fighting words
To Hell With the Archbishop of Canterbury
Rowan Williams' dangerous claptrap about "plural jurisdiction."

By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Feb. 11, 2008, at 12:27 PM ET

In December 1931, George Orwell got himself arrested in the slums of East London in order to find out about conditions "inside," and then he wrote an essay about the people he met while in detention. One of them was a buyer for a kosher butcher who had embezzled some of his boss's money. To Orwell's surprise, the man told him that "his employer would probably get into trouble at the synagogue for prosecuting him. It appears that the Jews have arbitration courts of their own, and a Jew is not supposed to prosecute another Jew, at least in a breach-of-trust case like this, without first submitting it to the arbitration court."
You might think that such relics of the medieval ghetto, and of the rabbinical control that was part of ghetto life, had more or less disappeared in England in the 21st century. And you would largely be right. There exists a "Beth Din," or religious court, in the prosperous North London suburb of Finchley to which the ultra-Orthodox submit some of their more arcane disputes. (This little world is very amusingly described by Naomi Alderman in her lovely novel Disobedience.) But to speak in general, Jews in Britain consider themselves, and are considered, to be answerable to the same laws as everybody else. Should I mention any of the numerous reasons why it would be extremely nerve-racking if this were not true?
But now the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has cited the Beth Din as one of his reasons for believing that sharia, or Islamic law, can and should become a part of what he called "plural jurisdiction" in Britain. His reasoning, if one may call it that, is clear: Other faiths already have their own legal authorities, so why not the Muslims, too? What could be more tolerant and diverse? This same argument has been used already, and will be used again, to demand that laws governing "blasphemy," originally written to protect only Christians from being upset, should now, in a nondiscriminatory way, be amended to cover Muslims as well. The alternative—don't have any blasphemy laws and let religious people's feelings be hurt, just as the feelings of the secular are regularly offended by religion—doesn't occur to the archbishop and people who think like him.
A BBC interview with Williams had him saying that the opening to sharia would "help maintain social cohesion." If that phrase is even intended to mean anything, it can only imply that a concession of this kind would lessen the propensity to violence among Muslims. But such abjectness is not the only definition of social cohesion that we have. By a nice coincidence, a London think tank called the Center for Social Cohesion issued a report just days before the leader of the world's Anglicans and Episcopalians capitulated to Islamic demands. Titled "Crimes of the Community: Honour-Based Violence in the UK," and written by James Brandon and Salam Hafez, it set out a shocking account of the rapid spread of theocratic crime. The main headings were murder and beating of women, genital mutilation, forced marriage, and vigilante methods employed against those who complained. It could well be—since we are becoming every day more familiar with the first three—that the fourth is the one that should concern us most.
Picture the life of a young Urdu-speaking woman brought to Yorkshire from Pakistan to marry a man—quite possibly a close cousin—whom she has never met. He takes her dowry, beats her, and abuses the children he forces her to bear. She is not allowed to leave the house unless in the company of a male relative and unless she is submissively covered from head to toe. Suppose that she is able to contact one of the few support groups that now exist for the many women in Britain who share her plight. What she ought to be able to say is, "I need the police, and I need the law to be enforced." But what she will often be told is, "Your problem is better handled within the community." And those words, almost a death sentence, have now been endorsed and underwritten—and even advocated—by the country's official spiritual authority.
You might argue that I am describing an extreme case (though, alas, now not an uncommon one), but it is the principle of equality before the law that really counts. And just look at how casually this sheep-faced English cleric throws away the work of centuries of civilization:
[A]n approach to law which simply said "there's one law for everybody and that's all there is to be said, and anything else that commands your loyalty or allegiance is completely irrelevant in the processes of the courts"—I think that's a bit of a danger.
In the midst of this dismal verbiage and euphemism, the plain statement—"There's one law for everybody and that's all there is to be said"—still stands out like a diamond in a dunghill. It stands out precisely because it is said simply, and because its essential grandeur is intelligible to everybody. Its principles ought to be just as intelligible and accessible to those who don't yet speak English, in just the same way as the great Lord Mansfield once ruled that, wherever someone might have been born, and whatever he had been through, he could not be subject to slavery once he had set foot on English soil. Simple enough? For the women who are the principal prey of the sharia system, it is often only when they are shipped or flown to Britain that their true miseries begin. This modern disgrace is deepened and extended by a fatuous cleric who, presiding over an increasingly emaciated and schismatic and irrelevant church, nonetheless maintains that any faith is better than none at all.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2184186/

What, Me Worry?

France says Iranian rocket cannot work in space
Published:
02.07.08, 21:16 /

France said on Thursday an Iranian rocket Tehran says is intended to put a satellite into orbit is in fact a missile that cannot navigate in space, and added to concerns that the technology is aimed at making weapons.
On Monday, Iran launched what it said was a rocket designed to carry a locally-made research satellite. "This new test, presented by the Iranian authorities as the illustration of a space programme when the missile in question does not have extra-atmospheric capabilities, is a further source of concern," French Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Pascale Andreani said on Thursday.

(Reuters)

Well, Europe is a lot closer!

http://www.citizen.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080205/GJNEWS02/912043622/-1/CITNEWS08

Evita Effect

The Evita Factor
The Clinton campaign has long known what Obama’s team is only now learning: Hispanics are the key to Super-Duper Tuesday—and November.
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By John Heilemann
Published Feb 1, 2008
(Photo: Illustration by Ward Sutton )
The ad begins with a frozen image of Barack Obama and Ted Kennedy; on the audio track the former intones, “Soy Barack Obama y yo apruebo este mensaje.” The next shot features Congressman Luis Gutierrez from Chicago, looking straight into the camera, speaking in Spanish, too. “We know what it feels like being used as a scapegoat just because of our background and our last name,” goes the English translation. “And no one understands this better than Barack Obama.”
The commercial, which went on the air this week in California and Arizona, is remarkable on a number of levels. There’s the bluntness of the language. There’s the crudeness of the appeal. There’s the way the ad plays the victim card with all the subtlety of Doyle Brunson slapping down a royal flush—something that Obama has refused to do in any other context. The other day, over a meal in Los Angeles, I asked two seasoned political pros what would happen if an adman proposed running a spot so artless, so thoroughly off-message, on English-language TV. Both responded without hesitation: The idea would be laughed out of the room.
That the Obama operation is running such an ad tells you a great deal—and not merely that it’s trafficking in the sort of identity politics it claims to abhor. It indicates just how much is at stake when it comes to the Hispanic vote on Super-Duper Tuesday, February 5. It reflects how aggressively, if perhaps belatedly, Team Obama is moving to prevent a royal culo-kicking among Latinos. But it also hints at something darker and more troubling for Democrats: that the race-tinged politics being practiced by both sides poses major risks down the road to whichever of them is left standing.

opinionjournal.com

San Jose State University has banned blood drives on campus as "discriminatory," reports the San Mateo County (Calif.) Times:

The rise of AIDS in the 1980s prompted the FDA to prohibit donations from men who had sex with men any time after 1977. These days, groups such as the American Red Cross say that lifetime prohibition is excessive, since modern blood testing will catch any diseases contracted more than three weeks before the donation.

They've lobbied for years for officials to relax the restriction on blood donation to one year after the latest sexual activity, but to no avail.
Gay rights groups on several college campuses, including Stanford's, have held protests on the issue in recent years. At San Jose State, it was an employee's complaint last year that prompted [SJSU president Don] Kassing's office to investigate whether the rule made blood drives discriminatory.
They decided it did, since gay men were being treated differently than other groups of people with similar risk factors.
"What San Jose State has done is to take an institutional position based on principles, based on values," said Larry Carr, the university's associate vice president for public affairs.

Well, how satisfying that must be for San Jose State University. Yet the paper reports "local blood banks say that position comes at a steep cost"--some 1,000 pints of blood a year gathered in drives on the campus. All this to protest a rule that clearly is not discriminatory in intent, and whose continued existence surely represents an abundance of caution rather than any antigay animus.
But hey, if patients suffer because there's not enough blood, that's just a price that has to be paid for this principled stand. Don Kassing's conscience simply will not allow him to do the right thing.

More 'Accountability Journalism'In June we noted that the Associated Press had embraced a new idiom called "accountability journalism." The AP's Ron Fournier explained that the venerable wire service, long known for its just-the-facts style of reporting, now aimed to be "provocative," telling readers not only what happened "but why it happened," "what it might mean," and "what it might reveal about the people who presume to be our leaders," who "sometimes" are "just plain wrong."
Yet he promised the AP would somehow do this without editorializing or becoming partisan. How well has it done? Here are a few examples.

An AP dispatch yesterday explained the differences in the two political parties' processes for selecting convention delegates via presidential primaries. A key distinction is that many states' Republican primaries are winner-take-all--that is, whichever candidate gets a plurality of the vote is allotted the state's entire slate of delegates. The Democrats, by contrast (along with Republicans in some states), divide up delegates proportionately. The result is that a strong second-place showing is worth more to a Democrat than to a Republican.
Here is how the AP's David Espo sums this all up in his lead paragraph:
When it comes to presidential primaries, Democrats and Republicans play by different rules. One party likes to share. The other, not so much.
Nope, nothing partisan there. Then there's a piece by the AP's Calvin Woodward that actually defends congressional earmarks. It starts off in a similarly cutesy style:
Earmarks are only pork when someone else is feasting on them. On your plate, they're veggies. They are the train that takes you to visit Aunt Betty, or the health clinic down the street, or the waste treatment plant that makes your water safer to drink. They're not all bridges to nowhere. They're also bicycle trails to somewhere.
If John McCain is true to his rhetoric in the Republican presidential campaign, he would take a broad ax to spending that voters, upon closer examination, might wish were cut in a more discerning way.
Woodward goes on to list a series of earmarks he considers to be worthy:
In California, $438,000 to Monterey County for gang prevention and intervention.
In Illinois, $5 million for the Red Cross to buy backup generators, cots, shelter trailers, emergency vehicles and more.
In New Haven, Conn., $487,000 to help families and children exposed to violence and trauma.
In Oneonta, N.Y., $243,000 for hospital equipment and facilities.
In St. James, Mo., $412,000 to expand services to abused and neglected children.
In North Dakota, $390,000 to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe for a methamphetamine prevention program.
This actually is a useful news story, a corrective to the most outrageous earmark examples typically offered by foes. Woodward's conclusion is this:
Pork haters like McCain say an agency with its eye on the national interest and an objective way of looking at a region's needs should decide on such spending, not members of Congress currying local--sometimes very local--favor.
But McCain's spending plan does not make such distinctions between waste and worthy. In his accounting, if it's an earmark, it's bad and it's gone.
This is a very shallow analysis that seems designed to paint the Republican front-runner as both simple-minded and uncaring. He's against abused children and the Red Cross! In truth, though, there is a strong argument that even these "worthy" earmarks should be anathema, not only to limited- government conservatives but to welfare-state liberals as well...
Woodward says that earmarking lawmakers justify the practice by insisting "they know their district's priorities better than Washington could." But if their chief concern is with local priorities, maybe they should run for City Council or state Senate.
One more example of the AP's colorful but not terribly detached reporting comes from economics writer Jeannine Aversa:
In a shower of pink slips, U.S. employers cut jobs last month for the first time in more than four years, the starkest signal yet that the economy is grinding to a halt if it hasn't already toppled into recession.
The headline refers to "a Pink Slip Blizzard," which directly contradicts the lead paragraph (a shower is an event of short duration, while a blizzard is prolonged). Aversa further explains:
Conditions are deteriorating, according to the latest employment snapshot by the Labor Department, which showed nervous employers slicing payrolls by 17,000.
We checked the Bureau of Labor Statistics press release, and it didn't say anything about employers being "nervous" or indeed give any clue at all to their emotional state. Moreover, the BLS characterizes the 17,000-job loss as a "small" one, and it's hard to argue with that. It amounts to less than 1 in 8,000 of the total 138.1 million nonfarm jobs in the country, and it isn't enough to affect the unemployment rate.