NOTABLES - People who make the news, not necessarily Church-related

Because there has been a page change during the newsday, the two other posts for today
on this thread before this were:

Cardinal Meisner in the crosshairs of the language police - Paul Badde in Die Welt infuses
a healthy dose of common sense into this teapot-tempest over political correctness, but notes that
it's part of the larger culture war against unpopular Church positions.

Lori posts an item comparing John Paul the Great University in California to Ave Maria University
in Florida. [I think she probably intended to post this in ODDS AND ENDS.]

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AHMADINEJAD AND 'HATE CRIMES' IN THE NAME OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM

Columnist John Podhoretz probably has written the best 'commentary' so far on the absurdity of Columbia University opening its doors wide open to Iranian President Ahmadinejad, so he can spout his crazed but nonetheless lethal ideology of hate on an American college campus - as if he would not already be doing that before the UN General Assembly right here in New York.

As someone who lives in New York, I am not surprised, because this once-reputable institution has long since become a center of the worst kind of academic perversion imaginable: its authorities, under someone called Lee Bollinger, have committed themselves totally for a pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel ideology, while doing their best to suppress any divergent opinion, claiming they have the right to do this in the name of academic freedom. And here I thought academic freedom was opening up the university to any and all kinds of thought - as long as it does not endanger anyone nor foment danger for anyone.

Podhoretz's very clever imaginary dialog between Ahmadinejad and Bollinger is a hilarious dead-on indictment, but also a chilling recital of the ideological crimes that Columbia has been perpetrating. And I frankly would not have cared much that he speaks at Columbia - as despicable as I find everything that Ahmadinejad stands for - were it not for Columbia's previous record of shameful and shameless anti-Israel bias.


A TERRORIST FOR TEA:
IMAGINE A'JAD AT COLUMBIA
By John Podhoretz
New York Post



September 21, 2007 - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to address a forum at Columbia University on Monday; school President Lee Bollinger promises to ask tough questions. - News item


BOLLINGER: Mr. President, you say the Holocaust didn't happen. That's very hurtful. Don't you know that hurts people's feelings?

Ahmadinejad: The truth hurts, Bollinger. I hosted a conference at which it was conclusively demonstrated that 6 million Jews actually escaped Nazi Germany by journeying over the Alps into Switzerland, singing "Climb Ev'ry Mountain."

B: That was the Von Trapp family in "The Sound of Music"! And that was Austria, not Germany! And the Von Trapps weren't even Jewish!

A: For someone who claims the Holocaust happened, you seem to know a great deal about the escape plans, Bollinger.

B: Oooh! You make me so mad I might actually venture an opinion about something!

A: This is my narrative, Bollinger. You have your narrative. Everyone has a narrative. What is truth to me might not be truth to you. Haven't you read your Derrida? The Ayatollah brought us back a copy from his exile in Paris.

B: And what about saying you are going to wipe Israel off the map?

A: What about it?

B: Well . . . that's not very nice, is it?

A: Actually, I was once very pro-Israel.

B: You were?

A: Yes, I was. Until I read the works of a Columbia professor named Edward Said.

B: Really, that is absolutely . . .

A: It was reading Said that convinced me Israel was an apartheid nation guilty of monstrous crimes and, therefore, that it should cease to exist. Well, now I am in a position to give aid to that cause. What kind of person would I be if I failed to heed the guidance provided by a respected Columbia professor?

B: Now wait a . . .

A: He was very august, wasn't he, Edward Said? I mean, you even have a professorship named after Edward Said here at Columbia. Oh, who's that I see in the front row? It's the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies here at Columbia, Mr. Rashid Khalidi!

Khalidi: Not now, Mahmoud. I'll Skype you later.

B: I can understand your anger at Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, Mr. President, but surely 5 million Israelis shouldn't be wiped off the map.

A: Why not? After all, at your sister school, Barnard College, you are in the process of granting tenure to Nadia Abu El-Haj, who has written a book that proves there was no ancient Jewish kingdom in Israel. Her work has had a great deal of influence on me. After all, if there is no Jewish claim on the land dating back to the time before Christ, there really is no reason for Israel to be where it is, right, Bollinger?

B: I have no say over Barnard tenure decisions, Mr. President, but I must say that there are some questions about the quality of her scholarship because she does not take account of the archaeological evidence.

A: That is uncalled for. Ms. El-Haj says in her own book that she rejects your "positivist commitment to scientific method," Bollinger. She has a narrative. A narrative, Bollinger! So shut your pie hole.

B: Now about your state support of terrorism . . .

A: What is terrorism, Bollinger? I take my wisdom from another newly tenured professor here at Columbia, Mr. Joseph Massad. You remember him. He's the one who Jewish students claimed had intimidated them in his classes.

B: That was never conclusively . . .

A: Right here on this campus, he called Israel a "racist state" and then said: "Every racist state should be destroyed." I don't know why you are upset with me, Bollinger - I'm learning so much from people who are paid by your institution!

B: Wait, let me check my list of very tough questions for a second . . .

A: Sorry, our time is up, Bollinger. You promised to give me a lift to Ground Zero.

B: I did no such . . .

A: Just kidding!

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I can't wait to hear the 'tough questions' Bollinger claims he will be asking Ahmadinejad.

9/23/07

I don't know if any other Forum member who lives in the USA has been following the weekend furor pro and con in New York City over Ahmadinejad's appearance at Columbia University tomorrow, Monday.

Geraldo Rivera just did a live show from the Columbia campus where scores of passionate advocates on either side spoke their piece. All this leaves me so furious and helpless, because not one anchorperson or commentator among the dozens I have heard this weekend has challenged the commonplaces and cliches that glibly come out of these

Let's examine the reasons given by those who think the man should speak at Columbia:

1. "This is America. Everyone has freedom of speech. He has a right to be heard. We have a right to hear what he has to say."

a. Haven't we heard enough already in the past 2-3 years that he has been in power, when everything he says has been amplified on the world stage?

b. Do we really expect him to say anything different from what he has been saying since he gained a world megaphone for his megalomania? Much less, learn from anything he has to say?

Yesterday before leaving Tehran, he presided at a rocket-rattling military parade and spoke under a sign that read DEATH TO AMERICA! He paid 'scholars' to hold a conference in Tehran to support his insane statement that the Holocaust is a myth. He has repeatedly said Israel should be eliminated from the face of the earth. What masochist wants to hear him spout all his customary manic bloodlust to your face?

c. He's already addressing the United Nations and will doubtless give a number of news conferences while he's in the US. Why give him another forum for his ideology of hate?

On top of that, they're giving him the cachet of being the first in Columbia's 2007 academic year series of 'Distinguished Lecturers on Political Affairs'. Political farce, rather, is what this all is!

d. Does anybody think that just because Columbia is welcoming him and allowing him 'freedom of speech', it will make him allow freedom of speech to even a single one of his own countrymen?

2. "This is a university. Even the most extreme ideas deserve to be discussed here."

a. Great words, except, what 'discussion' realistically do you think you will have? He will be there for what, one hour, say? Half of the time, at any rate, will be for him to say what he has to say - which will be twice as long as it needs to be because he will have to be translated....

b. Next the questions. Even if, say, he agrees, to stay for one hour to take questions, there will be 600 persons attending with tickets. How many of the 600 will be able to ask him anything? Don't forget the time it will take to translate both ways!

Columbia President Bollinger has already said he will start out the questioning and will ask him 'tough questions'. Good luck! Has anyone watched an Ahmadinejad press conference? He is slicker than any other politician except perhaps Hilary Clinton in not answering a question he/she does not want to answer. Is Bollinger or any other going to be able to badger him into answering something he wants to evade?

d. You don't engage in a discussion just because 'discussion' is right. But is it going to be useful at all? It's sheer folly and a waste of time to engage a fanatic or a 'true believer' on matters of principle!

I suspect people who insist on doing this are really driven by ego - they believe they can actually change the other person's mind and/or they just want to hear themselves argue and pat themselves on how brilliant they are - to what end, though, except to listen to yourself?

d. Are Ahmadinejad's extreme ideas really something any sane man would want to discuss?

It would be so refreshing if some among these eager beavers just blurts out - I want Ahmadinejad to speak here because:

1) Evil is fascinating - as are loonies and monsters - especially if they have world 'stature'. (People who enjoy this kind of thing are fascinated by the Hannibal Lecters [he's fictional but he stands for the cunning 'intellectual' who hypnotizes those who are suckers for that sort of cunning] and Ted Bundys of the world.)

2) It will be a feather in our cap because Columbia will prove once and for all that no other campus in the USA can outdo it in being liberal.

3) It will be cool to add to my CV that "I challenged Ahmadinejad at Columbia!"

4) What a 'happening' it will be - and I'll be at ringside.

All this adds up to wanting the wrong thing for all the wrong reasons.

It's good to know that my immediate gut reaction as an outsider to the outcry against the fact that Cardinal Meisner used a politically incorrect word is argued in this commentary by a German, translated here.


Herman, Cardinal Meisner and
moral bludgeoning of the wrong persons
A commentary by Holger Dohmen
Hamburger Abendblatt


Hamburg, Sept 20 (www.kath.net/HamburgerAbendblatt) - What do Eva Herman and Cardinal Joachim Meisner have in common? They have both used words which, according to the politically correct world view in this country, should be taboo.

The Catholic prelate warned against a culture that could 'degenerate' at a Museum opening, and the TV host and author spoke about the image of motherhood and family that the Nazis had.

[By way of background, Herman was fired by ARD where she worked for 18 years after she said:

---

"Values such as family, children and motherhood, which were also promoted in the Third Reich, were subsequently abandoned by the 1968 generation" in promoting her new book called The Noah's Ark Principle - Why We must Save the Family. "It was a gruesome time with a totally crazy and highly dangerous leader who led the Germans into ruin as we all know. But there was at the time also something good, and that is the values, that is the children, that is the families, that is a togetherness - it was all abolished, there was nothing left."

---

Sixty years after the end of the war, are the defense mechanisms against Nazism taking on hysterical features? Are we now living, as many readers have written, under a dictatorship of opinion?

When the author of these lines was a schoolboy in the 1950s, our history books still said that under Hitler, not everything was all bad. There were the autobahns, lower crime rate, old-fashioned values like discipline, and even a traditional idea of the family.

But soon the notion would grow that such attributes, in view of the monstrous crimes commmited by the Nazis against the Jews and the other peoples of Europe, could not seriously be praised. So it was in 1968.

Fast forward 40 years. The new reunited Germany has a great international reputation. Its tolerance, peaceableness and international trustworthiness are praised everywhere. A generation change has taken place, the social and historical conditioning from the Nazi era has been successfully overcome. The overwhelming majority of this people have learned their lesson. And we are carrying the responsibility history has given us.

But it is then appropriate to be so outraged over people like Herman or the Cardinal, both of whom can hardly be suspected of exalting Nazi ideas?

Why doesn't this society instead take on the neo-Nazis who make no secret of their admiration for that time? Many already sit in Parliament and in other positions of political responsibility. Soon there will be a mayor somewhere who sees himself as a successor to the Nazis. The objections raised by decent people or even their placative demonstrations are no longer enough to suppress this virus.

Bishop Kaessmann was right not to put up with this any longer and ask for a ban on the NPD. But we are very far from any such thing. Although there are always substitute moves. And that's where Herman and Meisner handily come in.

The choice of words used by these two very different persons is being disputed. As though the reflex reaction of being scandalized by their words because of the association with Nazi thought did not have anything to do with freedom of expression.

The campaign against both persons - which has been carried to the point of hate and humiliation - contradicts basic human principles and the Constitution, where it says, "Everyone has the right to express and to propagate his opinion in word, writing and images. There shall be no censorship."

That goes for everyone, especially persons who have never shown themselves to be enemies of our democratic system. And what Martin Walser once denounced as a 'moral bludgeon' which many in this country so easily wield is being used against the wrong people.

AAARRRRGGGGHHHH!

As I didn't have to go to work today, I have been listening to Ahmadinejad's monomaniacal rant, his utterly self-indulgent pretext for 'academic discourse' in Columbia today - and with each statement, I am getting more and more apoplectic. If Herr-Doktor President Ahmadinejad's reasoning [he points out every other sentence that he is an academic above all, who still meets his doctoral 'scientific' students every week] is typical of Muslim 'reason', God help us!

Not to mention that in his 25-minute incoherent prelude to the actual questioning - it was meant to be a discourse on religion and science! - he actually mentioned God and ethical/moral invocations more frequently than even Pope Benedict does in a comparable length of time. Talk about taking the name of God in vain...

Among other things, he claimed he does not really deny the Holocaust happened - which he called 'the root and cause of many catastrophes in our time'! - just that it has not been proven, and more research(!) has to be done from different perspectives to establish that it did happen! ... And get his non-sequitur: "But why are Palestinians being punished for this event that they had nothing do do with? It happened in Europe, and they have been made to pay for it every day for the past 60 years." Deal with that kind of thought process if you can!

Asked why he has had homosexuals executed, he answers: "Who says there are homosexuals in Iraq? We don't have those at all." [A pundit commented later - 'Because he already killed them all.']

The tone of the woman interpreter was almost just as objectionable - instead of adopting the neutral tone that interpreters should, she emoted her translation, amplifying even Ahmadinejad's deceptively even but condescending and contemptuous tone himself.....

Oh yes, and the coward does not dare to say in 'Jew York' what he says so glibly elsewhere - that Israel should be wiped off the face of the earth. Asked to answer this with a Yes or No, he comes back with a rat-tat-tat of alleged crimes against the Palestinians, starting with the refrain "For 60 years...", as though not a single Palestinian had ever been guilty of even killing a fly... When pressed to say just Yes or No, he says, "You invited me here. You have no right to tell me how to answer. That's not free flow of information!"

His basic technique for evading answers is to come back with "Let me ask you these questions instead...." and he used it again and again today. (And would you believe it, later, one student said admiringly, "What's wrong with that? He was employing Socratic dialog!" !!!! If that's an indication of what students are learning at Columbia, I'm sorry for them, and sorrier for their parents.)

All those who delude themselves that dialog is possible with anyone who has a closed mind should watch a tape of what took place at Columbia U today ... and shudder.... and pray.

But I must not overlook praising Columbia U president Lee Bollinger who did more than just ask tough questions (even if his interlocutor mostly danced around the questions eventually) - his lengthy introduction was almost a lawyer's bill of indictment of a monster, with specifics about all the violations of human rights that the Iranian government has been responsible for. And he ended up with pretty strong language: "I doubt that you will have the intellectual courage to answer these questions...You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated....You are nothing but a petty and cruel dictator....The civilized world is yearning to express its revulsion at what you stand for. I only regret that I cannot do better."

That prompted the Iranian to start his own harangue later by saying - seemingly goodnatured, with a smile even - that in Iran, they do not insult a guest that they have invited! "Insults are not part of freedom of speech," said he sanctimoniously. Then, he kept saying that he must be given more time to answer because "so much of my time has already been taken" [by Bollinger's speech].

Columbia's basic problem about inviting A'jad was that they did so under false pretenses - that he was to be the first in their 2007 series of "Distinguished Lecturers on Public Affairs". One wonders now if this dishonesty if they had told the Iranian that he was going to be indicted by the University President before he even opened his mouth, he would never have agreed to come]- was not, in fact, premeditated; and whether the underlying motive for the invitation was not so much the greatly-abused pretext of academic freedom, but rather a self-aggrandizing 'hero' opportunity for Bollinger.

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Other points:

1) For all the big hype about 'it's our chance to ask him questions' - the questions ended up being asked by the president and the dean only, even if the dean did say about one question that some students also forwarded it. And the questions were, of course, the most obvious ones.

2) There was simultaneous translation, so little time was lost that way.

3) Not as much applause as I would have expected for Bollinger's 'laying down the gauntlet' speech, but surprisingly (or perhaps not surprisingly), a lot of A'jad lines drew enthusiastic applause in that auditorium (about 700 attendees) - generally at lines that implied criticism of the US or Israel. A Tv channel counted at least 20 bursts of applause for the Iranian.

So Columbia lives up very well indeed to its liberal reputation, in which the unabashed line is not "My country, right or wrong", but "My country always wrong". Patriotism has become politically incorrect in America.

There is all the difference between honest and fair self-criticism, on the one hand, and on the other hand, blanket condemnation of anything and everything your country does in the world because you dislike the President and his ideology.

4) A TV channel said that some 70 of the 700 attendees wore T-shirts that read "All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to stand by and do nothing." They must have been responsible for the Boos that came from the audience now and then - not as clamorous, however, as those who applauded the Iranian President.

5) Maybe it was just as well it happened. President Bush said earlier this morning, "The man is president of a state that sponsors terrorism everywhere. But if a university president thinks that his students will benefit by being exposed to him directly, then that's his decision to make. America prides itself on freedom of speech, after all."

It was probably good in a different way, as well. One Columbia student asked about it yesterday said, "At least all of our students are now going to know what he thinks about many issues. Before this, very few were aware what he thinks about the Holocaust, and that he has openly called for the elimination of Israel and death to America. Sure, it may have been in the news, but it's the kind of thing most students don't really pay attention to - until you have a big media furor like now."

Don't think he is exaggerating. A recent nationwide poll showed that Harvard and other Ivy League freshmen scored much lower than some small colleges in Texas and the Midwest about current events and general information such as recognizing the preamble of the US Constitution!

6) Something that never came up in the questions was why Iran is actively arming terrorists in Iraq! Speaks for the obvious bias of the hosts and the audience.

7) Before coming to Columbia, A'jad took part in a videoconference with members of the National Press Club based in Washington, DC but I have not seen a story about that yet. Between the two appearances, he was asked a total of 37 questions, according to a journalist who was keeping score, and A'jad answered back with 58 questions! Well, they should have known better whom they were dealing with. It's not as if they have not watched previous 'interviews' or 'press conferences' with the man.

During Controversial Appearance at Columbia University
Monday, September 24, 2007
FoxNEWS


Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Monday questioned why Iran can't have a nuclear program when the United States has one, repeated his inference that historical accounts of the Holocaust are myths, and denied that there are homosexuals in Iran.

In animated remarks before students and faculty at a controversial speaking engagment at Columbia university, the Iranian leader also denied that Iran sponsors terror, and instead pointed the finger at the U.S. government as a supporter of terrorism.

"We don't need to resort to terrorism. We've been victims of terrorism, ourselves," he said. "Within six months, over 4,000 Iranians lost their lives, assassinated by terrorist groups. All this carried out by the hand of one single terrorist group. Regretfully, that same terrorist group now, today, in your country, is operating under the support of the U.S. administration, working freely, distributing declarations freely, and their camps in Iraq are supported by the U.S. government."

Ahmadinejad did not name the group to which he was referring.

Columbia President Lee Bollinger opened the program with a blistering introduction in which he lambasted Ahmadinejad for calling for the annihilation of Israel, denying the Holocaust and supporting the execution of children, and told the leader of Iran that he resembled "a petty and cruel dictator."

Bollinger levied repeated criticisms against Ahmadinejad, calling on him to answer a series of challenges about his leadership, blasting his views about the "myth" of the Holocaust as being "absurd," and saying that he doubted he "will have the intellectual courage to answer these questions."

"You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated," Bollinger told Ahmadinejad about the leader's Holocaust denial. "Will you cease this outrage?"

After sitting through Bollinger's rebuke, Ahmadinejad rose to applause, and after a religious invocation, opened his remarks by objecting to the scolding, saying it was insulting to be spoken about that way.

"At the outset, I want to complain a bit about the person who read this political statement made against me," Ahmadinejad said. "In Iran, we don't think it's necessary to come in before the speech has already begun with a series of complaints ... It was an insult to information and the knowledge of the audience here."

He said Bollinger's speech was full of "insults and claims that were incorrect, regretfully," and accused Bollinger of offering "unfriendly treatment" under the influence of the U.S. press and politicians.

He did not address Bollinger's accusations directly, instead launching into a long religious discussion laced with quotes from the Koran before turning to criticism of the Bush administration and past American governments, from warrantless wiretapping to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

He asked why the United States was allowed to develop nuclear weapons capabilities, but his country was not.

"How come you have that right and we don’t have it?" he challenged.

On the issue of the Holocaust, Ahmadinejad said more "research" was needed on what took place, but he seemed to acknowledge that it did exist.

"I am not saying that it didn't happen at all. This is not that judgment that I am passing here," he said. "Granted this happened, what does it have to do with the Palestinian people? ... Why is it that the Palestinian people are paying the price for an event they had nothing to do with?"

And the Iranian leader denied that homosexuality exists in his country when asked to explain the execution of homosexuals in Iran.

"In Iran we don't have homosexuals like in your country," he said, to laughter and boos from the audience. 'In Iran we do not have this phenomenon. I don't know who's told you that we have this."

Ahmadinejad began the first full day of his controversial New York City trip Monday - his third in three years - amid mounting protests and air-tight security, with his first appearance beginning just after noon EDT via video before the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. His highly publicized visit to Columbia University in New York City began at 1:30 p.m..

Bollinger, who was strongly criticized for inviting Ahmadinejad to Columbia, had promised tough questions in his introduction to Ahmadinejad's talk, but the strident and personal nature of his attack on the president of Iran was startling.

"Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator," Bollinger said, to loud applause.

He said Ahmadinejad's denial of the Holocaust might fool the illiterate and ignorant.

"When you come to a place like this it makes you simply ridiculous," Bollinger said. "The truth is that the Holocaust is the most documented event in human history."

Ahmadinejad said he simply wanted more research on the Holocaust, which he said was abused as a justification for Israeli mistreatment of the Palestinians.

"Why is it that the Palestinian people are paying the price for an event they had nothing to do with?" Ahmadinejad asked. He closed his prepared remarks with a terse smile, to applause and boos, before taking questions from the audience.

During the question and answer period, Ahmadinejad was taken to task on remarks he has made calling for the destruction of Israel, with the Columbia moderator accusing him of failing to answer the question.

"We love all nations. We are friends with the Jewish people. There are many Jews living in Iran with security," Ahmadinejad said. "Our proposal to the Palestinian plight is a humanitarian and a democratic proposal. What we say is that to solve this 60-year problem, we must allow the Palestinian people to decide about its future for itself."

The moderator asked him to simply answer "yes" or "no" on whether or not he wanted to destroy Israel.

"Mr. President, I think many members of our audience would like to hear a clearer answer to that question," the moderator said. "The question is: Do you or your government seek the destruction of the state of Israel as a Jewish state? And I think you could answer that question with a single word, either yes or no."

"You asked the question, and then you want the answer the way you want to hear it. Well, this isn't really a free flow of information," Ahmadinejad retorted. 'I'm just telling you what my position is. I'm asking you: Is the Palestinian issue not an international issue of prominence or not? Please tell me, yes or no? There's the plight of a people."

The moderator told him the answer to his question was "yes," and the Iranian president thanked him for his cooperation.

"We recognize there's a problem there that's been going on for 60 years. Everybody provides a solution. And our solution is a free referendum," the Iranian president said. "Let this referendum happen, and then you'll see what the results are."

Ahmadinejad said he believes that the United States and Iran have the potential to be great friends.

"I think that if the U.S. administration, if the U.S. government, puts aside some of its old behaviors, it can actually be a good friend for the Iranian people, for the Iranian nation," Ahmadinejad said.

"If the U.S. government recognizes the rights of the Iranian people, respects all nations and extends a hand of friendship with all Iranians, they, too, will see that Iranians will be one of its best friends."

President Bush said Ahmadinejad's appearance spoke to the "greatness" of the United States of America.

"He's the head of a state sponsor of terror, and yet, an institution in our country gives him the chance to express his point of view, which really speaks to the freedoms of the country," Bush told FOX News on Monday ahead of the Columbia event. "I'm not so sure I'd offer the same invitation, but nevertheless, it speaks volumes about the greatness, really, of America. We're confident enough to let a person express his views. I just really hope he tells everybody the truth."

Bush said that while he's "not sure" he would have offered the Iranian leader a platform from which to outline his agenda, he thinks it's OK that Columbia University did invite Ahmadinejad to speak.

"This is a place of high learning and if the president (of Columbia) thinks it's a good idea to have the leader from Iran come and talk to the students as an educational experience, I guess it's OK with me," Bush told FOX News in an interview. "The problem is Ahmadinejad uses these platforms to advance his agenda, which I suspect in this case ... He doesn't want America to know his true intentions."

Before his Columbia appearance Monday, the Iranian leader, speaking via video from New York City to journalists at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., tossed aside a question about Israel by saying Iran doesn't recognize the "regime," accusing it of killing people and committing various other atrocities.

It was typical of many of Ahmadinejad's responses, which often started with laughing challenges to journalists in which he said, "That's not right," or asked, "Where are you getting that?"

The Iranian president started his speech at the Press Club by reciting some verses from the Koran. No one on the panel or seated in the audience applauded or reacted in any way when he was introduced.

On the Holocaust — which the Iranian leader has called a "myth" — he said that "if the Holocaust is a reality, why don't we let more research be done on it? ... Where did the Holocaust happen to begin with? It happened in Europe, and given that, why is it that the Palestinian people should be displaced? Why should they give up their land?"

He also defended his request to visit Ground Zero--the site of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York City--saying he wanted to "pay my respects." But, he claimed, the U.S. government and other politicians prevented that from happening.

"I was interested in expressing my sympathy to victims of tragedy," he said. "It's the responsibility of everyone to understand the root causes of 9/11."

His request to lay a wreath at ground zero was denied by city officials and condemned by politicians who said a visit to the site of the 2001 terror attacks would violate sacred ground.

Police cited construction and security concerns in denying Ahmadinejad's request. Ahmadinejad told "60 Minutes" he would not press the issue but expressed disbelief that the visit would offend Americans.

During the Press Club address, the Iranian president delivered some remarks through an interpreter and then answered questions from the moderator. A similar format was used at the Columbia event.

Ahmadinejad said the world needs to build a better future "based on peace and security of all humanity," and he spoke of a world full of love, kindness, beauty and allegiance to God as the ultimate goal.

"No one should prevent love and kindness from flourishing in mankind and turn it into hostility," the Iranian president said. "Family is the center of love and beauty."

He said people should follow God, who would lead them to a "sublime" state.

"When we take a look around us, we are not happy with what we see," Ahmadinejad said. "Threats of war have affected everyone. Continuous wars have in fact hurt the human spirit. If we look at the root cause of some of these problems, we will be able to think about how to build a better future, a more prosperous future based on peace and security of all humanity."

Ahmadinejad spoke of the importance of the press, in spite of the fact that Iran's media is state-run and criticized as tightly controlled by the government.

"The press plays a connecting role. It provides information and can serve as a channel for promoting current thinking," he said. "The role of the press is to disseminate moral behavior ... The press can be the voices of the divine prophets."

The Press Club moderator asked the Iranian leader about Iranian weapons and involvement in Iraq, about his views on whether religions other than Islam have a place in the world, and on his country's treatment of women and approach to the freedom of the press.

The Iranian president repeatedly asked where the moderator got his information and challenged the truth of his statements.

And when asked whether Iran was sending weapons into Iraq to fight against American troops, Ahmadinejad replied that "Iraq security means our security." When pressed, he denied that Iran was engaging in that kind of activity.

When asked whether he wanted to go to war, he said he did not.

"Why is there a need for war?" Ahmadinejad said. "Why should they threaten another country? Why should they create more insecurity? I think officials who talk this kind of talk should really be pressured and warn to know what to say and when not to say something."

Ahmadinejad said that the religions of "Christ and Moses" as well as Islam are "all brothers. They all want the same thing."

He defended Iranian women as among the most free in the world, and said they were involved in all walks of life in Iran.

Thousands of people jammed two blocks of 47th Street across from the United Nations Monday to protest Ahmadinejad's visit to New York. Organizers claimed a turnout of tens of thousands. Police did not immediately have a crowd estimate.

The speakers, most of them politicians and officials from Jewish organizations, proclaimed their support for Israel and criticized the Iranian leader for his remarks questioning the Holocaust.

"We're here today to send a message that there is never a reason to give a hatemonger an open stage," New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn said.

Protesters also assembled at Columbia. Dozens stood near the lecture hall where Ahmadinejad was scheduled to speak, linking arms and singing traditional Jewish folk songs about peace and brotherhood, while nearby a two-person band played "You Are My Sunshine."

Signs in the crowd displayed a range of messages, including one that read "We refuse to choose between Islamic fundamentalism and American imperialism."

Ahmadinejad said Monday in an interview with The Associated Press that Iran would not launch an attack on Israel or any other nation.

"Iran will not attack any country," Ahmadinejad told the AP. Iran has always maintained a defensive policy, not an offensive one, he said, and has "never sought to expand its territory."

Asked whether he believed the U.S. is preparing for war with Iran, he responded: "That is not how I see it ... I believe that some of the talk in this regard arises first of all from anger. Secondly, it serves the electoral purposes domestically in this country. Third, it serves as a cover for policy failures over Iraq."

In a 30-minute interview at a hotel near the United Nations, Ahmadinejad struck a soothing tone. He said Iranian foreign policy was based on humanitarian concerns and seeking justice.

He reiterated his call for a debate at the United Nations on world issues with President Bush.

Referring to fears of a military campaign against Iran, he said: "We don't think you can compensate for one mistake by committing more mistakes."

Ahmadinejad's scheduled address to the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday was to be his third time attending the New York meeting in three years. The New York City police and the U.S. Secret Service are charged with providing a security detail and protecting the Iranian leader along with dozens of heads of state arriving for the assembly.

The Iranian mission has not disclosed Ahmadinejad's specific itinerary.

FOX News' Catherine Donaldson-Evans and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

A Response to Hitchens' "God Is Not Great"

Father Cantalamessa Analyzes Attack on Religion

ROME, SEPT. 24, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Here is the text of a commentary written by Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa, preacher of the Pontifical Household, in response to an essay on religion and evolution written by Christopher Hitchens.

* * *

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS AND THE END OF EVOLUTION

A few weeks ago an anonymous benefactor saw to it that I received a free Italian edition of an essay by the Anglo-American journalist Christopher Hitchens, titled "God Is Not Great," subtitled "How Religion Poisons Everything" (Giulio Einaudi, Turin/New York 2007).

I'm quite sure his aim was not to provoke me, but to help me out of the deception I find myself in as a believer and as a TV commentator on the Gospel.

Let me say at once that I'm grateful to my unknown friend. Many of the author's reproaches against believers of all religions -- the book treats Islam no better than Christianity, which shows considerable courage on the part of the author -- are well founded, and must be taken seriously so that the same errors of the past are not repeated in the future. The Second Vatican Council states that the Christian faith can and should benefit even from the criticisms of its attackers, and this is certainly one of those cases.

But Hitchens, in my view, makes a mountain out of every molehill. He claims to follow the Gospel principle of judging the tree by its fruits, but as for the tree of religion, he only considers the rotten fruits, never the good ones. The saints, the geniuses and benefactors given to humanity by the faith or nourished by it, count for nothing.

Using the same principles -- I mean, by considering only the dark side of an institution -- one could write a "black book" about any of the great human realities: the family; medicine (just think what it was used for at Auschwitz); politics and science, and about the author's own profession, journalism (how many times has it been, and still is, in the service of tyrants and serving the interests of powerful groups!).

No one is exempt from his criticisms. Francis of Assisi? "A mammal who was said to have preached to birds!"

Mother Teresa of Calcutta? "An ambitious Albanian nun" made famous by the book "Something Beautiful for God," written about her by Malcolm Muggeridge. In other words, Mother Teresa is just one of many products of the media age!

Pascal concludes his account of his discovery of the living God with the words: "Joy, joy, tears of joy." And C.S. Lewis describes his conversion as being "surprised by joy," but for Hitchens "there is something dreary and absurd" in these two authors, as in all believers: a fundamental absence of happiness. ("Why does such a belief not make its adherents happy?")

Dostoyevsky is one of the main witnesses for religion, but the arguments put into the mouth of the rebel atheist Ivan are given more attention than those of the pious Alysosha who, as is well known, reflects much more closely the thought of the author himself.

Tertullian becomes a "church father" so that his "credo quia absurdum" -- I believe because it is absurd -- can be interpreted as the thought of Christianity as a whole, whereas it is well known that when he wrote these words (here interpreted outside of their proper context and in an inexact way) the Church considered Tertullian a heretic.

Strange that the author should criticize Tertullian, because if there is one apologist he resembles, like a reversed reflection in a mirror, it is precisely the African: The same energetic style, the same will to triumph over his adversary by burying him under a mass of apparently -- but only apparently -- insuperable arguments: quantity replacing quality of argument.

An English reviewer (J. Cornwell of The Tablet) has compared the author of this book to "a tired old prizefighter throwing weary punches at an inert punching-bag while the true champ he'd like to duff up is absent from the gym."

He does not demolish the true faith, but a caricature of it. Reading the book, I was reminded of the sport of clay pigeon shooting: The ready-made targets are hurled into the air, and the marksman, aiming his shots with fine precision, blasts them to bits effortlessly.

Hitchens attacks the various religious fundamentalisms with an opposite kind of fundamentalism. In the Italian secular newspaper La Repubblica, Renzo Guolo wrote: "Hitchens' work looks like the militant manifesto of a world that appears polarized between the disturbing champions of fundamentalism, with their crazy projects for new, totalitarian ethical states, and the supporters of an integral neo-secularism which undervalues the search for meaning on which many are engaged in this age of the 'end of the narratives.'"

Hitchens shows signs of another kind of fundamentalism too: Although with the opposite intention, he reads Scripture, especially the Old Testament, in exactly the same way as certain biblical fundamentalists of the American evangelical variety -- literally, without any effort to contextualize or interpret the text historically. This enables him to speak of "the nightmare of the New Testament."

But Christopher Hitchens is an intelligent man. He foresees that religion will survive even his attack, just as it has survived countless others before it, and he goes to the trouble of providing an explanation for this embarrassing fact.

"Religious faith," he writes, "precisely because we are still-evolving creatures, is ineradicable. It will never die out, or at least not until we get over our fear of death, and of the dark, and of the unknown, and of each other."

Religion is only a provisional, intermediate state, connected with the situation of man as "an evolving being." Thus the author tacitly assumes the role of one who has single-handedly broken through this barrier, anticipating the end of evolution and "returning" to earth, like Nietzsche's Zarathustra, to enlighten poor mortals about the way things really are.

I repeat: One cannot fail to acknowledge the author's extraordinary erudition and the relevance of some of his criticisms. The pity is, by trying to win the argument hands down, he fails to convince.

Ahmadinejad, at Columbia,
Parries and Puzzles
By HELENE COOPER
The New York Times
Published: September 25, 2007


Damon Winter/The New York Times

He said that there were no homosexuals in Iran — not one — and that the Nazi slaughter of six million Jews should not be treated as fact, but theory, and therefore open to debate and more research.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, aired those and other bewildering thoughts in a two-hour verbal contest at Columbia University yesterday, providing some ammunition to people who said there was no point in inviting him to speak. Yet his appearance also offered evidence of why he is widely admired in the developing world for his defiance toward Western, especially American, power.

In repeated clashes with his hosts, Mr. Ahmadinejad accused the United States of supporting terrorist groups, and characterized as hypocritical American and European efforts to rein in Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

“If you have created the fifth generation of atomic bombs and are testing them already, who are you to question other people who just want nuclear power,” Mr. Ahmadinejad said, adding, pointedly: “I think the politicians who are after atomic bombs, politically, they’re backwards. Retarded.”

His speech at Columbia, in advance of his planned speech today at the United Nations, produced a day of intense protests and counterprotests around the campus. It was a performance at once both defiant — he said Iran could not recognize Israel “because it is based on ethnic discrimination, occupation and usurpation and it consistently threatens its neighbors” — and conciliatory — he said he wanted to visit ground zero to “show my respect” for what he called “a tragic event.”

And he said that even if the Holocaust did occur, the Palestinians should not pay the price for it.

He began the afternoon on the defensive.

Lee C. Bollinger, the president of Columbia, under intense attack for the invitation — one protester outside the campus auditorium where Mr. Ahmadinejad spoke passed out fliers that said, “Bollinger, too bad bin Laden is not available” — opened the event with a 10-minute verbal assault.

He said, “Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator,” adding, “You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.”


The Iranian president, who was seated 10 feet away from him on the stage, wore a frozen smile. The anti-Ahmadinejad portion of the audience, which looked to be about 70 percent (???) of it, cheered and chortled.

Mr. Bollinger praised himself and Columbia for showing they believed in freedom of speech by inviting the Iranian president, then continued his attack. He said it was “well documented” that Iran was a state sponsor of terrorism, accused Iran of fighting a proxy war against the United States in Iraq and questioned why Iran has refused “to adhere to the international standards” of disclosure for its nuclear program.

“I doubt,” Mr. Bollinger concluded, “that you will have the intellectual courage to answer these questions.”

Mr. Ahmadinejad did not directly answer the questions, but he did address them. Before doing so though, he said pointedly:

“In Iran, tradition requires when you invite a person to be a speaker, we actually respect our students enough to allow them to make their own judgment, and don’t think it’s necessary before the speech is even given to come in with a series of complaints to provide vaccination to the students and faculty.”

He added, to some cheers, “Nonetheless, I shall not begin by being affected by this unfriendly treatment.”

Mr. Ahmadinejad’s much-talked-about appearance at Columbia was the opening act of a week of dramatic theater here as the United Nations General Assembly opened its annual session. He and his nemesis, President Bush, are scheduled to address the General Assembly today.

Mr. Bush, asked about Columbia’s decision to invite Mr. Ahmadinejad, told Fox News that it was “O.K. with me,” but added that he might not have extended the invitation himself.

“When you really think about it,” Mr. Bush said, “he’s the head of a state sponsor of terror, he’s — and yet an institution in our country gives him a chance to express his point of view, which really speaks to the freedoms of the country. I’m not sure I’d have offered the same invitation.”

Mr. Ahmadinejad is allowed under international law and diplomatic protocols to travel freely within a 25-mile radius of Columbus Circle. But the police said last week that he would not be allowed near ground zero.

Inside the auditorium, the Columbia students laughed appreciatively when Mr. Ahmadinejad pushed back against the attempts by Dean John H. Coatsworth, the event’s moderator, to get him to stop rambling and answer questions directly.



“Do you or your government seek the destruction of the state of Israel?” Mr. Coatsworth asked.

“We love all people,” Mr. Ahmadinejad dodged. “We are friends of the Jews. There are many Jews living peacefully in Iran.” He went on to say that the Palestinian “nation” should be allowed a referendum to decide its own future.

Mr. Coatsworth persisted: “I think you can answer that question with a simple yes or no.”

Mr. Ahmadinejad was having none of it. “You ask the question and then you want the answer the way you want to hear it,” he shot back. “I ask you, is the Palestinian issue not a question of international importance? Please tell me yes or no.”

For that, he got a round of applause from the students, who had lined up four hours before the speech to get into the auditorium. Online tickets evaporated in 90 minutes last week, they said, almost on par with a Bruce Springsteen concert.

“I’m proud of my university today,” said Stina Reksten, a 28-year-old graduate student from Norway. “I don’t want to confuse the very dire human rights situation in Iran with the issue here, which is freedom of speech. This is about academic freedom.”

It remains unclear whether Columbia’s leaders were able to mollify critics through their critical treatment of Mr. Ahmadinejad.

But they made some headway: the American Israel Public Affairs Committee sent out an e-mail message shortly after the speech with the subject line, “A Must Read: Columbia University President’s Intro of Iran’s Ahmadinejad today.” Inside was a transcript of Mr. Bollinger’s introduction.

Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting.

I did see Pres. Ahmadinejad on C-SPAN but I think I turned it on somewhere in the middle of the question and answer session (if one can call it that).

When they asked him if there was ever a situation if he could recognize the state of Israel, he answered the question by speaking about previous injustices committed to the Palestinian people. Then when he was asked about an event in 1997 in which Iranians kidnapped Americans and held them hostage (specifically whether or not it was the right thing to do and if so why?) he said something along the line of that it wasn't good to dwell on the past and one must look toward the future.

Ironic that a Columbia student would say that he was employing Socratic dialog, as I am taking Anct. & Medv. Political Theory and have to read the Republic. From what I have read so far, I feel that in the case of Socrates, there was some answer resulting from the conversation. In Pres. Ahmadinejad's case, he avoids answering the specific question and speaks about past injustices; ex. 'Isn't the Palestinian issue an important question?' The result is that there's really is no answer for the question. He kept saying he is an academic above all, but he is a master of avoidance and double-talk, just as many politicans. He seems to be more like a Sophist* in regards to the Holocaust (*Sophists believed that there is no absolute truth, just the prevailing perpection at the time. Those in a position of power shape the truth.) My dad who saw the replay of some of the Columbia speech says to me 'See, he says that he didn't deny that the Holocaust happened, just that he want more research on it. He said before he was mis-translated.' Of course he's not going to say that in NY! Please!

I should ask my friend who is attending Columbia what she thought about it, but I can already guess.

Mother Superior Says Visionary Was Filled With Light



ROME, SEPT. 25, 2007 (Zenit.org).- When Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone's book about the last Fatima visionary was presented, guests got a chance to watch a video about Sister Lucia's final moments, related by her Mother Superior.

At Friday's presentation of L'Ultima Veggente di Fatima (The Last Fatima Visionary), written by the Pope's secretary of state, those in attendance saw a video reporting on the Convent of Coimbra, in Portugal, where Sister Lucia lived for the last 57 years of her life.

The visionary occupied the same cell during all those decades, and from there "she flew to heaven," said the superior of the Carmelite community, Sister Maria Celina of Jesus Crucified.

Recalling her first impressions of Sister Lucia, the superior said, "When I entered, it took me eight days to recognize Sister Lucia. When one of the sisters asked me: 'Mother, should I bring you a piece of bread to eat tonight?' I said to myself that this could not be Sister Lucia. And yet it was her."

Sister Maria Celina recalled how the visionary would stand at the end of the path leading to a statue of the Blessed Virgin, and scold her cousins who also witnessed the apparitions, "You went to heaven and left me here alone."

The superior said that Sister Lucia always denied any talk of a "fourth secret of Fatima." Sister Lucia would say of people who spread rumors of the alleged secret that "they are never satisfied; that they should do what Our Lady asked, that this is the most important thing. When someone would say: ‘Sister Lucia, they say there is another secret' […] she would look at them ironically. 'If there is one,' she would say, 'I wish they would tell it to me: I know of no other secrets.'"

Sister Maria Celina said that the visionary was never satisfied with the image made of Our Lady.

"The image of Our Lady was not how she wanted it," the superior said. "Sometimes she seemed ugly to her because it did not correspond to her exact memories; it was not what the artist derived from her description. It is somewhat like what happened with St. Bernadette."

Sister Maria Celina described Sister Lucia as a woman religious who "emanated joy."

"I lived with her for 28 years and I saw a person who, the older she got, the more she developed an evangelical childhood," she said. "She seemed again to be the child who had the apparitions in the Cova de Ira. The heavier her body became, the lighter her spirit became."

Speaking of Sister Lucia's last hours, the superior said: "When she needed assistance we placed her bed at the center of the cell and we were around her, together with the bishop of Leiria-Fatima. I was kneeling down next to her. Sister Lucia looked at everyone and then looked at me at the end. It was a long look, but in her eyes there was a deep light, which I carry in my soul.

"I pray to her always and I know she prays for us. There are things that have no need of words: A gesture or a thought is sufficient. Sister Lucia had a hearing problem. Now she doesn’t anymore. Now she understands everything without words."

Tony Blair to be guest speaker
at annual Al Smith dinner
with New York Catholics


NEW YORK, Sept. 26 (ICN) - Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair will be the guest speaker at a major New York Catholic fundraising event.

Mr Blair has accepted the invitation by Cardinal Edward Egan to deliver the annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner on October 18, 2007, in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel.

“We are most grateful to the former Prime Minister for accepting our invitation. In 1947, our speaker was another Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill. It is a distinct honor that we will have Mr. Blair with us this year,” said Cardinal Egan.

Over the years, the Smith Dinner has raised millions for charitable works throughout Greater New York, especially in the area of health care for the needy.

The event honours the memory of Al Smith, the former governor of New York, who was the first Catholic to be nominated by a major political party to run for President of the United States. Although unsuccessful, historians maintain that the Governor’s presidential bid paved the way for the candidacy of President John F. Kennedy.

British School Governor
Takes Gore's Film to Court
By THOMAS WAGNER

The court challenge may fail, but anything that will help bring out fact rather than merely propaganda will be welcome.

LONDON, Sept. 26 (abcnews.com) - The government's decision to circulate Al Gore's film about climate change to all English secondary schools was challenged in court Thursday by a school governor who believes it is inaccurate and biased.

Paul Downes, a lawyer for the claimant - Stewart Dimmock, 45, from the city of Dover - opened the High Court hearing in London by criticizing "An Inconvenient Truth," the documentary that won Gore, a former U.S. vice president, an Academy Award.

"Given the serious inaccuracies in the film and the misrepresentations it contains, the film is irredeemable," Downes told Judge Michael Burton.

The lawyer said that, even though the movie had already been distributed and may have been shown to pupils, it was not too late for the High Court to declare the government had acted unlawfully and quash the decision to authorize distribution.

The project was announced in February by the government's education and environment departments. It was planned that the DVD would go to more than 3,500 secondary schools in England as part of a "sustainable schools year of action."

Then-Education Secretary Alan Johnson said that influencing the opinions of children was crucial to developing a long-term public view on the environment.

Downes said he hopes to convince the court the film constitutes "just over half scientific material, 30 percent pure politics and about 20 percent sentimental mush - mush there to soften up the viewer for persuasion."

Scientifically, "the majority of the arguments advanced are false, or falsely exaggerated on the basis of the government's own evidence," the barrister said.

He said the key flaw of the film is that it is partisan, aimed at influencing rather than informing, and lacks balance. The government set out to disseminate "what we say is political propaganda into schools."

Guidance notes drawn up by the British government that accompany the movie pack "go nowhere near correcting these flaws. Indeed they don't even set out to do that," said Downes.

The government's counsel, Martin Chamberlain, said the guidance notes distributed to schools with the DVD warn against political indoctrination and will ensure the documentary is presented in a balanced way.

Although teachers can present the film in any way they wish, they are under a duty to provide balance, he said. For instance, teachers can explain to pupils that some of the views expressed in the documentary are political and ask: "What do you think about it?" said Chamberlain.

Dimmock, a truck driver from Dover, a port city in southeastern England, has children aged 11 and 14 and works part-time as a volunteer school governor.

Before Thursday's hearing, he said: "I wish my children to have the best education possible, free from bias and political spin, and Mr. Gore's film falls far short of the standard required."

He also said, "Climate change is important, but it should be taught to children in a neutral and measured manner. Indoctrinating school children in this manner is unprecedented and unacceptable."

Downes said that "scaring children into a particular point of view" over the alleged effects of global warming should not have any place in schools.

Judge Burton is to view the film, and Downes said he would provide clips of Web site references to various organizations around the world that do not accept the politics of "An Inconvenient Truth."

Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini tends to be a polarizing figure, and at 80, he continues to be freshly provocative everytime he expresses himself.

He wasn't quite forthcoming when he presented Pope Benedict's JESUS OF NAZARETH last spring and said he would have liked to write a book about Jesus. It turns out he has written one - as this story from PETRUS informs us - at least, about the Sermon on the Mount. This item posted Sept. 29 quotes some provocative statements from the book. Here is a translation:

VATICAN CITY - The teaching contained in the Sermon on the Mount is "sound for everyone, (it) touches us deep in our hearts” and has the power to spiritually renew people of all religions, Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini writes in a new book, Le tenebre e la luce. Il dramma della fede di fronte a Gesù (Shadows and light: The drama of faith confronting Christ) which comes out on October 3.

“Many times,” Martini writes, “I have insisted on the need for going beyond religious traditions when they are no longer authentic.['Ho insistito sulla necessita' di giungere a superare le tradizioni religiose quando non sono piu' autentiche'].
[How can a tradition turn out to be not authentic? If it were not authentic, then it does not qualify as tradition. It may turn out to be wrong or obsolete, but inauthentic?]

“And I have even stated – regarding the need for coexistence among different religions – that the most urgent challnge of our civilization is this: we should not insist so much on religious orthodoxy by the parties concerned, and hope only that each one may be religious as much as possible within his own faith.” [Come again?]

His reasoning arises from an analysis of the religious trial, defined as a ‘farcical trial against the accused Jesus’ in the version reported in the Gospel of John.

“It seems to me that John,” observes Martini, “meant to underscore a level of religious and juridical decadence: Jesus was brought to trial before those who are not authorized either to interrogate him nor to condemn him, and he (John) felt called on to explain how the trial was carried on.”

Here, he poses a very serious proboem, Martini opines, namely, the possibility that a religious institution can decay… Traditions, including ours, can in fact go through forms of decadence.”

Moreover, he adds, “I am personally not in favor of religious dialog when religions are considered monolithic. That is, realities that should be discussed as remaining immutable. Man was created in order to surpass himself.” [Hmm, is he advocating 'adjusting' one's faith, if necessary, to accommodate others in the name of religious dialog?]

Nevertheless, a dialog on the level of the great religions - ‘in itself rather a formality’ – remains ‘necessary’, but the inter-religious course should consist in ‘converting ourselves radically to the words of Jesus.’

These ‘true and authentic’ words. Martini says, come from the Semon on the Mount and refer to “that which constitute the most sense in human existence: fidelity, loyalty, humility, forgiveness, not being preoccupied with worldy matters, not to accumulate treasures, not to judge others so others will not judge you.”

This, concludes the cardinal, "is sound teaching for everyone – Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hundus, Buddhists…precisely insofar as it taps into the profundity of the spirit.”

====================================================================

I am frankly surprised none of the Italian papers has picked up on this so far. I suppose they are waiting for the book to actually come out....But if the excerpted quotations are in context, then he is actually making the 'bold' proposition that the Sermon on the Mount be made the basis for inter-religious dialog. And why not? Except that, human nature being what it is, to propose the teachings of Christ - no matter how universally valid they are - as the basis for dialog may not be welcomed by the other religions because it would imply their acknowledging the 'superiority' of Christ.

I am glad TIME magazine - corporate sibling of CNN - accommodated this article by Juan Williams, a veteran Washington journalist, about an incident and an issue that exploited persistent racial prejudices in America in order to get at one of the most successful anti-liberal communicators in the United States today. CNN and NBC News, among the most openly liberal of America's media outlets, have a vested interest in smearing O'Reilly who commands impressive ratings for his radio and TV news shows, which provide equal space and time to opposing liberal voices.

Williams is a senior correspondent for the liberal publicly-funded National Public Radio, a news analyst for Fox News (representing the liberal view) and the author of several books about the civil rights movement, race relations in America and a biography of the first Negro Supreme Courth justice, Thurgood Marshall.


What Bill O'Reilly Really Told Me
By JUAN WILLIAMS
Friday, Sep. 28, 2007


Bill O'Reilly on the Fox News show The O'Reilly Factor in 2007.(Jeff Christensen/AP)


It started with Bill O'Reilly's grandmother. And it blew up into charges of O'Reilly being called a racist and me being attacked as a "Happy Negro" (read that as a lackey or Uncle Tom).

O'Reilly, controversial host of the top-rated TV cable talk show on Fox News Channel, interviewed me on his radio show about a woman-hating, N-word-spouting rapper being hired by McDonald's for a celebrity endorsement.

O'Reilly has been on a crusade against big companies legitimizing a crass, hateful and pornographic popular culture by putting stars like Snoop Dogg, the pornographer/rapper, in their ads.

Sad to say, but a lot of today's rappers fit the bill.

They make their name by bragging about how many people they've killed, how many times they've been shot and how many "bitches" they've abused. And those rappers, along with no-talent black comedians who use the N-word and profanity constantly, are creating a very negative image of black people in music, in music videos and in the movies.

So, O'Reilly says to me that the reality to black life is very different from the lowlife behavior glorified by the rappers. He told me he was at a restaurant in Harlem recently and there was no one shouting profanity, no one threatening people. Then he mentioned going to an Anita Baker concert with an audience that was half black, and in sharp contrast to the corrosive images on TV, well dressed and well behaved.

I joked with O'Reilly that for him, a guy from Long Island, a visit to Harlem was like a "foreign trip." That's when he brought up his grandma. He said she was prejudiced against black people because she knew no flesh-and-blood black folks but only the one-dimensional TV coverage of black criminals shooting each other and the rappers and comedians glorifying "gangsta" life and thug cool. He criticized his grandmother as irrational for being afraid of people she really did not know.

I defended his grandma.

After watching all those racist, minstrel images of black people, I argued, she is right to buy into stereotypes of blacks as ignorant, oversexed and violent. And I said while I worried about his grandma having racist images justified in her mind I had bigger worries.

The most pernicious damage being done by the twisted presentation of black life in pop culture is the self-destructive message being beamed into young, vulnerable black brains. Young black people, searching for affirmation of their racial identity, are minute by minute being sold on the cheap idea that they are authentically black only if they imitate the violent, threatening attitude of the rappers and use the gutter language coming from the minstrels on TV.

The lesson from the rappers and comedians is that any young brother or sister who is proud to be black has to treat education with indifference, dismiss love and marriage as the business of white people and dress like the rappers who dress like prisoners — no comb in the jail so they wear doo-rags all day, and no belts so their pants hang down around their butts.

That was the heart and soul of the conversation between O'Reilly and me. The point of the whole exchange was to defeat corrupt, untrue and racist images of real black people.

So imagine how totally astounded I was when I heard O'Reilly was attacked on the basis of that radio conversation as a "racist." He was slammed for saying he went to a restaurant in Harlem and had a good time. He was slammed for saying the audience at the concert was nicely dressed. The suggestion was that O'Reilly had racist preconceptions about the restaurant and the concert crowd.

That twisted assumption led me to say publicly that the attacks on O'Reilly amounted to an effort to take what he said totally out of context in an attempt to brand him a racist by a liberal group that disagrees with much of his politics. But the out-of-context attacks on O'Reilly picked up speed and ended up on CNN, where one commentator branded me a "Happy Negro" for allowing O'Reilly to get by with making racist comments without objection.

This is so far from the truth of the conversation on the radio that it is beyond a matter of words being taken out of context. This is a pathetic cowardly, personal attack against me intended to damage my credibility and invalidate any support I offer to O'Reilly against the charges that he is a racist.

For the record, I am a black man who lives in a black neighborhood in a mostly black city, and is married to a black woman. I am also the author of several books and documentaries on the civil rights movement. And any viewer of the O'Reilly TV show knows that O'Reilly and I respect, even like, each other but are frequently at loud, finger-pointing odds over politics and people.

But this is an attempt to take down O'Reilly and dismiss anyone offering him support — me. This is along the lines of telling anyone who calls attention to the excesses of hip-hop culture a "self-hating" black man and skewering anyone who dares to say there is a crisis in black America because of the high dropout rates, high crime rates and high out-of-wedlock birth rates.That is what happened to another well-known Bill, Bill Cosby, after he spoke out about the self-destructive images and behavior in the black community.

The critics want to shut up Cosby, O'Reilly, me and anyone else who points out the crisis in black America. They want anyone who dares to speak publicly about problems in black America to fear being called a racist, if they are white, or a "Happy Negro" if they are black. They want silence so they can continue to make money by distorting black life and allowing black on black murder rates to climb along with the black dropout rate and the black poverty rate.

The critics want to paralyze efforts to help those locked in poverty and too often in a criminal culture where acceptance of drug use and violence becomes acceptable. They don't want black people to be known as Americans with a long distinguished history of patriotism, reverence for education and a willingness to fight for America's ideals — justice for all — despite the harsh facts of slavery and legal segregation.

They prefer to bash anyone who points out their tragic, mindless willingness to sell out the history and pride of black people to make a buck. But take this from the "Happy Negro." The critics are some Sad People.

P.S. about Juan Williams: In the same week, he was given an interview by President Bush at the White House because Williams wanted to get the President's views about the state of race relations in America today almost half a century 40 years after the peak of the civil rights movement. NPR, however, refused to use the interview at all - even if Williams was able to get Bush's thopughts about Ahmadinejad speaking at Columbia - on the pretext that they would have assigned a different reported to do the interview.

For NPR to abuse its senior political correspondent in this manner - and waste a perfectly legitimate exclusive news report - simply to refuse President Bush time on the network is the height of political prejudice and reflects the absolute intolerance of so-called liberals for anyone whose views they do not share. And they wonder why conservative radio and TV talk shows clobber their liberal counterparts in the ratings!


Here's how AP reported the original story.


Bill O'Reilly Says He's Being Smeared
By DAVID BAUDER
Wednesday, Sep. 26, 2007

NEW YORK (AP) — Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly said Wednesday his critics took remarks he made about a famed Harlem restaurant out of context and "fabricated a racial controversy where none exists." He criticized the liberal group Media Matters for America as "smear merchants" for publicizing statements he made on his radio show last week.

O'Reilly told his radio audience that he dined with civil rights activist Al Sharpton at Sylvia's recently and "couldn't get over the fact that there was no difference" between the black-run restaurant and others in New York City.

It was just like a suburban Italian restaurant, he said. "There wasn't any kind of craziness at all," he said.

O'Reilly told The Associated Press that Media Matters had "cherry-picked" remarks out of a broader conversation about racial attitudes. He had told listeners that his grandmother — and many other white Americans — feared blacks because they didn't know any and were swayed by violent images in black culture.

"If you listened to the full hour, it was a criticism of racism on the part of white Americans who are ignorant of the fact that there is no difference between white and black anymore," he told the AP. "Circumstances may be different in their lives but we're all Americans. Anyone who would be offended by that conversation would have to be looking to be offended."

His radio show was a conversation with Fox News contributor Juan Williams, author of a book about the coarseness of some black culture. Williams defended O'Reilly during a Tuesday appearance on "The O'Reilly Factor."

"It's so frustrating," Williams said. "They want to shut you up. They want to shut up anybody who has an honest discussion about race."

The controversy was similar to one that enveloped presidential candidate Joe Biden last winter. When Biden praised rival Barack Obama as "articulate" and "clean," many saw this as a way of conveying these were unusual characteristics for blacks.

Sylvia's manager Trenness Woods-Black told the New York Daily News that O'Reilly's remarks were "insulting" and showed he has little knowledge of the black community.

At one point on the radio show, Williams mentioned that too many people see little else in black culture beyond profane rap. "That's right," O'Reilly said. "There wasn't one person in Sylvia's who was screaming, `M.F.-er, I want more iced tea.'"

Karl Frisch, spokesman for Media Matters, said it is typical for O'Reilly to criticize his group for merely reporting what he says.

"We didn't call him a racist," Frisch said. "We said his comments were ignorant and racially charged and we stand by that."

O'Reilly said the Williams conversation was carried on more than 400 radio stations and there wasn't one complaint from a listener.

"This isn't about a racially insensitive remark," he said. "Anybody can listen to the unedited version of the conversation on billoreilly.com. You want to think I'm insensitive to race, you go right ahead."

The real story, he said, was about the "corrupt media culture" where outlets like CNN and MSNBC do stories about his remarks "because they're getting killed in the ratings."

"The O'Reilly Factor" is seen by more people — 2.2 million nightly average this year — than its direct competitors on MSNBC and CNN combined. MSNBC's "Countdown" with Keith Olbermann averages 721,000 viewers in the time slot while CNN's 8 p.m. show averages 611,000, according to Nielsen Media Research.

6 Supreme Court Justices Attend 'Red' Mass:
Archbishop Tells Them
America Is Founded on Humanism



WASHINGTON, D.C., OCT. 1, 2007 (Zenit.org).- The American project is to live out the consequences of Judeo-Christian humanism, Archbishop Timothy Dolan said in the presence of six Supreme Court justices at an annual Red Mass.

The Mass at St. Matthew the Apostle Cathedral in Washington was attended Sunday by some 1,500 civil leaders, including Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Stephen Breyer and Samuel Alito Jr.

Breyer is Jewish; the other five justices are Catholic. Archbishop Donald Wuerl of Washington was the lead celebrant.

The annual Red Mass is held each year before the Supreme Court begins its fall session. The session started today.

Archbishop Dolan of Milwaukee began his homily telling the story of a woman who said her life was saved by the experience of World Youth Day 2002 in Toronto.

The 24-year-old woman worked as a prostitute to support her alcohol and heroin addictions. But youth from a church invited her to World Youth Day, where she "met an old man who has changed my life. This old man told me he loved me. Oh, a lot of old men tell me they love me, for 15 minutes. This old man meant it.

"He told me God loved me, and that I'm actually God's work of art. He told me that the God who made all the stars actually knows my name. […] This old man makes sense. This old man got through to me. I now want to live."

She was referring to Pope John Paul II, Archbishop Dolan explained, adding, "Ideas have consequences, don't they? Convictions have corollaries."

The prelate went on to explain the "idea" and "conviction" of Judeo-Christian humanism.

He said: "This noble tenet - that human nature reflects God's own nature, that God looks at us and smiles with delight, that a human being shares in God's own life and is destined for eternity - this soaring conviction which resonates in the human heart, that was made explicit in God's Word, which animated the thinking of our most normative philosophers, and is a constant of Judeo-Christian humanism, this grand idea has particularly cogent consequences for the republic we call home, for the country we love."

The Milwaukee archbishop affirmed that the United States was founded on humanism.

He said: "It is a cherished part of our American heritage, then, to rejoice in a mutually enriching alliance between religion, morality and democracy, since, as de Tocqueville observed, 'Respect for the laws of God and man is the best way of remaining free, and liberty is the best means of remaining upright and religious.'

"So this soaring idea has consequences, and has throughout our history: in the quest for independence itself, in the formation of a republic, in abolition and civil rights, in the waging of war and promotion of peace, in care for the other, in the strengthening of marriage and family, and in the promotion of a culture of life."

Archbishop Dolan continued: "Maybe we're here because we realistically acknowledge that, in a world where we're tempted to act like animals instead of like God's icon, in a culture where life itself can be treated as a commodity, seen as a means to an end, or as an inconvenience when tiny or infirm, in a society where rights are reduced to whatever we have the urge to do instead of what we ought to do in a civil society, we need all the wisdom and fortitude God can give us, as civic leaders, magistrates, as ordinary citizens, to achieve, as Cardinal James Gibbons exhorted, 'liberty without license, authority without despotism.'"

====================================================================

Providence must surely be telling us something by the fact that 5 of the 9 justices of the US Supreme Court are Roman Catholic. Deo gratias, and may their tribe increase.

This is the third US Supreme Court-related item I've posted this morning! It's today's column by syndicated columnist Rich Lowry.


Thomas: Saved by his grandfather's stubbornness
By Rich Lowry
New York Post



October 2, 2007 - IF Clarence Thomas weren't a black conservative, his new memoir, My Grandfather's Son, would be hailed as a kind of classic - a powerful, moving tale of a black man's ascent from bone-crushing poverty to the pinnacle of the American system of government.

But Thomas has a unique lot in life. On top of the discrimination, insults and condescension he has experienced simply as a black man have come the outrage, insults and condescension he has experienced as a black man who broke with liberal orthodoxy.

In his view, all this culminated in his Supreme Court confirmation hearings, when liberal interest groups revived the old smear of the sexually rapacious black man in the guise of Anita Hill's allegations of sexual harassment.

The final section of the book dealing with the hearings is getting the most attention, and Thomas is being portrayed as the aggressor. He "lashes out," according to a headline in The Washington Post.

Those pages do indeed pulse with anger, but how could it be otherwise when Thomas contends - persuasively - that he did Hill a favor by hiring her to work for him in the federal government, he had never mistreated her, and her accusations were a brutal instance of the politics of personal destruction?

Thomas survived, of course, and if his opponents had been able to read this book they would have known he would. My Grandfather's Son is a tale of pride, determination and independence - from the constraints of discrimination and the deadening influence of group-think.

Thomas was abandoned by his father and didn't even meet him until he was 9 years old. He was raised in segregated Savannah, Ga., by his grandmother and his grandfather, a steely disciplinarian determined to keep Thomas and his brother out of trouble through sheer hard work.

"Old Man Can't is dead - I helped bury him," his barely literate grandfather used to say. He sent Thomas and his brother to a Catholic school where the nuns were nearly as strict as his grandfather. Missing school wasn't an option. His grandfather warned us, Thomas writes, "that if we died, he'd take our bodies to school for three days to make sure we weren't faking."

Thomas remembers, years later, watching his grandfather dote on Thomas's own son and wondering why he hadn't been so tender with him when he was growing up.

"Because you were my responsibility," his grandfather replied. Thomas' upbringing was a triumph of mind over matter, of will and discipline over social injustice and economic deprivation.

Thomas says he came to realize, "I had been raised by the greatest man I have ever known." His book is so moving because it is partly an unrequited love story between the two men, whose stubbornness and insecurities kept them from ever truly reconciling after various blowups and slights.

Thomas's pride was a key to his slow turn from radicalism to the right. His accomplishments and his reputation were paramount to him. When he graduated from Yale Law School, he realized that when he went on job interviews people assumed he wasn't as talented as his peers because of affirmative action. White liberals had cheapened what he had worked so hard for; he took a 15-cent sticker from a cigar and stuck it to his Yale diploma to symbolize its true worth.

Thomas is painfully honest about his struggles in this book: the drinking, the broken marriage, the debt, the despair that had him contemplating suicide even as he ascended in Washington. He constantly worried that he had exposed himself too much by being frank about his conservative views, and when the first President Bush nominated him to the Supreme Court, he was filled with dread. He feared his political enemies would stop at nothing.

He was right. But the ordeal drove him to the Christian faith of his grandparents, making him more than ever his grandfather's son. This is a great American story, written by an extraordinary man.


=====================================================================


A different view -


'POUTING THOMAS'
THROWS BOOK AT ANITA
Post Wire Services



WASHINGTON, September 30, 2007 - Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas settles scores in a scathing memoir, condemning the media, the Democratic senators who opposed his nomination and the "mob" of liberals he says desecrated his life.

In My Grandfather's Son, he gives a detailed description of the 1991 confirmation hearings, calling them a "high-tech lynching."

Thomas said he was pursued "not by bigots in white robes but by left-wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony."

He called Anita Hill, who hit him with sex-harassment allegations, as "touchy and apt to overreact."

He writes that Hill did a "mediocre" job at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission - where he was chairman.

Thomas said she was the tool of liberal activists "obsessed" with abortion and outraged because he did not fit their idea of what an African-American should believe.

"The mob I now faced carried no ropes or guns," Thomas writes of his hearings. "Its weapons were smooth-tongued lies . . . printed on the front pages of America's newspapers."

Thomas, 59, says in the book, on sale tomorrow, that he wrote it to "leave behind an accurate record of my own life as I remember it."

====================================================================

In interviews given by Thomas to promote the new book, he has affirmed, among other things, that the real issue during his confirmation hearings was his potential stand on abortion.


Anita Who?
Abortion was the issue!
By HASANI GITTENS
New York Post

September 28, 2007 - Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas says the real issue at his controversial confirmation hearing 16 years ago was abortion - not his private life or the sexual-harassment charges leveled against him by Anita Hill.

It was "the elephant in the room," Thomas said of the abortion issue in an interview with CBS' "60 Minutes" that was to air on Sunday.

"That was the issue, that is the issue that people are apparently so upset about, that you determine the composition of your Supreme Court and your entire federal judiciary [around], it seems now," Thomas said.

During his confirmation hearing, Thomas repeatedly declined to ex
press an opinion on abortion or the historic Roe vs. Wade decision because, he insisted, to do so "would seriously compromise my ability to sit on a case of that importance and involving that important issue." His positions since have leaned toward the conservative, anti-abortion side of the aisle.

He also tells "60 Minutes" that the hearing, which ostensibly focused on Hill's sensational accusations, harmed everyone involved, including the nation.

By ANITA HILL
The New York Times
Op-Ed Contributor
Published: October 2, 2007



ON Oct. 11, 1991, I testified about my experience as an employee of Clarence Thomas’s at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

I stand by my testimony.

Justice Thomas has every right to present himself as he wishes in his new memoir, "My Grandfather's Son." He may even be entitled to feel abused by the confirmation process that led to his appointment to the Supreme Court.

But I will not stand by silently and allow him, in his anger, to reinvent me.

In the portion of his book that addresses my role in the Senate hearings into his nomination, Justice Thomas offers a litany of unsubstantiated representations and outright smears that Republican senators made about me when I testified before the Judiciary Committee — that I was a "combative left-winger" who was "touchy" and prone to overreacting to "slights." A number of independent authors have shown those attacks to be baseless. What's more, their reports draw on the experiences of others who were familiar with Mr. Thomas's behavior, and who came forward after the hearings. It's no longer my word against his.

Justice Thomas's characterization of me is also hobbled by blatant inconsistencies. He claims, for instance, that I was a mediocre employee who had a job in the federal government only because he had "given it" to me. He ignores the reality: I was fully qualified to work in the government, having graduated from Yale Law School (his alma mater, which he calls one of the finest in the country), and passed the District of Columbia Bar exam, one of the toughest in the nation.

In 1981, when Mr. Thomas approached me about working for him, I was an associate in good standing at a Washington law firm. In 1991, the partner in charge of associate development informed Mr. Thomas’s mentor, Senator John Danforth of Missouri, that any assertions to the contrary were untrue. Yet, Mr. Thomas insists that I was "asked to leave" the firm.

It's worth noting, too, that Mr. Thomas hired me not once, but twice while he was in the Reagan administration — first at the Department of Education and then at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. After two years of working directly for him, I left Washington and returned home to Oklahoma to begin my teaching career.

In a particularly nasty blow, Justice Thomas attacked my religious conviction, telling "60 Minutes" this weekend, "She was not the demure, religious, conservative person that they portrayed." Perhaps he conveniently forgot that he wrote a letter of recommendation for me to work at the law school at Oral Roberts University, in Tulsa. I remained at that evangelical Christian university for three years, until the law school was sold to Liberty University, in Lynchburg, Va., another Christian college. Along with other faculty members, I was asked to consider a position there, but I decided to remain near my family in Oklahoma.

Regrettably, since 1991, I have repeatedly seen this kind of character attack on women and men who complain of harassment and discrimination in the workplace. In efforts to assail their accusers' credibility, detractors routinely diminish people's professional contributions. Often the accused is a supervisor, in a position to describe the complaining employee's work as "mediocre" or the employee as incompetent. Those accused of inappropriate behavior also often portray the individuals who complain as bizarre caricatures of themselves — oversensitive, even fanatical, and often immoral — even though they enjoy good and productive working relationships with their colleagues.

Finally, when attacks on the accusers' credibility fail, those accused of workplace improprieties downgrade the level of harm that may have occurred. When sensing that others will believe their accusers' versions of events, individuals confronted with their own bad behavior try to reduce legitimate concerns to the level of mere words or "slights" that should be dismissed without discussion.

Fortunately, we have made progress since 1991. Today, when employees complain of abuse in the workplace, investigators and judges are more likely to examine all the evidence and less likely to simply accept as true the word of those in power. But that could change. Our legal system will suffer if a sitting justice’s vitriolic pursuit of personal vindication discourages others from standing up for their rights.

The question of whether Clarence Thomas belongs on the Supreme Court is no longer on the table — it was settled by the Senate back in 1991. But questions remain about how we will resolve the kinds of issues my testimony exposed. My belief is that in the past 16 years we have come closer to making the resolution of these issues an honest search for the truth, which, after all, is at the core of all legal inquiry. My hope is that Justice Thomas's latest fusillade will not divert us from that path.

Anita Hill, a professor of social policy, law and women’s studies at Brandeis University, is a visiting scholar at the Newhouse Center for the Humanities at Wellesley College.

SOURCE: www.nytimes.com/2007/10/02/opinion/02hill.html?_r=1&ore...

Belated posting, but intereting.

Why Ahmadinejad Loves New York
By TONY KARON
Sept. 24, 2007

The Cheshire Cat smile worn by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during his address at Columbia University on Monday was no surprise — the event was a resounding victory for the Iranian President.

Of course, students and faculty in the hall jeered many of his comments, while protestors outside denounced him as the new Hitler. And Columbia University president Lee Bollinger — clearly stung by criticism of the institution for hosting Ahmadinejad — used his introduction to excoriate the Iranian leader as everything from a "cruel and petty dictator" to "astonishingly uneducated." But all of this was merely grist for Ahmadinejad.

The furor it had created ensured that what might have passed as a relatively obscure address in a small Ivy League auditorium turned into a national media event, in which the Iranian President had the microphone, unmolested, for the best part of an hour.

New York City Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn had criticized Columbia for hosting Ahmadinejad, warning that "all he will do on that stage ... is spew more hatred and more venom out there to the world."

Not quite. Despite the harsh words of his host, Bollinger, Ahmadinejad stayed on message, appearing relaxed, reasonable, open, even charismatic (???) Whether or not American TV audiences are seduced is beside the point, because Ahmadinejad's primary audience is not American.

The provocations of his New York visit are an integral part of his domestic political strategy, which depends on his ability to hold America's national attention with an unapologetically nationalist message about Iran's nuclear rights, lecturing them about God and their aim to run the world.

It was pure political jujitsu, using the momentum of your adversaries to your own advantage. The protestors got him on TV, and he used the platform to grandstand for the folks back home. He will share an even bigger global platform with President Bush on Tuesday, at the lectern of the U.N. General Assembly.

The two men won't appear together, of course, but each is making a pitch for international support in the showdown over Iran's nuclear issue. But Ahmedinajad appeared to steal a march on Bush Monday by virtue of his televised propaganda show at Columbia.

Challenged on his statements questioning the Holocaust, for example, Ahmadinejad cleverly turned the issue around, asking, "Why is it that the Palestinian people are paying the price for an event they had nothing to do with?" That argument may not get much sympathy with an American audience, but championing the Palestinian cause helps Iran's strategy of undermining the moderate Arab regimes allied with Washington.

Ahmadinejad's primary audience, however, is in Iran, because — despite Bollinger's assertion that he is a dictator — the Iranian President faces reelection in 2009.

As things stand, his failure to deliver on the economic promises he made in his first campaign and the deterioration of Iran's global position puts him at substantial risk of losing to the more pragmatic elements in the Iranian leadership, who are already campaigning against him.

Playing the nuclear card as an expression of Iranian national pride has always been part of his domestic political game, and the breathless television coverage his visit has prompted in the U.S. won't do his domestic prospects any harm.


My Dinner with Ahmadinejad
By RICHARD STENGEL
Sept. 27, 2007



The invitation was on creamy stationery with fancy calligraphy: The Permanent Representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran "requests the pleasure" of my company to dine with H.E. Dr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The dinner is at the Intercontinental Hotel — with names carefully written out at all the place settings around a rectangular table. There are about 50 of us, academics and journalists mostly. There's Brian Williams across the room, and Christiane Amanpour a few seats down.

And at a little after 8pm, on a day when he has already addressed the U.N., the evening after his confrontation at Columbia, a bowing and smiling Mahmoud Admadinejad glides into the room.

This is now an annual ritual for the President of Iran. Every year, during the U.N. General Assembly in New York, he plots out a media campaign that — in its shrewdness, relentlessness, and quest for attention — would rival Angelina Jolie on a movie junket.

And like any international figure, Mr. Ahmadinejad hones his performance for multiple audiences: in this case, the journalists and academics who can filter his speech and ideas for a wider American audience.

The format of the evening is curious. In his calm and fluent voice — "dear friends," he calls us — he requests that we not ask questions, but make statements, so that he can react to them in a form of dialogue.

The academics are not shy. They make statements not only about the need for dialogue and reconciliation, but castigate the Iranian government for chilling press freedoms and for arresting Iranian-American scholars who were only trying to foster better relations between America and Iran. Throughout, Ahmadinejad is courtly, preternaturally calm, and fiercely articulate.

After an hour, he is ready to respond. He does so first with a half-hour ode to the relationship between man and God that might have been dictated by the Persian poet Rumi.

"I believe that Almighty God created the universe for mankind. Man is God's most important creation and it is through him that we appreciate the beauties of the universe. God has sent man here on a mission."

That mission, he says, is to pursue love, justice, kindness and dignity. In fact, he repeats those works so often that it begins to sound like a mantra: Love. Justice. Kindness. Dignity. He speaks with the quiet zeal of a not-very-flamboyant televangelist. "The pursuit of justice through love and kindness and human dignity can end all conflicts on earth," he says. "Inshallah."

When it comes time for him to address the comments, he does so by citing each speaker by name — 23 in all, he notes. In contrast with what he calls the lack of respect and dignity accorded to him at Columbia — where, he says, he found it odd that an academic institution which prizes tolerance would treat him without any — he addresses each person carefully and patiently. Some highlights:

- Iran has not violated any of the rules of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Ahmadinejad says. He has proposed a multilateral uranium enrichment program with different nations, and can't understand why no one has taken up his offer.

- The U.S. and Iran can play a positive role together in Iraq. "If the U.S. withdraws from Iraq, good things will happen," he says. "I believe that the Iraqi people can rule themselves."

- In the Middle East, Ahmadinejad says the world must allow the Palestinians to decide their future for themselves: "That is the human solution to sixty years of instability." He refers to Israel only as "the Zionist regime" and does not mention the Holocaust.

- Ahmadinejad claims there are thirty newspapers published in Iran that are opposed to his government, citing that as evidence of press freedom in Iran.

- In answer to a question about how he viewed Hitler's legacy, he says, "I view Hitler's role as extremely negative, a despicably dark face."

- He notes that Americans don't understand Iranian history, saying that the movie 300 — with which he seems intimately familiar — was a "complete distortion of Iranian history." Iran, he says, has never invaded anyone in its history.

Finally, in response to a question about whether war with Iran was growing more likely, he says, "Mr. Bush is interested in harming Iran. But I believe there are wise politicians in America who will prevent such a war. We hate war. We would not welcome it. But we are prepared for every scenario. Yet I don't think war will happen."

With that, Ahmadinejad says he has an early morning appointment the next day, and that he welcomes greater dialogue like this evening. And then, still composed, and with the same slightly mysterious smile that never leaves his face all evening, he bows deeply and heads upstairs.

THERE IS HATEFUL METHOD IN HIS MADNESS

His otherwise unfailing bravado wasn't up to stating bluntly at Columbia University what he has said many times before - that Israel should be eliminated from the face of the earth. But back at home, he's saying it in ever blunter terms. When the world ignored Adolf Hitler's rants in the 1930s, he did not have nuclear weapons to back his bluster, although he did have his Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe to gobble up most of Europe when he decided to move in 1939.

Those who would shrug off today a ranting Ahmadinejad - who may already have nuclear arms - have not learned anything from history. Alas, many liberals in the USA would much rather pooh-pooh any possible threat from Ahmadinejad, eben allow themselves to be seduced by him (see earlier stories about TIME's coverage of his NYC visit), just to spite the Bush administration.


Ahmadinejad in new tirade
against Israel: Suggests Jews
should settle in Canada or
Alaska instead
by Hiedeh Farmani and Aresu Eqbali


TEHRAN, Oct. 5 (AFP) - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Friday launched a new tirade against Israel amid growing tensions with the West, vowing to work to abolish the Jewish state and questioning the scale of the Holocaust.

Ahmadinejad said Iran would strive to liberate "all of Palestine" from Israeli hands, in a speech to mark the Quds day, where Iran holds its annual mass protest marches in solidarity with the Palestinians.

Tens of thousands of Iranians turned out for the march in central Tehran, carrying anti-Zionist banners, chanting "Death to Israel" and burning Israeli and American flags.

"The Palestinian people are standing firm. The Iranian people and other peoples will not stop until all of Palestinian territory is liberated," Ahmadinejad told the faithful at Tehran University.

"They (world powers) should not think that the Iranian nation and other nations in the region will take off their hands off the throat of the Zionists and their supporters."

Ahmadinejad provoked an international outcry shortly after his election in 2005 when he called for Israel to be "wiped from the map" and also described the Holocaust as a "myth".

He has since toned down his rhetoric, but in this speech he reaffirmed his deeply controversial questioning of the mass slaughter of Jews in World War II and his suggestion that Israel could be moved to arctic North America.

"The Iranian nation hates killing and considers Hitler and the executioners of the World War II as black and dark figures," he said.

"But the Iranian nation has a question and as long as there is no clear and reasonable response to this question, it will remain.

"They have made the Holocaust sacred and do not allow anyone to ask questions. Under the pretext of the Holocaust they are allowed to commit whatever crime they like," he added.

"Europeans cannot tolerate the Zionists in their region and country, but they want to impose them on the people of the region... Give these vast lands of Canada and Alaska to them to create a country for themselves."

His graphic verbal assault on the Jewish state came amid growing tensions over the Iranian nuclear programme.

Israel, widely believed to be the only nuclear armed power in the Middle East, has expressed alarm over Iran's nuclear drive, which the Jewish state and its main ally the United States believe is aimed at making an atomic bomb.

The United States and Israel have never ruled out the option of military strikes and some European states, led by France, want to impose their own economic sanctions against Tehran.

Iran however insists that its nuclear programme is solely aimed at generating electricity for a growing population whose massive oil and gas reserves will eventually run out.

Israel was an ally of the imperial regime of the last Iranian shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, developing close military and economic ties, but all this changed when he was ousted by the Islamic revolution in 1979.

Iran is also home to 25,000 Iranian Jews, the largest Jewish community in the Middle East outside Israel, and officials say this shows its stance is anti-Zionist but in no way anti-Semitic.

State television showed pictures of tens of thousands of people streaming through the streets in other demonstrations held in every major city up-and-down the country, repeatedly chanting the mantra of "Death to Israel".

Despite the heavily politicised nature of the Tehran demonstration, there was a festive mood with the numerous children present having their faces painted as cats and rabbits in entertainment laid-on by the municipality.


The other side of Mad A'jad's double whammy:

Ahmadinejad talks tough
at Iran university
Calcutta News.Net
Saturday, 6th October, 2007

Amid growing pressure for more sanctions against Iran, President Ahmadinejad has told an audience at Tehran University that Iran will not be suspending uranium enrichment activities.

The West fears Iran could use enriched uranium to make nuclear weapons.

President Ahmadinejad said he was no longer prepared to be active in the political scene to argue about Iran's right to nuclear energy.

His defiant comments came after France and the U.S increased efforts for a third UN Security Council resolution imposing sanctions against the Islamic republic.

Ahmadinejad however reaffirmed his stance that he now considers Iran's nuclear case to be closed, owing to its intensified cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Iran has agreed a timetable with the UN nuclear watchdog to answer outstanding questions over its nuclear program to allow the agency to bring a four year investigation to a close.

The IAEA has so far failed to make any conclusion about whether the Iranian nuclear program is peaceful or not.

[If anyone still doubts whether the UN is anything other than a paper tiger, consider the IAEA's record. Without the cooperation of the country being investigated - Saddam's Iraq, Kim's North Korea and now Iran - it can really not reach any conclusions, so how can it be a true watchdog? As it is, Mad A'jad has been using the IAEA reports to scoff at the world and say, "See? The UN can't prove anything!"]

I have been unable to find a straight news report or organized commentary about this debate that took place October 3 in Birmingham, Alabama. If anyone finds something, please share. Here is a compilation of comments from crossroads.com -



Comments on the Dawkins/Lennox debate


This week two Oxford dons went toe-to-toe on Moody Radio: the Christian apologist Dr. John Lennox and atheist Dr. Richard Dawkins. Although I missed their exchange, here's what a few people I know had to say about the debate:

"What I thought was so devastating to Dawkins’ position was how Lennox turned the tables on him and sent him reeling with respect to the sense of right/wrong, good/bad. Lennox made it clear that the sense of right and wrong is neither genetic nor the outworking of group dynamics over generations, but something we simply all possess. Dawkins couldn’t deny this..."

"Lennox was persuasive, and was devastating on the topic 'Do you need religion to be good;, demonstrating that you don't need religion to be good, but without religion it's a moot argument as to what is 'good' or 'bad' since there is no objective standard.

"Thus Stalin, Pol Pot, Hitler, and Islamic terrorists have/could be doing the right thing in their own eyes with impunity in the afterlife. He offered very strong rebuttals to Dawkins on all of the topics, particularly showing how Dawkins' views are decidedly one-sided and devoid of thoughtful engagement of the things he so staunchly criticizes. He even got Dawkins to back off his assertion that religion in and of itself is universally dangerous."

"I heard about 45 minutes of the debate and thought Lennox did a very good job. Dawkins was polite and thoughtful, but I can't imagine anyone being persuaded by his presentation. He represented his position about as good as one could, but it was uphill for him."

"Dawkins was stumped in several places but especially when Lennox questioned him on 'how anyone could act in opposition to their genes'. Dawkins really eluded the question by saying that it was just true that humans do act in a way contrary to Darwinian evolution every time someone uses birth control measures. Dawkins never gave a reasoned basis for that action.”

"My wife listened and her comment was that she was embarrassed for Dawkins…just a terrible performance that would have convinced no one."

"I was there last evening. My sense of the crowd was that there was no dramatic shift of opinion toward Lennox’s arguments, though I thought them all extremely powerful and I am certain that seeds of doubt in Dawkins’ atheistic faith were planted in the minds of many secular humanists in the audience.

"Lennox’s position was bold and unrelenting. I DID find it interesting that Dawkins’ seemed willing on a couple of occasions to smuggle in tacit acceptance of a deistic God, which is not I suppose too surprising since that would be God no one had to meaningfully deal with anyway. The long line of UAB students eager for Dawkins’ book after the event, however, shows that all of us have a great deal more work to do, especially on our campuses."


BACKGROUND ON THE DEBATE
"The God Delusion" Debate
7:00 pm
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
The Alys Stephens Center
Birmingham, Alabama

Remaining true to our goal of engaging secular culture on critical issues in a thoughtful, respectful manner, Fixed Point Foundation sponsored a debate on what is arguably the most critical question of our time: the existence of God.

The debate featured Professor Richard Dawkins, Fellow of the Royal Society and Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University and Dr. John Lennox (MA, MA, Ph.D., D.Phil., D.Sc.), Reader in Mathematics and Fellow in Mathematics and Philosophy of Science, Green College, University of Oxford.

Dawkins, voted by Europe’s Prospect Magazine as one of the world’s most important intellectuals, is regarded by many as the spokesman for the “New Atheism.” BBC has labeled him “Darwin’s Rottweiler.” He has written numerous best-sellers, most notable among them, his recent book, The God Delusion. TGD has been on The New York Times List of Best-Sellers for over thirty weeks. It is a no-holds-barred assault on religious faith generally, and Christianity specifically. According to Dawkins, one can deduce atheism from scientific study; indeed, he argues that it is the only viable choice.

Lennox, a popular Christian apologist and scientist, travels widely speaking on the interface between science and religion. Like Dawkins, he has dedicated his career to science, but he has arrived at very different conclusions. "It is the very nature of science that leads me to belief in God," he says. Lennox possesses doctorates from Oxford, Cambridge, and the University of Wales. He has written a response to the notion that Science has exposed the Bible as obscurantist in a book titled God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? The book was published this fall.

The debate centered on Dawkins' views as expressed in his best-seller, The God Delusion and their validity over and against the Christian faith. This was be the first significant discussion on this issue in the "Bible Belt."

CDs and DVDs of this event are available for purchase from our website, and will be complete and ready to ship by last week of November.

For more information, contact us at info@fixed-point.org.

Physics Nobel goes to German, Frenchman
for discovering principle that led to
ever-shrinking hard disks
By MATT MOORE and KARL RITTER




STOCKHOLM, Sweden, Oct. 9 (AP) - Two European scientists won the 2007 Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for a discovery that lets computers, iPods and other digital devices store reams of data on ever-shrinking hard disks.

France's Albert Fert and German Peter Gruenberg independently discovered a physical effect in 1988 that has led to sensitive tools for reading the information stored on hard disks. That sensitivity lets the electronics industry use smaller and smaller disks.

"The MP3 and iPod industry would not have existed without this discovery," Borje Johansson, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences told The Associated Press. "You would not have an iPod without this effect."

The two scientists discovered a phenomenon called giant magnetoresistance. In this effect, very weak changes in magnetism generate larger changes in electrical resistance. This is how information stored magnetically on a hard disk can be converted to electrical signals that the computer reads.

Smaller disks mean fainter magnetic signals, so the ability to detect them is key to shrinking hard disks.

The first disk-reading device based on the effect was launched in 1997 "and this soon became the standard technology," the Nobel committee said.

Phil Schewe, a physicist and spokesman for the American Institute of Physics, said the prize honored "a terrific combination of great physics and huge practical application.

"I can hardly think of an application that has a bigger bang than the magnetic hard drive industry. Every one of us probably owns three or four or five devices, probably more, that depend on billions of bits of information stored on something the size of a dime."

Fert, 69, is the scientific director of the Mixed Unit for Physics at CNRS/Thales in Orsay, France, while Gruenberg, 68, is a professor at the Institute of Solid State Research in the west German city of Juelich.

Asked if he'd thought his discovery would have such wide application, Fert told The Associated Press, "You can never predict in physics.... These days when I go to my grocer and see him type on a computer, I say "'Wow, he's using something I put together in my mind. It's wonderful.'"

In a telephone conference with the award committee, Fert said he was very happy to win, and to share the $1.5 million prize with Gruenberg.

"This is a surprise for me but I knew that it was possible," he said. "I knew I was among the many candidates."

A former rugby player and now avid sailboarder, Fert told France's Inter Radio that he planned to share some of the spoils of his winnings with colleagues.

"As usual when I get prizes, I share a little with my associates and then I will see," he said. "I don't know. I think I need new sails for my windsurfers."

Last year, Americans John C. Mather and George F. Smoot won the physics prize for their work examining the infancy of the universe, studies that have aided the understanding of galaxies and stars and increasing support for the Big Bang theory of the beginning of the universe.

On Monday, two American scientists, Mario R. Capecchi and Oliver Smithies, and Briton Sir Martin J. Evans, won the 2007 Nobel Prize in medicine for groundbreaking discoveries that led to a powerful technique for manipulating mouse genes.

Prizes for chemistry, literature, peace and economics will be announced through Oct. 15.

The peace award is announced in Oslo, while the other prizes are announced in Stockholm. The prizes, each of which carries a cash prize of $1.5 million, were established in the will of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel.

The Nobel prizes are always presented to the winners on the Dec. 10 anniversary of the death of its creator.