The Islamic world never experienced either a Renaissance or an Enlightenment, but as this Wall Street Journal news story explains, a trove of manuscript photographs not previously known to have survived WWII is about to cause the Medieval Islamic world view to be confronted with the fruits of modern critical scholarship’s examination of its fundamental basis, the al-Koran (in PC-journalism-ese these days, the Quran), supposedly the directly-dictated word of God.
On the night of April 24, 1944, British air force bombers hammered a former Jesuit college here housing the Bavarian Academy of Science. The 16th-century building crumpled in the inferno. Among the treasures lost, later lamented Anton Spitaler, an Arabic scholar at the academy, was a unique photo archive of ancient manuscripts of the Quran.
The 450 rolls of film had been assembled before the war for a bold venture: a study of the evolution of the Quran, the text Muslims view as the verbatim transcript of God’s word. The wartime destruction made the project “outright impossible,” Mr. Spitaler wrote in the 1970s.
Mr. Spitaler was lying. The cache of photos survived, and he was sitting on it all along. The truth is only now dribbling out to scholars — and a Quran research project buried for more than 60 years has risen from the grave.
Spengler rhapsodies that the story has all the appeal of “Indiana Jones meets the Da Vinci Code,” including Nazis (“I hate those guys!”), and notes the possible ramifications.
What if scholars can prove beyond reasonable doubt that the Koran was not dictated by the Archangel Gabriel to the Prophet Mohammad during the 7th century, but rather was redacted by later writers drawing on a variety of extant Christian and Jewish sources? That would be the precise equivalent of proving that the Jesus Christ of the Gospels really was a composite of several individuals, some of whom lived a century or two apart.
There’ll be denial, indignation, demonstrating screaming Muslims, and more bombings and beheadings doubtless, but, indeed, what then for Islam?
Mlaw has announced its annual wacky warning label awards:
A label on a small tractor that warns, “Danger: Avoid Death,” has been chosen as the nation’s most obvious warning label in M-LAW’s annual Wacky Warning Label Contest.
The Wacky Warning Label Contest, now in its eleventh year, is conducted by Michigan Lawsuit Abuse Watch, M-LAW, to reveal how lawsuits, and fear of lawsuits, have driven the proliferation of common-sense warnings on U.S. products. …
second place: “Do not iron while wearing shirt.” …
third place: a label on a baby-stroller featuring a small storage pouch that warns, “Do not put child in bag.” …
Honorable mention for a warning label on a letter opener that says: “Caution: Safety goggles recommended.” …
Another honorable mention for a warning found on Vanishing Fabric Marker which cautions users:
“The Vanishing Fabric Marker should not be used as a writing instrument for signing checks or any legal documents.”
A D.C. ban on home handguns may not be constitutional, the solicitor general tells the Supreme Court, but rights are limited and federal firearm restrictions should be upheld.
In their legal battle over gun ownership and the 2nd Amendment, gun- control advocates never expected to get a boost from the Bush administration.
But that’s just what happened when U.S. Solicitor General Paul D. Clement urged the Supreme Court in a brief Friday to say that gun rights are limited and subject to “reasonable regulation” by the government and that all federal restrictions on firearms should be upheld.
Reasonable regulations include the federal ban on machine guns and other “particularly dangerous types of firearms,” he said in the brief. Moreover, the government forbids gun possession by felons, drug users, “mental defectives” and people subject to restraining orders, he said.
“Given the unquestionable threat to public safety that unrestricted private firearm possession would entail, various categories of firearm-related regulation are permitted by the 2nd Amendment,” Clement said. He filed the brief in a closely watched case involving Washington, D.C.’s ban on keeping handguns at home for self-defense.
The head of a gun-control group said he was pleasantly surprised by the solicitor general’s stand.
Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Handgun Violence, said he saluted the administration for recognizing a need for limits on gun rights.
Law enforcement experts looking for parallels between Mr. Parks’s confrontation and that of Mr. Goetz 23 years earlier said there were few to be found.
Malcolm Gladwell, a staff writer for The New Yorker, included an analysis of the Goetz case in his 2000 book, “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.†…
“These two events are just not comparable,†Mr. Gladwell said. “The Goetz incident was when we hit rock bottom.â€
“There was a spontaneous outpouring, with people calling him a hero,†he said. “We are so far from that now.â€
There’s the classic liberal perspective. The shooting of four criminals in the process of attacking and robbing him by a New Yorker was widely publicly applauded. Consequently, Bernhard Goetz’s self defense rose from the level of an incident to a historical event. The Goetz shooting was an intolerable assertion of individualism, one potentially capable of effectively politically challenging the principle of the state’s monopoly of force. Thus, from the statist perspective of the left, it was the Goetz self defense incident, not the crime level, which constituted the nadir of history for New York City.
The routine, daily use of force by criminals against innocent people was not the same level of problem at all.
J.R. Dunn discusses the incompatibility between a republican form of government and the left’s yearning for messianic leadership.
Republics are governed with limited powers by men making no pretensions to divine mandate or mystical empowerment. The left, on the other hand, is intrinsically an anti-republican party made up of political primitives, always awaiting the arrival of a god-king with transformative powers, capable of working miracles. With a single decree, the left’s magical leader can abolish economic scarcity, for example, giving free and abundant health care to everyone. Numberless liberal commentators have predicted that Obama by virtue of his racially mixed ancestry will miraculously cause America’s foreign adversaries to change into admirers.
When liberals refer to “leaders”, they’re not talking about the same thing as everybody else. One of the first acts of national leadership carried out by George Washington was to reject a crown. He was motivated by his personal sense of noblesse oblige, his awareness that he was setting an example of republican virtue. And the gesture was accepted in exactly that sense. Rather than imitate any of the rotten political systems of Europe, the U.S. would create its own, with a totally new interpretation of the role of the national leader.
A “leader” in the American sense is someone chosen to act as chief executive to handle a particular task for a particular period. He is a member of the team – the chief member, perhaps, but still a teammate. The fact that he is president is no different, except in scale, from someone running a charity drive, a company, or the army. The individual does the job, is suitably rewarded, and goes home. This system has its complexities (much of the structure of our government is in place to defeat the tendencies toward tyranny that afflicted every previous democracy on record without exception) and its drawbacks, but it has served this country well for over two centuries.
One of its major benefits is that it does away with much of the baggage surrounding the concept of “leader” as it’s understood in most of the world – the mystical, semi-divine nonsense that makes it so easy for “leader” to slide into “despot”. People will invade their neighbors, slaughter minorities, and march themselves right off the historical cliff on behalf of a duce, führer, or caudillo. They generally won’t for a chief executive.
It somehow comes as no surprise that American liberals have been trying to undo this innovation for much of the past century. To a convinced liberal, a leader is in no way limited to anything as mundane as running a country. A leader is a transcendent being, someone more than human, someone with a touch of the divine. Leaders don’t handle tasks, they lead movements, they embody the spirit of the age. They transfor. Leaders, to put it simply, are führers.
This explains why liberals are so attracted to tyrants on the international scene. Stalin is the classic historical example (for a dose of political hagiography at its most nauseating, see the film Mission to Moscow) though we’ve witnessed the same type of thing more recently involving Castro and Hugo Chavez. The search for this precise type of idol explains the visits to Chavez by the Sean Penns and Naomi Campbells. The fact that they’ve settled for Chavez, who on his best day reminds me of nothing more than a crazier Manuel Noriega, shows how pathological this urge can be.
Then we come to JFK, who set the image in concrete. Again, Kennedy did not seek the role – it was thrust on him, in large part retroactively, thanks to his assassination. But ever since, liberals have been searching for another example, for a JFK reborn to lead them to… well, lead them somewhere.
Ezra Levant, publisher of Calgary’s Western Standard, two years ago reprinted the Danish Mohammed cartoons.
Yesterday, as the National Post reports, he was hailed before the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission to answer a complaint filed by the head of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada.
Levant has produced several video statements defending Candanian free speech, which are linked by LGF.
The wife and I attended today the Old Dominion Hounds’ Joint Meet with the Casanova Hunt (to which numerous other Northern Virginia Hunts –including our own Blue Ridge Hunt– were invited).
The joint meet was a fund raiser undertaken to support efforts to oppose Dominion Power’s plan to build 16-story 500-kv electrical transmission towers through scenic and historic Frederick, Warren, Rappahannock, Culpeper, Fauquier, Prince William and Loudoun counties.
And for what? To bring more electrical power to the District of Columbia to illuminate federal offices whose functionaries are busily employed drafting new regulations and spending more tax dollars.
If the evil federal government wants more power, let ’em build nuclear power plants in the District, or do without and borrow some cardigan sweaters from Jimmy Carter.
Not in my backyard, and not in my neighboring fox hunt’s backyard, say I.
We did not get our fair share of abuse, actually. But we did see some fine riding and some lovely scenery. The Blue Ridge really is blue down there in Fauquier County. And the natives are as charming and hospitable as in the rest of the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Maher opened the panel discussion, with Tony Snow, Crier and Mark Cuban, by observing how he found it “odd†that polls showed Obama ahead in New Hampshire, yet Clinton won, and “it does bother me that a private company runs the polling machines and that only they certainly seem to know what went on.†A couple of minutes later, Maher noted that “in crime they always ask…’who profits?’†Looking at Snow, he then pondered:
Who profits from the Hillary victory? They don’t want to run against Obama. Your party does not want to run against him. They want to run against Hillary Clinton and now they have a race with her in it.
A bemused Snow called Maher’s reasoning “totally wacko!†and “completely wacked†as Maher contended Republicans have thrown races before: “They did it to Ed Muskie.â€
The London Times reports the story of a British coastguard who is resigning after being reprimanded for saving a life by violating his agency’s safety procedures.
A coastguard who risked his life to save a teenage girl stranded on a cliff ledge has resigned after he was criticised for breaching health and safety rules during the rescue.
Paul Waugh, 44, was so concerned for the 13-year-old girl that he clambered down to her in gale-force winds without waiting to fit safety harnesses.
The father of three, who was hailed as a hero and received an award for stopping the girl from falling 300ft as she waited for an RAF rescue helicopter, announced yesterday that he was leaving the service after 13 years.
Officials at the Maritime and Coastguard Agency said that Mr Waugh, from Cleveland, had breached health and safety regulations because he had not been roped up for the descent. A spokesman said that the rules were in place because the agency did not want any “dead heroesâ€.
Mr Waugh said: “I am very sad that I have had to leave because I loved my job, but it is one of those things. You save a life and this is how they treat you. I am sorry, but I would not leave any 13-year-old girl hanging off a cliff.
“Saving her life was the important thing. The cliff edge was crumbling away and I didn’t think I had time to wait. It was pitch black and all you could see was a little girl’s frightened face. She was even planning her own funeral. If I had left her and ran back to the vehicle, got the safety equipment and then ran back, she could have fallen. She had been stuck there for 45 minutes and the cliff ledge had actually gave way so she was hanging by her arms off tufts of grass.
“If she had fallen and I had stood watching her, my life would not have been worth living.â€
The former miner gave up as a volunteer for the agency, blaming “immense pressure†from management at Bridlington Coastguard.
The girl, Faye Harrison, had been walking with three friends along the cliff top at Brotton last January when they followed the wrong path down the cliff. As it got dark they became disorientated and stranded. A dog walker raised the alarm after hearing their screams for help.
Mr Waugh was paged by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, and with two others went to the scene. Because of a locked farm gate they could not get the rescue vehicle, which contained harnesses and ropes, to the cliff. Mr Waugh clambered down to Faye and held her to prevent her from falling. About 30 minutes later they were winched off by the helicopter.
Mr Waugh said: “I broke a rule and did not use the kit but I saved a life. I don’t call myself a hero. I would have helped even if I had not been in the coastguard. If I had done nothing I would have got slated, but I saved her life and I still get slated.†…
A spokesman for the Maritime and Coastguard Agency said: “We wish Paul well in his future endeavours and the MCA is very grateful for his past activities and work in the Coastguard Rescue Service. However, the MCA is very mindful of health and safety regulations, which are in place for very good reasons.
“Above all our responsibility is to maintain the health and welfare of those who we sometimes ask to go out in difficult and challenging conditions to affect rescues. The MCA is not looking for dead heroes. As such, we ask our volunteers to risk-assess the situations they and the injured or distressed person find themselves in, and to ensure that whatever action they take does not put anyone in further danger.â€
Edward J. Halliday, Sir Edmund Hillary, Auckland Museum, oil on canvas, 1955
Sir Edmund Hillary, conqueror of Mount Everest, (for whom the junior senator from New York was not named) has died at age 88. New Zealand plans a state funeral.
