Prospect Garden

Princeton University campus, midday today.

Photoblogging Communiversity

My latest post is up at the Star Ledger's New Jersey Voices.

I also had the pleasure of talking to Congressman Rush Holt (D-NJ) , who is a very loyal supporter of many of the non-profits who participate in Communiversity every year:

Blooms

It's a beautiful day, and the trees have exploded with blooms, so here are a few photos taken today:

On campus, in front of Prospect House

Prospect Garden:
Also in front of Prospect House,
In the Borough, Nassau Street on the side of Firestone Library:
Witherspoon Street
Corner of Nassau and Vanderventer, with the United Methodist Church in the background,
Washington Road, with one of the rear entrances to Firestone Library,




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Prof. Robert Fagles, 1933-2008

I just heard that professor Fagles died on Wednesday.
Here's the NY Times obituary, and the Daily Princetonian.

A memorial service will be held at the University in May.

He will be best remembered for his extraordinary translations and interpretations of the Illiad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid.





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Princeton's one-party state

My latest at the Star Ledger's New Jersey Voices is ready for your reading pleasure.

Death threats at Princeton U and in the Township

UPDATE, Monday December 17
Student admits that he staged a hoax:
Here's my article at Pajamas Media.
Nava '09 admits to fabricating assault, threatening e-mails

Francisco Nava '09 has admitted to fabricating an alleged assault on him that he said occurred Friday evening and to sending threatening emails to himself, other members of the Anscombe Society and prominent conservative politics professor Robert George, today while being interviewed by Princeton Township Police.

"He fabricated the story," Det. Sgt. Ernie Silagyi said.

Nava was released to Public Safety and charges "have not been filed pending further investigation," according to a statement from Township Police.

Former Anscombe president Sherif Girgis '08 said he is "deeply angry and upset" at the news the incident was fabricated. "I am deeply troubled about what this must mean about Francisco and about his personal life," he said, adding that he had harbored suspicions about Nava's story before the Township confirmed the assault was faked.

Girgis, who was one of the four Anscombe officers who received threatening emails Wednesday evening along with George, added that he believed the organization — which promotes socially conservative sexual mores on campus — had handled the situation well. "We did everything right," he said. "We did not jump to any conclusion about the facts of the case."

University communications director Lauren Robinson-Brown said the University is looking into the incident and "the investigation is ongoing," adding that "as the investigation continues, we will continue to provide all necessary support to everyone involved."

"As standard procedure, discipline isn't considered until an investigation is concluded," Robinson-Brown said. Nevertheless, the fabricated threats and assault are likely to result in disciplinary procedures against Nava.

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UPDATE:
Monday December 17: Former hoax and injury details complicate picture of assault

Instapundit found it in the Daily Prince:

Four officers of the Anscombe Society and a prominent conservative politics professor received threatening emails Wednesday evening from off-campus email addresses.

The five individuals received identical messages telling them they would "suffer," ordering them to "shut the fuck up" and declaring that "you are not welcome here." "We will destroy you," the message said.

Though the message did not explicitly mention the Anscombe Society, the four students who received emails were Anscombe vice president Jonathan Hwang '09, president Kevin Staley-Joyce '09, former president Sherif Girgis '08 and administrative committee chair Francisco Nava '09. Politics professor Robert George — who has publicly supported conservative causes, including the Anscombe Society's goal of promoting chastity — also received the message.

Threats through email and typed letters.

This is not a new experience for Professor George:

George, on the other hand, said he has received plenty of hate mail in his 23 years of teaching and discussing controversial issues. He forwarded this most recent email to Public Safety.

"If it's a death threat or a threat of violence, I [alert authorities]," he said. "But if someone's saying, 'I've got influence with President Tilghman and I'm going to see that you're fired,' or something, then I don't report it. That's just standard hate mail."

George added that he had received "less than 10, probably more than two" messages that threatened physical harm in his career.

And one student member of Anscombe was attacked in the Township,

Francisco Nava '09 was physically attacked by two men in Princeton Township Friday evening, sustaining a concussion but no other serious injuries. The assault comes on the heels of several threatening messages recently sent to Nava, apparently in connection with his involvement with the socially conservative Anscombe Society.

Nava said he was walking from a borrowed car to the house of a boy he is mentoring when he was stopped by a man dressed in black and wearing a ski cap. According to Nava, the man said that someone was hurt and asked for his help. A second assailant, who was waiting around the corner, grabbed Nava from behind. Together, the two men checked him against a wall and repeatedly hit his head against the bricks.

The Princeton Packet has absolutely nothing on the incidents.

As I mentioned in this podcast, Princeton is not a conservative-friendly place at all. However, these incidents are way beyond the pale.

Every so often you find a friendly bumper sticker around town, even if the trolls hive on the 'net.


Update
TigerHawk, Red State and Instapundit have more.
Princeton Tory:

The attack also comes only a day after a columnist for the Daily Princetonian criticized Princeton's administration for signaling that there was an "Open Season" on conservative students. "By permitting a double standard to exist, the University has — inadvertently, I am sure — signaled to those who would use intimidation tactics to silence the voices of morally conservative students that their misconduct will not be investigated, much less punished or even denounced," said the article written by Brandon McGinley, also a Tory staffer.

Worth knowing: it's OK to beat up conservative students at Princeton



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Dean, and today's items

Via Instapundit, hurricane Dean is getting worse. The Irish Trojan's Blog advises that people in Jamaica and the Yucatan peninsula leave the area now. This is the time to do it, folks.
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Princeton University tops the US News & World Report list of American Colleges and Universities.

On the one hand, while I'm not a PU alumna, I've greatly enjoyed all the classes that I've audited at PU: The professors are enthusiastically pleased to be teaching undergraduates, they are throughly knowledgeable in their fields, and I greatly admire their scholarship and human qualities.
On the other hand, with an endowment of nearly $12 billion and undergrad tuition and fees nearing $50,000/yr, it's a good thing PU is ranking at the top - for that kind of money, it should. Several colleges are painfully aware of that, and are trying to look into a different ranking system.

Another issue is that getting into PU is next-to-impossible. No matter how good a student you are, the odds are only 1 in 12, at best maybe 1 in 10. But that will be a post for another day.
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BBC bias?
Watch this video: The BBC correspondent in Athens wears the PLO scarf to report on the Athens brush fires.
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Via Larwyn, time for the bullet woman photoshop!
And let's not forget the Minnesota man, and the puppy, too.
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If you're about to have quadruplets, leave Calgary.

Lawrence Wright on "Al-Qaeda: Past, Present and Future"

Yesterday afternoon TigerHawk and I attended Lawrence Wright's lecture on "Al-Qaeda: Past, Present and Future." These are my notes:

Mr. Wright started his lecture by asking what drew the 9/11 attackers to al-Qaeda? They were college educated Saudis, not the products of religious schools, with no obvious mental disorders, not religious. What draws these young men to al-Q?

Social factors:
In the 70s: Most al-Qaeda recruits came from rural areas of Egypt – displacement was the most common element among them; they joined the jihad in countries away from home.
Another factor is feeling marginal in the culture you're in. The recent plots in UK by second- and third-generation Brits but whose feelings of marginality persisted through 3 generations. There's not a clash of civilizations, but aa clash of identities within a civilization. For instance, in Belgium the most common babies' name is Mohammed. For that Mohammed, not surprisingly, Mohammed becomes more than a religion, but an identity.

We're more blessed in America with a Muslim community that's part of our society. The average American Muslim makes a higher wage than the average American.

Displacement doesn't explan everything: there are nihilists and idealists in al-Qaeda.
There are economic reasons: 1/5 world's population lives in Muslim countries but those countries account for 1/2 of the world's poor. If you take the oil out of those economies, 300 million Arabs produce less than Nokia corporation.
1.3billion Muslims mostly living in the 57 countries of Organization of Islamic Countries produce less than the German GDP.

Another factor is the lack of civil society: no movies, no plays, no dating, no political life, no museums, few parks, no unions. Nothing between the government and the mosque except shopping. No wonder that a study on depression showed that 65% boys, 72% of college age girls in college were depressed.

The separation of the sexes takes a toll on women. Saudi woman can't drive, need permission of men to travel; can't check into a hotel. One of his reporters when he worked in Saudi Arabia, Najia, slept on carpet of mosque at the airport in order to be able to attend a press conference she wanted to report on.
It also takes a toll on men, who are deprived of the solace of women's companionship. The guys didn't spend adolescence molding their behavior trying to please girls. Women are referred to as BMOs - Black Moving Objects.

The element of humiliation:
Many Muslims are personally humiliated, for instance, in Egypt's prisions. But Mr. Wright saw video of Bin Laden talking at a mosque in the 1970s - on the theme of humiliation: Why did this rich young charismatic man feel humiliated? P

There's a profound sense of cultural humiliation: on 9/11/1683 at the Gates of Vienna marked the end of Islamic superpower. This sense of humiliation is linked to a desire to strike back. Mr. Wright quoted Bernard Lewis on the movement from "how did this happen" to "who did this" to us.
The sense of injustice is reinforced by images of Muslims under siege in Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan.
Fox News and al-Jazeera show images of the continuing humiliation of the Arabs. CNN showed a pair of US Marines ignoring "quivering lips of little girls" (LW's phase), and a family kneeling in front of Marines; this image was repeated endlessly.

The sense of humiliation is expanded by fact that nearly everything you own is made elsewhere. Measurements for excellence, such as Nobel Prizes, are practically absent from the Muslim world at large.

Al-Qaeda:
Bin-Laden wanted the US to replicate the errors of Soviets. After the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan the USSR dissolved. Bin-Laden miscalculated. 80% of al-Qaeda's membership was captured or killed, and was repudiated all over the world. The WOT was essentially dead; then, Iraq sparked the flames.

A-Qaeda had planned for day when a country's leadership would be smashed.
The old al_Qaeda was run from the top-down. The new is a network of small groups. In a way, it follows the model of street gangs: flat-horizontal groups tied together by internet. Al-Qaeda makes tremendous use of internet, leaving a legacy for future jihadists. Training's a vital element in al-Qaeda.

Now al-Qaeda has training camps in Mali, Iraq, Pak, Somalia, Afghanistan, and roots in many different countries. How has it been able to reconstitute?
Al-Qaeda believes in the management of savagery: through savage acts, and taking advantage of danger opportunity, such as attacking oil fields so the government neglects other areas. Once the government falls, people look to other sources for safety.

Mr. Wright mentioned how Al-Zarqawi came to the fore: he cut off the head of a hostage, and began bombing Shiite mosques, thus creating a civil war.

In 2005 Fuad Hussein outlined al-Qaeda's master plan in Zarqawi's biography, as a 20-year plan:

9/11: The Awakening. This first stage ended in 2003 when US entered Bagdhad.
2d stage, up to 2006: recruiting
3rd stage: Syria Turkey, Israel
4th stage: 2013 al-Qaeda overthrowing Arab governements as US power continues to decline
5th stage: Caliphate. Israel won't be able to defend itself
2016 total confrontation: Caliphate Islamic army on the attack
2020 definitive victory, which is defined as, "falsehood will come to an end. Islamic state w/lead mankind to shore of safety ...and happiness".

A failure of the US in Iraq will embolden al-Qaeda.

Measures we can take to defeat radicalism:
1. Fix our intelligence, and emphasize understanding, penetrating, disrupting AQ. FBI agent Ali Safan came close to stopping 9/11, but there are fewer Arabic speakers now than in 9/11. The head of FBI doesn't know the difference between Suni & Shiite. [SEE NOTE BELOW] We need native speakers. Instead, there's a new tier of bureaucracy: the Dept. of Homeland Security. We need skilled people on the ground. There are only 6 fluent Arabic speakers in the Iraq embassy. Spurned Arabs & Muslims can’t get a job in security after serving 4 yrs in the Army.
2. Need allies in this effort. "Antiamericanism seemed to have vanished from the lexicon after 9/11". Many countries have a stake in Iraq, for instance Sweden, and the countries harbroing millions of refugees in Iraq's neighbors.
3. We're in pregnant moment in Israeli-Palestinian crisis. It's difficult to make people make peace but it's clear that the Arabs are suing for peace and want peace. This offers a great opportunity to restore our reputation and focus in the settlements. If we want Israel to survive, need to create prosperous successful Palestine. We need to succed in Israel and Palestine as this will reduce the flow of recruits and inflammation.

3 reasons why al-Qaeda won't win:
1. Everyone is its enemy: Shiites, Israel, USA, Westeners, NATO, Russia, China, and "atheists, pagans and hypocrites", too.
2. Most of a-Qaeda's victims are Muslims: for instance, in Casablanca, Instanbul, Algiers, Bali.
3. Al-Qaeda offers nothing to the people that follow it. Bin-Laden never thought in terms of politics because al-Qaeda doesn't believe in the future. Al-Qaeda offers one thing: death. For instance, death, not victory, over the Soviets. Al-Qaeda is a suicide machine.

Questions and anwers:
Q: Humiliation issue; Why do the Turks, Albanians and Bosnians why feel less humiliated?
LW: There are no Turks that he knows of in a-Q, and very few Bosnians. A young Turk has the opportunity to affect his society, prosper, marry and date – no reason to look to old stories of former greatness. Al-Qaeda has used Spain's Caliphate beauty, tolerance, learning, poetry, history selectively to inflame their followers.

Q. What's the best way to extricate ourselves from Iraq?
LW: I'm ppposed to getting out. We have the moral burden to do as well as we can to the Iraqi people to try to create a space of calm so the Iraqis can organize themselves.
Al-Qaeda's happy if US stays because the civil war's prospering like crazy; a-Q's happy if the US withdraws and leaves a likely genocide, spreading to other countries. We should not fool ourselves with thinking there are easy paths out.

Q. aQ offers people something to do – could you address other sources of humiliation in that part of the world?
LW. Al-Qaeda's like an engine that runs on the river of despair in the Muslim world. We need to fight despair w/hope: jobs, greater sense of justice, but there's a limit on what we can do.
Egypt has the roots for democracy, but its future is 1. the Mubarak regime perpetuates itself, or 2. the Muslim Brotherhood comes to power through democratic means. It won't be pretty. The Muslim Brotherhood's a shallow political organization, with the jihad, and now people are beginning to look at democracy in a different way; if they come to power through democracy it'd be better [than through other means].

Q; In the West we do not look forward to death, but they look forward to death through religious teachings. Why does [LW] say he say it's not a cultural religious war, then?
LW: Jim Jones had an organization drawn people, even when knowing it celebrated death. Death has attraction not exclusive to al-Qaeda.
Qatar's more open & tolerant, profoundly different from Saudi Arabia; the rotten political systems are stifling & humiliating the ambitions of so many young people.

Q. The person commented on the concept of humiliation in American foreign policy: Attempt to humiliate Lebanon, Abu graib, "Bring them on", the US's unwavering support of Israelis, & therefusal to recognize Pal elections.
LW. Wishes for a humble foreing policy, and a far more modest role in foreign relations.

Q. On the culture of death – culture of an alternative to life; what comes after death?
LW. It's remarkable that the Muslims commit suicide – Mohammed said that suicides spend all of eternity repeating the act of killing himself w/ same instrument.
The suicide killings are justified because (using a suicide killing in Egypt) first there are no innocents because everyone in Egypt were perceived as supporting the advance of Islam. Suicidal choice is made because of those who die for the greater glory of god are not considered suicides but martyrs.
LW asked, why doesn't everyone see through this sophistry – because there's awillfulness to believe in this philosophy.

Q. General Petreus said there's no diplomatic solution - only through diplomacy [NOTE: see my prior post on this statement]
LW. Only the military can provide some kind of protection to the Iraqi people because the diplomats aren't going to do that. LW's not an expert on subject. He worries about staying or pulling out. Anyone who advocates one or the other has to acknowledge the dangers of either course.

Q. The West Bank had been in the hands of Jordan; Gaza was held by Egypt. Is the sense of humiliation misplaced because a state could have been created by the Arab world and it wasn't?
LW. No one who cares for Arabs can't help but feel anger by missed opportunities to make pace. There's an opportunity and we have to seize it.

Q. (This was a very wordy statement on the commenter's study of Palestinian suicide bombers: honor students; the whole society is disaffected. Gangs in US, Colombine, etc., all are disaffected by socty around them.)
LW. Agreed

Q. What are the Islamic intellectuals doing to counter this lack of civil society?
LW. In the Arab world there are different things going on in different places. Entrenched autocrats have an investment in staying in power. We face a chove: they help us on terrorism or we democratize (for instance, in Egypt). The US has helped train people for democracy in Yemen. There are no rapid chgs in the Middle East.
There's only a certain amt of chg people can take. For instance, the Editor of his paper (where LW worked in Saudi Arabia) had been a young shepherd, and graduated at the U of Texas, but lived an entire industrial revolution in his lifetime. The whole flood of change has been so instant there's a kind of reluctance for more. Saudi Arabia's so stuck: frustration, hopelessness, anger. What force is greater? Fear is that force. Fear not of the government (which is not as cruel as Egypt's), but fear of change. Change does not equal progress in the Middle East.

Q. What lies ahead for Europe?
LW. Europe's very exposed to attack. There are many radical Muslims in the UK; tis'a much different situation than here. LW was at a mosque when someone asked for more beheadings and he watched the nodding heads of community approval. There's a real problem in England right now. All over Europe, France Spain, Germany, the jihadi vets returning & joining new cells with the network now created in Iraq. The future in Europe's not very attractive.

NOTE On the matter of the head of the FBI not knowing the difference between the Sunni and the Shiia, I was wondering if Mr. Wright had in mind Democrat Silvestre Reyes, head of the House Intelligence Committe instead. Unfortunately I didn't have the opportunity to ask a question.

Other links:
Hugh Hewitt interviewed Lawrence Wright on Tuesday
Lawrence Wright's Official Website
Lawrence Wright is the author of

Spring today

After last week's flooding, we're enjoying a glorious weekend.
Here are some pictures in the vecinity of casa de Fausta:


TigerHawk has a slide show of the pictures he took at the PU campus yesterday.

Porch-blogging weather, for sure!

Off to a lecture, but in the meantime,

I was down with a cold yesterday but today I'm well enough that I want to listen to the chief political correspondent for The Jerusalem Post speak on "Israel in the Eyes of Foreign Media". I might post on it later tonight or tomorrow morning, depending on how my cold treats me.

As I said this morning, Hans Blix's going to discuss disarmament across the street from that lecture. Too bad he couldn't give the talk in Pyongyang or Tehran.

In the meantime, a little diversion,
Al Pacino leads his lady to tango heaven:

And I want that dress.

Dr John Fleming talks about the Middle Ages and the modern world, part 1

I had the distinct pleasure of talking to Dr. Fleming this afternoon.

A couple of years ago I started auditing Dr. Fleming's class on Chaucer and found out that Dr Fleming is the premier American scholar on Chaucer, for good reason. Unfortunately I had to drop out of the class for reasons outside my control, but the next Fall I enrolled again in his class, which was the last semester that he taught that class.

You can listen to the podcast here:


After the introduction, here's the interview:
F: Today's theme will be, what do we learn from the Middle Ages? The reason I thought of this theme is not only because of talking to you, but also because the first blockbuster movie of the year, The 300, is about the battle of Thermopylae among the Spartans and the Persians and that was one battle that was remembered very much throughtout the literature of the Middle Ages, was it?
JF: Well yes, and no. The Western Middle Ages which I studied, that is, the Latin speaking Middle Ages lost sight of Greek during the fairly early period, so they did not have direct access for many centuries to those classical historians, Thucidides and others, that modern scholars do study; But there was a large cultural memory and a general idea that Christendom was surrounded either by bleakness or by positive enemies, and of course with the rise of Islam that became a very real thing, so to that extent people were aware that there had been great victories by our forefathers that we had to somehow live up to.

F: On the Earlier Middle Ages, I've heard a lot about the Dark Ages and now the theme has changed to the Earlier Middle Ages, and I found out from reading in your class and other places that many of the things we think of as modern, were created during that period, such as cloth manufacturing, banking, mail delivery. So what makes the Dark Ages dark? Was it the cycle of invasions they had all the time?
JF: Well, what made the Dark Ages dark was Edward Gibbon in the 18th Century, that is, the particular view that you get in his famous book The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, [which] glorifies the ancient empire and thinks that there's a kind of hiatus between the arrival of Christianity and the Rennaissance in the 14-15th century.

Of course, when we use the term "the Middle Ages" it's notoriously elastic, it runs for a thousand years, from say, the time of St Augustine on the cusp on the 4-5th centuries down to the time of Erasmus at the end of the 15th century. So that thousand-year period covers a vast geographical area - just talking about the Western Middle Ages we're talking about the whole of Europe... but among other things that developed was the concept of the modern state. Our own great historian, Joseph Strayer has among his most widely read books a book about The Medieval Origins of the Modern State.

Another institution uniquely developed during this period is the University. There really is there nothing else in the world, in other cultures, exactly like the Western university, and it was developed during the period of the 12th and 13th centuries.

F: And the University is what saved the Ancient world for us?
JF: Absolutely. At least in this sense, the precursor of the University was the monastic school.

Christianity, as you of course know, is a text-based religion. It has to study and preserve the Bible and its commentaries, and for many long centuries the chief occupation of monastic life... was reading the Bible, commenting on the Bible, explaining the Bible, and in order to do this, they felt that they had to have access to the whole body of Classical Latin literature.

One of St Augustine's very famous books, De Doctrina Christiana, On Christian Doctrine, tries to explain that if you're going to study the Bible you've got to know, for example, what the words in the Bible mean. This is actually not very bad advice for some modern Christians. You have to understand how they exist within a historical context, you have to know what were the animals of the ancient Near East, and things like that. So it is that kind of scholarly motive that led them to read the Classics. And there's not a single major Latin text, not Ovid, not Virgil, that had not been saved for us by these monastic scribes. That's the point of that popular book, How the Irish Saved Civilization.

F And if I remember correctly, St. Augustine emphasized reason as a means of getting closer to God.
JF: Absolutely. We're used to the idea that there's some great divide or conflict between faith and reason. This idea, in a sense, grew in the Late Middle Agesn when Thomas Aquinas and other great theologians of that period had to deal with the rediscovery in the Latin West of Aristotle and a system of moral theology that seemed to be totally independent of the Christian revelation.

But, say, for Augustine, and for most of the early fathers of the Church, there was no conflict between faith and reason because faith seemed, on the basis of their empirical experience, a reasonable proposition. So, although Augustine would never do what Thomas Aquinas did, which is to sit down and in academic fashion try to prove the existence of God, you find in the Confessions and elsewhere lines of argument that basically are doing the same thing: argument by design. Some of this is highly relevant to theological controversy even today.

Part 2

Copyright 2007 Fausta Wertz, John Fleming

Dr John Fleming talks about the Middle Ages and the modern world, part 2

Part 1 here

The interview continues,

F It seems to me that one of the bigger differences between the Ancient world, and the Middle Ages and the contemporary world, is that the Ancient world placed a huge emphasis on duty. Duty and loyalty were basically everything. Right now I'm reading the Aeneid and duty was the underlining [sic, should be underlying] theme of that work, and Virgil created it in support of the Roman Empire.
JF: Right.
F: Now, the value of duty carried into the Middle Ages, but, what would be the underlying value of the Middle Ages? Would it be deeds tempered by faith? Would it be duty and loyalty?
JF: That is a fascinating question, and you really are getting to one of the points of difference between what I call the "Old World". By the Old World I start at a fairly late date.

I think that one of the great changes in Western mental structure came at about the end of the 18th Century, with the French Revolution, the American Revolution, and then the Industrial Revolution, and of course, in a very very broad generalization, but it is true that earlier stages of European civilization, very much like other societies that you find in most parts of the world today were, to a large extent, tribal or collectivist in the sense that one's chief identity was not personal, "I am so-and-so" but, "I am a member of this family", or "I am a member of the Church", or "I owe my feudal duty to such-and-such a lord".

You probably remember from the Chaucer course how this shows up even in comic situations. The Canterbury Tales, after you get through The Knight's Tale, begins with those two scurrilous, very funny, Miller's Tale and The Reeve's Tale. Well, the Reeve is a carpenter by trade. The Miller tells a tale about a dumb carpenter, and the Reeve, who is a carpenter, immediately assumes, "Oh, he's talking about me!". That is to say, the group identity is so great. So the way he attacks this miller is to tell a story about another miller.

However, there is one caveat in all this:
Christianity, basic Christian doctrine, and the sense of Christian identity, did have a very radical sense of individuality in this sense: If there was going to be a moral judgement, that is, if there was a way of adjudicating what is right and what is wrong, there had to be the independence of the individual human will. Things had to be done by volition. So that in this sense, you do have the germ, in Medieval Christianity, of the kind of radical and sometimes chaotic individualism of modern life.

One of the big problems in history is this relationship of the individual and society. We have an awful lot of societies still in the world who want to reduce the role of the individual into just kind of a cog in a larger society.

In Arthur Koestler's great book, Darkness at Noon - which is one of the first books to really have a huge impact on Western public opinion against the pretensions of Soviet communism - is about the purge trials and Rubichef, the chief character, is sort of an imaginary or fictional amalgam of a few of the Bolshevik leaders who were [among the] first murdered by Stalin, and the interrogator talking to him refers to the first person nominative pronoun, I, yo, as "the grammatical fiction". That is to say, "I", has no existence except in grammar because what matters is the masses, or the crowd.

Now, that was a tension in Medieval society, but it was resolved at the intellectual level, at least, by the end of the radical freedom of the will that came with Baptism.

F The rise of individualism during the Middle Ages is the start of the Modern Age, as I understand it.
JF: Well, that's right, and of course we all look in the mirror of history in the sort of way that Narcissus looked in the pool, that is to say, we can always see ourselves, so there is a great tendency to try to impose upon the past those categories with which we're comfortable, and one of the features of this is that individuality, or as the scholars now prefer to call it, subjectivity, the idea of an I who has a deep personal sense of individuality; one of the current features of scholarship is to keep pushing this back.

It used to be thought that, well, this phenomena appears only in the High Italian Rennaissance, other people said, "oh no, you have it in the 14th Century", now we find it in Abelard and Heloise in the 12th Century, and so on. But in general terms, what you say is true.

F: One theme I found in Chaucer is a theme of redemption through good deeds: You're not just what you say, and it's not just what you believe, it's what you do... so the emphasis was not just on a belief but also on what the individual character was doing.
JF: That is really interesting because it seems to me that you're finding there is one of the defining controversies of the Protestant Reformation. If you read the Scriptures, you can come up with arguments on either side; in the Epistle of James it says that "faith without works is dead", for example. But the very famous statement by St Paul, that Abraham was justified by faith - that is to say, he didn't do anything except believe, or accept what God was offering him. That became a foundational idea of a very broad stream of thought in the 16th Century, and it's part of the defining difference between what is a generally Catholic view of Christianity and what is generally a Protestant view of Christianity altogether.

That is, in Medieval Christianity there was a great deal of materiality: Beautiful buildings, beautiful sculptures, a rich liturgy, people went on physical pilgrimages, they made the sign of the Cross mechanically many times a day, and so forth, so there was a very physical dimension to it. Certainly a part of that was the belief that good works can be efficatious. This is where we get so many of our great public buildings and the monasteries, and the beautiful baptistries in the churches and so on. And people, to put it crudely, were so scared of their eternal disposition that they put a great deal of money into these things.

F: I was thinking of The Pardoner's Tale particularly, where there was a big split between what he was selling and what he was being.
JF: You're a brilliant student of Chaucer.
F: It's all your fault.
JF: That's exactly what the - I think Chaucer was trying to raise many different things with Pardoner's, but that's one of them.

Most people misunderstand Chaucer's ecclesiastical satire. They think it's like modern ecclesiastical satire and it isn't. If he had no use for the Church or the sacraments, or was an unbelieving agnostic or something, his incredible investment in ecclesiastical satire would be more or less meaningless. He is particularly invested in the idea of penance. That is to say, in the idea that, yeah, we all screw up, we all do terrible things but there is a remedy in repentance, in turning to God, saying you're sorry, and so on. And of course the poem is structured around a penitential action, namely the pilgrimage, and has many penitential actions including the final tale, The Parson's Tale, which is a very long sermon on the seven deadly sins, and offers an invitation to the whole world to come up and confess and one person does it, and that's Geoffrey Chaucer.

But to get back to the Pardoner, this is a person who understands at an intellectual level the efficacy of penance. He's even participating in the economy of penance but of course he did not have the power of it.
part 3 continues below)

Copyright 2007 Fausta Wertz, John Fleming

Le Monde loves Fidel, and today's items

Via No Pasaran,

Le Monde Diplomatique Director Ignacio Ramonet is gathering a "consencus" of French journalists to write an "authorized" retrospective of Castro's paradise on earth.

Joe is not amused
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Did you listen to my latest Blog Talk Radio?

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One of my childhood heroes, Buzz Aldrin, has an article at PJM, Let's go back to the moon
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ShrinkWrapped is discussing Abortion on Demand: Reverberations and Vicissitudes. Sigmund, Carl and Alfred has an absolutely heartbreaking post on the subject.

Do Women Have A Right To Informed Consent?
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Town Commons posts on the Muslim Council of Britain's guidelines for special treatment of Islamic children in the state school system:

• Allowance for girls beginning at the primary school level to wear the hijab
• seperation of the sexes in any sort of physical activity that would allow touching or that involves swimming
• special changing areas for muslim children to change clothes in private
• if you have a school field trip to a farm, muslims must not be allowed to touch a pig
• Parents can withdrawal their children from music classes
• Muslim children should not be asked to draw pictures of humans

Go read the rest.
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Via Larwyn, Hillary Clinton's Confederacy Hypocrisy. Hillary can't remember celebrating Confederate Flag Day back in Arkansas. How convenient.

Terrorists not allowed to use Constitution against us

War Power Game
The coming constiutional crisis

Edwards: Greatest Threat to World Peace is Israel
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Via Maria,
Russian missile "blackmail" won't work, Czechs say

The Czech Republic said on Tuesday it would not be intimidated by Russia over plans to site parts of a U.S. missile defense system on its territory and said attempts at "blackmail" by Moscow would backfire.

Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg said threats by Russian officials over the plans, which would involve placing a radar system on Czech land and a missile battery in Poland, would only make Czechs more determined to defend themselves.

Dennis Prager on Happiness Is a Moral Obligation

These PU students are making someone happy!
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Cinnammon writes about When Awards Become Politicized
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In a lighter mode,
Accessorize, accessorize I just bought myself one of these:

Handbag and lunch bag in one. And the red matches my nail polish, too.

Asteroids and today's other items

Via Jeremayakovka and Maria, if anyone's expecting the UN to solve this problem, I better spend my Roth IRA right now - I won't be reaching advanced old age: U.N. urged to take action on asteroid threat

An asteroid may come uncomfortably close to Earth in 2036 and the United Nations should assume responsibility for a space mission to deflect it, a group of astronauts, engineers and scientists said on Saturday.

-----------------------------Dinocrat writes about economics and global warming

Our question today is this: is there an survival purpose to the religious madness that grips the most fervent Global Warming adherents, turning them into harpies and hysterics? We think the answer is probably yes. The ancient story of Pharaoh’s dream tells us that the affluent and powerful have always had a little internal alarm bell warning them about the saven years of lean following the seven years of fat. Preparing for the lean times, and, as importantly, trying to ward them off, has been important for human survival — then and now.

Most people in America today have absolutely no idea how we became so rich over the last 130 years. They have no idea about the nexus of laws, an enterprising spirit of the people, available capital, good accounting, an expanding market, low cost resources, technology and engineering, and an adequate monetary policy that created the relative paradise that is capitalist America — a point we have made over and over again.

(h/t Larwyn)-----------------------------
SoCal Pundit discusses 24 in Attack of the Show.
24 is on tonight. You know what I'll be doing.
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You (Haven't) Come A Long Way Baby
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What will provide me more blogging material than Hillary as POTUS? Hillary as POTUS with Bill as Senator-for-life. (h/t Linda and four other friends)

"Why not?" Begala added. "He excelled as attorney general and governor of Arkansas, he excelled as president and he’s been a model of the modern Senate spouse."

He'd fit right in. (h/t Larwyn)
Linda has the scoop on Nancy the riveter.
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In a lighter mode, Neo-neocon posts on playing the cello.

If you really are Afif Safieh

I've been away most of the day and just noticed a comment on this post by a person claiming to be Afif Safieh. The comment reads,

What I have said in the lecture is "I never compare the Palestinian Nakba/ Catastrophe to the Holocaust. Each tragedy stands on its own. I never indulge in comparative martyrology. If I were a Jew or a gypsy, Nazi barbarity would be the most horrible event in History. If I were a Native American it would be the arrival of European settlers that resulted in almost total extermination. If I were a Black African, it would be slavery in previous centuries and Apartheid during last century. If I were an Armenian, it would be the Ottoman/ Turkish massacres. If I were Palestinian- and I happen to be one- it would be the Nakba. Humanity should condemn all the above. I do not know of a way to measure suffering or how to quantify pain, but what I do know is that we are not children of a lesser God." I believe these are not the words of a sick person or of an ethno-centered tribalist, but of a universalist.

If the person who wrote the comment cares to go back and read that post and the prior two related posts, they can plainly see that I have not called Mr. Safieh names ("sick person", "ethno-centered tribalist").

If you, the person who left that comment, really are Afif Safieh, I and other bloggers would like to ask you,

• As a Christian whose father is buried in a Catholic cemetery, how can you associate yourself closely with a man who weaponized people to kill others by committing suicide when suicide is the most grievous sin in Christianity?


• Why was there no push for a Palestinian state when Jordan controlled the West Bank and Egypt controlled Gaza, before the 1967 war?


• Israel's three conditions are:
  Cessation of hostilities and terror
  Secure borders.
  Diplomatic recognition of Israel.
  What exactly is one sided and unfair? What possible reason could the Palestinians have for not going along with the plan? In doing so, the floodgates of foreign aid, investment and all kinds of benefits would open?

Those are the questions we have for the real Afif Safieh.

More on the Safieh lecture

My neighbor TigerHawk posted on Afif Safieh, the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization Mission to the United States, speaks at Princeton just now. He's as surprised as I was on the warm welcome,

The University went to great pains to report that Safieh was first invited to speak at Princeton by Abraham Udovitch, "the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East," and that virtually every campus organization joined in the invitation. When Safieh stepped to the podium, the crowd applauded more loudly than I have ever heard at a Princeton lecture.

Indeed, more loudly than when Eli Weisel was introduced when he was on campus. TigerHawk continues,

It is, I think, a measure of the chicness of the Palestinian cause on college campuses that a man who joyfully worked for Yassir Arafat for almost twenty years would be received with such warmth and acclaim.

Speaking as he was to an essentially converted audience (there were a few obviously grumpy old townies and a few probably Jewish students who asked edged questions, but they were in the deep minority), Safieh was explicit in his objective -- to influence his audience to campaign for an American foreign policy that would be "non-aligned." True to his billing, Safieh was extremely polished and charming, and spoke as if he were giving a stump speech in a long campaign, a speech he had given many times and that he would give many times again.
...
This is a relentless Palestinian theme -- that there is moral equivalence between suicide bombings targeting civilians and Israeli strikes against members of Hamas or Islamic Jihad, or unintended civilian casualties related to those strikes. This attitude is extraordinarily widespread in the world, as we all saw law summer when the globe's chattering classes weighed the unintended casualties from Israeli strikes far more heavily than the directed casualties from Hezbollah's missiles.

Read his entire report.

Update Don't miss Atlas Shrug's post.

Prior posts: A friend's question
Report: Afif Safieh at Princeton University

Update, Friday, January 18 If you really are Afif Safieh

A friend's question

Yesterday I attended a lecture at the university where a very high-ranking PLO official presented himself as a victim of Israel. The material introducing this man specified that the speaker

served from 1978 to 1981 as a staff member in the office of Yasser Arafat, former chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, in Beirut, Lebanon

This self-proclaimed victim of Israel lives a life of privilege, lecturing across the world on the Palestinian cause. He socializes with the elites, wears fine clothes, and travels in style. Some victim.

The lecturer believes that Arafat

was a great man, undeniably one of the greatest of the second half of the twentieth century

Arafat, who basically invented airplane hijackings and suicide bombings, whose evil and venality can be matched by few.

But the lecture was not surprising.

What surprised me was how many people in the audience of 300 nodded in agreement to his statements. We're talking about an audience at a very rich town, listening in a large, well-appointed hall in one of the foremost universities in America. That audience applauded for nearly two minutes after the lecture was finished.

There were people there I know. People who are well-informed. People who supposedly know about the Middle East. People who take time to attend lectures and read on the subject. People who go to church. Those people were applauding a Christian whose father is buried at a Catholic cemetery but who nonetheless defends a monster who saw nothing wrong in weaponizing children to kill the people of the only democracy in the region.

Those were the people applauding the speaker.

So this morning, when Sigmund, Carl and Alfred, who is a good man, and a friend, asked in his post,

Does anyone seriously believe that the pious and noble words, spoken with such reasonableness in European languages by the Palestinians, can disguise their continued refusal to accept Israel's existence?

I couldn't help but remember yesterday's pius and noble words, spoken with such reasonableness in heavily accented English by a terrorist apologist, and I remember the hundred or so people nodding in agreement to those same words.

And I have to answer my friend's question, and say, yes.

That two minutes' applause opened my eyes.
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Update Kesher Talk has two posts of interest Working on mysteries without any clues
and Meet the new PLO diplomat

Update, Friday, January 18 If you really are Afif Safieh

Report: Afif Safieh at Princeton University

Yesterday Afif Safieh, head of the Palestine Liberation Organization Mission to the United States, gave a lecture at Princeton University on his perspective on the relationship between Palestine and Israel. There were approximately 300 people in the standing-room audience.

The title of the lecture was "Israel/Palestine: History Is Undecided" but Mr. Safieh essentially declaimed (almost word-by-word) his 2001 lecture (PDF file) Diplomacy in the Middle East: The art of delaying the inevitable, and parts of his 2004 lecture Which way is forward?, while repeatedly asserting, "I am a victim of the Israelis", and that the reason the peace process has failed is "not the Arabs' rejection of Israel, but Israel's rejection of the Arab acceptance of Israel".

Following Mr. Safeih's declamation, there was a question and answer session:
Q. 1 Going by the premise that it's morally wrong of both Israel and suicide bombers to kill, how does one get Arab leaders to appear on CNN and condemn suicide bombers?
and, following the Iranian Holocaust denial conference, how does one get Arab leaders to denounce it?
AS: "I have condemned every single suicide bombing, and am glad to point out that in 2006 there was only one suicide bombing.
"Whoever doesn't condemn Israeli invasions and Israel's untargeted and unqualified assassinations has no grounds for moral judgment.
"The Iranian conference was in extremely poor taste. As a person who has suffered, I have great sympathy for what they have suffered. Every national tragedy stands on its own: the Native Americans with the whites' arrival, the blacks with slavery, the Armenians under the Ottomans, and yet there is a need for soul searching: A community who doesn't understand the suffering it inflicts won't understand why it's causing it."

Q. 2: Regarding the road map, does the Bush administration care?
AS: "The quartet (US, EU, UN, and Russia) diplomacy's construction of a road map should have in mind the final destination of the road map: the return to the 1967 boundaries." Safieh's interested in the final destination: "we need acceleration".
He went on to repeat that diplomacy in the Middle East is the art of delaying the inevitable for as long as possible, and quoted Nahum Goldman as saying that "we should agree on a final destination at the beginning, deal with it now, and move forward".
Safieh believes in the importance of the American role, and "we should work on the nature of the Americans' advice."

Q. 3: What would be the final destination for the city of Jerusalem?
AS: "There are eight residential neighborhoods within Jerusalem and my family came from there... The international community and the Vatican also believe in two capitals in one, two national aspirations, and three religious rites of equal importance. I would like to see Jerusalem undivided".

Q. 4: What is status of the Geneva plan? Is it a possible approach?
AS: Safieh was not involved but the Palestinian parties had the blessings of Yasser Arafat. On the Israeli side, the people involved were not key players, were mostly from the left wing of the Labor party, and didn't have the blessings of the country's leadership.

Q. 5: Does AS hold Yasser Arafat responsible for walking away from the Clinton administration's peace negotiations?
AS: "People are rewriting what happened. First of all, if one goes by what the minister of Israel is saying, the Camp David of 2000, from what I have read was the most chaotic event in the history of humanity" (the audience chuckled). "Unfortunately we still suffer from the perception of what happened and Arafat is seen as having to carry the responsibility." AS mentioned a Washington Post article where it said that Israel should have shown more independence, and had Clinton proposed in July what he proposed in December, they would have come to an agreement.
"Now we deal with mutilated reality... Barat is a very complex person, and he came without a coalition and wanted to humiliate his political adversaries, and went back saying we no longer have a Palestinian partner".

Q. 6: Do you think that recent actions of the American administration are contributing?
AS: "The decisions are not wise" ... AS regrets that the recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton report are not followed. "It is the unresolved nature of the Palestinian problem that has soured recent events"...
When it comes to American politics vis-a-vis Palestine, "the superpower has the choice of being loved and respected, or feared and hated."

Q. 7: A student who went on a trip to Israel told of a soldier telling them to not go on a tour of the Christian quarters "because there are Arabs there".
AS: What we need is peace guaranteed by the international community, deployment of foreign troops, and a symbollic presence by the Security Council of the UN, so the Palestinians will be welcome in Jerusalem".
(note: He stressed the symbolic aspect).

Q. 8: "You mention the Israeli rejection of Arab acceptance, but the 2000 Camp David agreement specified that Israel would return 90% of the land" (the student asking the question went on to specifically detail all the provisions)... "How is it that you see Israel's rejection of Arab acceptance?"
AS: AS complimented the student on his knowledge, "if you think 90% is acceptable. I believe in 100% peace, yet it was not even 90%, it was 85%. and was not offered Jerusalem... In Jerusalem, Israel wanted the Western Wall, which is 400 meters long, with 2/3 of the old city of Jerusalem". He went on to blame the "Israeli refusal of Arab acceptance", and said that "Within Hamas the majority school of thought is that of pragmatism: if Israel withdraws to the '67 borders".

The lecture concluded with a long round of applause by the audience.

TigerHawk was there, too. I'll link to his post when it's up. Here's his post

Update Follow-up post: A friend's question.
More on the Safieh lecture
The Daily Princetonian also carried a news item.

Update, Friday, January 18 If you really are Afif Safieh