The Vatican Confronts Islam
by Daniel Pipes Jerusalem PostJuly 5, 2006
[Jerusalem Post title: "Quest for reciprocity"]

"Enough now with this turning the other cheek! It's our duty to protect ourselves." Thus spoke Monsignor Velasio De Paolis, secretary of the Vatican's supreme court, referring to Muslims. Explaining his apparent rejection of Jesus' admonition to his followers to "turn the other cheek," De Paolis noted that "The West has had relations with the Arab countries for half a century … and has not been able to get the slightest concession on human rights."
De Paolis is hardly alone in his thinking; indeed, the Catholic Church is undergoing a dramatic shift from a decades-old policy to protect Catholics living under Muslim rule. The old methods of quiet diplomacy and muted appeasement have clearly failed. The estimated 40 million Christians in Dar al-Islam, notes the Barnabas Fund's Patrick Sookhdeo, increasingly find themselves an embattled minority facing economic decline, dwindling rights, and physical jeopardy. Most of them, he goes on, are despised and distrusted second-class citizens, facing discrimination in education, jobs, and the courts.
These harsh circumstances are causing Christians to flee their ancestral lands for the West's more hospitable environment. Consequently, Christian populations of the Muslim world are in a free-fall. Two small but evocative instances of this pattern: for the first time in nearly two millennia, Nazareth and Bethlehem no longer have Christian majorities.
This reality of oppression and decline stands in dramatic contrast to the surging Muslim minority of the West. Although numbering fewer than 20 million and made up mostly of immigrants and their offspring, it is an increasingly established and vocal minority, granted extensive rights and protections even as it wins new legal, cultural, and political prerogatives.
This widening disparity has caught the attention of the Church, which for the first time is pointing to radical Islam, rather than the actions of Israel, as the central problem facing Christians living with Muslims.
Rumblings of this could be heard already in John Paul II's time. For example, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, the Vatican equivalent of foreign minister, noted in late 2003 that "There are too many majority Muslim countries where non-Muslims are second-class citizens." Tauran pushed for reciprocity: "Just as Muslims can build their houses of prayer anywhere in the world, the faithful of other religions should be able to do so as well."
Catholic demands for reciprocity have grown, especially since the accession of Pope Benedict XVI in April 2005, for whom Islam is a central concern. In February, the pope emphasized the need to respect "the convictions and religious practices of others so that, in a reciprocal manner, the exercise of freely-chosen religion is truly assured to all." In May, he again stressed the need for reciprocity: Christians must love immigrants and Muslims must treat well the Christians among them.
Lower-ranking clerics, as usual, are more outspoken. "Islam's radicalization is the principal cause of the Christian exodus," asserts Monsignor Philippe Brizard, director general of Oeuvre d'Orient, a French organization focused on Middle Eastern Christians. Bishop Rino Fisichella, rector of the Lateran University in Rome, advises the Church to drop its "diplomatic silence" and instead "put pressure on international organizations to make the societies and states in majority Muslim countries face up to their responsibilities."
The Danish cartoons crisis offered a typical example of Catholic disillusionment. Church leaders initially criticized the publication of the Muhammad cartoons. But when Muslims responded by murdering Catholic priests in Turkey and Nigeria, not to speak of scores of Christians killed during five days of riots in Nigeria, the Church responded with warnings to Muslims. "If we tell our people they have no right to offend, we have to tell the others they have no right to destroy us, " said Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican's Secretary of State. "We must always stress our demand for reciprocity in political contacts with authorities in Islamic countries and, even more, in cultural contacts," added Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo, its foreign minister.
Obtaining the same rights for Christians in Islamdom that Muslims enjoy in Christendom has become the key to the Vatican's diplomacy toward Muslims. This balanced, serious approach marks a profound improvement in understanding that could have implications well beyond the Church, given how many lay politicians heed its leadership in inter-faith matters. Should Western states also promote the principle of reciprocity, the results should indeed be interesting.

Gawker.com

Larry King Throws the Brown Darts
On Friday, a reader claimed to have heard Larry King fart on-air towards the end of his interview with Star Jones; the video presented a questionable noise that may or may not have been the sound of King's anal methane. While we may never know if he passed gas with Star Jones, we've since received more information to suggest that Larry King is a chronic crop duster:
I sat next to Larry King at a charity bbq dinner in Sun Valley, Idaho in 1996. He leaned left and beefed right... directly on me. I was in high school, didn't know what to do... He didn't say excuse me. And I later heard from a friend who was shooting documentary interviews with CNN anchors that during his interview with his highness, Larry King's handler had to stop the camera every 10-15 minutes. Larry farted explosively during the breaks. So I think you're on to something here, although I bet it's well known on the inside.
And from an IMDb message board:
Someone who works at CNN told me something pretty funny about Larry King. They said he has a gas problem and farts often. To prevent his guests from being overwhelmed by the awful stench, there is a fan underneath his desk that blows air in the opposite direction of his guests to move the fart smell away from them.
Know anything more? We're listening (or sniffing).

CodePink vs. America

Age of Hooper was at the Code Pink tantrum outside the White House, and he got this terrific video as a group of kids, taking a tour of Washington DC for July 4th, encountered the Code Pink lunatics—who began singing an anti-American version of “God Bless America” (as “God Help America”) directly at the tour group, deliberately taunting them. It’s a thing of beauty to watch as the “red state” kids spontaneously break into “America the Beautiful,” and completely shut down the moonbats.

(Video player requires Flash Player 8.)

Google PC

http://www.slate.com/id/2144896/?nav=ais

Hyping Hamdan
Have you noticed a theme in the press's coverage of last week's Hamdan v. Rumsfeld decision? If not, consider these examples:
-"The Supreme Court on Thursday repudiated the Bush administration's plan to put Guantánamo detainees on trial before military commissions, ruling broadly that the commissions were unauthorized by federal statute and violated international law. . . . The decision was . . . a sweeping and categorical defeat for the administration."-- New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/30/washington/30hamdan.html?ei=5090&en=fea431f33eb7549c&ex=1309320000&partneer=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all
-"The Supreme Court yesterday struck down the military commissions President Bush established to try suspected members of al-Qaeda, emphatically rejecting a signature Bush anti-terrorism measure and the broad assertion of executive power upon which the president had based it."-- Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/29/AR2006062900928.html
-"In a sharp rebuke of President George W. Bush's tactics in the war on terrorism, the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday struck down as unlawful the military tribunal system set up to try Guantanamo prisoners."-- Reuters http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/29/AR2006062900938.html
-"The Supreme Court rebuked President Bush and his anti-terror policies Thursday, ruling that his plan to try Guantanamo Bay detainees in military tribunals violates U.S. and international law."-- Associated Press http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/custom/newsroom/sns-ap-scotus-guantanamo-trials,1,4510986.story
-"The Supreme Court on Thursday sharply rejected the Bush administration's use of military commissions to try suspected terrorists, eliminating a central pillar of the president's anti-terrorism strategy. In a blunt dismissal of President Bush's claim that he had unfettered authority to try enemy combatants captured in the war on terror, the court ruled 5-3 that military trials of detainees at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba violated domestic and international laws."-- Chicago Tribune http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0606300152jun30,1,6967465.story
All of these stories go well beyond the facts to engage in editorializing, portraying the ruling as not just a legal defeat for the administration but a "repudiation," "rebuke," "sharp rejection," etc. But several serious analyses of the Hamdan decision--including our own on Thursday http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110008583 and David Rivkin and Lee Casey http://wwww.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008599 's, which appeared Friday in The Wall Street Journal, suggest that there is less to it. Justice Anthony Kennedy declined to join his four liberal colleagues in the most sweeping aspects of their opinion, and even that opinion left many issues unaddressed, so that the court's actual decision was narrower than much of the press coverage suggests.
Why were reporters so eager to portray this as a great defeat for the Bush administration? Partly because of anti-Bush bias: In at least some of the news stories--especialy Linda Greenhouse's Times piece, which we quoted extensively http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110008592#gass on Friday--it is clear that the reporter is happy with the result. And partly because of a bias in favor of a dramatic narrative.
It's true that some conservatives agree that the opinion was a "rebuke." They believe that it is an unwarranted infringement on executive power, just as liberal commentators see it as a victory over the evil George W. Bush.

That's fine. Commentators are entitled to their opinions. But reporters are not, and they would better serve their readers if they simply explained what the ruling said and refrained from tendentious characterizations of its significance.

Brand New Cadillac

In "Me and a Guy Named Elvis," which hits stores next month, author Jerry Schilling, a key member of Presley's "Memphis Mafia," recalls one night when John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin stopped by with a few friends to meet Elvis and found him decked out in pajamas. Elvis "stood, eyed John, and said, 'Let's swap pants,' while simultaneously, in expert [Monty] Python fashion, letting his pajama bottoms drop beneath his robe . . . John burst out laughing. Nobody accepted Elvis' offer."
Elvis loved to tweak performers who did his act. One night in Las Vegas, he passed a lounge where a burly singer was "overdoing the Elvis vibrato just a bit," the author says. 'Without breaking stride, Elvis . . . stormed into the lounge, walked right up onstage, hoisted his cane like he was going clobber the guy and said, 'If you're going to do it, do it right.' He gave the crowd . . . a great big wink, hopped off-stage, and zoomed right out of there. But the big singer didn't see the wink - he'd been so startled that he'd fallen off the stage."
Presley celebrated his 41st birthday by telling friends about his favorite blaxploitation flick -"Across 110th Street," starring Yaphet Kotto and Anthony Quinn. "He began to act out the whole movie, setting up each scene and then presenting just about every line of dialogue in the script," Schilling says. "He brought each character to life with walks, vocal mannerisms and the subtlest of gestures. [He] didn't stop until he got to the final scene of the film." Other movies in Elvis' repertoire were "Dr. Strangelove" and Monty Python flicks.
One habit of Elvis' that was not a joke was his insistence that his own music never be played inside Graceland. Schilling remembers one day when somebody put on "All Shook Up" during a party. "Who's the wise guy that put that goddamn music on? Get that crap off!" Presley roared.
"There was no doubt he was really angry," Schilling writes. "He was proud of his work, but it was just that - his work. He lived with his music outside of the house - he didn't need to hear it while he was trying to relax in his own basement."