Yes, we know.

VT Killer Mailed Package To NBC

But why oh why do they have to glorify this repulsively insane kid by airing the pictures over and over and over again? What is the point?

 Direct from China to Egypt:

Digital Korans, automatic prayer reciters and headphones dispensing religious advice are all part of the growing wave of outward religiosity that is increasingly defining daily life in Egypt.

At least some people think it’s a sign of the growing religiosity in Egypt that people want to carry around these gadgets that supposedly keep them on the straight and narrow. Others are not so sure:

Sociologist Saad Eddin Ibrahim, on the other hand, thinks the trend is more indicative of the “naivety of the consumers and the intelligence of the merchants.”

“It also says a lot about how quickly the Chinese economy reacts and adapts to the desires of the consumers — whoever they are,” he said with a smile.

Well, I’m with Mr. Ibrahim, ’cause I have a soft spot for sociologists.

Also: there’s this old joke about new gadgets. Here’s the punchline:

Does it give blowjobs?

Attend an Obama rally:

Obama threw away his prepared stump speech, and instead spoke about the day’s tragic events [at Virginia Tech]. “Please, have a seat,” he told the cheering crowd.

He explained his reasons for changing the tone of the event. Then he quoted Bobby Kennedy’s famous speech after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, about how, with one act of violence, “the whole nation is degraded.” America, Kennedy said, seems to tolerate violence, whether it is “civilian slaughter in far-off lands,” our increasingly coarse entertainment culture, or the ready access to guns.

“That was written in 1968–almost 40 years ago,” Obama said of Kennedy’s remarks. “We haven’t made much progress.”

Just what we need: someone else to tell us how bad we are, how bad we’ve been, and how we can do better.

He’s weak, he’s lame, he’s melancholy, and he’s a star. If you want to self-medicate, he’s your guy!

Feh.

All of you oversensitive Anglophiles should sit this one out, because I’m about to violate the Eleventh Commandment:

Palestinians Abduct British Journalist; British Journalists Union Boycotts Israel

I’m not sure what Israel’s crime is, but I hope it’s the craven, abject British National Union of Journalist (probably—and pathetically and wrongheadedly—hoping to ingratiate itself with whoever kidnapped Alan Johnston) that will get the punishment for publicly violating journalism’s code of ethics to take sides: to assert its solidarity with “the Palestinian people” [a faux-pious dodge,*** which fails to distinguish between those murderous Palestinians whose clearly stated and oft-repeated goal is to eliminate Israel and Israelis from existence and those not-murderous Palestinians who wish to get on with their lives and are willing to give peace in exchange for land or rich bribes]”

the Palestinian people — notably those suffering in the siege of Gaza, the community Alan Johnston has been so keen to help through his reporting

and at the same time to attack Israel for

a “savage pre-planned attack on Lebanon” last summer and the “slaughter of civilians in Gaza.”

Happily, not all British journalists agree with the NUJ, and some of those who disagree have been quite outspoken in their opinions:

The NUJ also cited Israel’s “continued attacks inside Lebanon following the defeat of its army by Hizballah.”

“What kind of language is this?” [Toby] Harnden [the Telegraph's D.C. correspondent] asked. “It is tendentious and politically loaded propaganda that would be rightly edited out of any news story written in a newspaper that had any pretensions of fairness.”

Simon McGregor-Wood of ABC News, who chairs the Foreign Press Association in Israel, said the NUJ’s statements “seem to go against some of the core ethics of journalism that we are here to protect, such as balance and objectivity.”

“I don’t think any representative body of journalists should be taking a side,” he said.

No kidding!

———-

*** I am grateful to the British journalist Nick Cohen for pointing this out in print.  He put it like this:

It’s not radical, it’s barely political, to turn a blind eye and say you are for the Palestinian cause. Political seriousness lies in stating which Palestine you are for and which Palestinians you support. The Palestinian fight is at once an anti-colonial struggle and a clash between modernity and reaction. The confusion of our times comes from the failure to grasp that it is possible to have an anti-colonialism of the far right.

While we’re at it, don’t excuse Hamas and Islamic Jihad and all the rest by saying the foundation of Israel and the defeat of all the Arab attempts to destroy it made them that way. Anti-Semitism isn’t a local side effect of a dirty war over a patch of land smaller than Wales. It’s everywhere from Malaysia to Morocco, and it has arrived here. …

To explain away a global phenomenon as a rational reaction to Israeli oppression, you have once again to turn the Jew into a supernatural figure whose existence is the cause of discontents throughout the earth. You have to revive anti-Semitism.

I am mystified by the Virginia Heffernan’s NYT review of “The Muslim Americans,” an episode of PBS’s America at the Crossroads series. Heffernan seethes with indignation that the film (which I haven’t seen yet—I’m Tivo’ing the whole thing: hey! I’m a busy person!) features only Muslims who are content to be Americans:

“The Muslim Americans” could have been really powerful.

Coulda shoulda woulda. Instead:

Women of preternatural beauty are shown in hijab alongside minivans. The Muslim men are described, at one point, as mostly doctors and lawyers. Even one who was falsely singled out by the F.B.I. — he had the same name as someone on their watch list — doesn’t seem that bothered by the experience. Everyone appears to love our big, warm, happy melting pot. They simply want to worship discreetly and get back to business. Perfect Americans.

Ms. Heffernan was looking for something else, though: the frisson of transgressiveness (about which more—a lot more—another time):

That’s fine, as far as it goes. But it makes a rather dull and not especially enlightening documentary. Does not one Muslim here think the nudity on American beaches is appalling? Or that Muslim girls shouldn’t date Christian boys? Or that jihad contains an element of violence? Or that the war in Iraq is unjustified? Or that 9/11 was (in the words of some Brooklyn graffiti) “an inside job”? Come on. Are Muslims really that much more measured and evenhanded than everyone else?

Someone is conflating Islam, which is a religion like any other, with fanatical, fundamentalist Islamism, which is a perverse totalitarian ideology masquerading as a religion. Someone is buying into the ignorant and idiotic notion that American Muslims have a reason to be seething with resentment against the United States. Indeed, someone at the New York Times is trying to promote that notion.

Why?