The Muslim Accomplishments That Weren't

By Jamie Glazov

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Peter BetBasoo

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Peter BetBasoo, co-founder and director of the Assyrian International News Agency (http://www.aina.org/). He was born in Baghdad in 1963 and emigrated to the U.S. in 1974. He obtained a B.S. in Geology at the University of Illinois Chicago (1980-1985) and a minor in Philosophy. In 2002, he worked in the State Department's Future of Iraq Project, in the Water, Agriculture and Environment group. In 2007, he authored the report, Incipient Genocide: The Ethnic Cleansing of the Assyrians of Iraq.

FP: Peter BetBasoo, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

BetBasoo: Thank you very much, Jamie, I am honored to be here.

FP: Tell us your thoughts on Muslim claims of accomplishments, revisionism and the expropriation of cultures and ideas.

BetBasoo: Let me preface my remarks by saying that I do not claim that Muslims have made no accomplishments. Individual Muslims have been successful in the full range of the human scientific and artistic endeavor. But a closer examination of these successes reveals that they came about because these individuals stepped outside of the Muslim realm. For example, today Muslim scientists and scholars are trained in the West. I claim that Islam is not conducive to the pursuit of rational inquiry, and when Islam asserts itself, it borrows, co-opts and ultimately, when time has passed and memory forgotten, claims that these borrowed and co-opted things were originated by Muslims, not by the native cultures that preceded the Muslims.

If something cannot be so expropriated, it is often destroyed. The most recent example was the Taliban's destruction of the 2500 year-old Buddhist statues in Afghanistan . In Iran , the UNESCO world heritage sites, Pasargadae and Persepolis , are threatened by the construction of the Sivand dam, and the Mullahs simply don't care, though they claim the water line will be below these cities, which date back to 560 B.C..

In Iraq , history text books teach that the Sumerians, Assyrians, Babylonians were in fact Arabs -- never mind that these civilizationsexisted a good 5600 years before Arabs/Muslims came into Mesopotamia .

In the Middle East it is nearly impossible to separate Islam from Arabs, they are two sides of the same coin. Hence, if you are an Arab, you must surely be a Muslim, and your accomplishments as well. If you are not a Muslim, then you need to be.

In India , over 3500 Hindu temples have been occupied and converted to Mosques, the most famous being the Taj Mahal. In Kosovo, under the auspices of the UN "peace" keeping force, over 600 Serbian churches and monasteries have been occupied or destroyed by the Muslim Kosovars. Kosovo is the most important religious center for the Serbians.

FP: So how about Muslim claims of accomplishment that aren’t real?

BetBasoo: Muslims claim many, many accomplishments we know they had nothing to do with. Arabic numerals? From India . The concept of zero? From Babylonia . Parabolic arches? From Assyria . The much ballyhooed claim of translating the Greek corpus of knowledge into Arabic? It was the Christian Assyrians, who first translated to Syriac, then to Arabic. The first University? Not Al-Azhar in Cairo (988 A.D.), but the School of Nisibis of the Church of the East (350 A.D.), which had three departments: Theology, Philosophy and Medicine. Al-Azhar only teaches Theology.

Speaking of medicine, Muslims will claim that medicine during the Golden Age of Islam, the Abbasid period, was the most advanced in the world. That is correct. But what they don't say is that the medical practitioners were exclusively Christians. The most famous medical family, the Bakhtishu family, Assyrians of the Church of the East, produced seven generations of doctors, who were the official physicians to the Caliphs of Baghdad for nearly 200 years.

There are many more examples, but I think these are enough to make the point.

FP: Why, in your view, does Islam fail in producing scholars and thinkers?

BetBasoo: It is a bold assertion to say that Islam fails in producing thinkers. Yet one is lead to this conclusion by a historical examination of Islamic civilizations. The putative "Golden Age of Islam", the Abbasid period, has been shown to be not the product of Muslims, but of their Christian subjects. In his book How Greek Science Passed to the Arabs, O'Leary's lists 22 scholars and translators during the Golden Age of Islam; 20 were Christians, 1 was a Persian, and 1 was a Muslim. This covers about a 250 year period. This "Golden Age", incidentally, came to an end after the Caliphs had forcefully converted enough Christians to Muslims (through the Jizya) that the Christian numbers fell below the critical threshold needed for sustaining the intellectual enterprise.

Given that this intellectual enterprise during the Abbasid period was the product of Christians, we ask the question: has there ever been an Islamic golden age? There was none during the rule of the Mamluks, who overthrew the Abbasids. Can we say the Ottomans, who followed the Mamluks, ever had a golden age?

In his book Religion of Peace, Robert Spencer has offered a penetrating and incisive analysis of why Islam fails to produce thinkers. His explanation is theological and theoretical. I will summarize it now and then give my own complimentary explanation, which is practical.

According to Robert Spencer, the Muslim god, Allah, is capricious. He is not subject to any laws and can, in fact, change laws arbitrarily without restraint. Quoting the Pope, Spencer says:

“for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.”

Spencer continues:

"the Pope was not so much saying that in the Islamic view Allah would command his people to do evil, but that he might change the content of the concepts of good and evil. In other words, Allah would always enjoin “justice and kindness,” but what constitutes “justice and kindness,” just as what constitutes “innocent blood,” might change."

And

"He [Allah] was thus not bound to govern the universe according to consistent and observable laws. 'He cannot be questioned concerning what He does'" (Qur’an 21:23 ).

And

"Accordingly, there was no point to observing the workings of the physical world; there was no reason to expect that any pattern to its workings would be consistent, or even discernable. If Allah could not be counted on to be consistent, why waste time observing the order of things? It could change tomorrow. Stanley Jaki, a Catholic priest and physicist, explains that it was al-Ghazali, the philosopher that the authors of the Open Letter recommend to the Pope, who 'denounced natural laws, the very objective of science, as a blasphemous constraint upon the free will of Allah.' He adds that 'Muslim mystics decried the notion of scientific law (as formulated by Aristotle) as blasphemous and irrational, depriving as it does the Creator of his freedom.' Social scientist Rodney Stark adds that 'it would seem that Islam has a conception of God appropriate to underwrite the rise of science. Not so. Allah is not presented as a lawful creator but is conceived of as an extremely active God who intrudes in the world as he deems it appropriate. This prompted the formation of a major theological bloc within Islam that condemns all efforts to formulate natural laws as blasphemy in that they deny Allah’s freedom to act.'"

Thus there is no incentive for Muslims to pursue rational inquiry, since any results obtained can be invalidated by Allah at his whim.

FP: And Christianity?

BetBasoo: In contrast, Christianity derives from the Bible the notion that God works and is subject to natural and predictable laws, which a rational inquiry into would be a fruitful undertaking. This notion is the fundamental basis of the scientific method, which is a Christian invention.

That is the theological/theoretical explanation of Islam's failure to produce thinkers. There is a practical one as well. Allow me to illustrate it by contrast.

There are two aspects of Christianity that every Christian must contend with. The first is the Trinity, the second is the literary style of the Bible.

In the Trinity there is a Mystery that must be understood. Just exactly who is the Father? Who is the Son? What is the Holy Spirit? How do these relate? How does the Holy Spirit interact with the corporeal? Where does it reside? In the heart? the liver? the brain? Does it exist separate from the human nature in the body (hence the Diophysites -- Roman Catholics, Protestants, Assyrian Church of the East) or is it inseparably fused and intertwined with the human nature in the body (hence the Monophysites -- the Eastern Orthodox Churches)?

The New Testament is written in parables. Seldom is the point of the story expressed directly. The reader is asked to read a parable and figure out what it means. Reading the New Testament requires analysis, it engages the critical thought processes of interpretation and deduction.

The effort at understanding the Mystery of the Trinity and of unraveling the meaning of parables exercises the mind and engages the Christian not only on a spiritual level, but an intellectual level as well. To wit, it teaches a Christian to think.

In contrast, the Koran is written in a prescriptive style. There are no parables. The Muslim is summarily told what to do, most of the time without explanation. The Muslim needs to read just enough to get the prescription. It's like the directions on your drug prescription: take two pills every eight hours. Period. No further explanation.

Thus on a practical level, the act of exercising these religions produces two different thought processes. Christianity asks the believer to think and analyze, to interpret and deduce. Islam asks the believer to obey blindly and without question. Indeed, the Koran says "...follow not that of which you have not the knowledge" (Children of Israel, 17.36).

FP: Peter BetBasoo, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.

BetBasoo: Thank you for having me.

Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine's managing editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in U.S. and Canadian foreign policy. He edited and wrote the introduction to David Horowitz’s Left Illusions. He is also the co-editor (with David Horowitz) of The Hate America Left and the author of Canadian Policy Toward Khrushchev’s Soviet Union (McGill-Queens University Press, 2002) and 15 Tips on How to be a Good Leftist. To see his previous symposiums, interviews and articles Click Here. Email him at jglazov@rogers.com.

Guns Save Lives

By John Stossel

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/

February 27, 2008

It's all too predictable. A day after a gunman killed six people and wounded 18 others at Northern Illinois University, The New York Times criticized the U.S. Interior Department for preparing to rethink its ban on guns in national parks.

The editorial board wants "the 51 senators who like the thought of guns in the parks -- and everywhere else, it seems -- to realize that the innocence of Americans is better protected by carefully controlling guns than it is by arming everyone to the teeth."

As usual, the Times editors seem unaware of how silly their argument is. To them, the choice is between "carefully controlling guns" and "arming everyone to the teeth." But no one favors "arming everyone to the teeth" (whatever that means). Instead, gun advocates favor freedom, choice and self-responsibility. If someone wishes to be prepared to defend himself, he should be free to do so. No one has the right to deprive others of the means of effective self-defense, like a handgun.

As for the first option, "carefully controlling guns," how many shootings at schools or malls will it take before we understand that people who intend to kill are not deterred by gun laws? Last I checked, murder is against the law everywhere. No one intent on murder will be stopped by the prospect of committing a lesser crime like illegal possession of a firearm. The intellectuals and politicians who make pious declarations about controlling guns should explain how their gunless utopia is to be realized.

While they search for -- excuse me -- their magic bullet, innocent people are dying defenseless.
That's because laws that make it difficult or impossible to carry a concealed handgun do deter one group of people: law-abiding citizens who might have used a gun to stop crime. Gun laws are laws against self-defense.

Criminals have the initiative. They choose the time, place and manner of their crimes, and they tend to make choices that maximize their own, not their victims', success. So criminals don't attack people they know are armed, and anyone thinking of committing mass murder is likely to be attracted to a gun-free zone, such as schools and malls.

Government may promise to protect us from criminals, but it cannot deliver on that promise. This was neatly summed up in book title a few years ago: "Dial 911 and Die." If you are the target of a crime, only one other person besides the criminal is sure to be on the scene: you. There is no good substitute for self-responsibility.

How, then, does it make sense to create mandatory gun-free zones, which in reality are free-crime zones?

The usual suspects keep calling for more gun control laws. But this idea that gun control is crime control is just a myth. The National Academy of Sciences reviewed dozens of studies and could not find a single gun regulation that clearly led to reduced violent crime or murder. When Washington, D.C., passed its tough handgun ban years ago, gun violence rose.

The press ignores the fact that often guns save lives.

It's what happened in 2002 at the Appalachian School of Law. Hearing shots, two students went to their cars, got their guns and restrained the shooter until police arrested him.

Likewise, law professor Glenn Reynolds writes, "Pearl, Miss., school shooter Luke Woodham was stopped when the school's vice principal took a .45 from his truck and ran to the scene. In (last) February's Utah mall shooting, it was an off-duty police officer who happened to be on the scene and carrying a gun".

It's impossible to know exactly how often guns stop criminals. Would-be victims don't usually report crimes that don't happen. But people use guns in self-defense every day. The Cato Institute's Tom Palmer says just showing his gun to muggers once saved his life.

"It equalizes unequals," Palmer told "20/20". "If someone gets into your house, which would you rather have, a handgun or a telephone? You can call the police if you want, and they'll get there, and they'll take a picture of your dead body. But they can't get there in time to save your life. The first line of defense is you."

Copyright 2008, Creators Syndicate Inc.

Today's Tune: Emmylou Harris - Prayer in Open D

(Click on title to play video)

Bob Ryan: I get a kick out of Tiger

Boston Globe
February 26, 2008



Final Day of the WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship
Tiger Woods secured his win over Stewart Cink on the 29th hole of the Match Play Championship, 8 and 7.

Where is Cole Porter when we need him?

In his 1934 composition "You're The Top," Porter equates the object of his affection to such things as the Coliseum, the Louvre museum, a Bendel bonnet, a Shakespeare sonnet, the Tower of Pisa, the Mona Lisa, Mahatma Gandhi, Napoleon brandy, the National Gallery, Garbo's salary, the "purple light of a summer night in Spain," cellophane, a turkey dinner, the time of the "Darby" winner, an O'Neill drama, Whistler's mama, the "nimble tread of the feet of Fred Astaire," camembert, Inferno's Dante, the "nose on the great Durante," a Waldorf salad, a Berlin ballad, an old Dutch master, Lady Astor, the steppes of Russia, and a Roxy usher.

Today, I suspect, Mr. Porter would probably say something along the lines of, "You've got the goods/you're Tiger Woods" (hey, he went to Yale; I was rejected).

But I have absolutely no doubt a man as astute as Cole Porter would have included Tiger Woods on any general list of things deemed to be the quintessence of excellence in our society.

You don't have to be a golfer to recognize that Tiger Woods stands astride his sport as no man ever has in his. As astonishing a thought as it might have been to grasp in 2000, 2004, or even last year, we have not yet seen the best of Tiger Woods. We are now seeing an even better, more refined, and possibly even more determined Tiger than we've ever known. We are looking at someone who, even more than being physically superior to everyone else, is wired like no one else. He is a combination of Bill Russell and Michael Jordan, and he isn't burdened by teammates.

No golfer, now or ever, truly expects to win every time he tees it up in a tournament. It is a preposterous notion, because golfers battle both each other and the golf course. The normal line separating the good golfers from the great ones and the great ones from the excellent ones and the excellent ones from the inner-circle ones is almost invisible. The margin of error for these people is infinitesimal. Really fine golfers can go from winning tournaments to losing their cards in one year. Their lives can change very quickly.

All the other golfers want to win. Some who make fine livings can only dream of winning. They accept the vagaries of their profession. The Mickelsons, Singhs, Elses, Goosens, Scotts, and Chois all accept the idea that some weeks they just won't have it. Some weeks, in fact, they will miss the cut. C'est la vie. Life goes on.

There is one, and only one, exception. The normal rules of this sport do not apply to Tiger Woods. He truly expects to win every time out. He expects to win the Bay Hill tournament next month. He expects to win the Masters at Augusta, he expects to win the US Open at Torrey Pines, he expects to win the British Open at Royal Birkdale, and he expects to win the PGA at Oakland Hills. The simple truth is that he truly, honestly expects to win every tournament he enters in 2008. No one else thinks like that. No one ever has.



Credit: Robert Beck/SI

Oh, and Tiger doesn't miss cuts. Everyone else does. They know it's part of the deal. Not for Tiger it isn't. In the last three-plus seasons he has missed only three of 54, and one of those times he had no business playing. He thought he was ready to compete in the aftermath of his beloved father's death, but he wasn't.

We used to joke back in the beginning of this century that the only two things that could possibly derail Tiger were injury and romance. We don't know about the former but the early returns are that he is having no trouble adjusting to the latter. Marriage hasn't deterred or distracted Tiger from the successful completion of his appointed rounds, and neither has fatherhood. The two new women in his life have strengthened him, not sidetracked him.

Tiger's performance in the Accenture Match Play Championship at the Gallery Club in Marana, Ariz., will go down as one of the greatest exhibitions of golf the world has ever known. During his six winning matches, he played 117 holes. He had 47 birdies and two eagles, lipping out a 35-foot eagle putt Sunday that would have enabled him to halve a hole with the bewildered Stewart Cink. OK, so maybe the Gallery Club isn't Royal Birkdale or Oakland Hills. It is a challenging enough layout to have been deemed worthy of staging a very prestigious tournament. I didn't notice anyone else ripping off birdies or eagles on 42 percent of the holes.

He started his week by extricating himself from a three-down-with-five-holes-to-play hole against J.B. Holmes by going birdie, birdie, birdie, eagle, from holes 14 through 17 before clinching the match with a shot to within 2 feet of the cup on the 18th hole. He finished his week by demolishing Cink, a three-time Ryder Cupper, by a record 8-and-7 score in Sunday's 36-hole finale.

But record scores are now Tiger's norm. Since last September, he has established tournament records four times.

Beginning in 2005, Tiger Woods has entered 54 tournaments and has won 23 of them, while placing in the top three in 11 others. Golf has become a worldwide phenomenon. The fields today are the deepest of all-time. Yet Tiger Woods has an almost incomprehensible success rate.

Tiger has already had a great year by anyone else's standards. He has played thrice, and, of course, has won thrice, earning $2,707,717, and it isn't even March.

Tiger doesn't talk about money - ever. He came onto the PGA Tour in 1996 with a fat Nike contract, so he has never stood over a putt thinking about the financial consequences of a miss. This, of course, is a tremendous advantage, but it is one he earned and deserved. Tiger has always been about winning, period, and the money that comes along with all that winning is a pleasant byproduct of his obsession and his skill.

If you are a true sports fan, how can you not root for Tiger Woods? He is treating us who love sport to living history. We are privileged to be watching a dedicated craftsman at the peak of his game. We are in the presence of the most accomplished athlete this country has ever produced.

Tiger Woods is so good, he might even have had Cole Porter reaching for the thesaurus.

Bob Ryan is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at ryan@globe.com.

Thomas Sowell: A Lesson from Venezuela

February 26, 2008
http://www.realclearpolitics.com

Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez rides a horse as during his weekly broadcast "Alo Presidente" in La Yaguita in the western state of Apure February 24, 2008. REUTERS/Miraflores Palace/Handout


People on the left often use other countries as examples of things that we should do. If other countries have a government-run medical system, then we should have one too, they say. If other countries control prices, then we should control prices -- or so the reasoning goes.

Almost never is there any suggestion that we should first find out whether the actual results of the policies we are supposed to imitate are better or worse than what we already have.

There is in fact a lot that we can learn from other countries if we look at the actual consequences of some of the things we are being urged to do, instead of just assuming that we should automatically imitate what others are doing.

Studies have already shown that the waiting time before being able to get surgery is several times as long in a number of countries with government-run medical systems as in the United States. Modern medical technology like MRIs and CAT scans are also rarer in such countries.

Venezuela is currently giving us a lesson on the consequences of price controls. The government of leftist President Hugo Chavez has imposed price controls -- and seems to be surprised that lower prices have lead to reduced supplies, even though price controls have led to reduced supplies in countries around the world and for thousands of years.

There were price controls back in the days of the Roman Empire, under the Pharaohs in Egypt, and in ancient Babylon. There is plenty of history to look at, if we bother.

Price controls under the Roman Emperor Diocletian led to a decline in the supply of goods. The same thing happened under President Richard Nixon's price controls in the 1970s. It has happened in Zimbabwe within the past year.

Rent control laws led to housing shortages in Cairo -- and in Berkeley, Hanoi, Paris, and other cities around the world.

When price controls in Venezuela led to food shortages, Hugo Chavez accused companies of "hoarding" food. The emperor Diocletian was similarly accusatory when his price controls reduced supplies, many centuries ago.

Political leaders always find someone else to blame for the bad consequences of their own policies.

Hugo Chavez has blamed foreign owned companies for Venezuela's food shortages and threatened to "nationalize" them. This too is an old political game that seldom does the people of the country any good.

What is remarkable is how little interest there is among the media and among the public in how often and how consistently this has happened in the wake of price controls.

When politicians today say that they are going to "bring down the cost of medical care" or make housing "affordable," what are they talking about other than price controls?

Do we want a shortage of medical care? Do you want to have to wait for months for surgery -- and suffer needlessly in the meantime, as people do in Canada and Britain?

Behind these wonderful-sounding political "solutions" to our problems is the notion that businesses are just ripping us off with arbitrarily set prices, and that the government can make them stop.

It makes a nice story and it can get votes for politicians who play the role of saviors. But it makes little economic sense. Why do so many businesses have losses, and even go bankrupt, if they can set their prices wherever they want to?

It is not uncommon for companies on the Fortune 500 list to operate in the red. Back during the days of the Great Depression of the 1930s, corporations as a whole operated in the red two years in a row.

They were trying to keep from going under while Franklin D. Roosevelt was denouncing them as "economic royalists." FDR knew how to win elections, even if he didn't know how to get the country out of the Great Depression.

That political lesson has been learned all too well, as much of the strident, anti-business political rhetoric of this election year demonstrates.

Now if only the media and the public had some interest in learning the economic lesson!

Copyright 2008, Creators Syndicate Inc.

Castro’s Cuba was no place for a socialist like me

Neil Clark says that he went to Havana in search of a left-wing Utopia and discovered instead an island fortress of poverty, corruption and currency apartheid

By Neil Clark
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Wednesday, 20th February 2008



It’s a country where the vast majority live in poverty, while a tiny, corrupt elite live in luxury. It’s a place where, 14 years after South Africa abolished apartheid, a form of it still operates. And it’s a country where you can be threatened with prison not just for criticising the country’s leadership, but also for querying a medical bill.

Welcome to Cuba, the ‘socialist’ paradise built by that great egalitarian Fidel Castro, who after 49 years at the helm has finally decided to hand over power — in the manner of a true democrat — to his brother Raúl.

My wife and I, as unreconstructed paleo-lefties who support Clause Four, free school meals and NHS dental provision, had long wanted to visit Castro’s Cuba. All the people whose views we respect had said that the Caribbean island was a progressive model whose policies on education and healthcare ought to be copied throughout the world. We went there last April desperately wanting to like the place — after all, if George W. Bush and other right-wing nasties hated Cuba so much, then the country must be on the right tracks.

But we returned home terribly disillusioned. Neither of us had been to a country which was so utterly decrepit.

Stay on the officially approved tourist trail round the newly renovated streets of ‘Old Havana’ and you’d get the impression that Cuba was a tropical version of Switzerland. There are smart restaurants, designer shops and modern hotels. Wander a few streets away, however, and you’ll witness scenes of incredible dereliction. Dilapidated buildings with wires hanging out, streets that haven’t been resurfaced for more than 50 years, balconies that look like they’re going to fall down at any minute. In my travels in the Middle East and Asia, I’ve certainly witnessed squalor, but nothing prepared me for the back streets of Havana.

The average wage in Cuba is a pitiful $17 a month. The monthly ration which includes 283g of fish, 226g of chicken, ten eggs and 1.8kg of potatoes is barely enough for a fortnight, meaning most Cubans need to work the black market to stay alive. Things that we in Britain take totally for granted — such as toilet paper, toothpaste and pens — are luxury goods in Cuba. I’ll never forget the look of joy from an old lady when I handed her a couple of old marker pens and a coloured pencil.



For Fidel’s chums, life is somewhat easier. Despite its calls for further belt-tightening, the Cuban government last year ordered Series 1, 3 and 5 BMWs for all its ambassadors and a Series 5 model for Raúl Castro, who had taken charge of the country after his brother’s hospitalisation.

The heartbreaking consequences of Cuba’s currency apartheid were bought home to my wife and I on a Saturday afternoon visit to Havana’s Coppelia ‘Ice Cream’ park. To the right of the park gates was a long queue of Cubans who had only Cuban pesos. They have to wait on average two hours every weekend to get their weekly scoop of ice cream. On the left, there was walk-in access to tourists and the lucky locals who had convertible pesos. Fifty years on, the Cuban revolution has turned full circle in a truly Orwellian fashion. Once again the locals find themselves excluded from the best beaches in their country, as they were under Batista. And prostitution, so rife in pre-revolutionary days, is back — the jineteras being the only group of Cubans allowed to enter the new purpose-built resorts.

US sanctions are routinely blamed by Cuba’s defenders for the country’s plight. But while sanctions are harsh and morally indefensible, there’s little doubt that they have been used by the regime as a smokescreen to cover up inefficiencies and corruption. Four years ago the head of the country’s largest tourism company, Cubanacan, was fired after millions of dollars went missing — the loss only coming to light after all state enterprises were ordered to transfer their US dollars into convertible pesos.

The totalitarian nature of Castro’s Cuba is no right-wing myth, but a reality. And you don’t have to be a political agitator to fall foul of the authorities, as my wife and I discovered. We had been told by our holiday rep that the hotel’s resident nurse would administer free basic medical care, but if we required the call-out services of a local doctor, we’d have to pay. After a day’s snorkelling I had a touch of ear-ache, so I popped along to the nurse’s office to ask if she had any medication. The nurse was a man, who after the most cursory examination of my ear pronounced that I had an infection which required antibiotics. How much would the antibiotics cost, I asked. About £60, he replied. As we were returning home later that day, I told him that I’d leave it till I got back. ‘Yes, but you still have to pay me £30 for this consultation,’ he replied. ‘But the services of the nurse are free,’ I said. ‘I’m a doctor,’ he replied.

Furious at being taken for a ride, my wife and I refused to pay and headed back to our room. But on trying to check out of the hotel later that morning, we were astonished to be told by the receptionist that if we did not settle the medical bill, she would ‘call state security’ and we would be arrested. We would not be allowed out of the country — ‘state security’ would apprehend us at the airport. The ‘doctor’ then reappeared to say that the rate — which had been set in stone — was after all negotiable, and that he’d accept £25. Forced into the corner and threatened with a night (at least) in a Cuban jail, we reluctantly paid up. ‘It’s nothing more than theft,’ I said to the ‘doctor’ as I handed over the money. ‘It doesn’t go to me,’ was his response. ‘It goes to the state.’

If the money from such scams really did go to the state — and towards improving the lot of the Cuban people — I wouldn’t have been so upset. But I strongly suspect that a share of my £25 will go towards the next fleet of BMWs for Castro’s cronies.

After the stress of our final day in Cuba, my wife and I were hugely relieved to leave the country. And when we were safely airborne, we both reflected that if any country was in need of a revolution, it was Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

Is this crazy, or is this crazy?

By Melanie Phillips
London Spectator

http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles-new/
Sunday, 24th February 2008

The decision by Britain, America and certain other European countries to recognise Kosovo as an independent state is mind-blowingly stupid and suicidal and of a piece with their obvious determination to capitulate in the war for civilisation. It is a rotten decision for the following reasons:

1) It endorses a breach of a country's right to maintain its own integrity. Serbia is a properly constituted democratic country. To recognise the validity of such a secession is to undermine the principle of a country's right to determine its own composition. It puts up two fingers to international law, which explicitly recognises Serbian authority over Kosovo and upholds a state’s right to its own sovereignty. It opens the way for any other breakaway movement to do the same, both in the Balkans and around the world. So Tamils can now claim a precedent for seceding from Sri Lanka, Corsicans from France, Basques from Spain. And after Kosovo, can Scotland be far behind?

2) It asserts that religion matters more than nationality. This is multiculturalism taken to its lunatic natural conclusion. It says in effect that nationality is not the glue that must bind people of different creeds together, but religion or ethnicity can be allowed to break the nation apart. Every nation with restive ethnic minorities will now be undermined by this endorsement of illegal Balkanisation. Serbians will now find themselves foreigners in their own country. And as Eldad Beck applies the same thinking to Israel -- whose kamikaze government is said to be ‘thinking about’ recognising Kosovo too -- a horrific potential scenario presents itself:

In contradiction to all the pessimistic predictions, Israel and the Palestinians are able to successfully conclude negotiations on a final-status agreement, among other things based to incentives provided by the European Union. In the final stages of negotiations, Israeli representatives cave in to international pressure and waive the demand to recognize Israel’s unique Jewish character.

A short while after the agreement is signed, an uprising breaks out in the Galilee, in the Triangle area, and in the southern Negev desert, with Arab Israelis demanding a cultural and political autonomy that would enable them to manage their own lives while disconnecting from the State of Israel’s ‘Jewish’ institutions.

The bloody clashes between the sides prompt the United Nations to call on Israel to restrain itself and consider the deployment of multinational forces to serve as a buffer. The European Union threatens to renounce Israel’s special status if it fails to act immediately in order to meet the demands of the minority living within it. Israel’s dependence on the EU is so great that it is forced to capitulate and turn into a ‘greater Tel Aviv’ shtetl.

3) It gives victory to the forces of ethnic cleansing. Although the Serbs under Milosevic committed atrocities, the Kosovars started the killing in their revolt against a sovereign country and drove out between 150,000 and 200,000 Serbs. In the past eight years 1,248 non-Albanians have been killed, with many more kidnapped, now presumed dead. 151 spiritual and cultural monuments in Kosovo have been destroyed by Albanians and 213 mosques built with money from Saudi Arabia. Eighty per cent of graveyards have been destroyed or desecrated, with no response from the international community. The Albanians have turned Christian graveyards into car parks, playgrounds and rubbish dumps. Anything relating to Serbia or Christianity libraries, public records, books, names of places and even towns have been wiped out.

4) Most important of all, an independent Muslim Kosovo is a beachhead for radical Islam in Europe. Al Qaeda has been operating in Kosovo since the early 1990s. Jihadis from Yemen and Chechnya have been fighting with the Kosovo Liberation Army and Saudi is pouring money into the Kosovo mosques thus turning them into Wahhabi hotbeds of radicalism. Caroline Glick notes in the Jerusalem Post:

In 2006, John Gizzi reported in Human Events that the German intelligence service BND had confirmed that the 2005 terrorist bombings in Britain and the 2004 bombings in Spain were organized in Kosovo. Furthermore, ‘The man at the center of the provision of the explosives in both instances was an Albanian, operating mostly out of Kosovo... who is the second ranking leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army, Niam Behzloulzi.’

It was at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 that some 70,000 died to keep the Islamic Ottoman Empire from advancing further into Europe. What is the point of fighting the jihad in Iraq when we are cheerfully opening the door to it in that very same place?

Russia’s President Putin has warned that recognising Kosovo will rebound very badly upon the countries who have blundered into endorsing it. The fact that this outcome is merely the inevitable consequence of the war so unwisely prosecuted by those countries against Serbia does not soften its deeply alarming implications. Putin is warning only too correctly of the dangers to the west of this development and the supreme folly of endorsing it.

For once, Putin is on the right side and Britain and America are utterly wrong. That is the measure of this debacle.


Melanie Phillips is a Daily Mail columnist. She also writes for the Jewish Chronicle and is a panellist on BBC Radio Four's Moral Maze. Her most recent book is 'Londonistan', published by Encounter and Gibson Square.

'No Country for Old Men’ Wins Oscar Tug of War

No film ran away with the night, however, as the 80th Academy Awards gave a bruised movie industry a chance to refocus its ever-inward gaze on laurels instead of labor strife. Ethan Coen, left, Joel Coen, center, and Scott Rudin accepted the award for best picture. More Photos >

By DAVID M. HALBFINGER and MICHAEL CIEPLY

The New York Times
Published: February 25, 2008

HOLLYWOOD — “No Country for Old Men,” Joel and Ethan Coen’s chilling confrontation of a desperate man with a relentless killer, won the Academy Award for best picture on Sunday night, providing a more-than-satisfying ending for the makers of a film that many believed lacked one.

The Coens, who live in New York and remain aloof from the Hollywood establishment, also shared the directing and adapted screenplay awards. Joel Coen thanked the academy members for “letting us continue to play in our corner of the sandbox.”

No film ran away with the night, however, as the 80th annual Academy Awards gave a bruised movie industry a chance to refocus its ever-inward gaze on laurels instead of labor strife.

Daniel Day-Lewis won best actor for his portrayal of a ruthless oil tycoon’s rise from the sweat and sludge of wildcatting to wealth, power and madness in “There Will Be Blood.”

And Marion Cotillard won the Oscar for best actress for her incarnation of the tormented chanteuse Edith Piaf in “La Vie en Rose.”

“Thank you life, thank you love,” an elated Ms. Cotillard said. “It is true there are some angels in this city.”

None of the best picture nominees went home empty-handed: all picked off a significant win in one category or another.

Javier Bardem won a fourth Oscar for “No Country,” capturing the best supporting actor for his role as the cattlegun-wielding, pageboy-wearing serial killer. He thanked the Coens, saying they “put one of the most horrible haircuts in history over my head.”

The Oscar for “No Country” was a long-sought triumph for Scott Rudin, a prolific producer who has specialized in movies on the smarter end of the spectrum, but only once before received a best-picture nomination, for “The Hours” in 2003.

Tilda Swinton took best supporting actress for playing a nervous wreck of a corporate lawyer who throws morality under the bus of her ambition in “Michael Clayton.”

The indie delight “Juno,” about a pregnant teenager with a mouth on her, won for best original screenplay, by Diablo Cody, who once worked as a stripper. She tearfully thanked her family for “loving me for who I am.”

“No Country” was denied in several technical categories, as well as in cinematography: Robert Elswit won that Oscar for “There Will Be Blood,” whose extended tracking shots in harsh open spaces and dimly lighted images of claustrophobic spots made for stunning scenes despite long stretches with little dialog.

With all four top acting prizes going to Europeans and the New York-based Coen brothers’ film in contention for several others, it was a night when Hollywood’s glittery establishment came out to honor what was essentially a gaggle of outsiders.

Another example: “Falling Slowly,” the ballad from “Once” about the music created in the space between two people, won best original song. It was written by the film’s stars, the Irish Glen Hansard and the Czech Marketa Irglova, who have since become a real-life couple.

“Atonement,” nominated for seven awards, won for best original score. The awards were otherwise all over the map, with the first nine going to different films, leaving the show’s host, Jon Stewart, to set the tone with a riff on the three-month writers’ strike that had threatened to turn the Oscars itself into a marathon of montages.

“You’re here — I can’t believe it, you’re actually here!” he joked as the show opened. “The fight is over, so tonight,” he added, “welcome to the makeup sex.”

Mindful of the election season, he took note of the Democratic primary race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. “Normally when you see a black man or a woman president, an asteroid is about to hit the Statue of Liberty,” he said.

“Ratatouille,” a rodent’s-eye view of the accessibility of art, won for best animated feature. Brad Bird, that film’s director, thanked his junior high school guidance counselor: “He asked me what I wanted to do with my life,” Mr. Bird recalled. “I said, ‘Make movies.’ He asked me what else I wanted to do with my life. And I said, ‘Make movies.’ ” Mr. Bird said the doubt he faced was “perfect training” for a life in Hollywood.

“Taxi to the Dark Side,” an examination of American torture practices, won best documentary feature.

Also in the early going, “La Vie en Rose” won for best makeup and “Elizabeth: The Golden Age” won for costume design. “The Golden Compass,” in which every human character is born with a shape-shifting animal companion known as a “daemon,” scored a big early upset in the visual-effects category, beating two far more successful films: “Transformers” and “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.”

Among the lesser-watched categories, “The Bourne Ultimatum” won Oscars for all three in which it was nominated: film editing, sound mixing and sound editing.

“The Counterfeiters,” a Nazi-era drama, became the first Austrian film to win an Oscar, for best foreign-language film.

Owen Wilson presented the award for best live-action short to “Le Mozart des Pickpockets,” and played it straight, avoiding any reference to his personal collapse and hospitalization just as his “Darjeeling Limited” was being released last fall. Best animated short went to “Peter and the Wolf,” and was presented by an animated Jerry Seinfeld, in his “Bee Movie” character.

The animation award, and Mr. Stewart’s opening monologue, provided a lighthearted liftoff for an Oscars telecast sure to be weighted down by the field of mostly small and dark films in the running for the top honors. Embraced by critics, those movies have been less warmly received by the mass audiences whose attentions have sustained the Academy Awards as one of the nation’s few remaining shared rituals.

The lack of a clear consensus among critics and audiences left the potential for an Oscar night in which the top awards were scattered in every direction. Among other things, the evening promised to be a tug of war over sensibilities: Academy voters were being asked to choose between the nihilism of “No Country for Old Men,” in which the serial killer prevails; the hopeful spunk of “Juno,” in which a pregnant teenager forges her own solutions; or, perhaps, a saga of childhood betrayal and lives destroyed, in “Atonement,” set against the backdrop of British retreat in the early days of World War II.

As Mr. Stewart put it: “Does this town need a hug?” He added, “All I can say is, thank God for teen pregnancy.”

The 80th annual Academy Awards, held at the Kodak Theater here, delivered a welcome return to pomp and ritual for a town still recovering from the strike by film and television writers that stripped the glitz from the enterprise. “I think the town is ready to celebrate,” said George Clooney, walking up the red carpet accompanied by his girlfriend, Sarah Larson. “I know I am, but then that’s never been a problem for me.”

On Sunday, however, jitters still surrounded a broadcast that was assembled quickly around a roster of independent-style films, none of which has shown the audience appeal of a “Titanic” or “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King,” previous best-picture winners that pulled large audiences to the awards show in the past.

The early proceedings were slightly ad hoc, not quite normal for a show that operates more like an industry, bringing the 6,500-member Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences roughly $40 million in net income each year. Security was tight, but did not operate with the usual precision. Promised ID checks and wristbanding did not occur. Mr. Stewart, the evening’s host, had little more than a week to prepare once writers voted to return to work.

With help from a smash-up special effects opening and Mr. Stewart’s monologue, things started out with a bang. But the show began to drag as one dusty montage after another of Oscar history piled up, more numerous and less effective than in recent memory.

The machine came slightly off the rails later on, as Mr. Stewart brought Ms. Irglova back out after a commercial break when she had been denied the chance to give an acceptance speech.

Probably nothing caught the slightly cynical air of self-reference better than Jack Nicholson’s lead-in to a montage of all 79 prior best-picture winners. “They touch the humanity — heh, heh, heh — in all of us,” laughed Mr. Nicholson, with a touch more of the Joker than human warmth.

A film community that lost its balance, and never quite got it back, was also clearly unsure how much fun was too much fun under the circumstances: The annual orgy of status, heat and sequined victory laps, Vanity Fair magazine’s Oscar after-party, was abruptly canceled, as were several other ordinarily hot-ticket private gatherings.

That sense of being unmoored was not the only disconnect on display.

All the stated concern for films and filmmakers aside, Oscar night has always been about stars — just ask ABC. Thirty nine million people tuned in two years ago when “Crash” upset “Brokeback Mountain,” one of the worst ratings performances in memory. (The 2003 telecast, shadowed by the beginning of the Iraq war, was worse.) That is compared with 1998, when 55 million viewers watched “Titanic” win 11 Oscars, Jack Nicholson beat out Matt Damon, and Helen Hunt slip past Kate Winslet.

Though no one would deny that this year’s contenders are long on talent, they are exceedingly short on celebrity. Casey Affleck’s breakthrough in “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” was nominated, but Brad Pitt’s starring performance was not. Cate Blanchett picked up nominations in both actress categories, but Angelina Jolie (“A Mighty Heart”) and Julia Roberts (“Charlie Wilson’s War”) went unacknowledged.

Rather, relative unknowns like the 21-year-old Ellen Page and the 13-year-old Saoirse Ronan nabbed nominations for best actress (“Juno”) and best supporting actress (“Atonement”), respectively. For that matter, Mr. Clooney (“Michael Clayton”) and Johnny Depp (“Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street”) picked up best-actor nominations, while the twice-honored Tom Hanks (“Charlie Wilson’s War”) and Denzel Washington (“American Gangster”) went empty-handed.

Instead, the megawatts would be supplied by the awards presenters — Mr. Hanks and Mr. Washington among them, along with stars like Jessica Alba, Renée Zellweger, Forest Whitaker, John Travolta and Harrison Ford — creating a scenario in which the Hollywood establishment turned out to sustain an institution that had failed to repay the gesture.

If Hollywood’s preoccupation with its intramural tensions seemed at odds with the celebratory order of the day, some here have suggested a divide involving the movies themselves: between the darkness and despair of films like “There Will Be Blood” and “No Country for Old Men” and what the industry’s countless amateur political analysts discern as a more hopeful mood abroad in the land. By that logic, the frustrations over the Iraq war that gave rise to such films, as well as more direct cinematic responses like “In the Valley of Elah,” may have come a year too late to strike a chord with a public that has finally moved on, at least to the next election.

Perhaps nothing has drawn more attention and concern than the sharp line dividing films that have pleased the widest audiences from those embraced by critics. Thanks to “Juno” and its $130 million in ticket sales, the five best-picture nominees together have grossed $327 million, $111 million of that since the academy nominations were announced, an unusually strong Oscar bump. But the combined grosses are a far cry from a decade earlier, when “Titanic” inflated the total.

“Juno” was not the only $100 million-plus movie up for an award; the animated “Ratatouille” received five nominations; “The Bourne Ultimatum,” “Transformers” and “Enchanted” each had three. But in the major categories, only “American Gangster” exceeded that mark besides “Juno.”

Art and quality aside, the paucity of widely seen movies up for consideration is ominous not just for ABC selling commercial time against the telecast but for the academy itself, rendering it that less culturally relevant. Left unchecked, the trend threatens to turn the yearly ritual into a niche affair instead of a shared national experience.

Yet for all the doom and gloom on the minds of academy members and obsessives — Heath Ledger’s death provided another reason to mourn — there were many areas in which excitement could be seen bubbling up out of the ground like Daniel Plainview’s black gold in “There Will Be Blood.”

If small and dark films captured the attention of critics and the academy, it was not for lack of ambition among Hollywood studios.

Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age

Lorne Gunter, National Post
http://www.nationalpost.com
Published: Monday, February 25, 2008



Note Celebrity Line's 1,000 foot Summit ship next to Hubbard Glacier for an appreciation of the size of this glacier. Hubbard Glacier, longest tidewater glacier in North America, begins its 76 mile journey to the sea on the slopes of Mount Logan, the tallest moutain in Canada and part of the largest non-polar icefield in the world. At the point where it enters Disenchantment Bay, at the head of Yakutat Bay, it is 6 miles wide.

Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.

The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January "was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average."

China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.

There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has felt the pinch as home buyers have stayed home rather than venturing out looking for new houses.

In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950.

And remember the Arctic Sea ice? The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its "lowest levels on record? Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.

The ice is back.

Gilles Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, says the Arctic winter has been so severe the ice has not only recovered, it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year.

OK, so one winter does not a climate make. It would be premature to claim an Ice Age is looming just because we have had one of our most brutal winters in decades.

But if environmentalists and environment reporters can run around shrieking about the manmade destruction of the natural order every time a robin shows up on Georgian Bay two weeks early, then it is at least fair game to use this winter's weather stories to wonder whether the alarmist are being a tad premature.

And it's not just anecdotal evidence that is piling up against the climate-change dogma.

According to Robert Toggweiler of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University and Joellen Russell, assistant professor of biogeochemical dynamics at the University of Arizona -- two prominent climate modellers -- the computer models that show polar ice-melt cooling the oceans, stopping the circulation of warm equatorial water to northern latitudes and triggering another Ice Age (a la the movie The Day After Tomorrow) are all wrong.

"We missed what was right in front of our eyes," says Prof. Russell. It's not ice melt but rather wind circulation that drives ocean currents northward from the tropics. Climate models until now have not properly accounted for the wind's effects on ocean circulation, so researchers have compensated by over-emphasizing the role of manmade warming on polar ice melt.

But when Profs. Toggweiler and Russell rejigged their model to include the 40-year cycle of winds away from the equator (then back towards it again), the role of ocean currents bringing warm southern waters to the north was obvious in the current Arctic warming.

Last month, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, shrugged off manmade climate change as "a drop in the bucket." Showing that solar activity has entered an inactive phase, Prof. Sorokhtin advised people to "stock up on fur coats."

He is not alone. Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.

The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased.

It's way too early to claim the same is about to happen again, but then it's way too early for the hysteria of the global warmers, too.

lgunter@shaw.ca

Today's Tune: Tift Merritt- Virginia, No One Can Warn You

Tift Merritt DVD Release, SchoolKids Records, Raleigh, November 13, 2007 (L)



(Click on title to play video)

What campus rape crisis?

Promiscuity and hype have created a phony epidemic at colleges.

By Heather Mac Donald
Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com
February 24, 2008

It's a lonely job, working the phones at a college rape crisis center. Day after day, you wait for the casualties to show up from the alleged campus rape epidemic -- but no one calls. Could this mean that the crisis is overblown? No. It means, according to campus sexual-assault organizations, that the abuse of coeds is worse than anyone had ever imagined. It means that consultants and counselors need more funding to persuade student rape victims to break the silence of their suffering.

It is a central claim of these organizations that between a fifth and a quarter of all college women will be raped or will be the targets of attempted rape by the end of their college years. Harvard's Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response uses the 20% to 25% statistic. Websites at New York University, Syracuse University, Penn State and the University of Virginia, among many other places, use the figures as well.

And who will be the assailants of these women? Not terrifying strangers who will grab them in dark alleys, but the guys sitting next to them in class or at the cafeteria.

If the one-in-four statistic is correct, campus rape represents a crime wave of unprecedented proportions. No felony, much less one as serious as rape, has a victimization rate remotely approaching 20% or 25%, even over many years. The 2006 violent crime rate in Detroit, one of the most violent cities in the U.S., was 2,400 murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults per 100,000 inhabitants -- a rate of 2.4%.

Such a crime wave -- in which millions of young women would graduate having suffered the most terrifying assault, short of murder, that a woman can experience -- would require nothing less than a state of emergency. Admissions policies, which if the numbers are true are allowing in tens of thousands of vicious criminals, would require a complete revision, perhaps banning male students entirely. The nation's nearly 10 million female undergraduates would need to take the most stringent safety precautions.

None of this crisis response occurs, of course -- because the crisis doesn't exist.

So where do the numbers come from? During the 1980s, feminist researchers committed to the rape-culture theory discovered that asking women directly if they had been raped yielded disappointing results -- very few women said that they had been. So Ms. magazine commissioned University of Arizona public health professor Mary Koss to develop a different way to measure the prevalence of rape.

Rather than asking female students about rape per se, Koss asked them if they had ever experienced actions that she then classified as rape. One question, for example, asked, "Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn't want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs?" -- a question that is ambiguous on several fronts, including the woman's degree of incapacitation, the causal relation between being given a drink and having sexual intercourse, and the man's intentions. Koss' method produced the 25% rate, which Ms. then published.

It was a flawed study on a number of levels, but the most powerful refutation came from her own subjects: 73% of the women whom the study characterized as rape victims told the researchers that they hadn't been raped. Further, 42% of the study's supposed victims said they had had intercourse again with their alleged assailants -- though it is highly unlikely that a raped woman would have sex again with the fiend who attacked her.

Despite all this, the numbers have stuck. Today, John Foubert, an education professor at William and Mary College (and founder of a group called One-in-Four, which works on sexual assault issues and has chapters on 17 campuses), says, "The one-in-four statistic has been replicated in several studies for several decades. To the extent that social science can prove anything, which I believe it can, the one-in-four statistic has been proven beyond all reasonable doubt. My instincts tell me that the statistic is actually much higher."

Yet subsequent campus rape studies keep turning up the pesky divergence between the victims' and the researchers' point of view.

A 2006 survey of sorority women at the University of Virginia, for example, found that only 23% of the subjects whom the survey characterized as rape victims felt that they had been raped -- a result that the university's director of sexual and domestic violence services calls "discouraging." Equally damning was a 2000 campus rape study conducted under the aegis of the Department of Justice. Sixty-five percent of those whom the researchers called "completed rape" victims and three-quarters of "attempted rape" victims said that they did not think that their experiences were "serious enough to report."

Believing in the campus rape epidemic, it turns out, requires ignoring women's own interpretations of their experiences.

Nevertheless, none of the weaknesses in the research has had the slightest drag on the campus "anti-rape" movement, because the movement is political, not empirical. In a rape culture, which "condones physical and emotional terrorism against women as a norm," sexual assault will wind up underreported, argued Carole Goldberg, the director of Yale's Sexual Harassment and Assault Resources and Education Center, in a March 2007 newsletter. Campus rape centers and 24-hour hotlines, aided by tens of millions of dollars of federal funding, are ubiquitous.

Needless to say, those facilities don't appear to get a tremendous amount of use. For example, Hillary Wing-Richards, the associate director of sexual-assault prevention at James Madison University, said the school's campus rape "help line" gets a varying number of calls, some of which are "request-for-information calls" -- where to go, who to talk to and the like.

"Some months there are 10 and others, one or two," she said.

Referring to rape hotlines, risk management consultant Brett Sokolow laments: "The problem is, on so many of our campuses, very few people ever call. And mostly we've resigned ourselves to the underutilization of these resources."

Federal law requires colleges to publish reported crimes affecting their students. The numbers of reported sexual assaults -- the law does not require their confirmation -- usually run under half a dozen a year on private campuses, and maybe two to three times that at large public universities.

So what reality does lie behind the rape hype? I believe that it's the booze-fueled hookup culture of one-night, or sometimes just partial-night, stands. Students in the '60s demanded that college administrators stop setting rules for fraternization. The colleges meekly complied and opened a Pandora's box of boorish, promiscuous behavior that gets cruder each year.

This culture has been written about widely. College women -- as well as men -- reportedly drink heavily before and during parties. For the women, that drinking is often goal-oriented, suggests Karin Agness, a recent University of Virginia graduate and founder of NeW, a club for conservative university women: It frees the drinker from responsibility and "provides an excuse for engaging in behavior that she ordinarily wouldn't." Nights can include a meaningless sexual encounter with a guy whom the girl may not even know.

In all these drunken couplings, there may be some deplorable instances of forced and truly non-consensual sex. But most campus "rape" cases exist in the gray area of seeming cooperation and tacit consent, which is why they are almost never prosecuted criminally.

"Ninety-nine percent of all college rape cases would be thrown out of court in a twinkling," observes University of Pennsylvania history professor Alan Kors.

Many students hold on to the view that women usually have the power to determine whether a campus social event ends with intercourse. A female Rutgers student expressed a common sentiment in a university sexual-assault survey: "When we go out to parties and I see girls and the way they dress and the way they act ... and just the way they are, under the influence and um, then they like accuse them of like, 'Oh yeah, my boyfriend did this to me' or whatever, I honestly always think it's their fault."

But suggest to a rape bureaucrat that female students share responsibility for the outcome of an evening and that greater sexual restraint would prevent campus "rape," and you might as well be saying that women should don the burka.

College officials have responded to the fallout of the college sexual revolution not with sound advice but with bizarre and anachronistic legalisms for responding to postcoital second thoughts.

University of Virginia students, for example, may demand a formal adjudication before the Sexual Assault Board; they can request a "structured meeting" with the Office of the Dean of Students by filing a formal complaint; or they can seek voluntary mediation.

Risk-management consultants travel the country to help colleges craft legal rules for student sexual congress.

"If one partner puts a condom on the other, does that signify that they are consenting to intercourse?" asks Alan D. Berkowitz, a campus rape consultant. Short of guiding the thus-sheathed instrumentality to port, it's hard to imagine a clearer signal of consent, although Berkowitz apparently finds it "inherently ambiguous."

And even as the campus rape industry decries alleged male predation, a parallel campus sex bureaucracy sends the message that students should have recreational sex at every opportunity.

New York University offers workshops on orgasms and "Sex Toys for Safer Sex" ("an evening with rubber, silicone and vibrating toys") in residence halls and various student clubs. Brown University's Student Services helps students answer the compelling question: "How can I bring sex toys into my relationship?" Princeton University's "Safer Sex Jeopardy" game for freshmen lists six types of vibrators and eight kinds of penile toys.

Why, exactly, are schools offering workshops on orgasms? Are students already so saturated with knowledge of the evolution of constitutional democracy, say, that colleges should reroute their resources to matters available on porn websites?

Remarkably, many students emerge from this farrago of mixed messages with common sense intact.

In a November column in the University of Virginia's student newspaper, a third-year student gave the real scoop on frat parties: They're filled with men hoping to have sex. Rather than calling these men "rapists," columnist Katelyn Kiley offered some practical wisdom to the women trooping off to Virginia's fraternity row:

"It's probably a good idea to keep your clothes on, and at the end of the night, to go home to your own bed. Interestingly enough, that's how you get [the guys] to keep asking you back."

Maybe such young iconoclasts can take up another discredited idea: College is for learning. Fighting male dominance or catering to the libidinal impulses released in the 1960s are sorry substitutes for the pursuit of knowledge.

Heather MacDonald is a contributing editor of City Journal, from which this is adapted.

Another city for Merritt

The singer-songwriter, long a Raleigh resident, has a new address, a new album and a new outlook

By David Menconi
Raleigh News & Observer Staff writer
February 24, 2008



Tift Merritt, now living in New York, says, 'In France, I discovered that I love writing in the city.' Her new album, 'Another Country,' contains songs she wrote during stays in Paris.

NEW YORK - Tift Merritt strolls toward the Hudson River in her quiet West Village neighborhood. Having moved here just a few months earlier, the North Carolina singer-songwriter is a newcomer to this tree-lined street with a century-old bohemian heritage.

With the blasé sophistication of a seasoned New Yorker, she notes the red brick compound where celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz lives and works, and Oscar-nominated filmmaker Julian Schnabel's raspberry-colored high-rise. But her face lights up with a newcomer's awe-struck glee when she rhapsodizes about the city's cold-weather palette or points out the White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street at West 11th.

"Yeah, that's where the Village Voice was conceived, and where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death," Merritt says. Then she adds with a laugh, "We hope to avoid a similar fate."

Generations of artists and performers have gravitated to New York, some to live in a cultural mecca amid the Leibovitzes and Schnabels and legends. Others come with larger-than-life dreams, the 8 million-to-1 chance of being discovered, for reinvention or escape.

Merritt's reasons were more pragmatic than dreamy. With her third album on the way ("Another Country," on Fantasy Records, arriving Tuesday), a national tour about to start and a new monthly public-radio show, New York simply made more sense than North Carolina, her home base since childhood.

In New York, the apartment she shares with drummer Zeke Hutchins is a few minutes away from her manager's office. She can get just about anywhere she needs to be faster from New York than RDU.



Tift Merritt works in the West Village studio apartment she shares with drummer Zeke Hutchins, background, her boyfriend and business partner.

But there's also the irresistible confluence of only-in-New York energy. Merritt had barely arrived when she found herself on the "I'm Not There" Bob Dylan tribute concert at the Beacon Theatre in November with Joe Henry, My Morning Jacket, Yo La Tengo and other alternative-rock stars.

"We were literally moving stuff into the apartment when we heard that a female singer had to cancel," says Merritt, 33. "My manager called to ask, I got on the show and there was no pressure. It was great."

The New York Times agreed, saying she had "the night's purest voice." Variety called her performance "the program's most gripping."

Of course, Merritt got plenty of love from her old hometown, especially after she earned a Grammy nomination for "Tambourine," her 2004 album. She advanced from selling out local clubs to such prestigious engagements as opening the N.C. Museum of Art's summer concert season and performing with the N.C. Symphony.

Behind the scenes, however, were struggles with her label, her manager and the industry itself. She abandoned music, went to Paris and finally found herself in the place she needed to be.

"In France, I discovered that I love writing in the city," Merritt says. "There's such an intensity to being in the city that matches the intensity of what you're experiencing in your head. So you go out on the street in this haze and you're met with an equivalent amount of energy. As opposed to going through the aisles of the grocery store down there, feeling like a freak in dreamland."

Going wrong, going right

At a small cafe near her studio apartment, Merritt settles in over coffee and croissants and talks about the decline that began, as all declines do, at the top. Her Grammy nomination, for country album of the year, felt like validation and fuel for a commercial breakthrough. But the breakthrough never came.



Merritt grabs a coffee at a neighborhood shop.

"The label thought the Grammy nomination was a fluke," Merritt sighs into her coffee. "That made me feel good the first time I heard it."

From a distance of 21/2 years, she can see the honor's downside. "Tambourine" (on Lost Highway Records) didn't sound Nashville enough for country radio. Yet with Grammy branding it country, other formats ignored it. Sales stalled at 68,000 copies -- 11,000 more than 2002's "Bramble Rose," but well short of expectations.

"The hardest part for me was feeling like I was just back in the van spinning my wheels," she says. "I'd become more of a performer than a writer, and the focus was on just doing the same 13 songs every night, over and over. There was no way we could work any harder, but I couldn't see that it was getting us anywhere."

One night, Merritt poured herself a glass of wine and did a Google search on "Paris," "apartment" and "piano." She found a place to sublet and flew to Paris in summer 2005.

"I went off to France really thinking I might not do this anymore," she says. "Maybe I'd teach, write novels, figure out something else. But I had not anticipated writing anything at all because I felt empty, like I had nothing to say."

But Paris turned out to be what she needed to rediscover her voice as a writer. Listening to Merritt talk about the experience brings Joni Mitchell's "Free Man in Paris" to mind: I was a free man in Paris/I felt unfettered and alive/There was nobody calling me up for favors/And no one's future to decide.

"France was very opposite of the show-business experience I'd been living," Merritt says. "I was anonymous and alone. I wore no makeup, wore the same clothes every day. And I wrote and wrote and wrote. It was like I had a chance to catch my breath, and I suddenly went back to what I really am: a writer. It surprised me, and it was a relief. Although it wasn't, 'Everything's OK now because this is gonna be a hit!'"

Most of the songs on "Another Country" emerged during several stays in Paris. The lyrics sound like the musings of someone in crisis, with song after song about loneliness, longing, trying to connect. "Broken," the first single, concludes with a murmuring coda that could be the theme for the project: "I think I will break but I mend." The title track likens love to a faraway country because sometimes you have to go a long way to find what you're looking for.

"It became clear very early on that 'Another Country' was the umbrella this whole thing came under," Merritt says. "I'm just following a tradition, the American expatriate in Paris. You feel that when you're over there."



Merritt notes the White Horse Tavern near her apartment is famous as a favorite hangout of poet Dylan Thomas.

Seeing more than music

After coffee, Merritt catches a subway for the Museum of Modern Art. On the way, a steady stream of messages trickles in via her iPhone, including one with welcome news from her manager: KGSR-FM in Austin, Texas, is playing "Broken." Last time she couldn't crack the playlist at this influential station.

So far, all the news about "Another Country" is good, including a four-star rave review in Paste magazine. Whether the album gets any further than "Tambourine" or "Bramble Rose" is up to the fates. But Merritt is ready to do her part.

"I'm scared about doing it, and about not doing it," Merritt says about firing up the endless-touring cycle again. "About what will or won't happen. I'm getting back in the van. That's all I can say."

With the tour looming, today might be her last chance to visit MoMA for a while. Being in New York rekindles artistic interests other than music -- fiction (she studied creative writing at UNC-Chapel Hill), photography and even painting. Merritt moves through galleries devoted to Pablo Picasso and Jasper Johns, noting favorites. She pauses before French painter Édouard Vuillard's "The Park," an 1894 painting that depicts an idyllic scene in Paris.

"It's really like this in the parks over there," she says, smiling at the memory. "The streets and sidewalks are lined with chairs. You see people sleeping, reading, sitting with their jackets off, playing chess, even making out. It was amazing, the days over there. So much intimacy. I can sound over-the-top silly talking about it."

In an upper-floor gallery, Merritt walks directly to "The Italians" by American abstract painter Cy Twombly. Wild marks cover the 6-by-8-foot canvas and give it the look of a graffiti wall.

"This is what a lot of his paintings are like," she says. "Sometimes there's a word or a piece of a phrase on this huge canvas" -- such as the word "ROMA," scrawled in the painting's upper right corner. "It's like he's writing a letter. I love how the words and the paint interact, so passionate and emotional."



Merritt takes the subway to a gig at Union Hall in Brooklyn. She says living in New York is a practical matter, but she enjoys the city's energy and the artistic environment, too.

Merritt's fascination with Twombly inspired her radio show, "The Spark," which is transmitted from the artistic outpost of Marfa, Texas. On the program, which debuted in January with author and "ambassador of goodness" Nick Hornby, Merritt talks to other artists, peer-to-peer, about their methods and inspirations. In coming shows, she interviews poet C.K. Williams, landscape painter Wolf Kahn and bluegrass trio Nickel Creek.

She would love to talk to Twombly, the man behind the complex painting that's reduced to a clinical description in the text on the museum wall.

"This is the man, the reason why I started the radio show," Merritt says. "He's this 79-year-old man and I can't find anything remotely human written about him. When I told my mentor at UNC about it, he said, 'Why don't you? He's probably lonely in his studio.' And I decided he was right. Young artists need to know what he thought about this, and what he sees when he looks at his work -- and how his wife gets the crayon out of his shirt."

She pauses to laugh, then turns back to the picture.

"I can't explain why I see something of myself in this painting," she says softly. "But I do. I could sit in front of this for days."

Into 'pop' at last

In Merritt's apartment, there's a to-do list on the bulletin board by the door. Some of the items -- "label," "manager" and "songs recorded" -- are checked off. "Paris apartment," "finish college" and other items remain. But Merritt and Hutchins, her business partner as well as drummer and boyfriend, have accomplished amazing things over the past year.

Along with recording "Another Country," they struck new deals with Fantasy/Concord Records -- label home to John Fogerty and the late Ray Charles -- and manager David Newgarden, whose clients include Robert Pollard/Guided by Voices, Cibo Matto and other rock acts. Newgarden says he hesitated to take on Merritt until he learned that she wanted to move away from country music.

Merritt was somewhat miscast as a country singer, and "Another Country" should move her into the "pop" category for good.

"I guess this album is my departure from Nashville," she says. "Which is ironic, given the title and the fact that it's my follow-up to a country Grammy nomination. So what do I do but go off to France during the 'Freedom Fries' period and write this. It's going to confuse people."

Merritt recorded the album in Los Angeles with "Tambourine" producer George Drakoulias and the core of her regular band: Hutchins, bassist Jay Brown and keyboardist Danny Eisenberg. If "Tambourine" was Merritt's "Dusty in Memphis" blue-eyed-soul move, "Another Country" would sound at home in Laurel Canyon, somewhere between Carole King and Bonnie Raitt.

A move to Los Angeles would have made sense, given the album's West Coast laid-back vibe. But Merritt decided New York was a better fit.

"I want to be in the real game -- to take it seriously and be where it happens," she says. "Maybe I can advocate better for myself if I can pop in on people for coffee. Somebody told me once, 'Don't go to New York to find yourself or your voice, find it somewhere else and bring it to the city.' Which was great advice."

She doesn't know how long her New York sojourn will last, in part because she'll be on the road for most of 2008. She thinks about children, and she'd like to go back to Paris and live there awhile, too.

Whatever her mailing address, there's little doubt about where home remains.

"North Carolina is still such a huge part of our lives, it almost doesn't matter where we live," Merritt says. "As much as we tour, we're never home, anyway. Six months from now, we will probably have spent more time in North Carolina than New York."


david.menconi@newsobserver.com or blogs.newsobserver.com/beat or (919) 829-4759.