A propos a recent Washington Post story noting the huge Muslim population in French prisons--Muslims make up 60 to 70 percent of French inmates, and 12 percent of the French population--the daringly thoughtful European blogger Fjordman has reminded me of an essay of his from last year called "Muslim Violence: Crime or Jihad?"

He writes:

Violence by Muslims is usually labelled simply as "crime," but I
believe it should more accurately be called Jihad. Those who know
early Islamic history, ...

"Jimmy's World," of course, was the title of a Pulitzer Prize-winning feature won by Janet Cooke of the Washington Post, and subsequently returned in ignominy after the entire story-- about a little boy named Jimmy who lived amid heroin-saturated degradation--was proved to be a total fake.

The concept of Jimmy's World comes to mind today on viewing this latest abomination from Hamas TV--broadcast, not incidentallly, just before Jimmy Carter arrived for his PLO/Hamas fest this month. The video, translated and uploaded to Youtube by Palestinian Media Watch, tries to put over another kind of total fake--an exercise in psychotic Holocaust denial, this time arguing that Jews engineered the mass murder of other Jews (the numbers being wildly exaggerated, Hamas simultaneously insists) to do away with the sick and infirm, and to create world sympathy.

I ...

Denial is a way of 21st-century American life.

The Washington Times noticed that the local DC government is making its gang problem go away by not talking about them--i.e., by calling the groups of young males responsible for the spike in city violence (10 murders in the past two weeks) not gangs, but "crews."

But, as the Times reported:

...police officials in other cities say the distinction is counterproductive. "The very first step in dealing with gangs is denial," said Capt. Charles Bloom of the Philadelphia Police Department. "Then you get to the point that you can't deny it anymor ...

Welcome to the War On Extremism (WOE), which our leaders, in their best imitations of ostriches, have settled on as an acronym that is suitably supine, attitudinally appeasing and therefore--and this is what is most important to them--non-offensive to the Islamic world.

Jeffrey Imm has a comprehensive overview of this veritable conspiracy of capitulation now underway at the highest levels of our government.

You will notice at the end of this valuable report that Imm advocates calling a spade a spade by, in essence, calling a spade a spadism: namely, calling the threat posed by the anti-liberty doctrines of Islam to be something called "Islamism." This, as I

Another decade, another retrospective--this one to mark the 40th anniversary of the sacking of Columbia. Of course, the New York Times chronicles the events of 1968 rather more sympathetically--namely, from the students' point of view:

The beatings. The arrests. The building takeovers. The heady communal life in the occupied college buildings. And, most vividly, the "bust," the early morning of April 30, 1968, when the police stormed the campus, pounding them bloody with nightsticks and dragging some to police vans by their hair.

How about a little context? As in:

The seizure of five camp ...

Tough-to-follow  interview with our "ally" Hamid Karzai in the New York Times. Seems he doesn't want coalition forces taking on Taliban forces in Afghanistan.

We have to make sure that when a Talib comes to Afghanistan, that he is safe from arrest by the coalition,' Karzai said.

We do?  

Another variation on the same theme of parents who need to be pushed to parent. According to today's Washington Post, the principle of the highly acclaimed Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland, has become so concerned about the threats, harassment, baiting and bullying that goes on unchecked and en masse at Facebook, the online social networking site, he has taken "the unusual step of asking parents to monitor their children's postings on the social networking site."

Parents monitor children? What is the post-grown-up world coming to?

Civilization sinks still lower this week with the release of Grand Theft Auto 4--the latest in the multi-billion dollar video game series that  immerses players  in a virtual world of depravity, violence, lawlessness and mayhem. The parent company Rockstar may market and sell the game to "adults," but GTA still tops the list of the most played video games among 12-14 year old boys, and it is the second most played video game among 12-14 year-old girls, according to a poll conducted by a research team hired by the game's "authors" and cited today in a Washington Post business column.

How can that be? How can a game marketed and sold to "adults" be so accessible to middle schoolers?

The problem is parents. (For more, see Chapter 4 in

We are constantly told the US is divided between Red States and Blue States. After reading through my mailbag on my Carter/Hamas column of last week, I'm thinking a far better way to assess the divisions that cleave this nation is the Carter Test: Was  Carter's  homage to Arafat (picured above) and obeisance to Hamas A) a Boon to Mankind or B) a Moral and National Disgrace? The two moral worldviews are mutually exclusive.

A sampling from the A) people, who, as you will see, discuss only the supposed depredations of Israel--never a word against or even about  Hamas.

Jimmy Carter is trying to achieve peace in the region where the Israelis ...

I sat down with The New Individualist's Jack Criss for a wide-ranging Q & A about The Death of the Grown-Up. The interview is available now in the May 2008 issue.