Quick Roundup 3

Andrew Dalton is Back!

Be sure to stop by Andrew Dalton's new blog, Witch Doctor Repellent, which replaces his old one, Venting Steam. When I update my links (hopefully this weekend), he'll be there.

Axiomatic Out

Don Watkins has announced the availability of his magazine's latest issue.

The French Intifada Continues

Via Matt Drudge, I learned of an incident that took place on a train route I think I traveled ages ago while attending college for a semester in Europe.

The gang of between 20 and 30 youths boarded the train, heading from Nice on the French Riviera to Lyon, in eastern France, early on Jan. 1, as it carried 600 passengers home from New Year's Eve partying overnight.

Once inside, they went wild, forcing passengers to hand over mobile phones and wallets, and slashing seats and breaking windows.

A 20-year-old woman cornered by several of the marauders was sexually molested.

"It was a real scene of pillage on the train," said the regional state prosecutor, Dominique Luigi, adding that the passengers were in a state of "panic."

Train staff alerted police, and the train pulled into a station to wait. The three officers who initially turned up later were joined by reinforcements.

...

Only three -- two 19-year-old Moroccans and a minor, all living in France -- were arrested. Both men were being held for robbery and one also was facing charges of sexual assault. The minor was to be judged separately.

Three others -- a man and two boys -- were arrested briefly in Marseille but were released despite reports they were carrying a knife, a screwdriver and a small amount of hashish.

I wonder how many were named "Mohammed". And note that in the last paragraph, you see the essence of the conflict as it currently stands: Naked aggression by unassimilated immigrants (or their descendents) unmet by the French, whose "fatal instinct" seems to be evasion and surrender.

Robert Tracinski, covering the same story in yesterday's TIA Daily, agrees that things look bad culturally for France.

Will France be able to find ... [a] spirit of resistance? A story in USA Today [link added]... offers a bad indication, though this, too, invites parallels to America: the spread of Arab ghetto slang throughout French culture, in a process Theodore Dalrymple calls "uncouth chic."

"Uncouth chic" is a good term, and what it describes seems to me merely a logical extension of the rebellion against traditional fashion epitomized by styles in the West which at first ostensibly imitated "workers" and "peasants" starting in the sixties and seventies and continuing to the present day.

One Impending Death, Two Predictable Responses

Ariel Sharon stands at death's door. Unsurprisingly, the president of Iran is openly wishing for his death and another theocrat, Pat Robertson, giving "credit" to God for an event he plainly is happy about.

"The prophet Joel makes it very clear that God has enmity against those who, quote, 'divide my land.' God considers this land to be his.

"You read the Bible, he says, 'This is my land.' And for any prime minister of Israel who decides he's going carve it up and give it away, God says, 'No. This is mine.'"

While I disagree with Sharon's latest peace initiatives with the barbarians who reside across his nation's borders, there are plenty of valid, secular reasons for my disagreement, none of which make me even remotely gleeful over Sharon's stroke.

I have heard it said that the God one worships (and this does not necessarily have to be in the traditional sense of the term describing a mystical or supernatural belief on that person's part) reflects one's conception of the ideal. In that light, it is revealing that Robertson's conception of the divine acts pretty much like a terrorist or an assassin.

I'd love to see ...

... Pat Mullins's article on Sharon and Israeli politics from yesterday's TIA Daily placed on the internet at their main site, if only for the following to gain wider currency.

[Labor leader Amir] Peretz fought [Binyamin] Netanyahu on every step on his pro-capitalist reforms. His populist rhetoric on the economy resonates with many Israelis. But Netanyahu has served as prime minister before, while Peretz is an inexperienced, inarticulate, incompetent buffoon, little more than a thuggish labor-union agitator, not a statesman of the caliber of Sharon or [Shimon] Peres. Israelis know that, by voting for Labor, they will be putting their country into the hands of the Al Sharpton of Israeli politics. [bold added]

-- CAV