Sanity and Sanctity: The Ennobling Fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien Part 1

by Leo Grin
Big Hollywood
http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/
February 19, 2011


“Oh f***, not another elf!”

Thus exclaimed English academic Hugo Dyson as his friend J.R.R. Tolkien prepared to read aloud the latest chapter in his then-unpublished “heroic romance” to a small audience of intimates in the pleasantly smoke-filled, gin-scented rooms of C. S. Lewis. Years earlier, during a fateful night of impassioned debate, it was Dyson and Tolkien who together convinced Lewis to forsake unbelief and embrace Christianity, doing such a good job of it that the future author of The Chronicles of Narnia would become the most influential Christian vindicator (I despise the word apologist) of the twentieth century.

Now Dyson was mocking the work of the man who would become the most influential purveyor of Christianized fiction of that same century, and many of Tolkien’s fellow Inklings were of the same mind. It was thus left to Lewis to spur the author of The Hobbit on to greater heights of imagination. “If they won’t write the kind of books we want to read, we shall have to write them ourselves,” he once told Tolkien, and that’s just what they did. Each used the medium known (fondly to some, pejoratively to most) as “fairy stories” to achieve the tang and ring and chime — and through them the thoughts and feelings and beliefs — that they were seeking in literature.

In between his increasingly unpopular Inkling readings, Tolkien wrote during snatches of time carved out of days filled with exhausting academic duties, and frequently only after penning worried, often melancholy letters to his sons off to war. “I sometimes feel appalled,” he admitted in one 1944 missive, “at the thought of the sum total of human misery all over the world at the present moment. . . If anguish were visible, almost the whole of this benighted planet would be enveloped in a dense dark vapour, shrouded from the amazed visions of the heavens! And the products of it all will be mainly evil….” In another he lamented that, “A small knowledge of history depresses one with the sense of the everlasting mass and weight of human iniquity: old, old, dreary, endless repetitive unchanging incurable wickedness. All towns, all villages, all habitations of men — sinks! . . . We do so little that is positive good, even if we negatively avoid what is actively evil. It must be terrible to be a priest!”

And yet, he also possessed shadowed hope: “At the same time one knows that there is always good: much more hidden, much less clearly discerned, seldom breaking out into recognizable, visible beauties of word or deed or face — not even when in fact sanctity, far greater than the visible advertised wickedness, is really there.”

Finding that quiet sanctity amidst clangorous wickedness and despair would become the defining characteristic of The Lord of the Rings.

To his youngest boy, Christopher (b. 1924, and then stationed in South Africa with the Royal Air Force), he regularly sent new chapters of his burgeoning magnum opus, along with news that, when he read each aloud to C. S. Lewis, the author of Mere Christianity and so many other kindly, bracing works would sometimes be moved to tears. “[Lewis] was for long my only audience,” Tolkien wrote later with deep appreciation. “Only from him did I ever get the idea that my ‘stuff’ could be more than a private hobby. But for his interest and unceasing eagerness for more I should never have brought The L. of the R. to a conclusion.”

**********

All about the hills the hosts of Mordor raged. The Captains of the West were foundering in a gathering sea. The sun gleamed red, and under the wings of the Nazgûl the shadows of death fell dark upon the earth. Aragorn stood beneath his banner, silent and stern, as one lost in thought of things long past or far away; but his eyes gleamed like stars that shine the brighter as the night deepens. Upon the hill-top stood Gandalf, and he was white and cold and no shadow fell on him. The onslaught of Mordor broke like a wave on the beleaguered hills, voices roaring like a tide amid the wreck and crash of arms.

**********

“I have not been nourished by English Literature,” Tolkien once wrote, “. . . for the simple reason that I have never found much there in which to rest my heart (or heart and head together). I was brought up in the Classics, and first discovered the sensation of literary pleasure in Homer.”

While browsing through a dusty old college library as a teen, young “Ronald” Tolkien discovered a veritable Ring of Power in the form of a book on Finnish grammar. Learning that language, he would later marvel, was “like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before.” Soon his study of other languages gave him a “sensibility to linguistic pattern which affects me emotionally like colour or music,” and he began penning stories and poems in a genuine, rigorously applied archaic mode, deeming our more garish modern idiom as possessing “an insincerity of thought, a disunion of word and meaning” whenever it was applied to tales of high romance. In Tolkien’s view, you couldn’t drink vintage spirits out of a soda pop can without it fatally marring the taste and experience.

At the same time, many old myths were missing something important. “I do know Celtic things (many in their original languages Irish and Welsh),” he once explained by way of example, “and feel for them a certain distaste: largely for their fundamental unreason. They have bright colour, but are like a broken stained glass window reassembled without design. They are in fact ‘mad’. . . but I don’t believe I am.”

He thus “set myself a task, the arrogance of which I fully recognized and trembled at: being precisely to restore to the English an epic tradition and present them with a mythology of their own.”

By the time the 1930s gave way to the 40s and then the 50s, Tolkien began to quietly despair at ever accomplishing his quest. “I have produced a monster,” he wrote to one correspondent, “an immensely long, complex, rather bitter, and very terrifying romance, quite unfit for children (if fit for anybody).” In 1953, while checking galley-proofs, he admitted that it “seems, I must confess, in print very long-winded in parts.” Over fifteen years after beginning his “arrogant” task, he was left to grimly muse that:

Hardly a word in its 600,000 or more has been unconsidered. And the placing, size, style, and contribution to the whole of all its features, incidents, and chapters has been laboriously pondered. I do not say this in recommendation. It is, I feel, only too likely that I am deluded, lost in a web of vain imaginings of not much value to others — in spite of the fact that a few readers have found it good, on the whole.

The first print run of The Fellowship of the Ring was limited to 4,500 copies. “I am dreading the publication,” he wrote, “for it will be impossible not to mind what is said. I have exposed my heart to be shot at.” Many in the entrenched Ivory Towers of academia and literary criticism did just that, offering up scathing critiques that — all too typical of such people — frequently got whole portions of the book (characters, events, dialogue) embarrassingly wrong. In response Tolkien could only sigh, having told his publisher, “It is written in my life-blood, such as that is, thick or thin; and I can no other.”

But one man above all others was determined to (I use a phrase coined by Robert E. Howard) “not be backward when the spears are splintering.” C. S. Lewis took up his pen like a Crusader and, in a review titled “The Gods Return to Earth,” shouted out to the world a written manifestation of the same tears he had shed while first hearing the story read in manuscript:

[The Fellowship of the Ring] is like lightning from a clear sky. . . To say that in it heroic romance, gorgeous, eloquent, and unashamed, has suddenly returned at a period almost pathological in its anti-romanticism, is inadequate. . . Here are beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron; here is a book that will break your heart. . . .

It is sane and vigilant invention, revealing at point after point the integration of the author’s mind. . . Anguish is, for me, almost the prevailing note. But not, as in the literature most typical of our age, the anguish of abnormal or contorted souls; rather that anguish of those who were happy before a certain darkness came up and will be happy if they live to see it gone. . . . But with the anguish comes also a strange exaltation. . . when we have finished, we return to our own life not relaxed but fortified….

Even now I have left out almost everything — the silvan leafiness, the passions, the high virtues, the remote horizons. Even if I had space I could hardly convey them. And after all the most obvious appeal of the book is perhaps also its deepest: “there was sorrow then too, and gathering dark, but great valour, and great deeds that were not wholly vain.” Not wholly vain — it is the cool middle point between illusion and disillusionment.

Over the ensuing decades Tolkien’s “long, complex, rather bitter, and very terrifying romance” sold millions of copies, and immeasurably enriched the lives of millions of souls, many of whom felt lost and alone in a mad world seemingly bereft of the sanity and the sanctity that his tale embodied. By the time the indispensable scholar and philologist Tom Shippey published his book J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (2001, with a title meant to be taken as a comment on Tolkien’s thematic essence as much as his popularity) his remaining detractors resembled nothing so much as the routed forces of Mordor, running “hither and thither mindless. . . wailing back to hide in holes and dark lightless places far from hope.”

And from the cimmerian gloom of those dark, lightless places, oh how they snarl! “The Lord of the Rings is racist,” wrote John Yatt in the Guardian in 2002:

It is soaked in the logic that race determines behaviour. . . the races that Tolkien has put on the side of evil are then given a rag-bag of non-white characteristics that could have been copied straight from a BNP [British National Party] leaflet. Dark, slant-eyed, swarthy, broad-faced — it’s amazing he doesn’t go the whole hog and give them a natural sense of rhythm. . . .

[LG -- actually, it was the 1980 Bakshi cartoon that did that: "Where there's a whip!" (ssss...crack!) "There's a way!"]

Begun in the 1930s, published in the 1950s, it’s shot through with the preoccupations and prejudices of its time. This is no clash of noble adversaries like the Iliad, no story of our common humanity like the Epic of Gilgamesh. It’s a fake, a forgery, a dodgy copy. Strip away the archaic turns of phrase and you find a set of basic assumptions that are frankly unacceptable in 21st-century Britain.

What gall. The Guardian is a paper, after all, that later praised fantasy author George RR Martin for his unflinchingly graphic portrayal of a world in which “the old are tortured and humiliated, women are raped, suffering is everywhere,” for his “unsettling passages of bracingly weird sex” and for his myriad scenes of “inventively unpleasant killing.” It’s a paper that later recommended Joe Abercrombie’s first book for its “delightfully twisted and evil” torturer “who can shorten a man’s arm from fingers to elbow in neat little slices,” and for its young hero possessing “no redeeming qualities whatsoever.” Hey, if that’s all to your taste, fair enough.

But does anyone really expect the rest of us to take that same paper seriously when it draws a courageous line in the sand against a mild-mannered Christian professor and his exquisitely rendered masterpiece? To meekly agree that Tolkien sitting on the shelf next to the books of Mssrs. Martin and Abercrombie is “frankly unacceptable” in this evolved new century of tolerance and diversity, lest we be branded racists and throwbacks ourselves? Or to renounce The Lord of the Rings in favor of books overflowing like a backed-up commode with torture-porn, sadism, and nihilism? (Apparently so: the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia has a meaty entry dedicated to RACISM, CHARGES OF.)

After a lecture, Shippey (whose wonderful Author of the Century book was itself trashed in the Guardian as “a belligerently argued piece of fan-magazine polemic”) was once asked what motivated people to spit such abject nonsense onto Tolkien’s self-professed “life-blood.” A man of eloquence and erudition, he responded with exactly the tone, and at exactly the length, that such diatribes deserve.

“They’re bastards!” he said cheerfully.

Or perhaps we should translate that into words Tolkien would have ruefully recognized, and that adequately express what people with intellectual standards think whenever they open a typical newspaper these days:

“Oh f***, not another liberal critic!”

To be continued. . . .


http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/lgrin/2011/02/19/sanity-and-sanctity-the-ennobling-fantasy-of-j-r-r-tolkien-part-1/#more-447368

Death to Apostates: Not a Perversion of Islam, but Islam

The case of Said Musa shows why we cannot graft democracy onto Islamic societies.

By Andrew C. McCarthy
http://www.nationalreview.com
February 19, 2011 4:00 A.M.

On NRO Friday, Paul Marshall lamented the Obama administration’s fecklessness, in particular the president’s appalling silence in the face of the death sentence Said Musa may suffer for the crime of converting to Christianity. This is in Afghanistan, the nation for which our troops are fighting and dying — not to defeat our enemies, but to prop up the Islamic “democracy” we have spent a decade trying to forge at a cost of billions.

This shameful episode (and the certain recurrence of it) perfectly illustrates the folly of Islamic nation-building. The stubborn fact is that we have asked for just these sorts of atrocious outcomes. Ever since 2003, when the thrust of the War On Terror stopped being the defeat of America’s enemies and decisively shifted to nation-building, we have insisted — against history, law, language, and logic — that Islamic culture is perfectly compatible with and hospitable to Western-style democracy. It is not, it never has been, and it never will be.

This is not the first time an apostate in the new American-made Afghanistan has confronted the very real possibility of being put to death by the state. In 2006, a Christian convert named Abdul Rahman was tried for apostasy. The episode prompted a groundswell of international criticism. In the end, Abdul Rahman was whisked out of the country before his execution could be carried out. A fig leaf was placed over the mess: The prospect of execution had been rendered unjust by the (perfectly sane) defendant’s purported mental illness — after all, who in his right mind would convert from Islam? His life was spared, but the Afghans never backed down from their insistence that a Muslim’s renunciation of Islam is a capital offense and that death is the mandated sentence.

They are right. Under the construction of sharia adopted by the Afghan constitution (namely Hanafi, one of Islam’s classical schools of jurisprudence), apostasy is the gravest offense a Muslim can commit. It is considered treason from the Muslim ummah. The penalty for that is death.

This is the dictate of Mohammed himself. One relevant hadith (from the authoritative Bukhari collection, No. 9.83.17) quotes the prophet as follows: “A Muslim . . . may not be killed except for three reasons: as punishment for murder, for adultery, or for apostasy.” It is true that the hadith says “may,” not “must,” and there is in fact some squabbling among sharia scholars about whether ostracism could be a sufficient sentence, at least if the apostasy is kept secret. Alas, the “may” hadith is not the prophet’s only directive on the matter. There is also No. 9.84.57: “Whoever changes his Islamic religion, then kill him.” That is fairly clear, wouldn’t you say? And as a result, mainstream Islamic scholarship holds that apostasy, certainly once it is publicly revealed, warrants the death penalty.

Having hailed the Afghan constitution as the start of a democratic tsunami, the startled Bush administration made all the predictable arguments against Abdul Rahman’s apostasy prosecution. Diplomats and nation-building enthusiasts pointed in panic at the vague, lofty language injected into the Afghan constitution to obscure Islamic law’s harsh reality — spoons full of sugar that had helped the sharia go down. The constitution assures religious freedom, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice maintained. It cites the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and even specifies that non-Muslims are free to perform their religious rites.

Read the fine print. It actually qualifies that all purported guarantees of personal and religious liberty are subject to Islamic law and Afghanistan’s commitment to being an Islamic state. We were supposed to celebrate this, just as the State Department did, because Islam is the “religion of peace” whose principles are just like ours — that’s why it was so ready for democracy.

It wasn’t so. Sharia is very different from Western law, and it couldn’t care less what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has to say on the matter of apostasy. Nor do the authoritative scholars at al-Azhar University in Cairo give a hoot that their straightforward interpretation of sharia’s apostasy principles upsets would-be Muslim reformers like Zuhdi Jasser. We may look at Dr. Jasser as a hero — I do — but at al-Azhar, the sharia scholars would point out that he is merely a doctor of medicine, not of Islamic jurisprudence.

The constitution that the State Department bragged about helping the new Afghan “democracy” draft established Islam as the state religion and installed sharia as a principal source of law. That constitution therefore fully supports the state killing of apostates. Case closed.

The purpose of real democracy, meaning Western republican democracy, is to promote individual liberty, the engine of human prosperity. No nation that establishes a state religion, installs its totalitarian legal code, and hence denies its citizens freedom of conscience, can ever be a democracy — no matter how many “free” elections it holds. Afghanistan is not a democracy. It is an Islamic sharia state.

To grasp this, one need only read the first three articles of its constitution [1]:

1. Afghanistan is an Islamic Republic, independent, unitary, and indivisible state.

2. The religion of the state of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is the sacred religion of Islam. Followers of other religions are free to exercise their faith and perform their religious rites within the limits of the provisions of law.

3. In Afghanistan, no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam.

Need to hear more? The articles creating the Afghan judiciary make higher education in Islamic jurisprudence a sufficient qualification to sit on the Afghan Supreme Court. Judges are expressly required to take an oath, “In the name of Allah, the Merciful and Compassionate,” to “support justice and righteousness in accord with the provisions of the sacred religion of Islam.” When there is no provision of law that seems to control a controversy, Article 130 directs that decisions be in accordance with “the Hanafi jurisprudence” of sharia.

Moreover, consistent with the Muslim Brotherhood’s blueprint for society (highly influential in Sunni Islamic countries and consonant with the transnational-progressive bent of the State Department), the constitution obliges the Afghan government to “create a prosperous and progressive society based on social justice” (which, naturally, includes free universal health care). It commands that the Afghan flag be inscribed, “There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is His prophet, and Allah is Great [i.e., Allahu Akbar].” The state is instructed to “devise and implement a unified educational curriculum based on the provisions of the sacred religion of Islam” and to “develop the curriculum of religious subjects on the basis of the Islamic sects existing in Afghanistan.” In addition, the constitution requires the Afghan government to ensure that the family, “a fundamental unit of society,” is supported in the upbringing of children by “the elimination of traditions contrary to the principles of the sacred religion of Islam.” Those contrary traditions include Western Judeo-Christian principles.

Was that what you figured we were doing when you heard we were “promoting democracy”? Is that a mission you would have agreed to commit our armed forces to accomplish? Yet, that’s what we’re fighting for. The War On Terror hasn’t been about 9/11 for a very long time. You may think our troops are in Afghanistan to defeat al-Qaeda and the Taliban — that’s what you’re told every time somebody has the temerity to suggest that we should leave. Our commanders, however, have acknowledged that destroying the enemy is not our objective. In fact, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the former top U.S. commander, said what is happening in Afghanistan is not even our war. “This conflict and country are [theirs] to win,” he wrote, “not mine.”[2]

It’s not our war, nor is it something those running it contemplate winning. “We are not trying to win this militarily,” the late Richard Holbrooke, President Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan, told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria last fall.[3] Indeed, the administration had concluded — upon what Ambassador Holbrooke described as consultation with our military commanders — that the war could not be won “militarily.” So the goal now is not to defeat the Taliban but to entice them into taking a seat at the table — in the vain hope that if they buy into the political process they will refrain from confederating with the likes of al-Qaeda.

Afghanistan is not an American war anymore. It’s a political experiment: Can we lay the foundation for Islamic social justice, hang a “democracy” label on it, and convince Americans that we’ve won, that all the blood and treasure have been worth it? The same thing, by the way, has been done in Iraq. Ever since the Iraqis adopted their American-brokered constitution, Christians have left the country in droves [4], and homosexuals, similarly, have been persecuted.[5] And the Iraqis are so grateful for all the American lives and “investment” sacrificed on their behalf that, just this week, the capital city of Baghdad demanded that the U.S. apologize and fork up another $1 billion in reparations. For what? Why, for “the ugly and destructive way” the American army’s Humvees and fortifications have damaged the city’s aesthetics and infrastructure. Yes, a brief time-out from the usual serenity of life in a sharia state to chastise Americans for their “deliberate ignorance and carelessness about the simplest forms of public taste.”[6]

In 2006, promoters of Islamic democracy — having dreamed that this chimera was not merely plausible but a boon for U.S. security against terrorists — were stunned upon awakening to the reality of “democratic” Afghanistan’s intention to execute Abdul Rahman for apostasy. This was an “affront to civilization,” we at NR said at the time.[7] As Samuel Huntington explained, however, there are two senses of “civilization.” One assumes that all human beings, all cultures, are essentially the same and share the same concept of the higher form of life — that there is only one real civilization. The other holds that different cultures have very different ways of looking at the world — that there are several different civilizations, and what is an affront to one may be a convention to another.

The underlying premise of the democracy project is the former sense of “civilization.” As I argued at the time [8], the real world is the latter. And now, five years removed from the Abdul Rahman case, five more years of intensive, costly American entanglement with Afghanistan, Paul Marshall gives us the harrowing plight of Said Musa. When he told the Afghan court he was a Christian man, no Afghan defense lawyer would have anything to do with him — except the one who spat on him. He was thrown in jail as an apostate among 400 Afghan Muslims, and he has since been beaten, mocked, deprived of sleep, derisively referred to as “Jesus Christ,” and sexually abused. And just as no Afghan lawyer was willing to aid an apostate, the Afghan sharia state declined to aid him — refusing him access to foreign counsel. We think of this as an affront to civilization. They, on the other hand, think they have their own civilization, and that our civilization and Said Musa are affronts to it.

The affront here is our own betrayal of our own principles. The Islamic democracy project is not democratizing the Muslim world. It is degrading individual liberty by masquerading sharia, in its most draconian form, as democracy. The only worthy reason for dispatching our young men and women in uniform to Islamic countries is to destroy America’s enemies. Our armed forces are not agents of Islamic social justice, and stabilizing a sharia state so its children can learn to hate the West as much as their parents do is not a mission the American people would ever have endorsed. It is past time to end this failed experiment.

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Links:

[1] http://www.afghan-web.com/politics/current_constitution.html

[2] http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/228339/mission-not-mcchrystal-clear/andrew-c-mccarthy

[3] http://www.politico.com/blogs/politicolive/1010/Holbrooke_Pure_military_victory.html

[4] http://www.thememriblog.org/blog_personal/en/30283.htm

[5] http://www.newsweek.com/2008/08/25/don-t-ask-don-t-tell-do-kill.html

[6] http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/17/us-iraq-usa-damages-idUSTRE71G2T820110217

[7] http://old.nationalreview.com/editorial/editors200603220953.asp

[8] http://old.nationalreview.com/mccarthy/mccarthy200603221438.asp

40 years on, Bryan Ferry still Mr Smooth

The Australian
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/
February 18, 2011

Bryan Ferry in Perth ahead of the Roxy Music tour beginning at the weekend. Picture: Marie Nirme/The Australian

BRYAN Ferry has grown used to his image as the suave, debonair crooner. At 65, the English singer still cuts a dashing figure, as he did in Perth yesterday before his band Roxy Music's eight-show Australian tour.

"There's nothing particularly forced about it," Ferry told The Australian, laughing at the perception of him as Mr Smooth. "There's no trickery involved. You just do what you do to be what you are. I don't think it's outlandish, what I do."

The story was somewhat different 40 years ago when Ferry formed Roxy Music in England. The band made an impact with early singles such as Virginia Plain and Pyjamarama, aided by stage costumes and make-up that mixed sci-fi B-movie weirdness with rockabilly chic.

"We were more underground in those early years," Ferry said.

"Now we have people coming to see us from different generations."

Four members from the band that became famous in 1972 are in Australia for the tour, which begins tomorrow in Margaret River. Drummer Paul Thompson, sax player Andy Mackay, guitarist Phil Manzanera and Ferry are marking the 40th anniversary by delving deep into the band's history rather than just relying on the hits such as Over You, More Than This and Avalon that brought them a more mainstream audience in the early 1980s.

"We're playing a lot of material from the early days, which is refreshing," said Ferry.

"It's only ever going to get played if we play it."

Ferry, who has also maintained a solo career since those early Roxy days, has been combining the two projects recently, promoting his last solo album Olympia when not on the road with his old bandmates. He'll be back touring the world as Bryan Ferry after the Roxy Music gigs.

Clearly, he's not content to rest on his laurels.

"I can't do that," he said. "I like making music. That's what I do."

For years, the occasional reunion of Roxy Music has sparked suggestions of another album, the first since Avalon in 1982, but Ferry all but ruled that out yesterday.

"It's very doubtful," he said. "We only see each other when we tour and we all lead very different lives." However, he said that recent shows in Britain had been recorded for a potential live album.

As to his 40 years in show business, the rock veteran said: "It only seems like a matter of months really."


Love is still the drug for Bryan Ferry

By Sally Browne
The Sunday Mail (Qld) February 20, 2011
http://www.couriermail.com.au/

GOING STRONG: Turning 65 hasn't slowed down Bryan Ferry. Source: Supplied

WHEN I call the Carlisle Hotel in New York, I don't have to ask for a pseudonym to protect the identity of this famous star, but am put through to him directly. No tour agent or publicist comes on the line, but a soft voice, which confirms I'm speaking to Bryan Ferry.

His speaking voice gives away his age, more than his looks or his music. And at 65, the suave, sophisticated and swoon-worthy singer of such hits as "Let's Stick Together" and "Love Is the Drug" can still make a girl's heart skip.

I'm unfashionably early, but that's good, I'm told, because Ferry has a lot going on. Last night he did The Late Show with David Letterman, today he has radio, the next day he has a live gig.

And in less than 24 hours, he'll be on a plane to Perth, the first stop in a series of Roxy Music concerts around Australia, which gets him into Brisbane on March 1.

It's a long flight, and he has stacked up the reading list. In the Ferry library is Patti Smith's memoir Just Kids and a book about Lou Reed. He's just finished one on Keith Richards.

"I don't normally read (music biographies) funnily enough,'' he says. "It's just a coincidence that there's been a few out recently that I wanted to read. I got a few as presents actually. But I do like reading biographies anyway, but quite often 18th century or your older things. I like reading about Versailles and French history. It's quite interesting.''

He recommends a book on Madame de La Tour du Pin, a lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette.

It's ironic that someone so protective of his own personal life would choose to read biographies of others.

After talking about himself for 30 years, Ferry is affable and open on some subjects but won't delve into others, particularly the history of his past sleeping arrangements.

Questions about Jerry Hall, whom he dated for two years before she left him for Mick Jagger, and his ex-wife Lucy Helmore, whom he was married to for more than 20 years, are avoided. And the British media have enjoyed pointing out that his current girlfriend is 36 years his junior.

One day, he says, he might attempt his own memoirs. "I hope I'll get round to doing it. It would be nice to put certain things down on paper,'' he says.

While relationships may be off the list, he's happy to talk about his sons, though. He has four of them and they are a source of great pride.

None has fallen too far from the tree.

Otis is a pro-hunting political activist, Isaac and Tara are heavily involved in the tour Isaac does visuals and Tara plays percussion and Merlin is studying English at university. Lucy Helmore is their mum.

"They're all a bit like me. It's strange. It's like four successful clones,'' Ferry laughs.

It's good to have some young blood on the tour and Ferry tells me that his band has an Australian connection Jorja Chalmers, who plays second keyboard and saxophone, is from Sydney.

He's also enjoying being back on stage with the original members of Roxy Music: Phil Manzanera, Andy Mackay and Paul Thompson.

The band produced eight influential albums in the 10 years that they were recording and have a wealth of songs to draw from, including "Avalon", "Virginia Plain", "Jealous Guy", "Love Is the Drug" and "More than This". But the tour also comes at a time when Ferry has put out his first solo album of original material since 2002.

A fantastic record, Olympia features more names than an A-list party, including Nile Rodgers, Dave Stewart, Scissor Sisters, Groove Armada, Flea of the Chili Peppers, Radioheads' Johnny Greenwood and Pink Floyd's Dave Gilmour.

Model Kate Moss graces the cover, the latest addition to the Bryan Ferry/Roxy Music model club.

It's an esteemed position.

Since their self-titled debut in 1972, the art rock band have been known for their covers featuring glamorous women in seductive poses.

In the roll call have been Hall, who also appeared in Ferry's solo music videos for "Let's Stick Together" and "The Price of Love", Amanda Lear, who Ferry dated before she went out with David Bowie, and Marilyn Cole, 1973's Playmate of the Year, who ended up becoming a playmate of Ferry's also.

Helmore appears on the cover of 1982's Avalon (although all that can be seen is her helmet) and it's that relationship that lasted the longest.

Although the record sleeves came out at a time when the feminist movement was at its peak, Ferry remembers no adverse reaction, apart from the Country Life cover, which in America had to be shrink-wrapped in green plastic, he recalls with a chuckle.

To him, the images were a glamorisation or glorification of women, born of his love of cinema and an art school aesthetic. The name "Roxy'' comes from a chain of cinemas, or "picture dream palaces'' as they were to a young boy growing up in the bleak surrounds of post-war northern England.

So is there a Roxy Girl Club?

"I suppose there is unofficially. There haven't been any annual meetings,'' he laughs.

In fact, Marilyn Cole came to their show in London last year.

"She came in a fur coat and she looked like a million dollars,'' Ferry recalls. "It was great for the girls in the band now. They met her and they went 'Wow, you look so great!' And Kate Moss was there as well, of course.''

Moss was a natural choice to inherit the role. Apart from being a family friend ("the boys all know her''), she's a big music fan and had the personality to carry it off.

"I wanted somebody with a bit of resonance because the original Olympia painting by Manet had a kind of scandal at the time in the mid-19th century it was a very strong and sexual picture. (Kate's) got a kind of history, a rock 'n' roll personality she's a bit of a dangerous woman, a femme fatale,'' Ferry says.

"She really got into it. She said 'I've always wanted to be a Roxy cover girl'.''

The glamorous life was a strong drawcard for the young Ferry. His father was a ploughman, who later looked after pit ponies used in coal mines. Much to his father's confusion, Ferry enrolled in art school, specialising in pottery among other things. The famous pop artist Richard Hamilton was his teacher.

"I found it very attractive because I was from very humble beginnings and it's very bleak, the north. It wasn't so glamorous, so when I went to the movies it was a special thing to see another world, several other worlds. And I went to the movies a lot.

"That was a big influence on my growing up. And when I started studying art it was a new world and a better world, so after university, four years later, I moved to London, and went there to seek my fortune as it were.

"I gravitated to music and suddenly found myself travelling the world and experiencing things firsthand. Rather than secondhand, through books or pictures or movies, I was living it.

"So life's just been like a wonderful adventure really, to tell you the truth. You never take things for granted if you come from that kind of poor beginnings.''

And that includes, he says, coming to New York for a couple of days.

"Coming to New York this week is exciting for me still,'' he says. "It's great. And it's been wonderful having my solo band, most of whom are in Roxy anyway, see it with fresh eyes. They're like 'You're going to have to drag me away from here!' I say 'Hey it's not so bad, we're going to go to Australia', and they say 'that's cool as well'.''

So, if there was to be a book written about him, what role would he play?

Would he describe himself as a gentleman or a bad boy?

"I'd say the perfect combination of both, really,'' he says smoothly.

"Hopefully the best of both worlds. And the bad guys are always interesting.''

Roxy Music play Riverstage, Brisbane, March 1; ticketmaster.com.au 136 100.

Today's Tune: Bryan Ferry - Song to the Siren (Live)

Bankruptcy of Borders proves flooding the market with books doesn't work

By Alexander Nazaryan
The Daily News
http://www.nydailynews.com
Friday, February 18th 2011, 4:00 AM

Henny Ray Abrams/AP

Borders plans to close 200 stores and layoff 6,000 employees.


Borders is bankrupt, and you shouldn't gloat about it, no matter how much you hate chain bookstores. In fact, if you are a writer, an editor or a reader, you should be downright furious. I am, and I rarely shopped there. Still, even if you only buy books at the smallest, most charming bookstore in the West Village, you're going to feel the tremors of Borders' demise. We all are.

Though some have suggested that Borders' loss is a gain for small bookstores, it is a loss for them, too - and for anyone who believes that books deserve better than a Walmart discount rack or your neighborhood tag sale.

The notion, suggested in yesterday's New York Times, that "the troubles of Borders are rooted in . . . problems . . . of [its] own making" - is a comforting but dangerous illusion, because it concentrates blame on one bookseller, as opposed to the entire publishing establishment - where it without question belongs.

Borders did expand too quickly and never adapted to the digital marketplace. Now, carrying $1.29 billion in debt, it's about to close 200 stores and lay off 6,000 employees. But this will hardly prove an isolated case. Though currently treading water, I am certain that Barnes & Noble cannot be very far behind. Smaller stores might survive, but it's hard to imagine them thriving - after all, most of them have already been battered by the forces assailing Borders.

What happened to real estate is now happening to books: An industry colluded to push an overpriced product on a public whose purse strings were tightening and whose tastes were changing. Demand dropped steadily, but supply kept soaring - only now is it coming down to earth. Nothing reminds me so much of those tracts of foreclosed houses in Florida as stack upon stack of hardcover books, desperate to be bought for $25.99.

Borders owes publishers vast amounts for such books, which it bought but then could not itself sell: $41 million to Penguin and $33.8 million to Simon & Schuster. Should they remain unpaid, every editor, author and agent in America will feel the pain.

But maybe such a reckoning is deserved - for too long, publishers have been out of touch with what Americans are reading, how they're reading it and how much they're willing to pay for it. But publishers, like financiers, appear to be largely immune to reality. The rise of Amazon, the profusion iPads and Kindles, the dominance of video games and movies - none of this seemed to trouble executives who imagined themselves immune to such obvious market forces.

For the love of God, Manhattan's flagship Barnes & Noble sits in Union Square, across from the shuttered Virgin Megastore, which was once so packed you could hardly reach for the latest REM disk. While reading itself is no more extinct than music, the bookstore will soon go the way of Bleecker St.'s famous record stores.

Indeed, the cause of recycling has never had a better friend than the next sure-fire hit novel. Yann Martel received a $3 million advance for this second novel, an allegory about the Holocaust. Not unlike a home mortgage, an advance comes with the hope of being repaid. In this case, though, Martel would have had to sell 120,000 books just to make back the advance. Instead, the book was a complete bust - an abandoned McMansion.

Hey, remember when Dan Brown's "The Lost Symbol" saved the entire publishing industry in 2008, as an article in the Wall Street Journal suggested it would? Me neither.

Much as real estate speculators bought up cheap land with the conviction that gentrification would continue forever (like the not-quite renaissance of the South Bronx as an artists' haven), publishers seized on every literary trend, convinced that if readers bought one book, they would like 20 more like it.

When Iran was the topic du jour some three years ago, they rolled out, among others, "When Skateboards Will Be Free: A Memoir of a Political Childhood" by Said Sayrafiezadeh, "Sons and Other Flammable Objects" by Porochista Khakpour, "Reading Lolita in Tehran" by Azar Nafisi and "The Septembers of Shiraz" by Dalia Sofer.

These may all be excellent reads, for all I know. Maybe all those "Twilight" and "Harry Potter" imitations are the finest stuff out there, rivaled only by the latest contender from Sweden trying to dethrone "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo."

In truth, flooding the market with books doesn't work, because books aren't like shoes or groceries. Readers don't demand choice as much as they demand quality. Fewer books, rigorously edited and thoughtfully published, would have better served both readers and writers.

Take, as a contrary example, Paul Harding's "Tinkers." A complete unknown, Harding received a tiny advance of $1,000 from tiny Bellevue Literary Press, for a tiny print run of 3,500. But small bookstores loved his book and recommended it to readers. They seemed to like it, too; so did the Pulitzer Prize committee, which awarded him the 2009 fiction prize. If there is hope for publishing, it is with modest presses and modest books, putting out titles for small but loyal audiences. But that's not something that's going to warm the heart of Penguin's CEO.

It's not only the publishers who are at fault. MFA programs train writers whose goal - not always, but far too often - is a six-figure advance, not the publication of serious (or even readable) literature. They write with the market squarely in their sights - the market, in turn, dictates what it thinks the reader wants from them. "Eat Pray Love" was huge? Better enroll in that memoir-writing course. Oh, and do you know anything about Iran?

And the people who write books - and teach the writing of them - also often write reviews, which is why your average book review (disclosure: I've written plenty) is about as honest as a real estate ad describing a run-down property as a "charming fixer-upper." Very few writers want to say something negative about another author, fearing that they will be punished in return. To hear reviewers tell it, every writer is the next John Updike, every novel a great American one. Say what you will about the movie business, at least there's very little sanctimony - no one, as far as I know, is calling Judd Apatow a reincarnated Orson Welles.

But people aren't stupid - not that stupid, anyway. Borders' meltdown suggests a deeper unwillingness of the American reader to partake in the cycle of poorly written books rushed to the market, wildly hyped and then promptly turned into so much blank paper again.

Those 200 Borders franchises about to shutter will further diminish bookstores in the crowded American marketplace, relegating them to the niche status of, say, taxidermy shops. The sad truth, though, for us book people, is that this was a long time coming and isn't over yet - and that we did it to ourselves.

anazaryan@nydailynews.com

Alexander Nazaryan is on the Editorial Board of the Daily News

Egypt Gets Its Khomeini

By Barry Rubin
http://www.americanthinker.com/
February 17, 2011

Friday, February 18 may be a turning point in Egyptian history. On that day Yusuf al-Qaradawi (pictured above), the best-known Muslim Brotherhood cleric in the world and one of the most famous Islamist thinkers, will address a mass rally in Cairo.

Up until now, the Egyptian revolution generally, and the Brotherhood in particular, has lacked a charismatic thinker, someone who could really mobilize the masses. Qaradawi is that man. Long resident in the Gulf, he is returning to his homeland in triumph. Through internet, radio, his 100 books, and his weekly satellite television program, Qaradawi has been an articulate voice for revolutionary Islamism. He is literally a living legend.

Under the old regime, Qaradawi was banned from the country. He is now 84 years old -- two years older than the fallen President Husni Mubarak--but he is tremendously energetic and clear-minded.

It was Qaradawi who, in critiquing Usama bin Ladin and al-Qaida, argued that Islamists should always participate in elections because they would, he claims, invariably win them. Hamas and Hezb'allah have shown that he was right on that point.

Symbolically, he will give the Friday prayer sermon to be held in Tahrir Square, the center of the revolutionary movement. The massing of hundreds of thousands of people in the square to hear Islamic services and a sermon by a radical Islamist is not the kind of thing that's been going on under the 60-year-old military regime that was recently overthrown.

The context is also the thanking of Qaradawi for his support of the revolution, an implication that he is somehow its spiritual father.

Qaradawi, though some in the West view him as a moderate, supports the straight Islamist line: anti-American, anti-Western, wipe Israel off the map, foment Jihad, stone homosexuals, in short the works.

One of Qaradawi's initiatives has been urging Muslims to settle in the West, of which he said, "that powerful West, which has come to rule the world, should not be left to the influence of the Jews alone." He contends that the three major threats Muslims face are Zionism, internal integration, and globalization. To survive, he argues, Muslims must fight the Zionists, Crusaders, idolaters, and Communists.

What is his view of both the Mubarak regime and the young, Facebook-flourishing liberals who made the revolution? As he said in 2004: "Some Arab and Muslim secularists are following the U.S. government by advocating the kind of reform that will disarm the nation from the elements of strength that are holding our people together."

Have no doubt. It is Qaradawi, not bin Ladin, who is the most dangerous revolutionary Islamist in the world, and he is about to unleash the full force of his power and persuasion on Egypt.

Who are you going to bet on being more influential, a Google executive and an unorganized band of well-intentioned liberal Egyptians or the world champion radical Islamist cleric?

- Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The GLORIA Center's site is www.gloria-center.org and of his blog, Rubin Reports, www.rubinreports.blogspot.com.

Apocalypse Now: Wisconsin vs. Big Labor

In bankrupt and near-bankrupt states, fiscal discipline can’t wait.

By Michelle Malkin
http://www.nationalreview.com/
http://michellemalkin.com/
February 18, 2011 12:00 A.M.


Welcome to the reckoning. We have met the fiscal apocalypse, and it is smack dab in the middle of the heartland. As Wisconsin goes, so goes the nation. Let us pray it does not go the way of the decrepit welfare states of the European Union.

The lowdown: State-government workers in the Badger State pay piddling amounts for generous taxpayer-subsidized health benefits. Faced with a $3.6 billion budget hole and a state constitutional ban on running a deficit, new Republican governor Scott Walker wants public unions to pony up a little more. He has proposed raising the public-employee share of health-insurance premiums from less than 5 percent to 12.4 percent. He is also pushing for state workers to cover half of their pension contributions. To spare taxpayers the soaring costs of byzantine union-negotiated work rules, he would rein in Big Labor’s collective-bargaining power to cover only wages unless approved at the ballot box.

MADISON, WI - FEBRUARY 16: Protesters filled the steps and grounds surrounding the State Capitol building on February 16, 2010 in Madison, Wisconsin. (Getty Images)

As the free-market MacIver Institute in Wisconsin points out, the benefits concessions Walker is asking public-union workers to make would still maintain their health-insurance-contribution rates at the second-lowest among Midwest states for family coverage. Moreover, a new analysis by benefits think tank HCTrends shows that the new rate “would also be less than the employee contributions required at 85 percent of large Milwaukee area employers.”

This modest call for shared sacrifice has triggered the wrath of the White House–Big Labor–Michael Moore axis. On Thursday, President Obama lamented the “assault on unions.” AFL-CIO and Service Employees International Union bosses dubbed Walker the “Mubarak of the Midwest” while their minions toted posters of Walker’s face superimposed on Hitler’s. Moore goaded thousands of striking union protesters to “shut down” the “new Cairo” while the state’s Democratic legislators bailed on floor debate over the union reform package.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan spurned the opportunity to condemn thousands of Wisconsin public-school teachers for lying about being “sick” and shutting down at least eight school districts across the state to attend capitol protests (many of whom dragged their students on a social-justice field trip with them). Instead, Duncan defended teachers for “doing probably the most important work in society.” Only striking government teachers could win federal praise for not doing their jobs.

Yes, the so-called progressives truly believe that bringing American union workers into the 21st century in line with the rest of the workforce is tantamount to dictatorship.

Yes, the so-called progressives truly believe that by walking off their jobs and out of their classrooms, they are “putting children first.”

If ever there were proof that public unions no longer work in the public interest, this is it. Big Labor dragoons workers into exclusive representation agreements, forces them to pay compulsory dues that fatten Democratic political coffers, and then has the chutzpah to cast itself as an Egyptian-style “freedom” and “human rights” movement.

Meanwhile, union leaders elsewhere are quietly forcing their low-wage members to share the sacrifice in order to preserve teetering health funds. In New York State, Skidmore College campus janitors, dining-service workers, and other maintenance employees received late notice from the SEIU that 4.15 percent of their gross earnings will now be deducted from their paychecks to cover the cost of the health plan provided through the behemoth 1199 SEIU Greater New York Benefit Fund. (If the name sounds familiar, it’s because this is one of several privileged SEIU affiliates that have received an Obamacare waiver.)

These workers are forced to join the union in order to preserve their jobs, and unlike non-union workers, they are locked into a single health plan. The SEIU has now decreed that they must pay new fees to include spouses on their plans and has hiked employee co-pays for doctor visits and prescription drugs.

What’s necessary for New York union workers is necessary for Wisconsin union workers — and for the rest of the protected union-worker class in bankrupt and near-bankrupt states across America. The “persuasion of power” so ruthlessly and recklessly exercised by the SEIU and its thuggish allies must be broken by the moral courage of fiscal discipline. It’s now or never.

— Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies (Regnery, 2010). © 2011 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Obama's Louis XV budget

By Charles Krauthammer
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com
Friday, February 18, 2011


Five days before his inauguration, President-elect Obama told The Post that entitlement reform could no longer be kicked down the road. He then spent the next two years kicking - racking up $3 trillion in new debt along the way - on the grounds that massive temporary deficit spending was necessary to prevent another Great Depression.

To prove his bona fides, he later appointed a deficit reduction commission. It made its report last December, when the economy was well past recession, solemnly declaring that "the era of debt denial is over."

That lasted all of two months. The president's first post-commission budget, submitted Monday, marks a return to obliviousness. Even Erskine Bowles, Obama's Democratic debt commission co-chair, says it goes "nowhere near where they will have to go to resolve our fiscal nightmare."

The budget touts a deficit reduction of $1.1 trillion over the next decade.

Where to begin? Even if you buy this number, Obama's budget adds $7.2 trillion in new debt over that same decade.

But there's a catch. The administration assumes economic growth levels higher than private economists and the Congressional Budget Office predict. Without this rosy scenario - using CBO growth estimates - $1.7 trillion of revenue disappears and U.S. debt increases $9 trillion over the next decade. This is almost $1 trillion every year.

Assume you buy the rosy scenario. Of what does this $1.1 trillion in deficit reduction consist? Painful cuts? Think again. It consists of $1.6 trillion in tax hikes, plus an odd $328 billion of some mysterious bipartisan funding for a transportation trust fund (gas taxes, one supposes) - for a grand total of nearly $2 trillion in new taxes.

Classic Obama debt reduction: Add $2 trillion in new taxes, then add $1 trillion in new spending and, presto, you've got $1 trillion of debt reduction. It's the same kind of mad deficit accounting in Obamacare: It reduces debt by adding $540 billion in new spending, then adding $770 billion in new taxes. Presto: $230 billion of "debt reduction." Bialystock & Bloom accounting.

And what of those "painful cuts" Obama is making to programs he really cares about? The catch is that these "cuts" are from a hugely inflated new baseline created by the orgy of spending in Obama's first two years. These were supposedly catastrophe-averting, anti-Depression emergency measures. But post-recession they remain in place. As a result, discretionary non-defense budget levels today are 24 percent higher than before Obama - 84 percent higher if you add in the stimulus money.

Which is why the supposedly painful cuts yield spending still at stratospheric levels. After all the cuts, Education Department funding for 2012 remains 35 percent higher than in the last pre-emergency pre-Obama year, 2008. Environmental Protection Agency: 18 percent higher. Energy Department: 22 percent higher. Consider even the biggest "painful cut" headline of all, the 50 percent cut in fuel subsidies for the poor. Barbaric, is it not? Except for the fact that the subsidies had been doubled from 2008 levels. The draconian cut is nothing but a return to normal pre-recession levels.

Yet all this is penny-ante stuff. The real money is in entitlements. And the real scandal of this budget is that Obama doesn't touch them. Not Social Security. Not Medicaid. Not Medicare.

What about tax reform, the other major recommendation of the deficit commission? Nothing.

How about just a subset of that - corporate tax reform, on which Republicans have signaled they are eager to collaborate? The formula is simple: Eliminate the loopholes to broaden the tax base, then lower the rates for everyone, promoting both fairness and economic efficiency. What does the Obama budget do? Removes tax breaks - and then keeps the rate at 35 percent, among the highest in the industrialized world (more than twice Canada's, for example).

Yet for all its gimmicks, this budget leaves the country at decade's end saddled with publicly held debt triple what Obama inherited.

A more cynical budget is hard to imagine. This one ignores the looming debt crisis, shifts all responsibility for serious budget-cutting to the Republicans - for which Democrats are ready with a two-year, full-artillery demagogic assault - and sets Obama up perfectly for reelection in 2012.

Obama fancies his happy talk, debt-denial optimism to be Reaganesque. It's more Louis XV. Reagan begat a quarter-century of prosperity; Louis, the deluge.

Moreover, unlike Obama, Louis had the decency to admit he was forfeiting the future. He never pretended to be winning it.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com

Today's Laugh Track: Tim Allen

Today's Tune: Reckless Kelly - Nobody's Girl (Live)

Cuban Filmaker Stonewalled in Trying to Tell the True Story of ‘Che’

Agustin Blazquez has produced a compelling film that demolishes the radical heartthrob’s reputation as a brave guerrilla fighting on behalf of the oppressed.

February 17, 2011 - by Mary Grabar
http://pajamasmedia.com/

Ministry of Interior building, adorned with a steel sculpture of Che Guevara, a replica of the iconic image, originally shot in 1960, by the celebrated photographer Alberto Korda. Wearing his famous black beret, wild flowing hair and messianic stare, this potent image of Che came to represent the physical embodiment of the Cuban Revolution. The 30-metre tall steel effigy hangs from the building where Che served as minister, underneath, the motto “Hasta la Victoria Siempre” (Always, every day revolution).

Among Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s final requests before he was executed by Bolivian forces in 1967 was that a message of hope be sent back to Fidel Castro: the revolution would come to America.

Che immediately became the martyr for the radical left, with his image seized by American protestors of the 1960s. Since then another, cultural, revolution has taken place. Wikipedia catalogs references to him worldwide from restaurant names, to advertising campaigns, to music, to pop culture. His image adorned an Obama Texas campaign office in 2008. Che’s image is now displayed by average college students and even toddlers. No one blinks an eye when a student garbed in clothing bearing his iconic upward gaze takes a seat in my classroom. Students get their fashion cues from music, movie, and sports stars, and follow professors who display Che on office doors and websites, and teach courses about him. Students can find online guides to writing papers about the 2003 New York Times bestselling translation of Che’s Motorcycle Diaries, which was made into the 2004 box office hit.

Those who document the reality of the Castro regime, however, do not find themselves well received in the academy. For example, Juan J. Lopez once taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago but was denied tenure in spite of a teaching award and a well-received book published by The Johns Hopkins University Press titled Democracy Delayed: The Case of Castro’s Cuba. Lopez had escaped Cuba with his parents and moved to the United States in 1967.

Agustin Blazquez who wrote about Lopez’s predicament in 2002 also is a Cuban exile frustrated by the artistic/academic community that, while ostensibly worshiping all that is “Latino,” shuns those who expose the communist Castro regime. In Cuba, Blazquez had been apprehended twice on bogus charges, and saw the inside of El Castillo del Principe prison that he calls a “dungeon.”

In 1965, at the age of 21, he used the offer of an acting school scholarship in Canada to request an exit permit and managed with some finagling of the communist bureaucracy to leave. After living in Spain and Canada, Blazquez arrived in the U.S. in 1967. He was greeted with warmth by Americans — except those in the art world.

He learned that grants and prizes for documentaries in his series “Covering Cuba” would not be forthcoming. The latest, and seventh, titled Che: The Other Side of an Icon, was produced on a budget of $14,000. Only about $4,000 of that was from a non-profit that he had started himself. He had submitted a more typical budget of $494,000 to CPB-PBS (Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Public Broadcasting System). Blazquez had no success with the publicly supported organization, nor did he with the taxpayer-supported American Film Institute in his other projects. In fact, he could not even get an airing on POV (Point of View), the program created by PBS specifically for the purpose of airing “controversial” films.

Still, Blazquez, by changing his approach and scaling back, and doing his own editing on his own equipment, has managed to produce a compelling film that demolishes the radical heartthrob’s reputation as a brave guerrilla fighting on behalf of the oppressed.

Testimony comes from survivors, relatives of victims, and scholars. For example, Jaime Suchliki, history professor and director of the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, presents U.S. concerns about “many Vietnams” in the region. Antonio Jorge, chief economist of the Ministry of Treasury, from 1959 to 1960, who received Guevara’s requests for government funds in person, testifies to Che’s looting of the government as National Bank president.

The Argentinean-born Che’s contemptuous attitudes towards Cubans, blacks, and peasants are revealed by those who knew him and are backed up in his own writings. Wheelchair-bound Margot Menendez, whose brother was executed, describes the treatment she and other women received as they waited futilely to visit relatives in prison. Strip searches and arbitrary cancellations are recalled. So are the beatings by guards when the women rushed “Che’s” car as it entered the prison yard. Blanca Rojas recalls learning of her father’s execution by seeing it on television the same night she gave birth to her son. The dramatic footage is shown of Col. Cornelio Rojas — made an “example” — who stands tall and defiant up to the point when the gun shots in the head bring him down.

Journalist Humberto Fontova recounts Che’s 1962 terrorist bomb plot that would have likely exceeded the devastation of 9/11. It was planned to explode in New York City’s shopping district on the day after Thanksgiving, the busiest shopping day of the year. The plan was foiled by the FBI.

Fontova exposes “Che” not only as a sadistic killer but as an incompetent revolutionary. Che, who had inherited his father’s social and ethnic pretensions as an Argentinean of mixed European heritage, as well as his mentally unstable mother’s radical tendencies, had severely bungled his work as the head of banking and as minister of industries in collectivizing farms. It was then that Castro sent him to what he knew would be his death in Bolivia, for Che could not even “put compass to map.”

Nevertheless, the narrative put out in a press release by the AFI for the 2008 film by Steven Soderbergh simply titled Che, describes Che “galvanizing poor peasants into a military force that can take on trained professionals.” The same AFI turned down Blazquez’s third film on Elian Gonzalez, the young Cuban refugee who was forcibly sent back to Cuba under President Clinton after his mother had drowned during their escape.

Contrary to AFI’s depiction, Che’s delight was in shooting 240 defenseless victims, some as young as 15. Political prisoners say the real number is much higher. Che also delighted in having people and their children rounded up off the street and forced to watch executions.

Such facts and testimonies presented in a straightforward manner show the real “Che.” One sees the horror melded over the decades into a resigned sadness in the faces of family members of his victims. Such understated testimony should make any Che-t-shirt-clad student pause.

But to get an airing on a college campus is no easy task. The dissenting intellectual on today’s campus, if he gets past the gatekeepers, is met with stonewalling. Dead silence is what mostly greeted Blazquez when he contacted over 100 campuses for the screening of his first film. Subtle impediments in the form of last-minute room changes and announcements torn off walls were placed in his path at the two campuses where he did manage to get permission to air his documentary.

Nor could he make headway with PBS that has a division for “educational media.” The late Reed Irvine in 1996 recounted Blazquez writing directly to 65 public television stations after getting nowhere with PBS, but getting only four responses — all rejections.

Blazquez then testified at a hearing before a House of Representatives appropriations committee about PBS. Still, the censorship and bias continue. In 2007, Blazquez charged PBS with airing the documentaries of Castro-collaborator Estela Bravo, a native New Yorker, who has lived in Cuba since 1983 as a member of the pro-Castro privileged elite. He documented instances of PBS airing other documentaries that showed individuals maligning the Cuban exile community as “the right-wing fringe” and the “Miami mafia.”

Despite the hostility, Blazquez is working on his eighth documentary. It’s about an exiled Cuban-American ballad singer who has similarly found American TV and show business doors closed to her.

The DVDs in his “Covering Cuba” series are sold at http://www.cubacollectibles.com/.

Mary Grabar earned her Ph.D. in English from the University of Georgia and teaches in the Atlanta area. She is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and published fiction writer. Visit her website and get on her mailing list at http://www.marygrabar.com/. Mary blogs at the http://www.theliteratecitizen.com/.

Bangladesh Today, Egypt Tomorrow

The long-term strategy for enforcing sharia law.

By Andrew C. McCarthy
http://www.nationalreview.com
February 16, 2011 4:00 A.M.

James Clapper issued a clarification last week. Within hours of testifying to Congress that the Muslim Brotherhood is a “largely secular” organization, he clarified that he had meant to say the Muslim Brotherhood is not a secular organization. Clapper, the Obama administration’s national intelligence director, did not clue us in on whether he’d been tipped off by the organization’s name or by its motto proclaiming devotion to Islam, Mohammed, the Koran, sharia, and jihad — the final term being one he may have missed thanks to ongoing government efforts to purge it from our lexicon.

If Mr. Clapper’s information was a tad off, his timing was even worse. And not just because even giddy Western pundits were occasionally pausing from their dance on Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak’s political grave to admit that the pharaoh’s demise could pave the way for a Brotherhood-led Islamist ascendancy.

What might an Islamist ascendency look like? Consider this: Shortly before Clapper’s faux pas, a ghastly report out of Bangladesh began making the rounds: A 14-year-old girl named Hena had been killed by fewer than 80 lashes of the 100-lash whipping local sharia authorities had ordered her to suffer. It’s difficult to contain one’s anger at the details. Hena had been raped by a 40-year-old Muslim man, described in news accounts as her “relative.” The allegation of rape got the authorities involved, but that turned out to be even worse than the sexual assault itself.

Under sharia, rape cannot be proved absent the testimony of four witnesses. Rapists tend not to bring witnesses along for their attacks. In any event, moreover, sharia values a woman’s testimony as only half that of a man, so the deck is stacked and rape cannot be proved in most cases. Yet that hardly means the report of rape is of no consequence. Unable to establish that she’d been forcibly violated, the teenager became in the eyes of the sharia court a woman who’d had sexual intercourse outside of marriage. Thus the draconian lashing sentence that became a death sentence.

What has that to do with the Muslim Brotherhood? It turns out that these not-so-secular “moderates” spend a great deal of time ruminating on the subject of sharia’s brutal huddud laws — those prescribing sadistic penalties, such as whippings and stoning, for extramarital fornication, adultery, and homosexuality.

The Brotherhood’s emir for such ruminations is the famed Egyptian sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a sharia scholar who graduated from the storied al-Azhar University. He is probably the ummah’s most influential Islamic cleric — just ask such admirers as Ground Zero mosque imam Feisal Rauf. Qaradawi is sold as a Muslim modernizer by his many Western fans, particularly the Islamic-studies programs that the Saudis, longtime patrons of the Muslim Brotherhood, pay institutions like Georgetown University to operate. What the academy avoids telling you is that the sheikh, who has endorsed suicide bombings in Israel and the killing of American troops and support personnel in Iraq, also supports female genital mutilation (euphemistically called “circumcision”) as well as sharia standards that discount a woman’s testimony, limit a woman’s inheritance rights to half of a man’s share, and permit men to marry up to four wives (who may, of course, be beaten if they are disobedient).

Qaradawi is also quite opinionated when it comes to the matter of rape. He agrees that a woman must be punished not only if she cannot show that she was the victim of sexual assault, but also if, as they say, she was asking for it. “For her to be absolved from guilt,” he has explained, “a raped woman must have shown good conduct.” If, for example, she has dressed immodestly — particularly if she has dressed in the Western style — she is deemed to have brought the attack upon herself.

To the extent that influential Islamist views about huddud laws are known in the West — which is not much — it is a big problem for the Brotherhood. Their motto declares that “the Koran is our law,” and it’s not an empty slogan. The Brothers believe in these behavioral strictures and in the savage penalties meted out for transgressions. That complicates life for an organization struggling to put on a happy, secular face for the West (at least when it’s not writing memos about its “grand jihad” to destroy our civilization from within). Not everyone in America is as desperate to be convinced as our intelligence agencies.

So the more wily Islamists struggle to thread the needle. None is wilier than Tariq Ramadan, grandson of both Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna and Said Ramadan, the Brotherhood legend who established its extensive European network. Tariq Ramadan is now free to visit the U.S., the Obama State Department having reversed the Bush administration’s decision to bar him for alleged terror support. In 2005, while this bar was still in effect, Ramadan endeavored to demonstrate his “moderate” credentials by proposing a moratorium on the huddud laws.

Naturally, there was wild applause from the Clappers in the Western commentariat — a cheap date if ever there was one. Note, however, that Ramadan was not condemning huddud or calling for its repeal — just a moratorium. As he framed it, the problem was not sharia but society: The benighted world that is still mired in jahalia, the dark ages before Mohammed. It had not yet seen the wisdom of adopting Islam’s legal system. For Ramadan, the huddud laws themselves were fine; it was just that until countries fully adopted sharia, the conditions would not be in place to assure that huddud would be justly imposed. In the end, the answer for Islamists is always the same: more Islamic law, not less.

Still, it seemed to be a masterstroke of Brotherhood dissembling that would have made his grandfathers proud. It would enable Islamists to appear positively evolved even as they urged adoption of their seventh-century blueprint for society. Except you’ll never guess who wasn’t buying: all those wonderful secular moderates who guide the Brotherhood.

To put it mildly, Qaradawi and his conglomerate of academic and media acolytes went berserk. There were blistering diatribes condemning Ramadan. His proposal was belittled as an “unfounded innovation” that was “juristically baseless” and threatened to sow discord throughout the ummah. That last, by the way, is an extremely serious charge. Sowing discord is often construed as treason, the functional equivalent of public apostasy. The penalty for that under sharia is — you’ll never guess — death.

Here’s what you want to remember: Tariq Ramadan is widely revered in Brotherhood circles, for both his heritage and his service to the cause. When he stepped off the sharia reservation, though, that did not stop Qaradawi and the Brothers from slapping him back into his place. You, on the other hand, don’t enjoy a similar reservoir of good will with these alleged secular moderates. You are not an Islamic jurist of legendary standing.

You’re more like Hena.

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Today's Tune: Bruce Springsteen - Dream Baby Dream

Today's Laugh Track: Bill Cosby

On Egypt the Left are all neo-cons now

By Melanie Phillips
The Australian
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/
February 15, 2011

The future of Egypt following the departure of president Hosni Mubarak remains opaque.

No one can currently predict whether it will end up as a democracy with free elections, a military dictatorship, or an Islamic theocratic tyranny.

But the Western Left has known one thing for certain from the very start of the protests: that the tyrannical dictator Mubarak had to go, that the protesters in Tahrir Square were all on the side of freedom and that the convulsions presaged a joyous new dawn of democracy and human rights.

This was despite the serious risk of an Islamist takeover in Egypt, with the consequent extinction of human rights for the Egyptians worse than anything under Mubarak's clearly repressive regime. And it was also despite the fact that opinion polls have suggested that many, if not most Egyptians harbour Islamist, anti-Western and ferociously anti-Jewish ideas.

Nevertheless, Western progressives were shouting for regime change. At which point it began to seem that, like Alice, one had somehow been transported through the looking-glass.

For during the past seven years, Western liberals have fulminated without remission that George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Tony Blair were criminally out to lunch to pretend that democracy could ever come to Iraq through ousting a dictator.

The neo-con article of faith, that the Arab or Islamic world, could or should embrace democracy and human rights, was held up as an example of cultural imperialism, racist bigotry or insanity, or all three.

But suddenly everyone in the bien-pensant world has apparently become a neo-con.

The US, they now fulminated, had been criminally obtuse in propping up the dictator Mubarak rather than helping turn Egypt into a democracy.

So what was the difference? Simple. Saddam Hussein was an enemy of the West; Mubarak was an ally. So progressives claimed that getting rid of the former was a crime against humanity, while not getting rid of the latter was a crime against humanity. Got that?

It would doubtless be uncharitable to add that, throughout this supposedly diabolical Mubarak presidency those same liberals saw no problem taking vacations rubber-necking round the Pyramids or steaming up the Nile. No boycott, divestment or sanctions movement there; such censure is never applied by the Left to any of the tyrannies of the Middle East, of course, only against the sole democracy in the region: Israel.

Nor do the double standards stop there. When the people of Lebanon made their pitch for democracy against the crushing oppression of Hezbollah, Western bien-pensants were totally indifferent. When the people of Iran made their pitch for democracy against the savage cruelties of the Islamic regime, the bien-pensants were totally indifferent. But when the Egyptians took to the streets, the bien-pensants all but wetted themselves with excitement.

What was the difference? If the Lebanese and Iranians had succeeded, the West would have been strengthened. But the risk still remains that the canny Muslim Brotherhood will bide their time before pouncing and coming to power in Egypt, which would of course furnish another major threat for the free world.

And this is the most frightening thing of all in this back-to-front universe: the way in which the West has sanitised the Muslim Brothers and even, in the case of the Obama administration, actually tried to push them into power.

When it wasn't flip-flopping over whether Mubarak should stay or go, the White House first said it wouldn't mind if the Muslim Brothers became part of the Egyptian government.

Then it urged the inclusion of "important non-secular actors" - code for the Muslim Brothers - in a "more democratic" Egypt. And then it was revealed that its proposal for the immediate transfer of power called for the transitional government to include the brotherhood.

What madness was this? The Muslim Brothers' goal is to Islamise the world. They are religious fascists. While certainly there are millions of Muslims around the world who do want to live under democracy, the Brothers are totally against any secular rule at all and stand for an extinction of human rights. They are fanatical Jew-haters. In the 1930s they were effectively created as a political force by the Nazi Party, with which they formulated a final solution for Palestine by ridding it of its Jews, an agenda continued today by their offshoot, Hamas.

Today, they are no less the mortal enemies of the free world. Their leaders have declared war on America, gloating that the US is "experiencing the beginning of its end and is heading towards its demise", and that "resistance is the only solution".

They support al-Qa'ida terrorism "against the Americans and the Zionists". They declared that after Mubarak they would dissolve the peace treaty with Israel.

They support Hezbollah, make overtures to Iran, and openly employ a strategy of simulating moderation to gain power though democratic means in order to destroy democracy.

If Egypt is eventually taken over by the brotherhood, Jordan will be next, and both will turn into Iran/Gaza in a matter of a few years. Oh, and the Brothers are also busy Islamising Britain and America. Yet on both sides of the pond, significant elements of the political and defence establishment have decided that the Muslim Brothers are basically peace-loving, sensible, pragmatic chaps who are useful allies against the men of violence.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that the double standards of the Left result from its deep hatred of the Western society whose basic values they wish to overturn. Whether during the French Revolution or the Stalinist purges, the Left has repeatedly sided with the extinction of human freedom and refused to accept the monstrous evidence of its own credulousness.

Among political and defence elites, moreover, the stranglehold of multicultural victim culture, the influence of revisionist "scholars" such as John Esposito or Karen Armstrong who sanitise Islam, and the deep desire to take the path of least resistance - plus the reflexive view that the real threat to the world is not the Islamic jihad but the state of Israel - means that the establishment meets the Left on the same side of the looking-glass.

Has there ever been a civilisation more bent on collective suicide than the contemporary West?

- Melanie Phillips is the author of The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth and Power, published by Encounter.

Democracy is a Relative Term

By Robert Spencer
http://www.humanevents.com
15 February 2011

Everyone is excited about the toppling of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. “This is a moment of huge opportunity,” enthused one noted analyst. Another agreed: “We will soon see a new Middle East materializing.” The two analysts in question are Tony Blair and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — and that sums up the reigning confusion about what exactly has happened in Egypt, and what is likely to happen next.

Blair opined that “this is a moment of huge opportunity, not just for Egypt,” but for the entire Middle East. “Despite all those challenges,” Blair added, “this is a moment when the whole of the Middle East could pivot and face towards change and modernization and democracy.”

Maybe. Ahmadinejad, however, is envisioning a wholly different scenario. He predicted that “we will soon see a new Middle East materializing without America and the Zionist regime, and there will be no room for world arrogance [that is, the West] in it.”

So who’s right? Will Egypt become a Western-style pluralistic democracy, with equal rights for women, as well as for its sizable and embattled Christian minority? Or was Muslim Brotherhood spokesman Ahmad Mersi correct when he declared that the Egyptian people want the rule of Islamic law?

Over the course of Egypt’s revolution, the mainstream media has been intent on downplaying the popularity of the Muslim Brotherhood. Egyptian presidential contender Mohamed ElBaradei also minimized both the Brotherhood’s commitment to the draconian elements of Islamic law and its popularity, saying, “This is total bogus that the Muslim Brotherhood are religiously conservative. They are no way extremists. They are no way using violence. They are not a majority of the Egyptian people. They will not be more than maybe 20 percent of the Egyptian people.”

ElBaradei’s claim that the Brotherhood is not “religiously conservative,” although echoed by Obama’s clueless intelligence chief, James Clapper, is ridiculous on its face, and contradicted by numerous statements of past and present Brotherhood leaders, including Mersi. Nonetheless, the Brotherhood has an 80-year history in Egypt, and in the course of 80 years, one may make a lot of enemies — so ElBaradei’s lowballing of the Brotherhood’s likely post-Mubarak support within the country may not be very far off the mark.

Nonetheless, it may be able to steer post-Mubarak events in Egypt its way precisely because it is the foremost exponent of political Islam in Egypt. A Pew Research Center survey conducted in Egypt in spring 2010 found that no fewer than 85% of Egyptians thought that Islam was a positive influence in politics. Fifty-nine per cent said they identified with “Islamic fundamentalists” in their struggle against “groups who want to modernize the country,” which had the support of only 27% of Egyptians. Only 20% were “very concerned” about “Islamic extremism” within Egypt.

In light of all that, it may seem puzzling that 59% of Egyptians affirmed that “democracy is preferable to any other kind of government.” But while Westerners may assume that democracy refers in all cases to the implementation of Jeffersonian principles of limited government, tolerance, the free press, and popular accountability, all too often nowadays it has been reduced to mere head-counting — and in Egypt as well as elsewhere in the Middle East, the advocates of political Islam are the ones who have the heads.

That’s why Mohammad-Javad Larijani, secretary-general of the ironically named Iranian High Council for Human Rights, was able to express unqualified support for the Egyptian uprising: “In my opinion, the Islamic Republic of Iran should see these events without exception in a positive light.” He characterized the already-toppled Ben Ali government in Tunisia as “anti-Islamic,” and predicted that soon Tunisians would have a “people’s government.” And in Egypt, Larijani said, “Muslims are more active in political agitation and, God willing, they will establish the regime that they want.”

The regime they want, by all indications, is an Islamic one. A Kerensky-style interregnum featuring an uneasy democratic coalition enjoying little popular support may follow Mubarak, or the military may clamp down entirely on the protests. But if the Egyptian people are allowed to express their will, almost certainly an Islamic regime will follow — with consequences that should give even Tony Blair reason to regret his enthusiasm.


- Mr. Spencer is director of Jihad Watch and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), The Truth About Muhammad, Stealth Jihad and The Complete Infidel's Guide to the Koran (all from Regnery-a HUMAN EVENTS sister company).

Whither Egypt?

by Daniel J. Flynn
http://www.humanevents.com/
Posted 02/14/2011 ET

The storming of the Bastille, July 14, 1789

Egypt’s revolution has overthrown Hosni Mubarak. What comes next? Much hope and little thought have gone into the answer. This seems always the case with revolution.

The inability to anticipate tomorrow correlates to our unwillingness to remember yesterday. If there is a lesson to be gleaned from Egypt at this early stage it is that nobody bothered to learn from past revolutions. This isn’t for lack of lessons. History offers thousands. Here are a few:

Lesson # 1789: Don’t judge a revolution by its slogans. The Jacobins spoke of liberty, equality, and fraternity. But, as Chamfort observed, this soon became “Be my brother or I’ll kill you.” Reading slogans and not seeing events, Americans an ocean away envisioned a revolution similar to their own. “The liberty of the whole earth was depending upon the issue of the contest,” Thomas Jefferson, a former U.S. minister to France, reflected, “and was ever such a prize won with so little innocent blood?” Was ever so much foolishness compressed in so few words? Jefferson, who saw some of the events of 1789 firsthand, opined that “rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated.” The revolutionaries agreed. Even wise men are idiots on their worst days.

Lesson # 1917: Revolutions create dangerous power vacuums. Western optimists insisted that since the Muslim Brotherhood had little to do with the initial demonstrations in Egypt, they would have nothing to do with a new government. Anyone watching the Russian Revolution unfold might have said the same thing of the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks didn’t overthrow the czar. Lenin was in Zurich; Trotsky, New York. They overthrew the people who overthrew the czar. When people rightly point out that the Muslim Brotherhood was late for the revolution, they wrongly assume that the protestors in the beginning become the government in the end. The Bolsheviks, who waited like vultures to feast on the withered state, proved otherwise.

Lesson # 1979: The overthrowers are often worse than the overthrown. It is hard to imagine Westerners, let alone left-wing Westerners, seeing themselves in the Ayatollah Khomeini. But in the late 1970s, Michel Foucault, the Manchester Guardian, and The Nation were among those predicting great things from the Iranian Revolution. Mother Jones, for instance, embarrassingly foresaw “democratic reforms, freedom for political prisoners, an end to the astronomical waste of huge arms purchases, and a constitutional government” should the Ayatollah take power. When we see a ruffian, be it the Shah or Mubarak, we assume the righteousness of their adversaries. Alas, they’re usually just other ruffians.

Outside observers got France, Russia, and Iran wrong, horribly wrong. It’s possible that we got Egypt wrong, too, and for similar reasons. We judged Egypt by placard platitudes. We ignored the danger of the void. We imagined that the enemy of an autocrat was necessarily a democrat rather than an extremist. In other words, we repeated the mistakes that past revolution watchers made.

The person who understands this best is the one affected by it most. “They may be talking about democracy but they don’t know what they’re talking about and the result will be extremism and radical Islam,” Hosni Mubarak said of the U.S. government. “We see the democracy the United States spearheaded in Iran and with Hamas, in Gaza, and that’s the fate of the Middle East.”

One hopes not. One thinks maybe.

On the subject of upheavals of the state, there is no better guide than Reflections on the Revolution in France. Therein, Edmund Burke wrote that “it is with infinite caution that any man ought to venture upon pulling down an edifice which has answered in any tolerable degree for ages the common purpose of society, or on building it up again, without having models and patterns of approved utility before his eyes.” Egypt may again demonstrate Burke’s wisdom.


- Daniel J. Flynn is a columnist for HUMAN EVENTS and the author of numerous books, including A Conservative History of the American Left (Crown Forum, 2008), Intellectual Morons (Crown Forum, 2004), and Why the Left Hates America (Prima Forum, 2002).

Today's Laugh Track: Larry Miller

Lights Out for the Middle East’s Christians?

The tumult in Cairo may spell much worse to come for the Copts.

By Rich Lowry
http://www.nationalreview.com
February 11, 2011 12:00 A.M.

An Egyptian Muslim mob attacks a Coptic Christian

Hosni Mubarak can count on at least one loyal supporter. Coptic Christian leader Pope Shenouda wants the anti-Mubarak protesters to stand down. He has two inarguable reasons to stick with the dictator: fear and experience.

Even if the Muslim Brotherhood doesn’t take over, there is every reason to believe that a democratically elected Egyptian government will become more Islamist and more hostile to the country’s roughly 8 million Christians, who are overwhelmingly Copts. As a horrifying premonition, the Copts need look no farther than democratic Iraq, where the ethnic cleansing of Christians is still unspooling, slowly but inexorably.

It’s an irony almost too bitter to bear that George W. Bush, an evangelical Christian fired by a vision of freedom with religious overtones, waged a war of liberation in Iraq that led to the uprooting of the country’s Christians. And did almost nothing to prevent it, or even remark upon it. Iraq’s Christians are the collateral damage of the country’s post-Saddam revolution.

In a civil war, a small, defenseless minority hated by fanatics of both warring sides will not fare well. But even after the surge tamped down Sunni–Shiite violence, the war on Christians continued. One convent in Hamdaniyah in the north has been attacked 20 times since the start of the war, and as recently as last spring; according to USA Today, it was down to four nuns last year out of an original 55.

Before the invasion, roughly 1.4 million Christians lived in Iraq. About half of them have fled, with many more sure to follow. For a community that dates back almost to the inception of Christianity, this is nothing short of a historic cataclysm.

Iraq’s Christians have fallen prey to a one-two punch of terrorism and official indifference. Sunni extremists attack churches and assassinate individual Christians. In October, gunmen took 100 Christians hostage at Our Lady of Perpetual Help church in Baghdad and slaughtered more than 40 of them. The Shiite government can’t or won’t stop these depredations. By one estimate, 2010 was the deadliest year yet for Iraq’s Christians.

In Egypt, Copts are already targeted. A suicide bombing on New Year’s Day in front of an Alexandria church killed more than 20. Nina Shea of the Hudson Institute notes that “the context is a government that has failed to make the rights of religious minorities a priority.” And this was under the pro-Western, relatively secular dictator.

When the Muslim Brotherhood takes a place at the table, it will no doubt do all it can to imbue Egyptian government with Islamism’s enmity toward Christians. In terms of public opinion, the Brotherhood may be pushing at an open door. According to a Pew survey in Egypt last year, 84 percent of Egyptian Muslims — not yet familiar with Thomas Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists — support executing apostates.

If the fashionably tolerant deigned to notice any of this, they might call it “Christophobia.” They prefer, though, to avert their gaze from the rancid hatreds roiling the Islamic world and delude themselves with pleasant absurdities. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper says the Muslim Brotherhood is “largely secular.” This is a description that doesn’t even quite apply to American Episcopalians, let alone to the militant Islamic group explicitly devoted to jihad.

In Egypt, we may see another collision between our democratic universalism and Islamic particularism. We rightly believe that all men are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights. Many of the people upon whom we project this vision of universal freedom, though, believe justice prevails only if their faith and its believers rule. Unfortunately, they’re the ones who get to vote.

This is why Egypt could experience both a democratic opening and yet more Christian persecution. At 10 percent of the population, Copts are the region’s largest Christian community. If Egypt becomes intolerable for them, it’s lights out for Christianity in the Middle East.

— Rich Lowry is editor of National Review. He can be reached via e-mail, comments.lowry@nationalreview.com. © 2011 by King Features Syndicate.

Related:

http://islamizationwatch.blogspot.com/2009/07/egypt-muslim-mob-shouting-allah-akbar.html