephone service.

Mr. Carroll says ChinesePod has more than 270,000 visitors a month, several thousand of them paying about $240 a year for a combination of premium services. Most of the paying customers live in the United States, he said.

[link thanks to Noam]

Beirut veteran Lee Smith writes on The Arabs and Obama

Lee Smith is the former editor-in-chief of The Village Voice Literary Supplement. His work regularly appears in The Weekly Standard and Slate. He is writing a book on Arab culture (which I can't wait to read!) for Doubleday.

David Duke PhD. writes: American Embassy Stormed in Serbia: Why are We Surprised?

No American, and I am no exception, can be happy to see an American embassy attacked and set on fire, the American flag ripped down and almost an entire nation hating the U.S. and the American people with every fiber of the their being.

But, looking at American history in Serbia, what exactly should we expect? Serbia has never been an enemy of the United States yet we have committed acts of war and terrorism against it. We have dispatched armies and invaded it, dropped bombs on civilian targets such as bridges, office buildings and power plants, and we have dictated what Serbia does within its own nation...

...In the 1990s the conflict came to a head with ethnic attacks against Serbians rising to a fever pitch along with calls for Independence. The nation then known as Yugoslavia struggled against this separatist movement and a radical guerrilla war against Serbians began in earnest by the KLA, The Kosovo Liberation Army.

It is not America’s business to decide anything about another country halfway around the world...

..When warfare broke out in the mid 1990s between the Serbians under Milošević and the revolutionary Albanians in the Serbian province of Kosovo. Immediately the Jewish-influenced U.S. sided with Kosovo and waged a violent, yet undeclared war with Serbia. America’s Jewish foreign policy bosses then influenced Britain and ultimately NATO to go to war against Serbia.

An overwhelming, high tech American military force attacked not only the Serbian military forces within Kosovo and Serbia, but even bombed the civilian infrastructure throughout the nation of Serbia. City Bridges and power stations, civilian trains, and civilian buildings were bombed all over the country, even in the Serbian capitol of Belgrade. Such Bombings are routinely described by the Jewish media as terrorism when done by opponents of American policy, but when America does it, it is called “peace-keeping operations.” At the time it occurred I wrote about how sick to the stomach I felt seeing American bombs falling on a European capitol...

...Jewish supremacists lead and control the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Federal Reserve, and are able to use these instruments to force nations to support Israel’s interests in the UN and in other international bodies.

They have gotten America involved in the internal affairs of Serbia in order to weaken a nation where Zionists have little influence, while at the same time make newly independent nations such as Kosovo, nations that must be completely dependent on U.S. military support and thus dependent on the Jewish powerbrokers.

Duke really does have to spin himself dizzy trying to blame this all on the Jews, but, you know, that's his job. Otherwise, his defense of the Serbs reads like the rest.

UPDATE: In related news, the BNP is expressing solidarity with the Serbs.

Christopher Hitchens in Slate:

It is very important to remember that Slobodan Milosevic launched his own petty and violent career, as the head of a Serb-Montenegrin crime family, precisely by canceling Kosovo's pre-existing autonomy in 1990, remaking himself as a nationalist demagogue instead of a Communist one, and bringing in the roof of the Yugoslav federation.

You will by now have read dark remarks made by partisans of the Russian and Serb Orthodox viewpoint, to the effect that if one "secession" is allowed, then what is to prevent every Gypsy or Chechen or Ossetian from proclaiming their own statelet? You should, first, ask if the Bosnian Serbs ought not to have thought of this first and been better advised by the "realist" or Kissinger school that now weeps such hypocritical tears. You should, second, ask if you know of any case comparable to the Kosovo one, where a national minority was so long imprisoned within an artificial state.

Of course, one ought to acknowledge that this is a calamity for the Serbs and indeed an injustice in the sense of an insult to their pride and history. But the injustice was self-inflicted.

Alessio Vinci in CNN "Serb protests echo Milosevic era"

The melancholic Serb music, the firebrand speeches and the flags gave the sense of a nation at odds with the rest of the world, a victim of an incredible injustice.

It was very much a gathering aimed at showing Serb unity, but the nationalist element was very much present.

Tomislav Nikolic, the ultranationalist leader who narrowly lost a presidential election a few weeks ago was there. And so was Vojslav Kostunica, the Serbian prime minister, who led anti-Milosevic demonstrations in 2000 without ever being a big fan of the West. "For as long as we live, Kosovo will be in Serbia!" he told the crowd. These could have been Milosevic's words of a decade ago.

The Serbian government organized the rally to show the world Serb indignation and anger at Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence. People arrived from all over Serbia also thanks to free transport, including trains and buses.

Serb officials have been consistent in saying that they will challenge Kosovo's independence politically and diplomatically, and ruled out any use of force.

But images of the burning U.S. Embassy in Belgrade are making that effort, already pretty much a lost cause, much harder. Indeed Serbia's pro-West president Boris Tadic reacted saying that violence is putting Kosovo further away from Serbia, not closer.

Yet one cannot ignore the inadequate security that Serb officials put in place to protect sensitive sites at a time of high tension and passion. On Sunday, hours after Kosovo declared independence, Serb riot police fought pitch battles with thugs and violent demonstrators outside the U.S. compound as they tried to storm it a first time.

Where were they Thursday night?..

Alan Sullivan at Fresh Bilge:

The US Embassy in Belgrade has been sacked by an angry mob. The building was unoccupied at the time; our courageous diplomats had already fled. Embassies used to be regarded as sovereign territory of nations that set them up. The US has shown little interest in defending this principle in recent decades, so it gets easier and easier for such outrages to occur.

Of course, the Kosovo border should have been redrawn before the independence declaration. Now there’s no telling what will happen. It is well to remember where World War One began.

Paul L. Williams, Ph.D. - Bush Administration Unites with al Qaeda in Kosovo

The turmoil in Kosovo began in 1989 when Slovodan Milosevic, president of Serbia and the Free Republic of Yugoslavia, set out to create a greater Serbia by annexing Kosovo. When the Kosovo assembly approved this measure, ethnic Albanians (the sanitized way of saying native Muslims) rebelled. In 1990 Milosevic dispatched troops into Kosovo to squelch the rebellion and restore order. In 1992, the ethnic Albanians responded to this military measure by establishing their own government in Kosovo - - the Republic of Kosovo - - with self proclaimed pacifist Ibrahim Rugova as its president.

With two governments in one tiny country, the situation quickly became downright ugly. In 1993 Milosevic ordered the arrest of thirty ethnic Albanians for planning an armed uprising. In 1995 a Serbian court sentenced sixty-eight members of Rugova's government to prison for setting up a parallel police force. ..

To aid in the struggle for independence, the ethnic Albanians turned to Osama bin Laden and the mujahadeen. Muslim warriors from Chechnya, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia traveled in droves to Kosovo. By 1995 more than sixty thousand holy warriors, including members of al Qaeda, had made their way to the Balkans to prepare for the struggle against Milosevic and the Christian Serbs.

So, if the ethnic Albanians "provoked" the Serbs, then why did the Milosevic's JNA and militia forces use their military superiority to trash Croatia? And why did the Croatians respond by trashing the Serbs, killing 14,000 Serb civilians, looting Serb property, and killing and mutilating Serb civilians?

What would have happened if American and the international community had done nothing? How far would the fighting have spread?

Muslim terrorism/fascism is a threat because they’re fighting us with the equivalent of bearskins and knives, yet they manage to terrify millions. They’ve only gotten as far as they have because so very few people want to fight them. Islamist terrorism is also a threat because it may provoke a European reaction. When Europeans decide to fight, they tend to vote for groups that, to most American eyes, look fairly fascist. When they decide to fight, they have a history of being more aggressive than any other culture on earth.

And, when the Euros get their game going, the Balkans tend to be at the epicenter of the worst of it. That may be one reason why we originally felt the need to intervene.

The majority of American conservatives oppose fascism but for some reason that I can't begin to fathom, some are leaning towards the idea that the best way to fight Islamist-fascism is to ally with Eurofascism.

In the comment's section at Atlas, a supporter of the Serbian point of view said:

What would you do if someone from another country came to your home...tossed you out, placed soldiers in your backyard to keep you from your home.........and then gave your home and all your belongings to a terrorist group based thousands of mile away? Would you merely accept it? Would you consider those who stole your land to be friends? "YOU ARE EITHER WITH US OR AGAINST US!!"

I responded:

Yeah cry me a river. This is the old whiny bully routine - hit me in face, then cry about how victimized you are. It the old sad song that terrorists like the Palestinians and their Islamist supporters have been playing so well.

So who am I WITH or AGAINST? I'm against the whiny bullies.

Lawhawk describes the media and CAIR's current war against Charles Johnson's LGF:

How is it that media outlets (and here) in St. Louis can run stories about comments left on those websites without actually interviewing any of the principles involved? Is this the face of the media in 2008? Charles Johnson is rightfully pissed off about this. I can't blame him one bit.

His website is being smeared by CAIR. CAIR is hoping to get the FBI investigating the site for four comments made yesterday (and subsequently deleted by Charles after he was made aware of them). CAIR never once tried to contact Charles directly. That's bad enough.

Even worse, none of the media outlets attempted to contact Charles, despite the fact that Charles has been interviewed by media outlets in the past (for his exposure of the Rathergate fraud), has a handy-dandy contact form on every page, and openly reminds all posters that comments are subject to deletion and posters banned for threatening violence. All four of the posts have been subsequently deleted.

The email conversation between Charles and Tim Townsend, who works the religion beat for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, is posted here:

From: Charles Johnson
Sent: Wednesday, February 20, 2008 12:22 PM
To: Tim Townsend
Subject: Re: A very irresponsible report

And I’ll take your unwillingness to address a single other point in my email as evidence that you know you’re in the wrong.

CJ

————————

On Feb 20, 2008, at 10:25 AM, Tim Townsend wrote:

Oooohh. You’re like a master of logic. So smart.

————————

From: Charles Johnson
Sent: Wednesday, February 20, 2008 12:28 PM
To: Tim Townsend
Subject: Re: A very irresponsible report

This little thread of emails will be forwarded to your editors, by the way.

You may want to brush up on reading comprehension as well, because I did not say you wrote “anti-Muslim”. If you had bothered to read my post on the matter, you would know where that comes from.

CJ

————————

On Feb 20, 2008, at 10:42 AM, Tim Townsend wrote:

Wow, you’re going to TELL on me?

You ranted to a reporter, demanding an apology for his story, and wrote “LGF is a highly reputable blog, and we are NOT ‘anti-Muslim.’” How could you possibly think I would not take that as directed at the story?

————————

It's not clear if the report was intentionally biased or just sloppy reporting, but it is a fact that some in the mass media are not fans of blogs.

But they're also not fans of getting angry letters from lawyers. Neither is CAIR. Many bloggers are lawyers.

Which may have prompted this retraction from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch?

Garbage, "Push it"

From Shabba Goy's Pimp my Revolution:

And while we are at it - spare me the stuff about "well, yes, but the healthcare system...". It is a myth. Walk into a Cuban chemists and try and find the medicine that you need. The shelves are empty. The hospitals are lacking basic resources. There are great doctors and some of them are doing genuinely wonderful work in Castro's propaganda campaigns abroad. But for the average Cuban, you better not get sick.

And every time I read the phrase 'Miami mafia' I can't help but chalk up another little victory for Castro's propaganda campaign in the West. Even people who will say not a good word about Castro will come out with this crap about Florida gangsters determined to destroy the great health system.

Think about it, there are 1.2 million Cuban-Americans. 1.2 MILLION. They include people who fled Cuba in fear, people who wanted simply to escape poverty, people who had been threatened by the regime, people who lost everything when Castro's gang stole their property, Afro-Cubans escaping double or triple-oppression, all manner of people with all manner of reasons for wanting to live in a free country. Dismissing them all as evil casino owners and pimps who can't wait to get back to Havana and start dealing drugs is just so clearly ludicrous yet it is constantly present in any discourse about the prospect of change in Cuba. To the average European lefty, the very phrase Cuban-American makes someone suspicious.

French President Sarkozy proposes a new way to teach children about the Holocaust. From the NY Times article, By Making Holocaust Personal to Pupils, Sarkozy Stirs Anger:

President Nicolas Sarkozy dropped an intellectual bombshell this week, surprising the nation and touching off waves of protest with his revision of the school curriculum: beginning next fall, he said, every fifth grader will have to learn the life story of one of the 11,000 French children killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust.

“Nothing is more moving, for a child, than the story of a child his own age, who has the same games, the same joys and the same hopes as he, but who, in the dawn of the 1940s, had the bad fortune to be defined as a Jew,” Mr. Sarkozy said at the end of a dinner speech to France’s Jewish community on Wednesday night. He added that every French child should be “entrusted with the memory of a French child-victim of the Holocaust.”...

...Mr. Sarkozy’s advisers acknowledged that he came up with his Holocaust plan for schoolchildren without any formal consultation. In the face of the criticism, however, Mr. Sarkozy vowed to proceed.

“It is ignorance — not knowledge — that leads to the repetition of abominable situations,” he said during a visit to Périgueux in central France on Friday, adding, “You do not traumatize children by giving them the gift of the memory of a country.”

This sounds reasonable. Why would people be so angry?

Adding to the national fracas over the announcement, Mr. Sarkozy wrapped his plan in the cloak of religion, placing blame for the wars and violence of the last century on an “absence of God” and calling the Nazi belief in a hierarchy of races “radically incompatible with Judeo-Christian monotheism.”...

But there is something else. Mr. Sarkozy is shattering another barrier in French intellectual life: religion. His public statements on the subject seem to reflect a deeply held belief that religious values have an important place in everyday French society — an iconoclastic position for a French politician.

When Mr. Sarkozy was made an Honorary Canon of the Basilica of St. John Lateran in Rome last December, he proposed a “positive secularism” that “does not consider religions a danger, but an asset.” He was even more provocative in declaring that “the schoolteacher will never be able to replace the priest or the pastor” in teaching the difference between good and evil.

Oh.

According to historical record, relying on the priest or the pastor to teach the difference between good and evil might not be such a hot idea.

Priests salute

Sarkozy is saying that children should learn from history; they should learn how to avoid the repetition of abominable situations, like the rise of an authoritarian, genocidal regime. But history shows that the Christian establishment did not prevent the rise of the Nazis, or the Holocaust. In fact, the Nazis agenda of racial "purification" would not have worked without the cooperation of many Christian churches.

From a review of Pope Benedict XVI: A Biography of Joseph Ratzinger:

Many ordinary Catholics objected to attacks on their church, but there was simply no opposition to Nazism tout ensemble. ... In fact, there were key points at which Nazi and Catholic attitudes intersected and created a basis for mutual support. Both groups hated the Weimar Republic. The Nazis opposed Weimar because it was allegedly too Jewish and led by the “November Criminals” who sold out the country after the First World War; Catholics objected to it because it smacked of liberalism, sexual degeneracy, and an irreligious spirit.

Cardinal Faulhaber, for example, gave a speech in May 1933 in which he expressed thanks for the Volksgemeinschaft, or spirit of community, which Hitler had fostered, and rejected “liberal individualism.” Moreover, Catholics shared with Nazis an instinctive fear of the Bolsheviks.

Finally, there was a form of anti-Jewish sentiment that was openly accepted among Catholics, based in part on the theological argument that the Jews sinned by rejecting Christ and in part on the historical fact that many Jews had played leading roles in the Kulturkampf. As early as 1925, a Franciscan priest named Erhard Schuland wrote a book called “Katholizismus und Vaterland” (Catholicism and Fatherland) that called on Germans to fight “the destructive influence of the Jews in religion, morality, literature and art, and political and social life.” Schuland expressed what was very much the consensus in German Catholicism of the day...

Hitler Fan

Many Protestant leaders embraced "postitive Christianity"

The Christianity promoted by the Nazis was labeled “positive Christianity,” a perspective that focused on the relationship between Christian promises of salvation and the German Volk as a special race of people. Point 24 of the NSDAP Party Program, created in 1920 and never rescinded, reads:

“We demand freedom for all religious confessions in the state, insofar as they do not endanger its existence or conflict with the customs and moral sentiments of the Germanic race. The party as such represents the standpoint of a positive Christianity, without owing itself to a particular confession. It fights the spirit of Jewish materialism within us and without us, and is convinced that a lasting recovery of our Volk can only take place from within, on the basis of the principle: public need comes before private greed.”

Saluting the State Bishop

Christian leaders were often eager to cooperate because they preferred the Nazis to the Communists and the Weimar regime. When some Jews converted to Christianity because they feared for their lives, Christian leaders gave the names of those Jews to the Nazis. Even after the war, Christian leaders were wary of helping the allies, because they feared that eliminating all Nazis would leave Communists and Social Democrats in charge

We criticize the Europeans for their rejection of religion now, but it is entirely likely that they rejected religion because of this legacy of Christian cooperation with the Nazis. Their goal of these religious leaders was not to defend good from evil, it was to maintain respect for authority and the social order. The current French reaction to Sarkozy's belief that "the schoolteacher will never be able to replace the priest or the pastor" in teaching the difference between good and evil" is almost reasonable because of this legacy.

So, what does history teach us about the growth of authoritarian, genocidal fascism? It shows us that Hitler didn't gain power by encouraging racism or violence. He gained it by promising to empower the German people. The majority of Germans, secular and religious, did not approve of the open violence of Kristallnacht. It was unpopular even within Nazi circles. In 1936, the Gestapo criticized "Hitler's toleration of the corruption and luxury life-style of the Party big-wigs at a time when poor living standards still afflicted most ordinary Germans"

Hitler regained popularity by proving that he was the strong horse. One day after the Gestapo report was submitted, German troops marched into the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland. After that, Hitler's approval rate rose exponentially. He was beloved by the majority of Germans, and they would do anything for him. Until he started losing the war.

In addition to teaching them about the lives of Jewish children, if Sarkozy wants children to learn how to defy and weaken authoritarian, genocidal regimes, he could teach them about the Rosenstrasse Protest, where non-Jewish women protested against the imprisonment of their Jewish husbands and children by the Nazis. Even though the Gestapo threatened to shoot them, the women kept up their protest. Goebbels and Hitler eventually ordered the release of the intermarried prisoners in order to dissolve the protest. All the Jews released from Rosenstrasse survived the war.

Scene from the film Rosenstrasse

Sarkozy could also teach them about the effectiveness of the Allies military strategy. He could also teach them about the brilliant strategist and orator, Winston Churchill, who said that religion “is a delicious narcotic. It may soothe our pains and chase our worries, but it checks our growth and saps our strength..”

He can teach them that past and current events prove that the resistance of individual citizens, backed up by a non-authoritarian state with a decent military force will help us avoid the repetition of abominable situations.

The sleazy punk making this extortionate threat wasn't Tommy "Sneakers" Cacciopoli or Frankie "Breeze" Calabrese. This bit of cheap extortionism was most recently issued by one of our Saudi royal friends - specifically His Royal Highness Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz.

..the same Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz who was appointed Secretary-General of the National Security Council by the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King "moderate ally" Abdullah.

..the same Bandar who, prior to his appointment, served as the Ambassador of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to the USA from October 24, 1983 to September 8, 2005, and who was a beloved friend to all of our presidents, democrats and republican.

According to court documents from the BAE case in Britain, Bandar threatened Britain with "another 7/7" and the loss of "British lives on British streets" if they continued their investigation into the scandal.

Saudi Arabia's rulers threatened to make it easier for terrorists to attack London unless corruption investigations into their arms deals were halted, according to court documents revealed yesterday.

Previously secret files describe how investigators were told they faced "another 7/7" and the loss of "British lives on British streets" if they pressed on with their inquiries and the Saudis carried out their threat to cut off intelligence.

Prince Bandar, the head of the Saudi national security council, and son of the crown prince, was alleged in court to be the man behind the threats to hold back information about suicide bombers and terrorists. He faces accusations that he himself took more than £1bn in secret payments from the arms company BAE.

He was accused in yesterday's high court hearings of flying to London in December 2006 and uttering threats which made the prime minister, Tony Blair, force an end to the Serious Fraud Office investigation into bribery allegations involving Bandar and his family.

The threats halted the fraud inquiry, but triggered an international outcry, with allegations that Britain had broken international anti-bribery treaties.

This is the same extortionist Bandar who, according to the BBC, enjoyed unparalleled access to centres of power in the US and played an important behind-the-scenes role in diplomacy and international deals.

..the same Bandar who was so beloved by Jimmy Carter and his family.

The same Bandar who has permission to land at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington.

The same Bandar who, according to Bob Woodward, was secretly briefed on our plans to get Saddam out of Iraq - and whose approval was so essential to our plans.

The same Bandar who sent thousands of dollars to 9/11 hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar.

Good thing the FBI did an investigation and found out that there was no connection between our royal Saudi friends and terrorism.

Now that we know the beloved Prince Bandar is an extortionist, the next step would be to find out how often he's successfully made threats like this. I'm sure top men are working tirelessly on that question right now.

UPDATE: Mere Rhetoric has more:

We're not saying that this is the kind of thing that's been holding up the investigation into how Saudi money is corrupting future diplomats at Georgetown... No really, it's not. We just needed a way to work that investigation into a post, and "the corrupting influence of Saudi money" is the least strained hook we could come up with. It's not bribery or blackmail as much as it's the usual anti-American intellectual alliance between State Department sophisticates and Our Friends the Saudis. Unseemly, but probably not illegal.

Almost difficult to imagine how US foreign policy elites came up with the brilliant idea of giving the Saudis 20 billion in cutting edge weapons.

More from The Dungeon of Fallujah

Sergeant Dehaan was comfortable with his mission in Iraq and the flaws of the Iraqi Police he was tasked with training and molding.

“I prefer these small and morally ambiguous wars to the big morally black-and-white wars,” he said to me later. “It would be nice if we had more support back home like we did during World War II. But look at how many people were killed in World War II. If a bunch of unpopular small wars prevent another popular big war, I'll take ’em.”

Unpopular small wars are usually unpopular in America because the objective of these wars is not to defend the American people. Sure, the politicians can claim that these wars are being fought to protect us, but as Lincoln said, you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.

The Bush administration sold the war in Iraq as a part of the war against terrorism, and as a way of protecting the world from Saddams proto-nuclear arsenal. Bush, Cheney and the rest of the world did, for the most part, agree that Saddam probably was planning to build up a nuclear arsenal. The rest of the world also agreed that, if Saddam did posess any WMDs, he'd be likely to use them, since he'd used them in the past. Saddam could also use the threat of these weapons to intimidate every other nation in the region, much in the same way as Saudi Prince Bandar uses al Qaeda to intimidate the west. The effectiveness of the weapon sometimes takes a backseat to its effectiveness as a threat. Since the State Department has never abandoned the domino theory or the Carter Doctrine, our government saw Saddams ability to threaten his neighbors as a problem that would imbalance the 'stability' of the region, something leading to a larger war.

Bush and Rumsfeld's idea didn't work out as planned, and our tendency to be intimidated by threats of nukes is still a weak point, but, conversely, American actions in Iraq may prevent a larger war. Not due to Rumsfeld's efforts, but due to Petraeus' efforts and the work that the troops have been doing to support the Anbar Awakening.

According to Bill Roggio's post in the Long War Journal, Sheik Abdul Sattar Al-Rishawi and his allies among the tribes and anti al Qaeda insurgent groups only began forming alliances in the spring and summer of 2006.

John Nagl didn't publish his counter-insurgency manual untill 2005. Before that, the army didn't do counterinsurgency. Apparently they were burned by Vietnam, so they decided to avoid those kind of wars. I can't begin to fathom the logic there, but the attitude is finally changing.

We're only beginning to learn how to deal with terrorism. It will be another few years before we can expect to see any real change, given the intractable nature of our foreign policy and the state department. However, we are finally beginning to move in a positive direction. In our small, unpopular war in Iraq, men like General Petraeus and Sergeant Dehaan have shown the world that, when people refuse to cooperate with terrorism, when they actively fight against it (with the help of the state or army), terrorist militias become the weak horse. We are, slowly but surely, developing effective counterterrorism measures. As we do so, we eliminate the usefulness of terrorism as a weapon of war.

Michael Totten posts his latest report from the Dungeon of Fallujah

It was darker in there. The men hadn’t shaved. They sat on the floor and squinted up at the police holding weapons. And they squinted at me. Unlike the suspected criminals in the previous room, none smiled or greeted us in any way. They did not seem curious. They looked at us as if we were bugs.

“They’re extremely violent,” Sergeant Dehaan said as though they weren’t sitting right there in front of us. He patted his rifle. “They’re treated the same as everyone else, but they have to be segregated.”

My skin tingled and I felt flashes of heat. These men would kill me if I met them anywhere else.

Not all Middle Eastern terrorists are alike. I have been inside Hezbollah’s headquarters south of Beirut. I brushed shoulders with Hamas leaders in the Palestinian parliament, although I was there to interview other people. Never once did I worry that the Lebanese or Palestinian terrorists would actually harm me. Al Qaeda is different. These guys are like Arabic Hannibal Lectors.

“Is it safe to be in here?” I said.

“Well,” Sergeant Dehaan said. “There’s five cops. And me.”

Last summer in Ramadi I met a handful of detainees who were suspected of being Al Qaeda. They looked like doofuses who couldn’t get a date or a job.

Most of the men in this room looked like they were perfectly willing to murder us all with their hands. I could see it in their eyes, in the sinister way some of them squinted at me, in the tightness of their jaw muscles. I wished I had a gun of my own.

Should we have even been standing there in the first place? More than 50 potential killers all but surrounded us. They sat on the floor, but some of them were less than three feet away.

Speaking of feeling the fear, being locked in a prison with violently nihilistic terrorists who would be happy to kill me (and who outnumber the cops!) would have to rank as #1 on my own not-to-do list.

If anyone deserves to be paid for the work they do, it's Michael Totten. Please don't forget to hit the tip jar!

17 Danish newspapers print controversial Mohammed cartoon

COPENHAGEN (AFP) - At least 17 Danish newspapers printed a controversial cartoon of Prophet Mohammed Wednesday, vowing to defend freedom of expression a day after police foiled a murder plot against the cartoonist...

...The Danish press has unanimously condemned the alleged murder plot against Westergaard, who has lived in hiding for the past three months.

Even the centre-left newspaper of reference, Politiken, which was most critical of Jyllands-Posten's decision in 2005 to publish the cartoons, joined in the cries of condemnation.

The alleged murder plot was "deeply shocking and worrying" and "shows that there are fanatic Islamists who are ready to make good on their threats and there are people in this country who neither respect freedom of expression nor the law," an editorial read.

It said the media should stand behind Jyllands-Posten "when it is threatened with terrorism".

Members of Denmark's Muslim community have distanced themselves from the alleged murder plot, but opposed the publication of the cartoon on Wednesday.

Imam Walid Abdul Pedersen, a Protestant who converted to Islam, said: "It's not a good idea to reproduce it and the newspapers could have defended the cartoonist differently, without resorting to provocation."

"It's good to have a dialogue on freedom of expression, but you shouldn't seek out a confrontation from the start," he said.

He said it was possible the reprinting could prompt "negative reactions abroad."....

So who is doing the provoking here..?

Johann Hari on the difference between multiculturalism and liberalism:

Multiculturalism was formed with good intentions as a counter-reaction. But it has become a mirror-image of this old racism, treating Muslim women – and others – as so different that they do not deserve the same rights as the rest of us. As the European-Iranian feminist Azar Majedi puts it: "By creating different laws and judicial systems for each ethnic group, we are not fighting racism. In fact, we are institutionalising it."

When people talk about defending Muslim culture, ask them – which culture? The culture of Irum and Nasireen, or the culture of their abusive husbands? Multiculturalism patronisingly treats immigrants as homogenous blocks – when in fact they are as diffuse and dissenting as the rest of us. Would anybody lump me in with Richard Littlejohn and Nick Griffin as part of a "white community"?

There is a better way for the state to understand and regulate human differences, beyond the old oppositions of Tebbittry and multiculturalism. It is called liberalism. A liberal society allows an individual to do whatever he or she wants, provided it doesn't harm other people. You can choose to wear PVC hotpants or a veil. You can choose to spend all day praying, or all day mocking people who pray.

Where a multiculturalist prizes the rights of religious groups, a liberal favours the rights of the individual. So if you want to preach that the Archangel Gabriel revealed the word of God to an illiterate nomad two millennia ago, you can do it as much as you like. You can write books and hold rallies and make your case. What you cannot do is argue that since this angel supposedly said women are worth half of a man when it comes to inheritance, and that gay people should be killed, you can ditch the rules of liberalism and act on it.

The job of a liberal state is not to stamp The True National Essence on its citizens, nor to promote "difference" for its own sake. It is to uphold the equal rights of every individual – whether they are white men or Muslim women. It has one liberal culture, with freedoms used differently by different people.

Via the London Times: I was forced to marry my cousin - it's normal in my culture, but SO WRONG

These days Khaleda Begum, 25, hardly leaves the confines of her one-bedroom flat.

And when she does, her heart thumps and she looks over her shoulder in terror. For, in the eyes of her Muslim family, Khaleda has done the unthinkable.

Disgusted by her arranged marriage to a cousin - a suitor found for her by her father - she has fled her family home and now, fearful of reprisals, lives under police protection.

Khaleda's story makes shocking reading for anyone who is under the misguided belief that such marriages do not regularly go on in Britain today.

For Khaleda, who was born in Britain and took GCSEs and A-levels at her British school in the hope of becoming a teacher in this country, was forced by her father to go to Pakistan and marry his cousin - a man 20 years her senior, who spoke no English and whom she had never even met.

And according to Khaleda - who today, having escaped "the marriage from hell," lives in hiding with her British partner, Phil - she is far from alone.

She says: "Virtually every Asian girl I have ever met has an arranged marriage and the vast majority of them are to their cousins.

"It is well known within the community that such marriages do produce deformed babies. No one talks about it, but it is one of the reasons why I found such a marriage to someone so closely related to myself to be so very repugnant.

"Just before I was forced to marry I heard of one of my cousins who'd been forced to marry her auntie's son...

"They had a baby daughter who died and when they asked doctors why, they were told it was because of inter-breeding. They were told the parents were too closely related to have a normal baby.

"And this was just one of many instances I would hear of. Anyone who thinks it doesn't happen is in denial. As I know from the most painful and personal experience, it is barbaric and unnatural.

"Marrying someone who is related to you - and being forced to do so - goes against all your natural urges. It is not racist to tell the truth. What I cannot understand is why it is allowed to go on in this country at all."...

...And so another young Muslim woman's life is ruined by this outdated practice. Just how many more babies will have to be born deformed, or even dead, before it is finally stopped?

Similar stories can be told by the Amish in America. Incest and forced marriages are against the law in the majority of states in America for many reasons, only one of which is the health of children. We're not talking about free people making individual choices here.

I don't understand why this happens, but I do know that when it does, it a sign of a very sick society..

Firefighters have called for more protection after a new report revealed a shocking catalogue of attacks against crews who face the daily threat of being ambushed, shot at, stabbed and abused.

The Fire Brigades Union claimed that the number of incidents is increasing even though official figures show a fall in attacks against crews.

The union estimated there are 40 attacks on firemen and women every week and said the number of incidents recorded by fire authorities in England and Wales are four times those in the official Government statistics.

Attacks increased by 15% last year but official Government figures showed a dramatic fall of 68%, said the union. In some parts of the country, attacks are so frequent that they are no longer reported, according to the FBU.

Firefighters have been pelted with bricks, bottles and stones as they tried to tackle fires and have been lured into ambushes by hoax calls, according to the report.

Some people have set booby traps for crews who have also been attacked with knives, petrol bombs and lumps of wood.

FBU general secretary Matt Wrack said it is almost "beyond belief" that firemen and women can be attacked so viciously while fighting fires and trying to save lives.

More at Mere Rhetoric

Afghanistan is suffering through the worst winter in recent history

The snow is finally melting and the roads reopening in western and central Afghanistan, and the thaw is revealing the true impact of the worst winter in living memory.

Officially 800 people have died, but many more will no doubt have frozen to death when the snow fell heavier and the temperatures dropped lower than anybody expected. ..

...The extreme temperatures and heavy snow struck parts of the country that are not usually hit.

Heavy snow in mountains

All that can be seen from the air is a vast blanket of snow "About 800 people died, many around Herat and Herat province," says Dr Abdul Matin Adrak, director of the Afghanistan National Disaster Management Authority.

"All the people were out of their houses with animals, they were busy with them on the land, but the snow struck and they died."

According to officials, it was the worst winter in 100 years for parts of China

BEIJING: Some parts of China have seen their worst weather in 100 years this winter, with the recent snowfalls the biggest in that time, a meteorological official said on Monday.

"For some provinces such as Hubei and Hunan (both in central China), it's been the biggest snowfall in 100 years," said an official at China Meteorological Administration's publicity department.

"Other provinces have had the biggest snowfall in 50 years. Others again, the biggest snowfall in decades," said the official, who declined to be named.

Snowstorms and freezing temperatures have left millions of Chinese stranded at rail stations and bus depots as they have tried in vain to get home for Thursday's Lunar New Year, the biggest festival in the Chinese calendar.

..and in Madison Wisconsin..

MADISON - Madison has set a new record for snowfall

The state's second-largest city broke its old seasonal record when 1.8 inches of snow fell overnight, bringing the total for this season to 77.3 inches, according to the National Weather Service.

"There's no official word yet but we have enough on the ground to say the seasonal snowfall record is broken,"

Weather Central meteorologist Brian Olson said.

and in Fairplay, Colorado..

FAIRPLAY - Emergency crews in Park County are manning the telephone lines and hearing from many people stuck at home because of snow packed roads. It's estimated about 100 people live off those county roads that snow removal crews just haven't been able to keep up with this winter.

Of course the global warming advocates will ignore this, but I'm sure the average consumer is paying attention.

I figured that the 'green' industry would suffer when the weather started getting cold, but I didn't expect the Gorebots to be proven wrong so soon..

Thanks to Karol, a link to a very New York food and restaurant blog - Eater.

Of course, a New York foodie blog has to have a compliants department. From NYC Nightlife Taskforce Raid

So, my place was invaded last Friday night, February 1, 2008. The space is approximately 650 square feet, with room for 50-60 comfortably. At 11:30 PM, peak time, 18 government agents descended on our asses. We had NYPD, DOH, FDNY, SLA, and DOB. 18 people in all, single filed their way right in. And stayed for an hour, lights on, music off.

Louis 649 is a live music venue. Yeah, it's fucking loud and the neighbor upstairs complains. Yadda yadda yadda. She also pays $250 for a real two bedroom. Two hundred and fifty dollars. On 9th Street and Avenue C. And I'm not a yuppy business owner who doesn't understand. I'm a 24 year old welfare child from the Bronx who busts his ass. I pay $700 for my sprawling apartment in the Bronx and I got motherfuckers hanging outside my window smoking pot and bullshitting all night. Cue the violin.

The problem is, I'm wondering if there's any illegality in the modus operandi of this "Task Force" and the way they barge in during peak hours with so many people. I understand if we had a history of drug problems, under age drinking, violence, or whatever other "serious" problem you can think of. But we are a problem bar because of some really loud, live jazz.

Bay Ridge, 1958

I can't add anything to Charles Johnson's description of Hamas' Jew-Eating Rabbit:

In the Hamas kids’ show Pioneers of Tomorrow, the degenerates responsible for this sick trash have killed off their giant bee character Nahoul (dead because the evil Israelis stopped him from getting medical treatment), and replaced him with a malevolent rabbit that eats Jews.

Yes, really.

Islamophobia watch is now claiming that criticism of incest is Islamophobia:

Ann Cryer a Labour MP called for the NHS to do more to warn parents of the dangers of inbreeding.

"This is to do with a medieval culture where you keep wealth within the family," she said. "I have encountered cases of blindness and deafness. There was one poor girl who had to have an oxygen tank on her back and breathe from a hole in the front of her neck. The parents were warned they should not have any more children. But when the husband returned again from Pakistan, within months they had another child with exactly the same condition."

According to Islamophobia Watch:

Jo Revill points out that "his claims don't appear to be supported by medical evidence. The risk of a child having birth defects if the parents are cousins is double that of other children, which means the risk rises from about 3 per cent in the general population to about 6 per cent when there is consanguinity (when the parents are closely related)."

However, Revill did not address the fact that the issue was first raised when research showed British Pakistanis were 13 times more likely to have children with recessive disorders than the general population. Also, has anyone studied the cumulative effect of a long-standing familial tradition of first-cousin marriages?

The biggest question is - isn't incest in general against the law over there? If it isn't, it should be.

Another example of how politicizing medical issues can, literally, retard a society.

I've been getting a ton of German $pam lately. It's not obscene, it's techy/mundane - "High-Tech Funk-Steckdosen" telephones, garden hoses, chairs.

Has anyone else out there been getting this stuff?

Congratulations to Ace of Spades!

See the video

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams started quite a row a few days ago when he suggested that Britain's legal system should accommodate aspects of traditional Islamic law. Britons on the left and the right have agreed to vehemently disagree with him - and to say their piece about Sharia law.

The British have been putting up with so much lately. I was wondering which straw would break the camel's back. This may or may not be it, but if anyone deserves to be deluged by his own self-generated shitstorm, it's his Holiness.

A selection of responses:

From Baroness Sayeeda Warsi: Sharia would not help integration but disunity

Further, Dr Williams's assertion that implementing sharia would help social cohesion is simply incorrect. It will alienate large sections of society, resentful of preferential treatment. Put simply, the recognition of sharia would simply be the tip of the multicultural iceberg, focusing on what divides us, rather than unites us. Rather than reinforcing social cohesion, it could lead to cultural and legal apartheid.

Instead, we need to create a society that is held together by a strong sense of shared identity and common values, encourages active citizenship and inspires people to join. For me, this means two things: localism and responsibility. Cohesion is local because, after all, it's about people learning to live alongside each other in neighbourhoods. This means listening to individual voices and ideas, particularly from women and young people, and devolving power through local government to the grassroots.

Cohesion is also about responsibility, because we're all in this together

David T. at Harry's Place says Sack Rowan Williams, Disestablish the Church

Clerics should appreciate the proper limits of their authority. They should do their best to discourage sectarianism and violence between their followers and those of other religions. They should do their best to win converts from other religions, if they truely believe that they represent the only path to salvation.

But, most of all, they should keep their foolish bearded faces out of the business of lawmaking.

In the Spectator, Melanie Philips asks: Dhimmi — or just dim? * (link thanks to T.)

The man doesn’t even have the courage of his lack of convictions. Far from defending what he actually said about sharia law, the Archbishop of Canterbury is fighting to save his job by frantically back-tracking and claiming he has been misunderstood. It was all got up by the tabloids… no-one actually read the lecture… people have jumped to the wrong conclusion from a few misleading headlines. Ye gods. What planet is he living on? Everyone heard what the man actually said on the World at One; by now, many have heroically ploughed through his lecture as well. It is the words that he actually uttered that have caused unprecedented numbers to take to their keyboards in outrage.

Ali Eteraz opposes Sharia Arbitration Courts in UK

[reason] 4 - Coercion

I hear a lot that the arbitration courts don’t apply unless both parties consent.

I guess people forget that for Muslims, marriage is an all-family business. Heck, its in the Quran that in cases of marital-conflict you appoint two negotiators. You think these negotiators — whose primary motivation, due to social stigma, is going to be to keep the couple from divorcing — is not going to try and talk them towards the Sharia court?

Coercion won’t be by people putting a gun to the heads of women. Instead, women will be gently “reminded” (with a nice hard grasp on their arm) that if they don’t go to Sharia judge they will be seen as impious and not-devout. You have no idea of the power of social death.

Joan Smith: British women are already suffering from Islamic law

The Archbishop of Canterbury says sharia courts could rule on family issues, but this is exactly where they can cause most harm:

If a woman is running away from her parents or a violent husband, mosques and sharia courts are not the obvious place for her to turn to get justice. The Centre for Social Cohesion study contains a startling insight into attitudes in one British mosque, reported by Mohamed Baleela, a team leader at the Domestic Violence Intervention Project in Hammersmith, west London. "Last time I talked about marital rape in a mosque," he said, "I nearly got beaten up. Because we said that the law makes it illegal to rape your wife, someone got up and hit me because he was ignorant of the law."

There is an argument, and it is a compelling one, that we should all be subject to the same laws. People who look favourably on a parallel system of religious courts for civil matters claim they do no harm if all parties consent to their use. This, of course, is the crux of the matter: how can we know that women from traditional and religious families have given consent when they are under huge pressure from relatives? They may be threatened into accepting the authority of a religious court, just as hundreds of young women (and some young men) are coerced into getting married against their will...

...Only someone as out of touch with modern Britain as the Archbishop of Canterbury could possibly think otherwise, or line up so willingly with the forces of reaction.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: What he wishes on us is an abomination

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.

Pray tell me sir, how do separate and impenetrable courts and schools and extreme female segregation promote commonalities and deep bonds between citizens of these small isles?

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.

From the Times' Sharia in Britain: your reaction

The day sharia law is adopted in my country is the day the ballot box is put to one side and we have to fight for our rights.

TP, Manchester

Sharia in Britain? Come should we really have to discuss such an issue in our own country. Unbelievable! How long are we gonna be ruled by the appeasing vote-fis