In the English town of Luton, the call to Jihad is real and strong, especially among some of the young. This report from the Times of London is deeply chilling. Here’s Mohammed Abdullah, a 22-year-old accountant, in his own words: “There are people leaving all the time. Not just in Luton, but all over Britain. We, as Muslims, don’t perceive ourselves as British Muslims. We are Muslims who live in Britain. All we want to do is go to Afghanistan to defend the honour and sanctity of Islam.” The British government has now said that such individuals, if they returned to Britain, would be tried for, among other things, treason. Good for Blair. Meanwhile, according to a report in the Daily Telegraph, a poll of 500 British Muslims between the ages of 20 and 45 found that, “an overwhelming majority – 91 per cent – believed the war was between the Christian West and Islam, while 98 per cent would not fight for Britain. In marked contrast, 48 per cent said they would fight for bin Laden or for Islam.” Okay, if that is not a fifth column, could someone please tell me what is?
GOOD NEWS WATCH: I’ve become so depressed these past couple of weeks, I’ve decided to add a new feature to the site called simply “Good News Watch.” One nugget captured my attention on the way back from Los Angeles today (where I had a great dinner and discussion with an as.com reader and her friends). A report in the Los Angeles Times focused on the startling decline in domestic homicides in the past two decades. According to the Times, “National crime data released last week show that although homicides between spouses increased slightly in 2000, the numbers remain close to a 25-year low at an estimated 900 or so per year. That’s down nearly 60% from the more than 2,000 that occurred yearly in the late 1970s. Killings between unmarried lovers also have fallen, to an estimated 732 in 2000, down from about 900 in the mid-1980s.” The question is: why? The Times posits the most plausible explanation: divorce. I’ve long felt that the conservative worry about high divorce rates got only part of the picture. Yes, no-one should doubt the importance of stable two-parent families (gay or straight) for the rearing of children. But no-one should doubt either the horrors that were also part of a marriage system in which women were virtually imprisoned, had few employment opportunities, and were sometimes driven to desperate measures by abusive husbands. That interpretation is borne out by the fact that the biggest drop in spousal murders has been among those committed by women against men. Those women who were driven to kill are now able to escape. That’s an unmitigated good thing. And one reason that the looser divorce laws of the last few decades have not been entirely bad news. It seems to me that any critique of higher divorce rates should at least take this aspect of the matter into account.
TOM WOLFE ON SUSAN SONTAG: “The white race is the cancer of human history? Who was this woman? Who and what? An anthropological epidemiologist? A renowned authority on the history of cultures throughout the world, a synthesizer of the magnitude of a Max Weber, a Joachim Wach, a Sir James Frazer, an Arnold Toynbee? Actually, she was just another scribbler who spent her life signing up for protest meetings and lumbering to the podium encumbered by her prose style, which had a handicapped parking sticker valid at Partisan Review. Perhaps she was exceptionally hell-bent on illustrating McLuhan’s line about indignation endowing the idiot with dignity, but otherwise she was just a typical American intellectual of the post-World War II period.” – from “In The Land of the Rococo Marxists.”
The Dish 