Free Republic

Culture: Slavery's stain on American history cannot and should not be whitewashed. But neither should it be portrayed as worse than it was to serve a political agenda. And yet this is what Hollywood is doing with its slate of horror films about slavery and its legacy. "The Butler" — which claims to be "based on a true story" — opens with a stomach-turning scene of white cruelty. A boy picking cotton on a Georgia plantation watches his mother dragged off to a shack where she's raped by a white landowner, who not long after the assault coldly walks up...

Age: 65; born Oct. 5, 1938, and named Maria Teresa Thierstein Simoes-Ferreira, in Mozambique, then a Portuguese territory in east Africa and now independent. Education: Graduated from a university in South Africa, trained to be an interpreter in Switzerland; speaks Portuguese, English, French, Spanish and Italian.

We Americans see terrorism as a symptom of problems within the Islamic religion and the Arab and Islamic cultures generally. We have become fairly expert about what is wrong with them, and have yet to ask ourselves, "Is their culture and their religion the only one that has gone wrong?" It is time we do ask - for so long as we persist in seeing the problem as theirs alone, the solution will elude us. America and Islam are convulsed today in a Jihad of unprecedented proportions. But it has nothing to do with Islamic terrorism or the arrogant exercise...

I want to say something about the accusations that California gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger is — how to put it? — too Austrian. But before I do, I need to make something clear about my attitude toward Austria: I don't like it. All my life I have endeavored to avoid Austrian products (not hard if you're not into beer and cookies). I've never visited the place and don't intend to. My aim isn't to singlehandedly destroy the Austrian tourist industry. It's just that hanging out with Adolf Hitler's countrymen isn't my idea of a relaxing vacation. I'd probably dislike Austria...