That’s what France says now. I guess it’s only bad when the US does it “unilaterally” (that is, with Britain, Australia, Italy, Poland, Spain…)

Some commenters in this post (and over at Little Green Footballs) are (unaccountably, to me) skeptical about Laura Mansfield’s tale of the mosque. I emailed her to ask if she wanted to respond, and she wrote:

I did not provide details as to the location of the mosque or the date of the visit simply for safety reasons. They do not have my full name. However if I provide the date and the name/location of the mosque I might as well walk back in, hand the imam a copy of the article, and wait for the backlash.

I do not have the weight of a governmental agency behind me; I have had to redact certain information for security purposes.

Let me also add that the sessions were audiotaped – not broadcast quality but certainly understandable.

I suspected that was the situation, as I noted in previous comments. People will, of course, continue to believe (and disbelieve) as they choose.

On the tenth anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, Laura Mansfield has a very disturbing story–Jihad comes to Small Town, USA:

Khaled and three of his companions had gone to New York for several days in January. He told of how uncomfortable his trip up to NYC had been. He felt like he was being watched, and thought he was the victim of racial profiling.

Khaled and his friends were pretty unhappy about it, and while in New York, they came up with a plan to “teach a lesson” to the passengers and crew. You can imagine the story Khaled told. He described how he and his friends whispered to each other on the flight, made simultaneous visits to the restroom, and generally tried to “spook” the other passengers. He laughed when he described how several women were in tears, and one man sitting near him was praying.

The others in the room thought the story was quite amusing, judging from the laughter. The imam stood up and told the group that this was a kind of peaceful civil disobedience that should be encouraged, and commended Khaled and his friends for their efforts.

This part of the meeting was all spoken in Arabic.

In Israel, Yasser Arafat was well known (at least to the non-naive) for making conciliatory speeches in English and inflammatory ones in Arabic. Apparently, he’s not alone in this practice.

While I agree with his general thrust–that (as Iraq seems to many) the early US didn’t look for very promising for forming a government either–Publius errs slightly when he writes:

There were Scottish, Irish, English, Indians, Dutch, French, Germans, and those who had lived in America since its founding. And more; many speaking languages other than English at the time.

Yet we ended up with a Constitution and a country to rally around. Our eventual Civil War was never fought on the basis of ethnic differences either, but serious compounding issues over nearly forty years that led to a war not of national origin, but of the preservation of our nation.

The roots of the War Between the States did in fact lie (at least partly) in national (or at least regional) origin. It was a war between groups of people descended from the English settlers who first settled North America. The Union was an alliance of the Puritans of New England (originally from East Anglia) and the Quakers of the Delaware Valley (originally from the Midlands), fighting against the Confederacy, which was an alliance of the Cavaliers of southwest England who settled the Tidewater country of Virginia and the Piedmont and the redneck Presbyterians from the borderlands and Ulster who had colonized Appalachia and the deep south. The war was to a large degree a fight over different conceptions of liberty, and in some senses, could be said to be an echo of the English Civil War, with a similar result.

For more information, read Albion’s Seed, by David Hackett Fischer.

That’s the title of my latest piece about popes, past and future, at TechCentralStation.

The Dutch, who are in some ways on the front line of the war, are starting to figure out that, as Anglospherian Jim Bennett has said, “Democracy, immigration, multi-culturalism–pick any two.”

On the sixtieth anniversary of the invasion of Okinawa, Victor Davis Hanson offers some lessons from that experience:

For all the horror, stupidity

On the sixtieth anniversary of the invasion of Okinawa, Victor Davis Hanson offers some lessons from that experience:

For all the horror, stupidity

On the sixtieth anniversary of the invasion of Okinawa, Victor Davis Hanson offers some lessons from that experience:

For all the horror, stupidity

Mark Kraft thinks so. At first glance, that’s how it looks to me, too, but I’d be interested to see what the General or his defenders have to say.

Unlike him, though, I don’t see any basis of inference that Rumsfeld did anything wrong. Of course, I don’t consider any of the things listed in that memo torture, or relevant to the more egregious acts at Abu Ghraib. I am concerned about the possible perjury before Congress, though. As they say, it’s not the act, it’s the cover up.