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On the front of the Arabic index page of the Al-Qassam website, any reader yesterday would have found an animated cartoon. It consists of the Star of David -- the symbol of the Jewish faith -- being obliterated by a mushroom cloud. Al-Qassam speaks for the “militant wing” of Hamas, the party that recently won the Palestinian election, by a landslide. The distinction between Hamas and its militant wing is meaningless. Western reporters habitually make this distinction, and stress that the “non-militant” branches of Hamas run orphanages and distribute welfare. This is like implying that President Bush is not responsible...

It is important for people in the West to realize how the “Danish cartoon apoplexy” was started. Contrary to the impression left by most mainstream media, most of the Muslim world does not read Danish, store Danish flags in their closets, or have sea-mail subscriptions to all the Danish provincial newspapers. Everything they needed to riot was supplied, including a large volume of hateful lies. Riots seldom, perhaps never happen spontaneously, in the Muslim world, or in ours for that matter. You need people committed to setting the bold example -- to pitching the first rock through the first window....

There is a new book by Efraim Karsh, just coming out from Yale, which everyone who feels entitled to an opinion about “the Middle East” may feel compelled to read. The book is entitled, Islamic Imperialism: A History, and supplies just what it promises with comprehensive scholarly footnotes. The topic is so large, that I don’t want to reduce it to a blurb. Some things require a book. And the authority of Prof. Karsh’s previous book, Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East, 1789-1923, is sufficient to promote the new one. The author, who heads...

Conservative victory increasingly likely in Canada Sat Jan 14, 2006 1:56 PM ET By Randall Palmer HUNTSVILLE, Ontario, Jan 14 (Reuters) - All indications on Saturday pointed to the Conservatives ousting Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin in Canada's general election on Jan. 23. With a little more than a week to go and polls showing the opposition party enjoying a commanding lead, pundits from all sides were turning against Martin and Conservatives candidates -- once reluctant to sound confident for fear of scaring away voters -- were speaking more openly about victory. For the first time since 1988, the influential...

The decency deficitWhile it has been a subject for exuberant mockery among some liberal Democrats, I was appalled, this week, to learn that Martha-Ann Alito, wife of the U.S. Supreme Court nominee, was driven in tears from his Senate confirmation hearing. She had been listening to senators such as Ted Kennedy accuse her husband of concealing the most ghastly and extraordinary views -- of being a closet racial and misogynist bigot -- on the basis of some ridiculously fluffy guilt-by-association. When a Republican senator was reduced to clarifying that Sam Alito was not a bigot, Mrs Alito could take no...

One of my American friends asked me this question a couple of weeks ago: "Do you think what is happening in France will happen in Canada?" Now, I'm not sure the average Canadian would even know what has happened in France, but take it from me, the Islamic Revolution in Europe has begun. Not that the average Canadian (a class which, of course, excludes Western Standard readers) is without an excuse. For if he listens to CBC, he will be under the impression that the rioting has been by "underprivileged French youths." The fact that they had been chanting "Allahou...

If enterprise and moral rectitude are what defines militarism these days, then we need more of it --------------------------------- I don't think I have to explain to readers of this magazine why a country would want to have military forces. It's one of those things you either get or don't, and as I've noticed from reading The Globe and Mail, if you don't get it, arguments aren't going to help you. The guys who do the fighting do not choose the war. I would have thought this an elementary observation, but it is lost on a large section of the voting...

It took 22 months to drag Saddam Hussein all the way from his hidey hole to an Iraqi court, to stand trial. It took 15 years, counting from his invasion of Kuwait; 17 dating from the gassing of Kurds in the village of Halabja; 25 from his invasion of Iran; 26 since he overthrew his political mentor, Ahmad el-Bakr; 37 since he participated in the bloodshed that brought the secular-socialist Baath Party definitively to power; 46 since an earlier less successful bloodbath; and 49 since he first participated in a scheme of political murder. Here is a man of 68,...

-snip- Today, instead of my usual two cents' worth, the reader gets two single-penny columns. I wanted to subtract from what I said last week, on President Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the U.S. Supreme Court. In the week since, much dust has settled, and it has become clear that Ms Miers is acceptable to the broad rightwing Republican constituency, and to not a few Democrats. She is despised, chiefly, by the rightwing intellectuals (people like me), who were heartbroken that Mr Bush would pass over the long list of brilliant, strict-constructionist legal scholars that have arisen in response...

The Liberals are betting that voters are just fine with having an unaccomplished terrorist-sympathizer as our head of state ------------------------- "A pretty face, and a nice pair of thighs." This rather vulgar, and refreshingly sexist remark was made to me by a former colleague of hers at Radio-Canada, about our next governor general. (Or, as I prefer to put it, "governess general of our nanny state.") Michaëlle Jean is perhaps the spaciest viceregal selection in the whole history of our Dominion; and no, I haven't forgotten Ed Schreyer, nor Jeanne Sauvé, nor Roméo LeBlanc, nor Adrienne Clarkson. Taking this last...

The German election ended Sunday with the effective defeat of both challengers to the chancellor's office. Angela Merkel, leader of the opposition CDU/CSU, entered the campaign with a huge lead in the polls, which shrank as it continued. Whereas Gerhard Schroeder -- who, by fairly common consensus, has misgoverned Germany for the last seven years -- was once again able to scare up a comeback. In the last election, his crude, demagogic, last-minute appeal was to German anti-Americanism. This time he succeeded a little more subtly in labelling the CDU the "party of social coldness", to panic the beneficiaries of...

There's plenty wrong with America, since you asked. (Everybody's asking.) I'm tempted to say, the only difference from Canada, is that they have a few things right. That would be unfair, of course -- I am often pleased to discover things we still get right.But one of them would not be disaster preparation. If something happened up here, on the scale of Katrina, we wouldn't even have the resources to arrive late. We would be waiting for the Americans to come save us, the same way the government in Louisiana just waved and pointed at Washington, D.C. The theory being,...

In arrogant moments, I think of myself as one of the few people dissecting the plot in the Middle East. But there are days when I think I should hang up my marble slab. One of them occurred this week, when I read a column by David Frum (in Il Foglio, the Italian edition of the Wall Street Journal) explaining why Ariel Sharon decided to withdraw all Israeli settlements from Gaza -- even at the risk of fomenting something like civil war in Israel itself, and alienating key political allies. It was a move that could not be explained by...

In case you didn't know, Muslims are not a racial group. Like Christians, they come in a great variety. Islam is a religion, and what distinguishes the Muslim from the non-Muslim is his greater or lesser adherence to that religion. So when Hazel Blair, the British Home Office minister, promised Muslim leaders yesterday there would be no "racial profiling" of Muslims, she was talking complete bosh. British Prime Minister Tony Blair has struck a much different tone recently. He is intelligent enough to realize he is cornered by events. His increasingly short-tempered remarks are harbinger of an increasingly nasty "Jihad...

Canada has become a phoney country made up of diverse tribes who have no idea what they're doing together "Why do you think Canada is breaking up?" This perfectly straightforward question from a reader took me aback. What appears obvious to me, may not appear so to others; and vice versa. The short answer is, because there is nothing left to hold it together. Anything that was particular about the country — not about regions but about the country as a whole — has been obviated by government legislation, or put quite purposely into disuse. We are no longer a...

It is time to invoke the Altalena again. This is the ship full of arms and newly-recruited Jewish fighters, which Menachem Begin's Irgun attempted to land in Palestine, in June 1948, just as the State of Israel was coming into being. The shipment wasn't meant for the government, but for the Jewish underground, to defend Jerusalem against an impending Arab onslaught. Because it was illegal, and the Irgun fighters were hesitating to accept the new state's authority, Israel's founding prime minister, David Ben Gurion, ordered the ship to be shelled. By doing so, he established once and for all that...

There are two sides to every war (at least two sides). In being compelled to read On War by Karl von Clausewitz recently, for the sake of some colloquium in which I was participating, I was struck by his repetition of this elementary fact. The “prophet of total war” — who is anything but that, as one quickly discovers upon actually reading him — is at pains to remind us why there can be no “theory of war”. It is because the enemy has free will, and need not play along with the theory. Elementary this is, yet almost impossible...

I wonder if anyone is home in Quebec? For a long time, if any were, I have wanted to write them a letter. Today, I've decided to just write it, and see if I get a response. It will be in English. Letters from English Canada are often in that language. Let me begin by telling you what I don't want to say. I don't want to say, "I wuv you." Especially, visitors from Ontario have been telling you this, whenever they've felt you were getting uppity. They are like the unfortunate husband, who does not realize that his wife...

Forty-five months after the opening stroke of the still misnamed "War on Terror", I wonder where we are. It is because I have been wondering, that I have let that topic slide in the last couple of months. Moreover, I've been shy about repeating points that seem as true to me today as when I first wrote them. But with the prospect of two weeks' leave before me (including travel), some kind of review may now be overdue. I do feel sure, that while the continuing terrorist carnage in Iraq, especially, but also in Afghanistan, must disturb us as conscientious...

We have all seen the pictures of the exploded toads of Germany. (Confess, comrade: you have seen the pictures!) They went with a news story of hundreds of toads, mysteriously swelling, then exploding, in a "dangerous" Hamburg pond. This has now travelled the Internet so widely, as to have popped into my inbox a dozen times. There were several theories, including unknown viruses, fungal infections, or an undetected swamp gas. A legion of animal-welfare workers, veterinarians, general biologists and specialists in batrachian anatomy, admit to being stumped. Ditto, soothsayers. As the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle haplessly mused, toads are supposed...