Get Me From the Church on Time

http://www.powerlineblog.com/

June 1, 2008

Barack Obama gave his "More Perfect Union" speech in Philadelphia on March 18 to tamp down the furor caused by the release of video excerpts of his pastor's sermons. Obama himself had proclaimed the importance of his pastor to his life over the past twenty years in books and interviews. Both circumstantial and direct evidence demonstrated Obama's knowledge of Reverend Wright's sick and indefensible views.

Rather than forthrightly condemn them in his Philadelphia speech, Obama chose to give the appearance of transcending them. Obama reviewed American history going back to the founding, provided autobiographical reflections, and presented himself as the man come to redeem racial relations in the United States. Obama denied familiarity with the statements whose revelation gave rise to his speech and suggested that they unfairly represented the man. Obama's speech provided the larger context for understanding Wright. Here is the key passage:

Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way.

But the truth is, that isn't all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God's work here on Earth - by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

In my first book, Dreams From My Father, I described the experience of my first service at Trinity:

"People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend's voice up into the rafters....And in that single note - hope! - I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion's den, Ezekiel's field of dry bones. Those stories - of survival, and freedom, and hope - became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn't need to feel shame about...memories that all people might study and cherish - and with which we could start to rebuild."

That has been my experience at Trinity. Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety - the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity's services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions - the good and the bad - of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother...

Obama's speech was hailed as a master stroke by members of the mainstream media and other left-wing partisans. Here, for example, is the Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan:

This was a testing; and he did not merely pass it by uttering safe bromides. He addressed the intimate, painful love he has for an imperfect and sometimes embittered man. And how that love enables him to see that man's faults and pain as well as his promise. This is what my faith is about. It is what the Gospels are about. This is a candidate who does not merely speak as a Christian. He acts like a Christian.

Here, for another example, is Time's Joe Klein:

The rhetorical magic of the speech—what made it extraordinary—was that it was, at once, both unequivocal and healing. There were no weasel words, no Bushian platitudes or Clintonian verb-parsing. Obama was unequivocal in his candor about black anger and white resentment—sentiments that few mainstream politicians acknowledge (although demagogues of both races have consistently exploited them). And he was unequivocal in his refusal to disown Wright. Cynics and political opponents quickly noted that Obama used a forest of verbiage to camouflage a correction—the fact that he was aware of Wright's views, that he had heard such sermons from the pulpit, after first denying that he had. And that may have been politics as usual. But the speech wasn't.

It was a grand demonstration of the largely unfulfilled promise of Obama's candidacy: the possibility that, given his eloquence and intelligence, he will be able to create a new sense of national unity—not by smoothing over problems but by confronting them candidly and with civility.

Yet this and its like elsewhere in the mainstream media were not enough for Garry Wills (and the New York Review of Books). For Wills, Obama's speech stood with Abraham Lincoln's 1860 Cooper Union Speech. Lincoln's speech was a remarkable work of original scholarship reconstructing the views of the founding fathers on slavery. Obama's speech was a Clintonian triangulation seeking to negotiate his way through an inconvenient personal controversy, and not very honestly at that. Wills presented himself as the voice of moderation in the media hosannas over Obama's Philadelphia speech:

Obama's speech has been widely praised—compared with JFK's speech to Protestant ministers, or FDR's First Inaugural, even to the Gettysburg Address. Those are exaggerations. But the comparison with the Cooper Union address is both more realistic and more enlightening.

Lincoln's Cooper Union speech is still looking good 150 years later. Obama's Philadelphia speech didn't last 150 days. It failed upon the reeentry of Wright to reiterate the views that had prompted Obama to give the Philadelphia speech in the first place. Thus Obama's press conference on April 29.

At his press conference repudiating Wright, Obama ignored Wright's racist speech to the NAACP in Detroit. Rather, he framed his remarks as a response to Wright's appearance at the National Press Club the following day. In this appearance Wright reiterated what Obama had previously dismissed as "snippets of those sermons" on 9/11 as America's just deserts, AIDS as a product of the United States government, and Louis Farrakhan as a great man. The Wright on display at the National Press Club, however, was a person unrecognizable to Obama. Indeed, he was a person who could be disowned. Moving on from Clintonian triangulation in his Philadelphia speech, Obama had become Nixonian at his press conference. In the immortal formulation of Ron Ziegler, Obama's March 18 Philadelphia speech had by April 29 been rendered "inoperative."

This past Sunday Father Michael Pfleger engaged in merciless racial mockery of Sen. Clinton from the pulpit of Obama's church in Chicago. Although Obama has known Pfleger for some 20 years and Pfleger has been involved in Obama's campaign, Obama professed himself "deeply disapointed" in Pfleger's tirade. Obama conveyed the impression that that he was surprised by the remarks and that they were somehow out of character for Pfleger.

Pfleger's appearance at Trinity United Church was introduced on the pulpit by Pastor Otis Moss. Moss praised Pfleger effusively before his remarks. After Pfleger's remarks, Moss pronounced himself satisfied. Speaking from the pulpit, he said: "We thank God for the message, and we thank God for the messenger." He added: "We thank God for Father Michael Pfleger, we thank God for Father Mike." In his April 29 press conference on Jeremiah Wright, to explain his continuing allegiance to the church, Obama described Moss as TUC's "wonderful young pastor."

Yesterday Obama announced his withdrawal from Trinity United Church. He rendered both his testimony praising Moss and his inalterable allegiance to Trinity United Church "inoperative." Obama portrayed his resignation from the church both as an act taken to shield himself from having church-related remarks imputed to him, and to shield the church from the scrutiny it had been under. The tenor of his remarks suggest that both he and his church have been the victims of a frenzy.

Obama also vaguely referred to “a cultural and a stylistic gap” as a source of the problem. Perhaps the entire saga is little more than a tribute to the incomprehension of unsophisticated outsiders. Such outsiders lack the tools necessary to understand the reflections of Reverend Wright and his ilk in churches espousing black liberation theology. As in "Cool Hand Luke," according to Obama, what we have here is failure to communicate. Unfortunately, not a single member of the press sought further elaboration from Obama on that point.

Every installment of this saga reveals Obama to be a deeply opportunistic politician, ready to beat a hasty retreat from yesterday's statement of cherished principle in order to fight another day. Each installment of the saga also reveals the organs of the mainstream media to be Obama's handmaidens. From March 18 forward they have cheered on Obama's every step, even when Obama's succeeding steps proved them fools.

In the aftermath of this saga, it should begin to dawn on attentive observers that Barack Obama represents a type that flourishes on many college campuses. The technical term that applies to Obama is b.s. artist. Obama is an overaged example of the phenomenon, but his skills in the art have brought him great success and he's not giving it up now. (This post draws on my own "Wright's wrong" and "Does Barack Obama know his friends?")

To comment on this post go here.
Posted by Scott Johnson at 6:06 AM Permalink

Today's Tune: Emmylou Harris - Wayfaring Stranger (Live)

(Click on title to play video)

The Ballad of Emmylou Harris

From The London Times
June 1, 2008

At 61, Emmylou Harris is still the drop-dead-gorgeous queen of country rock. But behind closed doors the singer has sad secrets to reveal



By Robert Sandall

Your first thought on meeting Emmylou Harris is that if this is what 30-odd years on the road fronting country-rock bands does for you, maybe we should all try it. For all the grief it brought her early on, it seems, as she enters her seventh decade, to have left her in terrific shape.

Never mind the fact that she is commonly referred to as a “legend,” a routine tribute to her role in making country music cool again in the 1970s, which was trumpeted by an effusive Jools Holland when she performed on his TV show Later in May. Forget the 15m albums she’s sold, her dozen Grammys, the halls of fame to which she’s been elected and the respect she’s earned from fellow legends who have queued up to sing with her over the years – a cast that has included Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Dolly Parton and Mark Knopfler. According to another of her many musical accomplices, the country star Rodney Crowell, Harris has been “one of the few women who have that cultural mystique that poetic artists like Dylan and Lennon carry. She was one of the first women to stand up with that sort of integrity”.

This is all laudable stuff; but what’s most striking about Harris in person is just, well, her. Like the tremulous voice on her records, nothing appears to have been retouched. How effortlessly she seems to have adapted to growing old in a field where youth (or the appearance of it) rules supreme. Or to put it more simply, as one fan, “Steve”, did online around the time of her birthday last year, “Emmylou is 60? God, if a woman can be truly sexy at that age, she’s it… Jeez.” A year on, Steve would undoubtedly approve of the demure, quietly spoken lady in tinted glasses and loose floral daywear sipping herbal tea in a London hotel. She’s here to talk about her new album, All I Intended to Be, which is out next week. Her first solo album in five years, it’s a typically well-crafted collection that shows off her prowess as an interpreter of other people’s songs, her ability to elide the distinction between folk, country and rock, and her own underrated skill as a songwriter.



Fine as it is, All I Intended to Be is unlikely to change Harris’s life, or indeed anybody else’s. The most interesting thing about it is the way it discreetly nods to her troubled past. It is peopled with ghosts and coloured by a mood of persistent, aching sadness that seems, paradoxically, to have got more pronounced the older and more successful Harris has become. It is summed up on her bleak and heartfelt cover of the Tracy Chapman tune All That You Have Is Your Soul.

The album was produced by the second of Harris’s three ex-husbands, Brian Ahern, the Canadian she met in 1975 who helped to steer her stuttering, if not chaotic, career in the direction of mainstream success. They split up, personally and professionally, in 1983, but have remained friends.

The renewal of their working relationship, Harris says diplomatically, is no big deal. “Brian and I have done things together over the years. Neither of us are the sort of people who like to stay angry, and we’ve been very much committed to raising our daughter.” Meghann is now 28 and working as a film scriptwriter in Los Angeles.

It all sounds calm and manageable today, but before she got her act together with Ahern, Harris’s life in music was a turbulent hard-luck story. A well-educated middle-class girl, she was sucked into the youth-culture vortex of the 1960s with unhappy consequences, ending up in the early 1970s an impoverished single mother, living off food stamps, trying to make it as a folk singer. In a male-dominated industry (where, as she once put it, “ladies were regarded as a liability: the view was, they get pregnant and they freak out on the road, they’re unreliable and they don’t sell”) this was a tough call.



Just as tough was her struggle later on to emerge from the shadow of her musical partner and mentor, Gram Parsons. A legendary party animal, former member of the Byrds and leader of the Flying Burrito Brothers, Parsons was a close associate and drug buddy of the Rolling Stones. Praised by Keith Richards for teaching him more about country music than anybody else, and also for his narcotic know-how – “Gram could get better coke than the mafia,” Richards once cooed – Parsons died in 1973, aged 26, following a drink-and-drugs binge in a motel in the Joshua Tree National Park. Feted by rock bands like U2, who named their album The Joshua Tree after the site of his demise, Parsons’s cultish reputation has grown posthumously in step with that of his protégée, the woman he discovered, hired and sang with for the last two years of his life. As Harris’s friend and Nashville neighbour the country singer Nanci Griffith has noted, “More people know Gram Parsons now through Emmy than did during his lifetime.”

It’s hard to connect this well-mannered, bespectacled senior with her 24-year-old self. As she says gracious things such as “I have never stopped admiring Brian [Ahern]’s work or him as a person,” and insists that drugs aren’t for her and that she doesn’t “have the stomach” for alcohol, you wonder how Harris came to tour America with a drunken connoisseur of class-A drugs, quietly knitting clothes for her daughter at the front of the bus while he and the rest of the band got stoned at the back. Maybe they did, as the critics agree, help reinvent country rock; but Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris were one of the most unlikely couples in music. It’s strange to reflect that a bad boy like Parsons should have provided the launch pad for a woman widely regarded as one of rock’s first feminist icons.

As she apologises at the start of the interview for having taken so long to finish her new record (“My focus was, dare I say, a little lacking” – what with touring, preparing a career-retrospective box set, and looking after her charity, Bonaparte’s Retreat, a refuge for dogs that she runs from her Nashville home), it’s easy to forget that Harris is a survivor of one of the most self-destructive, but also most creative, periods in rock history. My hope interviewing her now is that, with all her southern politesse and with a new album to shift, she hasn’t chosen to forget it too.

Harris has been reluctant in the past to go into detail about the relationship with Parsons, and completely blanked his biographer, Ben Fong-Torres. “I have my own biography of Gram – I don’t want to be part of somebody else’s,” she said later. Others have noted a sharp contrast between the enthusiasm with which Harris has always praised Parsons’s influence on her music – she even recorded a concept album, The Ballad of Sally Rose, themed around it – and her silence on the subject of the man. “Harris likes to mention Parsons, but she doesn’t like to be asked about him,” the writer Nicholas Dawidoff has observed, describing the effect as “a feeling you’ve been led into sensitive terrain by the same person who then wheels and warns you away”.



Emmylou Harris and Gram Parsons

The inevitable suspicion is that Harris and Parsons were clandestine lovers as well as singing partners. But Phil Kaufman, Parsons’s close friend and road manager, who went on to work for Harris, has categorically denied it. “It was a relationship consummated by music. It wasn’t a physical consummation.” More’s the pity, according to Kaufman. He thinks that if Parsons hadn’t already been married, “something would have happened between them. If Gram had been with Emmylou, it would have saved his life. She didn’t have any of those bad habits. She might have levelled him off. They might be still married today, and have lived happily ever after”.

Emmylou Harris was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1947. Her mother was a local belle; her father a Yankee pilot from New Jersey who, bored by civilian life, re-enlisted after the second world war. He went to serve in Korea and nearly didn’t come back after his fighter was shot down. Harris recalls, aged five, her first experience of unhinging grief as her mother read the telegram reporting “Bucky” Harris as missing in action. “It was terrifying. We didn’t know for months if he was dead or alive.” In fact, her father had parachuted to safety and, after nine months in a North Korean PoW camp, was still determined to pursue a career in the US Air Force. So the family moved to North Carolina, where they led a comfortable but stateless existence in off-base military housing, before settling in Virginia. “We weren’t part of a real community. There were people from all over, which meant there was no culture.” Harris explains that this is why, despite her southern upbringing, she doesn’t have much of a southern accent and why she wasn’t fed a musical diet of country-and-western music.

“I loved Johnny Cash, but the folk revival happened when I was 15. There was an electricity about it, something romantic about those ballads, whereas country music sounded boring. You have to grow up, start paying the rent and have your heart broken before you understand country. As a teenager I became obsessed with Bob Dylan. And Joan Baez! I mean, what girl back then didn’t want to be her?”



She flirted with the idea of acting – “You know, all those big emotions” – and won a university scholarship to study drama. But the more she played her music, the less she enjoyed the acting. “When I was singing, it felt so real. Whereas when I was acting, I was just acting.” Dropping out of college, in 1968 she headed for the epicentre of the East Coast folk scene, New York.

At first things went well: she was signed by a tiny folk label, and by 1970 had released her first album, Gliding Bird, and married her musician boyfriend, Tom Slocum. But things soon took a turn for the worse. The album flopped, selling 1,300 copies, and her marriage collapsed, by which time she was pregnant with her first child, Hallie. “Everything blew up in my face. I was living in a tiny Manhattan apartment with a child, no skills, waiting table for tips. I thought my life was over.” Harris went back to live with her parents – “They said, ‘You can stay as long as you want’” – and began to eke out a living playing at the folk clubs in Washington, DC. It was during a residency at a place called Clyde’s that she met the musician who was to turn her life upside down, as he did his own.

Born Ingram Cecil Connor III, Gram Parsons was a baby-faced hippie prince from a privileged but troubled background. His mother’s family were rich Floridean citrus growers; his father was from old-moneyed Tennessean stock. Both had a fatal weakness for alcohol and a tendency to depression. His father shot himself when Parsons was 12, and by the time Parsons succumbed to his overdose, his mother had already drunk herself to death. Thanks partly to his parenting, Parsons found the excessive hippie lifestyle of the 1960s greatly to his liking. With his dandyish crushed-velvet gear, his impeccable drugs contacts and a passion for what he called “Cosmic American Music”, he soon moved in the highest circles in rock. Here he discovered, as the decade neared its end, that the old country music he loved was becoming fashionable with the long-hairs and R&B nuts like the Stones, who once dismissed it as fodder for rednecks.



By 1971, Parsons was getting serious about his new solo career. He felt he needed a female vocal foil. Chris Hillman, a bandmate from the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers, suggested a singer he’d heard in a Washington folk club. By an extraordinary coincidence, this conversation took place at a venue in Baltimore in earshot of Harris’s baby-sitter, who gave Parsons her number. “When I got his call I didn’t know who he was. We met at the train station. Gram was there with his new wife, Gretchen, this charming southern boy with wonderful manners and a wide smile. I was playing Clyde’s that night. We worked up a few numbers between sets and sang them to this tiny crowd. Gram said it sounded good and he’d call me. I thought, ‘Oh, sure…’”

But having raved to his friends about the musical chemistry he felt singing with this beautiful unknown folkie, Parsons did call. Less than a year later he posted Harris a return air ticket to LA, where he was recording his first solo album. From the moment Parsons picked her up at the airport, Harris didn’t know what had hit her. Learning, fast, about the rich traditions of country music was only part of it.

“It was a totally new world. I was a person who never had fun in high school because I was too busy being a grade-A student, and here was with people who really knew how to enjoy themselves. I was very much the country mouse, trying to be professional, always turning up on time, ready to work, while Gram seemed very untogether. This was a man who really had a vision; the problem was, he was drinking heavily. I didn’t think the record would ever get made.”

But it did; and afterwards Harris spent months on the road in a band Parsons named the Fallen Angels, singing at the front of the stage with the man being touted as rock’s next big thing. “Gram was always fine when we were singing together. That was one thing I could do for him. It was when I wasn’t around that he seemed to get into trouble.” By the time they returned to the studio in the summer of 1973 to record another album, it seemed to Harris that “Gram had turned a corner. He’d stopped drinking and drugging. I thought everything was gonna be okay”. The last time they spoke, Parsons phoned to tell her that her favourite track from their recent sessions had been left off the Grievous Angel album but would definitely feature on the next. “We thought things were going to go on into eternity.” Less than a fortnight later, Parsons overdosed in the bath, full of whisky and heroin.



Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris

Parsons’s death was bad enough; but for her, its gothic aftermath was worse: “I didn’t have any chance to grieve in the traditional way.” First, Parsons’s roadie Phil Kaufman intercepted the air ambulance transporting the body, drove the coffin out into the desert, doused it in kerosene and burnt it, in accordance, he said, with a verbal instruction from Parsons. Next, Harris was told she “would not be welcome” at the memorial service in New Orleans. Parsons’s wife was deeply suspicious of her husband’s new musical companion. She’d already vetoed his plan to put Harris’s name and image next to his on the cover of Grievous Angel. Now she was barring her from the church where Parsons’s ashes were to be interred. “I was left running away from my grief. I just got in my little car and drove all over America for months, looking for people who knew Gram who could comfort me, looking for any piece of that time I could hold onto.”

Harris still blames herself for not doing more to prevent Parsons’s death. “It’s a great regret of mine. How could I not have seen it coming? He was so young, and such a strong presence, I couldn’t imagine he wasn’t gonna be there always.” Not only does Harris reject the notion that she was romantically involved with Parsons: she doesn’t even think she treated him the way a friend should have. “The most dismaying thing to me is that I was too self-absorbed in what I was getting from Gram musically to notice what was happening to him. I was too focused on me, and discovering this incredible music.”

The next two years were, Harris says, “a very black period”. Her daughter, Hallie, was being looked after most of the time by her parents. “I didn’t have any money. I had a sense of terrible loss. But what I also had was a fire in my belly. I wasn’t going to go back to waiting table. I felt I had to be better at fronting a band.”

Linda Ronstadt, whom she’d met during the Fallen Angels tour, urged her record company, Warner Brothers, to sign Harris up. And so, in 1975, with Ahern producing, Harris released her second solo album, Pieces of the Sky, which turned her into the star she has been ever since.



Harris says that what she loves about singing country is “its restraint, which intensifies the emotion in the music”. Restraint has certainly been evident in her life since Parsons died, and not just in her beautifully modulated vocals and miraculously undamaged appearance. She has been married twice, to Ahern and to an English songwriter, Paul Kennerley, with whom she split in 1993. Since then she’s lived with her mother and what she describes as a “menagerie” of stray pets in a large house in Nashville. She cheerfully calls herself “an excellent ex-wife” who has “a wonderful relationship with my two husbands. Paul and Brian are probably my two best friends”. She never mentions her first husband, Tom Slocum, by name. For the past 16 years there has been no significant other in her life.

Her chief confidants and companions these days are her dogs. Around the time she broke up with Kennerley she adopted a “big gangly poodle mix” called Bonaparte. When he died in 2002 she took up with Keeta – “a yellow dog, very friendly, with no neuroses” – whom she takes with her on tour in America. As well as enjoying one-sided conversations with Keeta and some of her other pets – “If I’m crazy, I’m blissfully so!” – she says she finds communing with animals has helped her deal with big, painful emotions, especially those associated with bereavement. “Animals have a much better attitude to life and death than we do. They know when their time has come. We are the ones that suffer when they pass, but it’s a healing kind of grief that enables us to deal with other griefs that are not so easy to grab hold of.” You wonder if she might still not have done her grieving over the passing of Gram Parsons. Harris looks unsettled, waffles a bit about “the general weight of the world” but, restrained to the last, declines to elaborate

Hobbit movies meet dire foe in son of Tolkien

From The London Times
May 25, 2008



Andy Serkis will play Gollum again

John Harlow in Los Angeles

The son of JRR Tolkien will try next week to halt Hollywood plans to follow the critical and commercial triumph of the Lord of the Rings trilogy by filming The Hobbit and a sequel.

Christopher Tolkien, 83, is calling for “one last crusade” in a long-running court battle against the producers of The Lord of the Rings only weeks before carpenters are due to begin work in New Zealand on the sets for the latest Middle-earth epic.

He claims the Tolkien family is owed £80m by New Line Cinema under a deal for a 7.5% share of profits that was signed in 1969, when his father reluctantly sold film rights to pay a tax bill.

Today the film-makers will confirm that Sir Ian McKellen is returning to his role as the wizard Gandalf in The Hobbit and that Andy Serkis will reprise his role as the murderous creature Gollum.

Sir Ian Holm, who played the hobbit Bilbo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings, is expected to narrate. Viggo Mortensen has unexpectedly been asked to return as Aragorn, a character who does not appear in the original Hobbit story, published in 1937.

Peter Jackson, who directed the Rings trilogy, is to produce the Hobbit films. The director will be Guillermo del Toro, the Mexican whose grim fantasy Pan’s Labyrinth won three Oscars last year.

However, at a hearing on June 6 Christopher Tolkien will ask a Californian judge to back his claim that he can “terminate” film rights to The Hobbit. He is said to be furious with the New Line studio, which earned £3 billion from the Rings trilogy. Tolkien’s lawyers accuse New Line of “accounting chicanery”. Warner Bros, owner of New Line, declined to comment.

In an internet press conference last night, Jackson and del Toro answered questions about the new films, which will cost about £150m to make over the next three years.

The first will be rooted firmly in the original book The Hobbit, following the naive young Bilbo on a quest for dragon’s gold and showing how he obtained his all-powerful ring. The second will cover the 50 years between his return home and the events of The Lord of the Rings.

That period is described in The Silmarillion, a collection of notes and tales assembled by Christopher Tolkien and published four years after his father’s death in 1973.

Tolkien Jr, described by his biographer as “cantankerous”, is unlikely to allow the film-makers free access to The Silmarillion. He has always been sceptical of Hollywood. Even now relatives are unsure whether he has watched The Lord of the Rings, which won a total of 17 Oscars.

Michelangelo for Readers With Deep Pockets

By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO

The New York Times
Published: May 31, 2008

BOLOGNA, Italy — The gala presentation of “Michelangelo: La Dotta Mano” (“Michelangelo: The Wise Hand”), a volume of photographs of this Renaissance master’s sculptures, may well have been the most lavish book debut in history.

Aurelio Amendola/FMR
A photograph of Michelangelo’s “Pietà” by Aurelio Amendola from the art book “Michelangelo: La Dotta Mano.” More Photos »

Multimedia
Slide Show
‘Michelangelo: La Dotta Mano’

With Piazza Maggiore, Bologna’s main square, as the backdrop, a short video depiction of the volume, which can be seen on http://www.fmronline.it/, was followed on Thursday night by an hourlong spectacle that included dozens of costumed dancers, a string quartet playing from a stage suspended in midair, suckling pigs roasted over a pit, a fake snowfall and a foppishly dressed acrobat walking Spiderman-style up the facade of San Petronio, the city’s cathedral.
But then, this is no ordinary book, starting with its retail price of 100,000 euros, or around $155,000, at Friday’s exchange rate.
Included in the price of what its publishers are calling “the most beautiful book in the world” is a sleek black case, its own stand and a 500-year guarantee.

“This isn’t an appliance,” Marilena Ferrari, chairman of the book’s publisher, Gruppo FMR, told Bologna’s mayor and guests at the book’s official presentation in a grand salon in City Hall on Thursday morning. “That’s the amount of time we feel we can guarantee the materials we used to craft it.”

Using the high standards of the privately published books in the 19th century — an ideal known as the “book beautiful” — as a starting point, FMR sought expert artisans from various fields to create something Ms. Ferrari described as “a work of art in itself.”

Aurelio Amendola’s black-and-white photographs were printed on paper made exclusively for the project. There are detachable reproductions of Michelangelo drawings on handmade folios created according to centuries-old traditions. And then there’s the cover: a scale reproduction in marble of the “Madonna della Scala” (“Madonna of the Steps”), a bas-relief of the Virgin and Child sculptured by Michelangelo when he was still in his teens. The original is housed in the Casa Buonarroti in Florence.

It took two white-gloved attendants to lug around the 46.2-pound book at its City Hall debut.

The marble cover was the trickiest aspect of production.

“It was difficult to find the right depth,” said Nanni Tamar, the project’s production manager. Six sculptors of marble are working on the first 33 copies in a limited edition of 99. “We broke a lot of slabs along the way,” Mr. Tamar said.

This isn’t the most expensive book ever made. There are books incorporating precious metals or gemstones that increase the price, like that of the entrepreneur Roger Shashoua, whose memoir, “Dancing With the Bear,” according to its Web site, dancingwiththebear.com, comes in a diamond-encrusted “special oligarch” edition that ranges in price from $1 million to $6 million.

Luxury publishing in general seems to be on the upswing. “From my experience, it’s growing,” said Ovais Naqvi, chief executive of Gloria, a new luxury publisher that this year came out with a book about New York City that sells at $2,500 to $15,000.

“There are a certain amount of people who are testing how far the market can be pushed,” Mr. Naqvi said.

Because production of the Michelangelo book is so labor-intensive (Ms. Ferrari likened the process to a Renaissance workshop), aspiring buyers can expect a six-month wait, the same as for a Ferrari (the car), said Pietro Tomassini, FMR’s commercial director.

“We think it will sell out in a very short time,” he said. Customers in the United States, Europe and Russia have already reserved copies, he added, though he declined to say how many.

Cristiano Collari, the book specialist for Christie’s auction house in Milan, was a little taken aback by the price, which he said was comparable to that of good copies of rare ancient texts like the “Hypnerotomachia Poliphili” (1499), which he described as the “bibliophile’s prime fetish.” But even contemporary art books can turn out to be good investments, Mr. Collari said, though the market is always hard to predict.

For this first title in its “Book Wonderful” series — apart from a forthcoming book about Catherine de Medici, the rest are top secret — FMR chose to pay homage to Michelangelo and to time its publication to coincide with the 500th anniversary of the first painted stroke on the Sistine Chapel ceiling in the Vatican, which took place in May 1508.

The question remains, who would pay so much for such a book?
Franco Negretto, a financial consultant here who was awed by Thursday night’s spectacle — “I’ve seen a lot of shows in this square, but this was one of the best” — said he’d been sold by FMR’s pitch, despite the price tag.
“I’ll do everything I can to buy it,” he said solemnly.

Texas Rangers' Hamilton could get hotter

By Tim Cowlishaw
The Dallas Morning News
10:36 PM CDT on Thursday, May 29, 2008



OAKLAND, CA - MAY 04: Josh Hamilton #32 of the Texas Rangers looks on against the Oakland Athletics on May 4, 2008 at McAfee Coliseum in Oakland, California. (Photo by Jed Jacobsohn/Getty Images)

Ian Kinsler is ready to take issue with the latest issue of Sports Illustrated.

The cover shows that now-familiar follow-through of the sweet left-handed swing of the Rangers center fielder. Above him the words: "The Unbelievable Josh Hamilton."

"I don't know if it's unbelievable," Kinsler said. "He is what I expected. What I saw in Arizona in the spring, that's what was unbelievable."

Here's what Kinsler saw.

Hamilton, a left-handed hitter, was stroking drive after drive to left field deeper than anything Kinsler, a right-handed hitter, was able to.

"I thought, 'What's the deal with this guy? He hits the ball to the opposite field harder than I can pull it there?' So after that, I haven't really been surprised by anything that he has done."

What Kinsler saw was the awesome power of the one-time No. 1 overall pick in the June draft whose drug abuse and personal decline kept him out of baseball for 3 ½ seasons. It was just July, 2006 that Hamilton was allowed to return to the minor leagues.

He played in all of 15 games that summer.



Texas Rangers' Josh Hamilton points toward the Tampa Bay Rays dugout before batting during the first inning of a baseball game Monday, May 26, 2008 in St. Petersburg, Fla. Hamilton, the 1999 number one draft pick overall by the Rays, was playing his first game ever at Tropicana Field.
(AP Photo/Steve Nesius)

Last year with Cincinnati, injuries limited Hamilton to 90 games, but he showed signs of the power that had made him Tampa Bay's first pick in the 1999 draft. Among rookies, his .554 slugging percentage was second to Milwaukee's Ryan Braun.

In the first third of this season, Hamilton was nothing short of the best player in the majors.

His 13 homers are second to Chicago's Carlos Quentin (14) among American League players. His .324 batting average has him six points behind the Yankees' Hideki Matsui (.330), the AL leader. And he is the major leagues' runaway RBIs leader with 58.

A triple crown?

No one has done it since Carl Yastrzemski in 1967. Hamilton probably will have the hardest time staying around the top in batting average. But the home runs and RBIs should just keep coming.

"Tools wise, he is the best player I have ever seen," Kinsler said. "Here's the thing about Josh. He was out of the game three years, almost four, and his baseball instincts are great. I've seen him put his head down and run after balls in center field. You can't do that without having a great feel for the game."

Hamilton's middle-of-the-lineup heroics came to the Rangers at a steep price. General manager Jon Daniels traded the team's top pitching prospect, Edinson Volquez, to get him.

In fairness, Volquez could just as easily be on the cover of Sports Illustrated this week if he had as compelling an off-the-field tale as Hamilton. Volquez is 7-2 for the Reds and his 1.31 earned run average is the best among starting pitchers in the majors.



Texas Rangers' Josh Hamilton hits a grand slam in the eighth inning of a baseball game against the Tampa Bay Rays on Tuesday, May 27, 2008, in St. Petersburg, Fla.
(AP Photo/Mike Carlson)

But it was a good trade because I would always trade a potentially good pitcher for a more proven (even if it was just a half-season in Cincinnati) hitter.

Pitchers, as valuable as they are and as much as we all know the Rangers need them, are simply too hard to predict.

It would be great if Volquez were still in Arlington. But Hamilton has been otherworldly and should only get better.

The Rangers open a 10-game homestand against Oakland tonight. In the American League, only Chicago has played fewer home games than Texas. And the weather is just starting to heat up.

That's when the balls really start carrying in that jet stream to right-center. And that's where Hamilton loves to launch the ball.

"We haven't really been home that much," Kinsler said. "Wait until it heats up. Wait until you see what Josh does then."

Maybe that will qualify as ... unbelievable.

Mark Steyn: Sexism, not Obama, beat Hillary

Orange County Register
Saturday, May 31, 2008

"Someone wins, someone doesn't win, that's life," Nancy Kopp, Maryland's treasurer, told The Washington Post. "But women don't want to be totally dissed." She was talking about her political candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Democratic women are feeling metaphorically battered by the Obama campaign. "Healing The Wounds Of Democrats' Sexism," as the Boston Globe headline put it, will not be easy. Geraldine Ferraro is among many prominent Democrat ladies putting up their own money for a study from the Shorenstein Center at Harvard to determine whether Sen. Clinton's presidential hopes fell victim to party and media sexism.

How else to explain why their gal got clobbered by a pretty boy with a resume you could print on the back of his driver's license, a Rolodex apparently limited to neosegregationist race-baiters, campus Marxist terrorists and indicted fraudsters, and a rhetorical surefootedness that makes Dan Quayle look like Socrates.

"On this Memorial Day," said Barack Obama last Monday, "as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes – and I see many of them in the audience here today."

Hey, why not? In Obama's Cook County, Ill., many fallen heroes from the Spanish-American War still show up in the voting booths come November. It's not unreasonable for some of them to turn up at an Obama campaign rally, too.

But what of the fallen heroine? If it's any consolation to Sen. Clinton, she's not the only female to find that social progress is strangely accommodating of old-time sexism. There was a front-page story in London last week about a British Indian couple in Birmingham – she's 59, he's 72 – who'd had twins through in vitro fertilization and then abandoned the babies at the hospital when they turned out to be daughters, announcing their plans to fly back to India for another round of IVF in hopes of getting a boy.

In the wake of the media uproar, the parents now claim something got "lost in translation" and have been back to the hospital to visit the wee bairns. But think of Mom and Dad as the Democratic Party and the abandoned daughters as Hillary, and it all makes sense.

There's a lot of that about. Sex-selective abortion is a fact of life in India, where the gender ratio has declined to 1,000 boys to 900 girls nationally, and as low as 1,000 boys to 300 girls in some Punjabi cities. In China, the state-enforced "one child" policy has brought about the most gender-distorted demographic cohort in global history, the so-called guang gun– "bare branches." If you can only have one kid, parents choose to abort girls and wait for a boy, to the point where in the first generation to grow to adulthood under this policy there are 119 boys for every 100 girls. In practice, a "woman's right to choose" turns out to mean the right to choose not to have any women.

And what of the Western world?

From 2000-05, Indian women in England and Wales gave birth to 114 boys for every 100 girls.

A similar pattern seems to be emerging among Chinese, Korean and Indian communities in America. "The sex of a firstborn child in these families conformed to the natural pattern of 1.05 boys to every girl, a pattern that continued for other children when the firstborn was a boy," wrote Colleen Carroll Campbell, of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and former Bush speechwriter, in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch the other day. "But if the firstborn child was a girl, the likelihood of a boy coming next was considerably higher than normal at 1.17-to-1. After two girls, the probability of a boy's birth rose to a decidedly unnatural 1.51-to-1."

By midcentury, when today's millions of surplus boys will be entering middle age, India and China are expected to account for a combined 50 percent of global GDP. On present trends, they will be the most male-heavy societies that have ever existed.

As I wrote in my book "America Alone," unless China's planning on becoming the first gay superpower since Sparta, what's going to happen to all those excess men? As a general rule, large numbers of excitable lads who can't get any action are not a recipe for societal stability. Unless the Japanese have invented amazingly lifelike sex robots by then (think Austin Powers' "fembots"), we're likely to be in a planetwide rape epidemic and a world of globalized, industrial-scale sex slavery.

And what of the Western world?

Canada and Europe are in steep demographic decline and dependent on immigration to sustain their populations. And – as those Anglo-Welsh statistics suggest – many of the available immigrants are already from male-dominated cultures and will eventually be male-dominated numbers-wise, too: circa 2020, the personal ads in the Shanghai classifieds seeking "SWF with good sense of humor" will be defining "must live locally" as any ZIP code this side of Mars.

Smaller families may mean just a boy or a girl for liberal Democrats, but in other societies it means just a boy. The Indian writer Gita Aravamudan calls this the "female feticide." Colleen Carroll Campbell writes that abortion, "touted as the key to liberating future generations of women," has become instead "the preferred means of eradicating them." And, while it won't eradicate all of them, Philip Longman, a demographer of impeccably liberal credentials, put the future in a nutshell in the title of his essay: "The Return of Patriarchy."

Enlightened progressives take it for granted that social progress is like technological progress – that women's rights are like the internal combustion engine or the jet airplane: once invented they can't be uninvented.

But that's a careless assumption. There was a small, nothing story out of Toronto this week – the York University Federation of Students wants a campuswide ban on any pro-life student clubs. Henceforth, students would be permitted to debate abortion only "within a pro-choice realm," as the vice-president Gilary Massa put it.

Nothing unusual there. A distressing number of student groups are inimical to free speech these days. But then I saw a picture of the gung-ho abortion absolutist: Gilary Massa is a young Muslim woman covered in a hijab.

On such internal contradictions is the future being built. By "The Return of Patriarchy," Philip Longman doesn't mean 1950s sitcom dads. No doubt Western feminists will be relieved to hear that.

©MARK STEYN

Today's Tune: Michael Jackson - Dirty Diana

(Click on title to play video)

Italy at War

http://www.nationalreview.com
May 30, 2008 4:00 AM

Cleaning up the garbage.

By Michael Ledeen



Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi

Do not envy Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. He’s got a multifront war to fight, and it is not at all clear that he’s got the troops with which to do it. His political party, the Freedom People, swept into power with what seems to be a solid majority, and even his opponents expect this government to serve the full five years. He promised Italians that he would bring order to replace the extraordinary (even by Italian standards) confusion of his center-left predecessors, reduce taxes, and impose decent security in cities increasingly characterized by petty crime, hooliganism, and violence of all sorts, ranging from the European plague of drunken soccer fans picking fights with anyone in uniform, to xenophobic eruptions against illegal immigrants, many living in shanty towns on the outside of major cities like Rome, Milan, and Naples, and finally to the scourge of organized crime, especially the Neapolitan camorra (mafia) and the ‘ndrangheta (gangsters) in nearby Calabria (the Sicilian mafia has been badly weakened in recent years and is much less of a threat to law and order). Security always trumps more abstract political issues, and if Berlusconi’s going to succeed he’s got to get a grip on these matters.

This is certainly not the longstanding stereotype of Italy, the land of the sweet life and charming people, but it’s what they’ve got nowadays, and in private conversations over the past month I learned that most Italians want Berlusconi to act quickly and forcefully, even though the chattering classes continue to preach soothing multicultural sermons. And the symbol of the security problem, from illegal immigration to organized crime, is Naples, which has dominated recent Italian news with two dreadful stories: the mountains of garbage in the streets (a problem intimately connected to the camorra), and a brief eruption of vigilante attacks against the gypsies who have set up camps around the city.

A few days ago, a gypsy girl was caught running down the stairs of a suburban apartment, carrying a newborn baby girl in her arms. The mother screamed, the neighbors appeared, the gypsy was surrounded, and the police had to save the kidnapper from a lynching. Within hours, the gypsy camp was targeted with Molotov cocktails by young men on motorcycles, and most of the gypsies — most of whom had come from Romania — were forced to flee. In succeeding days, the papers were full of stories with headlines like “So they DO steal children,” citing official sources to confirm the age-old belief that the gypsies not only traffic in little children, but also force them to beg and steal on behalf of the tribe.



Gypsies in Florence, Italy

The fate of the gypsies understandably provokes a lot of passion; after all, they were sent to the Nazi death camps along with Jews, people with birth defects, political foes of the Third Reich, and homosexuals. Given the simplistic, politically correct, one-page version of the history of fascism (fascism is bad, is right-wing, defends the status quo, and is racist, while antifascism is good, is left-wing, calls for revolution, and is super-tolerant) that is presented to most European students nowadays, it is easy to understand why Spanish socialist politicians would righteously denounce an Italian government that has called for tougher measures against illegal immigrants. And yet, it’s a real problem, and, with the exception of Eastern Europe, very few countries have attempted to integrate the gypsies, or even to pass laws in favor of common education for gypsy children. The European parliament recently granted all of one minute to a Hungarian liberal deputy to discuss the matter.

There are between 12-15 million gypsies in the 27 countries of the EU, and of these, a mere 200,000 are in Italy. Eighty thousand of them are legal Italian citizens, having fled from oppression, starvation, and unemployment in their “home” countries. Most Italian-based gypsies have been in the country for years, if not decades, and rarely have family or friends back in Romania, Bulgaria, or Hungary, where most of them started their wanderings. They need education, protection, and discipline, but these are in short supply in today’s Europe. The new government is unlikely to launch a major drive for assimilation, and will deal with the issue as part of the overall security problem.

Italians are relatively free of chauvinism, and the eruption of violence against the Neapolitan gypsy camp is best understood in the context of the city’s other intimately related main problems: the garbage crisis, and the power of organized crime.

The garbage crisis is an old one, and is part and parcel of the city’s history. Naples is famous for filth and disease, having endured many infamous episodes of plague and cholera, and Neapolitans have seen several failed efforts to “modernize” the many slums in and around the town. Fifteen years ago, putrid black water started flowing from faucets in two of the poor neighborhoods, producing a public outcry that led the central government to take the extraordinary step of firing the city council. A few months later, the left-wing reformist, Antonio Bassolino, was elected mayor on a platform of clean hands and urban renewal. Alas, if anything, the Left has been even more corrupt than its predecessors, and Bassolino, now the president of the region around Naples, has become the universally despised symbol of that corruption. Mounting evidence of collusion with the local mafia and his manifest inability to cope with the garbage crisis (even after being granted extraordinary authority and billions of euros by the Rome and European governments) ended the dream, and he will spend many hours facing criminal charges in the years to come. He’s even lost his political touch: At the height of the recent garbage crisis, with uncollected bags of refuse piled high all over town, local papers showed a picture of Bassolino’s street . . . clean as can be. It’s hard to find a Neapolitan who will admit to voting for Bassolino in the last election.



Meanwhile, undoubtedly stimulated by the imminent arrival of the council of ministers, emergency cleanup trucks were at work throughout the night. I saw them in several different neighborhoods, including the infamous slums known as the Spanish Quarters, and two others considered so dangerous that even the locals stay away: Forcella and the Sanità. Two nights before Berlusconi’s arrival, Forcella was pretty good, and the Sanità was sparkling clean, while better neighborhoods, including, sad to say, the comfortable middle-class one where my hotel is located, seemed worse than ever. By the time the ministers arrived, the central city was pristine, and even the traffic was orderly.

You may well wonder, how can this be? The official explanation is that the garbage has been loaded on trains headed for Germany. And it’s even true. So far as it goes. But even so, it’s pretty clear that the city could have been cleaned up well before the arrival of Berlusconi and his cabinet. It wasn’t, because the authorities either didn’t want it to, or were so incompetent they just couldn’t. But, as we all saw, they are competent; the city got cleaned up in 48 hours. So they didn’t want to. Why?

Because the whole garbage thing, as so many of Naples’s current problems, has to do with organized crime. In one of those eery coincidences that convince me that life really does imitate art, the film Gomorra debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in the midst of this catastrophe, and won second prize. The film is based on a best-selling book written by a brave and very talented young journalist named Roberto Saviani. It may yet cost him his life; the government has provided him with round-the-clock bodyguards, and his movements are kept secret until the very last minute.



Gomorrah- US cover

Gomorra is technically a novel (and a pun) about the Neapolitan mafia, the camorra, although it’s impossible to read it without the conviction that it’s serious reportage, and in fact some of the camorra thugs named in the “novel” are awaiting sentencing at this very moment.

One of the revelations in the book the movie is based on (now a few years old) has to do with the garbage crisis. According to Saviani, the camorra got into the business of collecting toxic waste from the north, and burying it in caves and empty volcano craters around Naples, thereby polluting the soil for generations to come, and poisoning those unlucky enough to live in the area.

Everyone is affected; American sailors at the nearby NATO base are being tested to identify a medical problem thus far labelled with the technical medical term “Naples Crud,” which some doctors apparently think may be caused by the dioxin produced by bonfires of garbage. The mob doesn’t care. The criminals obviously do not want this lucrative business taken over by the forces of national law and order, and it is widely believed — although as yet without concrete proof — that many of the uprisings are organized by the camorristi. It sure makes sense. As one of the characters in the movie puts it, “morality is for losers.” For the mob, it is all about money and the power that money brings. The camorra is one of the wealthiest organizations in the world, and does not hesitate to kill anyone who gets in its way. Saviano really needs protection.

The murderous power of the camorra was demonstrated just the other day, when one Domenico Novello, a middle-aged entrepreneur who testified against them from 2001 to 2003, was assassinated in front of his favorite coffee bar in the suburb of Castelvolturno, shortly after breakfast. Five years ago, the police concluded that Novello was no longer in grave danger, and the bodyguards were withdrawn. His assassins were patient. Not for nothing do Italians say that vendetta is a plate best eaten cold. Such stories emphasize why Saviano is so closely protected. The good news is that he has some reason for optimism; the police rounded up two leading camorristi a week ago. But now you can understand why the authorities were not eager to “solve” the garbage problem.



Gomorra- Italian cover

All of which brings us to the big picture, which is the failure of the Italian state, from the national government in Rome, to the local governments in the Campania region and the city of Naples, to provide decent security to the citizenry. And without decent security, nothing else really matters. There is a new mood of desperation in the streets these days, a mixture of frustration and fatalism that a local prosecutor has termed “highly explosive.” There is no doubt that the mood is ugly, and the people are turning for help in a new direction. Neapolitans have hated “the North” ever since the 1860s, when the kingdom of Naples was conquered by Giuseppe Garibaldi and the armies of the king of Piedmont and Savoy, and annexed to the new Italy. But today they are praying for Silvio Berlusconi, a quintessential northerner from Milan, to save them. The day before Berlusconi’s arrival, some brilliantly inventive poster makers plastered the city’s walls with a proclamation that, if the prime minister solved the garbage and camorra crises, they’d call for “Immediate Sainthood” (using the phrase Santo Subito that the faithful chanted at the funeral of John Paul II). In typical Neapolitan fashion, the poster makers knew that only a miracle could save the city, and so they used religious language.

Berlusconi no doubt appreciated the nice touch (he’s sufficiently observant to have built his own chapel and his own tomb on his estate in the north), and his first steps looked good to me. He announced that his government would treat the crisis as a national-security matter, that a top security person would be appointed to manage it, and report directly to him, and that the army would be used to guarantee security at the disposal sites. Moreover, an ambitious program of building incinerators was announced, the first one — which was supposed to be completed in 2001 — to be operational by the end of the year.

First steps are important, and these were good ones, but there’s a long way to go. If Naples, and the new government, are going to succeed, they will have to enlarge the battlefield to confront the camorristi and other mafiosi. And that’s a big fight indeed.

— Michael Ledeen is author of The Iranian Time Bomb: The Mullah Zealots’ Quest for Destruction.

Horror In Hamburg

By Stephen Brown

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

Friday, May 30, 2008

DDP
Sixteen-year-old honor killing victim Morsal Obeidi: a daily struggle to be the kind of person she wanted to be.

A young female form lying crumpled on a sidewalk. Blood flowing from multiple stab wounds. Police cars. Ambulances. Flashing lights. Emergency personnel working frantically to save an innocent life that had barely begun.

It is a scene that is becoming all too common in Western Europe with its growing Muslim population, as the northern German city of Hamburg experienced in May yet another horrifying honor murder of a young female.

Morsal Obeidi, barely 16, arrived in Hamburg from the war-torn country of Afghanistan when she was three, probably barely remembering her country of origin in her new homeland. The German Muslim student, who had won a prize in her multicultural school for tolerance and peaceful co-existence with others, was stabbed 20 times by her 23-year old brother, Ahmed, who ambushed her at a commuter train station.

The reason for Morsal’s murder is a common one for female Muslim victims of honor killings who emigrate to the West with their families and grow up between two cultures: she was living too western a lifestyle.

“She had a different life than the family wished,” admitted Ahmed, who assaulted his sister so severely that he wounded himself and had to be treated in hospital.

According to one report, Ahmed’s younger sister started her teenaged rebellion when she was 14. The schoolgirl was tired of living by the rules of the family’s Afghan-Muslim culture that see the daughters confined at home and made to do housework when not at school while the sons have all the freedom they want.

Such girls from South Asian and Muslim communities are also monitored very carefully after reaching puberty, as the male members of the family are very concerned that they remain virgins until marriage, since this involves their “honor.” One German Muslim woman wrote that the physical attributes she developed upon turning 13 filled her Turkish father with “deep worry.” This male obsession with virginity is manifested in the expression, common in these traditional cultures, that “…a man’s honor lies between a woman’s legs.”

Ahmed was most likely one of those male family members concerned about his sister’s chastity. It was reported he watched Morsal very closely and, when he was not available, he had cousins, uncles and aunts do it for him.

Morsal’s rebellion against such strict control included such normal, western behaviour for teenaged girls as wearing “uncovered hair, makeup and jeans” as well as smoking, drinking and staying out late, all of which brought her into conflict with her family. But all in all, it was reported the young schoolgirl simply wanted the same freedoms her German classmates had.

Like in many families where honor murders occur, violence was already extensive in Morsal’s. Before her death, the teenager had suffered numerous assaults at the hands of her father, Ahmed and a 13-year-old brother, who had once knocked her tooth out. An older sister is also suspected of mistreating her.

“You dress like a tramp,” Ahmed said to his sister once before beating her up, his sense of moral superiority being somewhat misplaced, since he himself has an extensive criminal record, starting when he was 13. This ‘man of honor’ is a thief and had already knifed others in fights, once being stabbed eight times himself in an argument involving prostitutes outside a brothel.

DPA
The confessed killer, Morsal Obeidi's brother Ahmad Obeidi: He resented her for her uncovered hair, her makeup and her short skirts.

Such domestic violence had caused the tormented Afghan-German girl to spend nights at youth shelters. But like many immigrant teenagers from traditional cultures, with their deep sense of family which they do not want to give up overnight, she always returned home. But the final straw leading to her tragic death may have been the young girl’s staying away from home for three nights in a row.

Sadly, Morsal’s was not the only honor murder to occur in Germany this year.
Last March in Berlin, an 18-year old boy stabbed his grandparents to death after his German mother had separated from his Turkish father and got a new boyfriend. The murders were carried out at the behest of the father, according a newspaper report, to restore his honor. The father and son had already assaulted the grandfather and boyfriend earlier in separate instances, while the father had threatened his wife’s family many times with death, causing his spouse to flee to a women’s shelter.

The wife’s unavailability is probably what caused her parents to be targeted as well the fact the grandmother approved of the separation (no surprise there). The son carried out the killing, since, like in other honor murders in Germany, the Muslim families often get the underage sons to do the killing because the maximum sentence for a minor for murder is only ten years, and often less.

Like in the Berlin case, a Kurdish man from Iraq murdered his wife for leaving him, for which he received a life sentence at his trial last fall in Munich. Leaving the husband can often be a death sentence for the wife in traditional Muslim families.

This particular killer showed no remorse whatsoever and was even smiling in the court room. Only three hours after a successful divorce court hearing in 2006, the murderer ambushed his ex-spouse on the street, stabbed her twelve times (the knife broke, stopping the assault) and then poured gasoline over her prostrate body lying on the sidewalk, burning her alive. This was all done before the eyes of their five-year-old son with the sadistic killer telling the court you can’t take children into consideration when it concerns honor.

Also at his trial, the Kurd said he had killed his wife because she had betrayed him and that his “religion and culture” forbid that. Laughably, he also partly blamed German laws for his murderous rage. He whined that in Germany “…only women have rights. So they become stuck-up and believe they can do whatever they want.”

The killer also admitted he first received permission from his wife’s father in Iraq to murder his daughter. When it is believed a woman has dishonoured the family, even if married, it is usually her birth family that kills her, since it was responsible for her upbringing and thus it is the one “dishonoured.”

This ongoing clash between the religious and cultural values of Muslim societies with those of western civilization manifested themselves in two other honor murder trials in Germany.
In Monchengladbach, a city in the Rhineland, a Turkish immigrant received a life sentence last February for shooting his wife and daughter to death on the street in 2007. Again, it was a case of a wife leaving her husband with their children after years of brutal treatment that included rapes and beatings.

Like the Kurd in the Munich case, this criminal also showed no remorse and also murdered his wife in dramatic fashion. After she had fallen to the ground with the first shot, the ‘man of honor’ put his foot on her and fired twice more directly into her head. One female Muslim lawyer at the trial said such theatrical executions are meant to show “…that the man is doing everything to restore his honor and that he defended himself against the rebellious wife.”

And last March in Bonn, a father was facing a life sentence for having murdered his 17-year-old daughter in 1993. The native Syrian, along with two nephews, strangled the young victim with a cord because, like Morsal Obeidi, she wanted to “live like German girls.” They later buried the body in a wood.

The father’s undoing was that he made his other daughter witness the murder as a warning as to what would happen to her if she ever decided to determine her own life.

“If you don’t behave according to our rules, the same thing is going to happen to you,” she was told.

Racked by guilt that made her life a living hell, the surviving sister informed the police of the honor killing 14 years later.

Like after the Hatun Surucu honor murder in Berlin in 2005 that awoke Germany to this social horror in their midst, German politicians and authorities are again falling all over themselves after the Morsal Obeidi killing in Hamburg. They say they will examine the youth shelters’ role in failing to prevent the tragic murder (as if they are to blame), as well as nebulously promising to do more to protect women facing such danger as well as explain to them their rights.

In reality, while these measures will help somewhat, much like a band aid, the real problem has to do with the values the murderers acquire in their countries of origin. As long as these men believe they have a cultural and religious right to control women, determine their lives (especially their sexuality), treat them like eternal minors, and even murder them when they transgress some archaic, tribal code of honor, then it appears there is not much Western countries can do after they arrive within their borders, since they despise our culture and, like the Kurd in the Munich trial, hold our laws in contempt.

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that parts of western European cities, where Muslims form the majority of the population, are now ruled by sharia law where these anti-civilization values can grow and spread.

But every voice, especially those of victims like Morsal, makes a difference. A spirit of change exists in every culture, including the Muslim. It is the Muslim women that have to be compulsorily educated in massive fashion if honor murders are ever to be stopped. Making Muslim womens’ visas and those of their family members’ contingent on this understanding of compulsory education would benefit enormously in this effort. No half measures. More Muslim women would determine their own lives if they were not so afraid of honor killings. And a real sense of urgency is needed to deal with this social nightmare facing these young female souls.

But in the end, it is we Westerners who have to stand up for the life-affirming values we hold dear and change our laws substantially to reflect this. Western legal codes were written when the predatory and barbaric practice of honor murder was unknown due to the absence of these immigrant groups. This must be rectified and the new reality reflected in new laws, since the bottom line is that we cannot have women being killed at sixteen if we are to call ourselves human.

- Stephen Brown is a columnist for Frontpagemag.com. A scholar and former news reporter, his field of expertise is Muslim forced marriages and honor killings. Email him at alsolzh@hotmail.com.

Today's Tune: Jay & The Americans - This Magic Moment

(Click on title to play video)

Meanwhile, Back at Trinity United

By JAMES TARANTO

The Wall Street Journal

May 29, 2008

Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan embraces father Michael Pfleger before speaking at Saint Sabina Catholic Church Friday, May 25, 2007 in Chicago.

Blogger Armando Llorens of the pro-Clinton site TalkLeft.com has an eye-opening video from the Trinity United Church of Christ, which remains Barack Obama's church. The video was uploaded to YouTube this past Sunday, though it is unclear if it was shot then or earlier. But to judge by the subject matter, it is quite recent.

The video features Father Michael Pfleger, with an introduction by the Rev. Otis Moss, Jeremiah Wright's successor at Trinity United. As we noted last month, the Democratic presidential front-runner described Moss as a "wonderful young pastor" after Obama renounced Wright.

Blogress Michelle Malkin has transcribed the video, in which Pfleger, described by Moss as "a friend of Trinity . . . a brother beloved . . . a preacher par excellence . . . a prophetic, powerful pulpiteer . . . our friend . . . our brother," delivers a hateful rant against Hillary Clinton:

When Hillary was crying [gesturing tears, uproarious laughter from audience]--and people said that was put-on--I really don't believe it was put-on.

I really believe that she just always thought "This is mine" [laughter, hoots]. "I'm Bill's wife. I'm white. And this is mine. And I jus' gotta get up. And step into the plate." And then out of nowhere came, "Hey, I'm Barack Obama." And she said: "Oh, damn! Where did you come from!?!?!" [Crowd going nuts, Pfleger screaming]. "I'm white! I'm entitled! There's a black man stealing my show." [Sobs.] She wasn't the only one crying! There was a whole lotta white people cryin'!

Who is Michael Pfleger? As we noted last month, he is a strong supporter of Louis Farrakhan and has been described as a "spiritual adviser" to Obama. He also publicly threatened the life of a Chicago businessman and, according to one report, "is known for climbing ladders to deface liquor billboards."

In his Trinity United oration, Pfleger asserted that white people have a moral obligation to surrender their assets, which, he suggested, properly belong to blacks (the video clip begins in midsentence):

--honest enough to address the one who says, "Well, don't hold me responsible [gesticulating] for what my ancestors did." But you have enjoyed the benefits of what your ancestors did and unless you are ready to give up the benefits [voice rising], throw away your 401 fund, throw away your trust fund, throw away all the money you put into the company you walked into because yo' daddy and yo' granddaddy and yo' greatgranddaddy--[screaming at the top of his lungs]--unless you're willing to give up the benefits, then you must be responsible for what was done in your generation 'cuz you are the beneficiary of this insurance policy!

Pfleger is white. Many Illinois taxpayers are black. The New York Times reported earlier this month that the latter have been forced to subsidize the former, through the good offices of one state Sen. Barack Obama:

Mr. Obama more eagerly met the demands for spending earmarks for churches and community groups in his district, said State Senator Donne E. Trotter, then the ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee. "I know this firsthand, because the community groups in his district stopped coming to me," Mr. Trotter said.

Typical of Mr. Obama's earmarks was a $100,000 grant for a youth center at a Catholic church run by the Rev. Michael Pfleger, a controversial priest who was one of the few South Side clergymen to back Mr. Obama against [Rep. Bobby] Rush.

Father Pfleger has long worked with South Side political leaders to reduce crime and improve the community. But he has drawn fire from some quarters for defending the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and inviting him to speak at his church. Father Pfleger, who did not return calls for comment, is one of the religious leaders whose "faith testimonials" Mr. Obama has posted on his presidential campaign Web site.

We searched the Obama Web site in vain for Pfleger's endorsement. It appears the campaign has suppressed it, although a copy appears on the Michelle Malkin page linked above.

Llorens, the TalkLeft blogger who posted the video, says twice in his short post that "this has nothing to do with Barack Obama." It seems to us Llorens is quite wrong about this, although possibly he is being ironic. For one thing, it raises serious questions about Obama's moral judgment that he not only attends but sends his two young daughters to a church whose pulpit regularly features such hatred.

It also renders doubtful one of the most frequent arguments for an Obama presidency: that he would diminish anti-American sentiment around the world through his conciliatory mien and tough diplomacy. His response to the political crisis over his spiritual advisers has been vacillatory, not conciliatory: first he stood by them, then he distanced himself from them. Now he pretends they don't exist--which differs from the putative Bush administration approach to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad & Co. how exactly?

Obama does not appear to have succeeded in diminishing anti-American sentiment in his own church, from religious leaders who fervently support him. The danger is that he would show similar weakness on the world stage, and that America's enemies would find such weakness provocative rather than meliorative.